Dirt and pebbles sprayed across my shoulders and the back of my head, as a low round must have kicked the ground behind me. I dodged from one side of the row to the other, better using the trees for cover, slaloming among them, which increased the chances of being taken down by a branch harder than my head.
A scream. Loud, shrill, prolonged. As the gunfire abruptly ceased, I thought that maybe one of the searchers, hurrying forward too eagerly, had gotten ahead of the gunner and had taken a round or two.
As the hideous screams seemed to slither through the grove with corporal substance, I stopped dodging around the trees and ran only along the west side of the row. My legs on fire. Chest aching. Each exhalation hot as furnace air. I couldn’t keep up that pace much longer. I was no more a marathon runner than I was a man of action.
I thought the need to tend to one of their own injured would bring a couple of them to a halt, improving my odds of survival. I saw a pale geometry in the darkness ahead, the white boards of the southern fence. If they were delaying ten seconds, twenty, I could be up the fence and over, at least temporarily out of sight. A shot rang out, and the screaming stopped. Another single shot perhaps made certain that the screamer had been permanently silenced. They weren’t the type to leave a wounded comrade behind. They were the type who would finish him off and be done with the distraction. I shouldn’t have expected anything else, considering that Jim and Bob executed Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene merely because I might have seen their faces. True believers. Fanatics. They didn’t fear death. In their view, death came with a reward. They probably thought they would be royalty in Hell. The execution of their own had set them back no more than five seconds, if at all, but the fence loomed immediately in front of me.
Thirty-eight
I slammed into the fence, grappled for handholds, toed up from the base rail, went monkey-fast over the top, and fell to the ground on the farther side just as a hail of man-stoppers cracked the top rail and the cross-boards. Bullet-plucked chicken wire twanged and plinked as I went flat and squirmed away.
The land sloped down to a wall of boulders stacked as they might be in a breakwater at the entrance to a harbor. I scrambled down them to a flash-flood channel about twelve feet wide and at least ten feet below the elevated orchard. Crane-placed boulders formed the farther wall, as well.
Maybe the cultists knew what lay beyond the fence, knew that I could stand upright and still be well below their line of fire. The guns fell silent again. In seconds, they would be climbing the fence.
We didn’t get a lot of rain in the Mojave, but from time to time we were hit by a storm of such power that everyone made lame jokes about building an ark. In town, a well-planned and extensive drainage system could handle all but the most intense, protracted downpours. But where there were no city streets and storm drains, the rushing torrents either created temporary lakes or raced through the arroyos that had been carved in the land by centuries of such deluges. This was one such arroyo, fortified for the length of this property to protect the orchard and to prevent further erosion.
If I went to the right, west, I’d eventually reach a two-lane county road. There wouldn’t be much traffic at that hour. Even if I could flag down a vehicle, I would be less likely to escape than to be shot along with whoever stopped to give me a ride.
I hurried to the east, toward the array of buildings that served the orchard. If you’re running for your life, a drainage channel of that kind is no safer than a long hallway, which itself has much in common with a target lane in a shooting range. When my pursuers caught up with me, I wouldn’t have anywhere to hide, because the sloped walls of boulders weren’t as nature might have tumbled them, but were instead stacked tightly and with calculation, to ensure stability.
Far away in the night, a siren wailed. It didn’t give me any hope. The police might have been responding to 911 calls related to the barrage that destroyed the Explorer, but they surely weren’t already aware of events at the orchard.
Delaying a few seconds longer than seemed wise, I finally darted to my right and scrambled up the massive rocks. Maybe the assassins’ weapons, which were more cumbersome than pistols, and whatever other gear they might be carrying slowed them down a little when they had to scale the fence. Or maybe they needed a few seconds to spot me after they reached the channel. Whatever the reason, I made it to the top of the boulders and started toward the nearest building before gunfire rattled again. One brief burst. The keening of a few spent rounds ricocheting off stone. The subsequent silence suggested that I must have gotten ahead of them to an extent that persuaded them not to waste ammunition.
Here the ground was heavily graveled to keep down workday dust, and it crunched underfoot as I approached the first building, which appeared barnlike but massive. Perhaps two hundred feet long and sixty wide. Two stories. Small windows high on the long wall, maybe thirty of them in a row, a few feet under the eave of the curved roof. All were dark. The narrow end of the structure featured two large roll-up doors and a man door between them. Above each truck-size entrance, a security lamp poured forth a pool of light, and a camera gazed down from higher still.
I feared being an easy target in that brightness, but I didn’t want to waste time running wide of it. I sprinted onto that well-lit stage and hoped that we had not arrived at the death scene. Past the first big door. Past the second. Turned right at the corner. For the next several seconds, they would not have me in sight, with or without night-vision goggles.
Twenty or twenty-five yards beyond the first building stood three others, smaller but still large, each a different size, a different shape. This one wood, that one concrete block skinned with stucco. I ventured among them, putting more walls between me and the cultists. The security lights here were dimmer, regular bulbs, not floodlights like the first two. Shadows were plentiful.
Gravel had been spread in a thinner layer here than elsewhere, but silent movement remained impossible. On the upside, I couldn’t leave footprints in a carpet of small loose stones.
I’d had about enough of running, whether under fire or not. The air temperature was seventy-five degrees or a little higher. I was sweating like you would think a pig would sweat; actually, however, pigs don’t sweat, another fact that I learned from Ozzie Boone, who wrote a novel in which an expert on hogs trained three of them to kill an enemy of his. Anyway, my mouth was dry. Throat scratchy. Eyes burning from sweat salt. I needed to get out of the chase, find a hidey-hole.
Acutely aware that I had mere seconds to disappear from sight before the search team streamed among the buildings, rejecting one possible hiding place after another, I came to the back of the two-story block-and-stucco building. Ladder rungs embedded in the wall led to the flat roof. I almost didn’t see them in the dim light from a caged security lamp at the farther end of the structure. They were painted to match the stucco.
When you think of hiding places, you imagine crawling under something or behind something, or into a hole, but you can be easily trapped in such places. I could be trapped on a roof, too, but they would not be able to get me in their sights if I stayed below the parapet wall. And the only way to get to me would be by the ladder. Any fool who climbed it, even mildly suspicious that I might have taken refuge up there, would lose the top of his head when he came into view.