She hid.
She crawled behind a cluster of thorny brush, which nicked and bit at her skin, reminding her she was alive, yes, but she was past enjoying that sensation and teetering instead on the edge of despair and desperation. Her feet were cold and bleeding, the thin socks torn to shreds from her marathon run. She crouched behind the thicket and tried not to breathe audibly. She stopped breathing through her mouth, pulling the air in ever so gently through her nose, sipping and savoring it like a priceless wine.
She was quaking with fear and cold as he lumbered by, gun in hand; he wasn’t running, exactly — it was more like a jog. An idiot jogger wants to kill me, she thought.
Like a four-wheel-drive vehicle, he rolled past, woods be damned, the sound of his forward movement taking several minutes to die down. She waited. She had no idea what to do next.
Stay put? It was night, but she had no notion of the time — if dawn came soon, she’d be naked here. If nighttime lasted long enough, perhaps that dangerous dork would comb the entire woods and find her, finally. If she took off and started running again, he would hear her, quite probably, and, very certainly, take up pursuit again.
What would Nolan do?
Nolan would find a way to kill the bastard, but that wasn’t Sherry’s way. She’d given that her best shot with the shovel, and blew it. It wasn’t likely nature would provide her with a killing tool better than a shovel. Someone who knew the woods would find something to use, no doubt; but Sherry had only stalked shopping malls before. She had never been camping in her life. This was a hell of an indoctrination.
She was shivering with the cold, now. Wondering where she was. Looking up through branches at the spooky sky, wondering how to read it, wishing, way back when, she’d been a Girl Scout and not a cheerleader.
Maybe if she just moved quietly through the woods — in the opposite direction from where Lyle had pushed on — she might get somewhere. Maybe even civilization. The road and the river were around here somewhere.
She moved out from behind the bushes and began making her way through the woods again. Not running. Moving quickly, yes, but not running; pausing at a tree every few yards to listen for Lyle. Hearing nothing.
Pretty soon she came upon the grave in progress again.
It froze her to the earth, like Lot’s wife. She had no idea she’d gotten turned around. Here she was back at square one.
But — once past the shock of stumbling across what Lyle intended as her permanent home — was this so bad? There was the shovel again, sprawled half in, half out of the would-be grave, much as Lyle had been when she tried to bash him. It was a weapon. She picked it up.
And just in time, because Lyle stepped out into the moonlight and his handsome blank face squeezed in something like thought and he aimed the .38 at her and she swung the shovel like a bat and caught his wrist and the gun went flying.
“Don’t fight me,” Lyle said, reaching his hands out toward her as if she should embrace him. There was no malice in his voice at all.
“Fuck you, asshole!” She swung the shovel at him and caught him in the side and he went down, moaning. She moved toward him quickly, the hurting ankle slowing her just a bit, and raised the shovel to deliver a finishing blow, and the bastard reached out and grabbed that bad ankle and pulled her legs out from under her. She fell back, tumbling.
Tumbling into the grave.
It was shallow, but it was her grave, and it was no place she wanted to be; her mind filled with horror. The shovel was no longer in her hands. She was on her back in her own grave. A scream caught in her throat.
And Lyle was standing at her feet, in the grave, looking down at her, with his blank, banal pretty-boy face marred by one of her shovel blows. Good. She kicked a field goal with his nuts and he grabbed himself with both hands, howling, and pitched forward on her.
He wasn’t unconscious, but he was in pain, enough pain that he couldn’t do anything about her scrambling frantically out from under him, cursing him, hitting at him, clawing at him, and then scurrying off, back into the woods, a different direction this time.
Running again, hobbling on the ankle, but running, hearing nothing but her own panting, her stomach aching, her feet numb, her legs aching but pumping, like her heart keeping the blood going; she wasn’t dead yet.
She paused against a tree, panting. Wondering how long she could keep this up; when her legs would go out on her. She couldn’t hear him back there. That was something, anyway. Couldn’t hear him shambling after her.
But then she did hear something else:
A honking horn.
Car horn; distant, but she had a good fix on what direction. She smiled tightly and began to run. Even the ankle stopped hurting, stopped hurting as much, anyway.
She was no fool. She knew that that car could belong to Lyle’s father or somebody else involved in this foul fucking thing. She would have to be careful as she neared the highway. But once to the highway, she would know where she was. She could cling to the woods and bushes along the side of the road and follow it and if she saw a car that didn’t have Lyle or his pa in it, she would go for it.
She began to smile again. She was going to make it. Nolan was a survivor and so was she.
He’d be proud of her. And they’d be together.
But the euphoria passed as reality set in: Nolan was in trouble. Her thoughts raced ahead of her churning legs. He was pulled in on some elaborate heist at the mall and Lyle’s father was there, intending to kill him when it was over. That was obvious: she’d been the hostage. She’d been the leverage to make Nolan jump. But Lyle’s father had given the order to Lyle to kill her.
Which meant Nolan would be the next to die; he was still under that sentence of death they’d both sensed, on the phone, in what might be the last time she heard his voice.
Tears streaked her face.
She had to reach him, somehow, before the heist was a wrap. She had to let him know she was okay. She had to get to him before Lyle’s father blew him away.
More than her own life was at stake here; Nolan’s was too.
She picked up speed. Somehow she picked up speed. The highway was up there. She knew it was. She’d take a chance. She’d try to flag the first car that came along. Hell, Lyle’s father would be at the mall, and Lyle was lost somewhere in the forest. She could risk it. She ran.
She ran, and as she crossed what looked like so much snow and leaves and weeds, she felt something give beneath her. Then the ground under her broke open like thin ice, and she went crashing through rotted planks and plummeting down an endless drop, hitting her head on something hard along the side, halfway down, blacking out, landing hard on her back, with a whump, which she neither felt nor heard.
Sometime later, however, her eyes opened momentarily and she looked up and thirty feet above her, looking down into the abandoned, brick-lined well, was Lyle. With a face blank as the moon. Peering down to see if she was alive.
He was the last thing she saw.
20
Jon sipped hot chocolate from the Thermos cup, wondering how it had suddenly become his lot in life to sit on watch in parked vehicles. It was a little after 2:00 A.M., and a long night (long morning, actually) stretched out ahead of him; hell, they wouldn’t be out of here till 6:30. Despite the work involved, he would have much rather been inside, helping load up the semis — this one in whose cab he sat was just in the process of being loaded. The Leeches and the others were piling on and stacking up washing machines and other appliances in the trailer behind him, much of the stuff still in cartons and taken from the back room of the J. C. Penney’s whose adjacent loading dock the truck was backed up to.