by Ted Dekker
Still no sign of a shooter, no sign of any danger.
“Hello?”
No response to her call.
Louder this time. “Hello? Anybody out there?”
No, nothing but the rain drumming on the vehicles.
She started to shove the gun into the back of her Lucky jeans, which were now drenched right through to her skin, but a quick image of the gun blowing a hole in her butt stopped her short.
It was then, hand still on the pistol at the small of her back, that she heard the cry.
She jerked the gun to her left and listened. There it was again, farther down the road, hidden in the growing dark. An indistinguishable cry for help or of pain.
Or the killer, howling at the moon in victory.
The cry did not come again. Wendy crouched low and ran down the roadside toward the sound, gun extended. She wanted to yell but was torn, knowing that in the very unlikely case the sound had been made by whoever had shot at the truck, she would be exposing herself to danger.
That she was now running away from the safety of her car through the dark rain, toward an unidentified stranger, struck her as absurd. On the other hand, she would gladly spend the rest of her life pulling little girls with broken legs out of the ditches into which they had fallen, regardless of the consequences.
She’d run less than fifty yards when a van loomed through the rain. She pulled up, panting.
The van had swerved off the road and down the shallow embankment on the left, where it now rested in complete darkness. It wasn’t the kind of minivan in which moms hauled their children to soccer matches. This was the larger, square kind—the kind killers threw their kidnapped victims into before roaring off to the deep woods.
A streak of fear passed through her. Refusing to be gutless was one thing. Acting foolishly out of some misguided sense of justice was another. This was now feeling like the latter.