The three of them drove in silence through the darkness. From the backseat, all Graham saw were trees. They passed quickly in the wash of the headlights.
“How far do we have to go?” Graham asked. It felt like they’d been on the road for over an hour.
“So you do have a voice,” Peter said with a laugh. “For a while there, we were wondering. Nice to meet you.”
It was a teasing attempt at being friendly, of striking up a conversation, but Graham wondered if they had any idea how many bullets had been fired at him in the past day. If they did, maybe they’d understand that his sense of humor wasn’t everything it used to be.
“It’s not that far,” Anita said. “Maybe twenty minutes. Are you okay? Do you need to stop?”
“I’m okay,” he said.
Peter shot him a look over his shoulder. “We’re really sorry you’re having to go through all this,” he said. “I don’t know the details of your particular case — and I don’t need to unless you want to talk about it — but if it makes you feel any better at all, we deal with a lot of kids who are in the same position as you, and this night — the first night — is almost always the very worst. Things get better from here.”
More nice words from a man who clearly had no freaking clue what he was talking about. His father was almost certainly dead, his mother had been badly wounded, and the people who did it to them were now trying to hunt down the survivors. For all Graham knew, one of those survivors — himself — had been successfully hunted down and now was being taken to a place he didn’t know to endure whatever was coming. Where in all of that was any possibility that the worst was over?
When you can’t say something nice… Graham opted to say nothing.
A few seconds later, the car slowed. Then it slowed some more.
“What’s wrong?” Anita asked.
“This guy behind me,” Peter replied. “He’s been on my tail for the last five miles. I’m giving him a chance to pass.”
Graham looked out the back window into the headlights of the vehicle behind them. They were too bright for him to tell whether they belonged to a car or a truck, but they were very close. They made no effort to pass. Graham’s heart rate doubled.
“Go faster,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Peter said. “I’m not getting caught up in road—”
“They’re going to try to take me,” Graham said. Hearing the edge in his own voice raised his anxiety levels even higher.
“What?” Anita said.
Peter laughed. “Whoa, Graham—”
“Whoa yourself, Peter,” Graham snapped. He didn’t know how he was as certain as he was, but there was zero doubt in his mind that he was correct. This was the hit team. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere. This is exactly the right place.”
“Perhaps a few too many FPS games there, young man,” Peter said.
Graham recognized FPS as first-person shooter games, and he hated them. “Did they tell you that people tried to murder my whole family?” Graham asked. “Did they tell you that my mom is in some secret hospital, and that my friggin’ au pair is really a bodyguard and she’s being hunted down, too?” Graham knew damn well that no one had told them that because until right now, Graham hadn’t told anyone either.
“You’re making that up,” Anita said. But he heard the doubt in her voice. The fear.
“No, I’m not,” Graham said. “Why would I—” He cut himself off. He wanted to live, not argue. “If you don’t believe me, speed up.”
“Why?”
“If they speed up, too, then we’ll know I’m right.”
“I don’t want to know you’re right,” Anita said. Fear had hijacked her voice and transformed it into a squeak.
“Okay, then,” Graham negotiated. “If they don’t, then we’ll know I’m wrong.”
Peter said nothing, but the engine noise grew as their car accelerated. Graham saw the concern in Peter’s eyes as his gaze darted between the road and the rearview mirror. Graham undid his seat belt so he could turn around in the seat. “They’re not falling behind,” he announced.
“So I noticed,” Peter said. He picked up more speed, but the distance between the two cars actually decreased.
“My God, Peter,” Anita said. “Slow down. You’ll kill us all.”
“No!” Graham shouted. “Better him killing us all than them killing us all.”
“Peter, come on,” Anita coaxed. “Be reasonable. This can’t be true. We don’t even know this boy.”
“You don’t need to know me. I don’t know you, either. Just don’t stop!”
Peter fixed him with his eyes in the mirror, then glanced beyond him into the lights of their pursuer. He backed off the accelerator.
“What are you doing?” Graham shouted. “We’ve got to go faster.”
“No, we don’t,” Peter said. “We’ve established that they’re trying to follow us. It’s not important to outrun them. As long as we keep moving, nothing changes. We’ll drive to a public place — a restaurant parking lot or maybe a firehouse or police station. Whatever needs to be settled can be settled there.”
“I’m calling the police,” Anita said. She dug in her purse for her cell phone.
Graham started to object out of reflex, then realized that that was a pretty good idea.
Anita stared at her phone.
“What’s wrong?” Peter asked.
“No signal,” she said.
He sighed. “Yeah, this is a real dead zone in here.”
Dead zone. Did he really just say dead zone?
“Turn around and buckle in, Graham,” Peter said. “You staring out the window doesn’t help anyone. We’re going to be—”
Anita yelled, “Look out!”
Graham was still turning when Peter slammed on the brakes, and before he had a chance to register anything that was going on, he found himself rebounding off the back of Anita’s seat on his way to land on the floor of the backseat.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed. “It’s a trap! They set up a roadblock!”
Graham hadn’t seen it yet, but he didn’t have to. Didn’t want to. His ribs landed hard on the hump on the floor, and something sharp jabbed his leg — he thought maybe it was an ice scraper left over from last winter.
“Run!” he shouted, and he scrabbled along the floor to find the door handle.
He still hadn’t looked when he pulled the latch and pushed the back door open on Anita’s side. He expected gunfire at any second, so he kept his head down as he spilled onto the road. He hit first on his back, lighting up the pain in his ribs, but then he rolled to his hands and knees, found his feet, and took off at a run.
“There!” someone yelled. It was a man’s voice and it was heavily accented. “He is running away!” That extra bit allowed Graham to recognize that accent as Chechen. Friends of his parents, perhaps? Were they here to help? Were they among the people it was safe for him to trust?
No. Trust no one. He ran.
“Graham!” The man yelled. “Do not run! We are here to help.”
Bullshit.
Graham lowered his head and concentrated on the wall of leaves and branches that lay ahead of him. They were going to hurt when he ran into them at this speed, but the fact that they were dense and it was dark meant that they would be able to provide him with shelter. He’d just have to duck in far enough to be covered, and then he could hunker down—
“Your mother sent me!” the man yelled. He panted through the words, which seemed to be coming from less far away.
Graham didn’t dare look behind. He didn’t dare do anything that might slow him down. He wished now that Jolaine had bought him running shoes instead of—
A heavy hand landed between his shoulder blades, a shove that sent him face-first into the ground. He got his hands out in time to catch himself, and they slid through rocks and sticks, tearing the hide from the heels of his hands, and also from his knees. He reflexively clenched his teeth to keep his jaws from snapping together and maybe biting his tongue.