She kept going because there was no going back.
Laura left the snowfield and the Dinosaur Gardens, where the prehistoric creatures were frozen for all time, and she started down the road to the car that would now carry a solitary traveler.
5
Fight the Furies
IN THE WARMTH OF THE CHEROKEE, MARY'S BLADDER LET GO.
The wet heat soaked into the seat beneath her hips and thighs. All she could think of was another song from the memory vault: "MacArthur Park," and all that sweet green icing flowing down. She was backing the Cherokee down the mountain road, the tires skidding left and right. The feeling was returning to her hands now, the prickling of a thousand hot needles. Her face felt as if several layers of flesh had been flayed off, and the blood on her jeans had frozen into a shine. Her right hand was streaked with crimson, the Angers twitching their nerve-damage dance. Drummer was still crying, but she let him sing; he was alive, and he was hers.
The Cherokee's rear end bashed into one of the abandoned cars on the roadside. She got the vehicle straightened out again, and in another moment metal shrieked as the Cherokee skidded over to the right and grazed a station wagon. Then she had reached the bottom of the road, and she turned the Cherokee toward I-80, the heater buzzing but the cold still latched deep in her lungs. She found a sign that pointed to I-80 West, and she turned onto the entrance ramp, the snow swirling like underwater silt before her lights. Blocking her way was another big flashing sign: STOP ROAD CLOSED. But there was no pig car this time, and Mary plowed the Cherokee through the snow on the right shoulder and got back on the ramp.
It made a long, snow-slick curve onto I-80 that Mary took at a crawl. And then she was on the interstate, the pig car at the McFadden exit a quarter mile behind her. She slowly let the speed wind up to forty miles an hour, the highway ascending under her wheels. Snow was still coming down hard, the wind a fierce beast. She was on her way across the Rockies.
Less than ten minutes after Mary had turned onto I-80, a rust-eaten Cutlass with one eye made the ramp's curve and came after her.
The icy tears were thawing on Laura's face. She was wired, her pulse racing. One hand was clenched firmly on the wheel, the elbow of her other arm helping steer. The single working wiper was making a shrill whining noise as it pushed the snow away, and Laura feared the wiper motor might be about to burn out. The Cutlass was climbing, the highway ahead waxy with ice. She kept her speed between thirty and thirty-five, and she prayed to God that Mary was still alert enough not to go off the road. Mary was badly hurt and half frozen, just like her. Under the bandages, Laura's mangled hand was a swollen blaze. Her body had reached and passed its threshold of pain, and now she was going on sheer willpower and Black Cats. She was still going because tears wouldn't get David back, and neither would she get her son by crawling into a corner and surrendering. She had come too far now to give up. She'd left her friend behind, in the snow. Mary Terror had another sin to pay for.
The wind thrashed at the Cutlass, and the car's frame moaned like a human voice. Laura stared straight ahead, unblinking, into the storm. She was looking for red taillights, but there was nothing but snow and darkness beyond. The highway was curving to the right, still ascending. The tires slid over a sheet of ice and Laura's heart stuttered, but then the tires gripped pavement again. The wiper motor's whine had gotten louder, and that frightened Laura more than the ice. If the wiper failed, she was finished until the storm ended. Now the road began to descend and curve to the left, and Laura had to ease on the brake. The tires slipped once more, the Cutlass sliding over almost to the median's ice-crusted guardrail before she regained control. Sheets of snow that looked solid were flailing at the windshield, and again the highway climbed. A gust of wind hit the Cutlass like a punch from the left, the wheel shivering in her grip.
She had to go on even if she was making only ten miles an hour. She had to go on until the wiper motor burned out and the snow closed in. The only thing in her life that mattered worth a damn anymore was holding her son in her arms, and she would fight the furies every mile of the way if that's what had to be done.
Ahead, Mary had slowed the Cherokee. The road had leveled off, and snowdrifts four and five feet high stood on this section of I-80. The winds were beating at the Cherokee from both sides, their noise like banshee wails. Mary threaded a path between the drifts, her tires spinning on ice and then catching again. The Cherokee suddenly got away from her and fishtailed, and she fought the wheel, but there was nothing she could do. The entire vehicle made a slow spin and crunched into a snowdrift. She powered the Cherokee through it, the engine straining. Thirty more yards, and the drifts were all around her, some of them sculpted to eight feet high. She kept going, trying to find a path through them, but she had to stop again be-because the snowdrifts were up to the hood and would not be bullied.
She looked in the rearview mirror. Darkness upon darkness. Where was the bitch? Still back at the Silver Cloud Inn? Or on the highway? The bitch was a fighter, but she wasn't crazy enough to try to cross the Rockies in a blizzard. No, that kind of insanity was Mary's domain.
She wasn't going anywhere for a while. There was plenty of gas in the tank. The heater was all right. In a couple of hours dawn would break. Maybe in the light she could find a way out of this.
Mary pulled up the emergency brake, then switched off the headlights and the wipers. Within seconds the windshield was covered over. She let the engine idle, and she picked up Drummer. He was through crying, but now he was making mewling hungry noises. She reached for her bag and the baby's formula. The acidic smell of urine drifted to hen Drummer had joined her in wetting himself. Hell of a place to change a diaper, she thought, but she was a mother now, and such things had to be done. She glanced in the rearview mirror again. Still nothing. The bitch had stayed at the Silver Cloud with Benedict Bedelia. The shots would've hit Laura Clayhead if Didi hadn't gotten in the way. They'd been good shots, the both of them. She didn't know exactly where Didi had been hit, but she didn't think Didi was going to be chasing anybody for a while.
Two miles behind the Cherokee, Laura heard a grinding noise. It went on for ten seconds, and then the wiper stopped. Snow blanked the windshield. "Damn it!" Laura shouted as she eased pressure on the brake. The car began to skid, first to the left and then back to the right, turning and sliding sideways along I-80. Laura's nerves were screaming, but all she could do was brace herself for a collision. At last the Cutlass straightened out, began to respond to the brake, and rolled to a slippery halt.
Her traveling was over until the snow stopped. There was nothing to do but pull up the emergency brake and turn off the headlight. The heater was rattling, but it was pumping out warm air. There was a little more than a half tank of gas. She could survive for a few hours.
In the darkness Laura forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, trying to calm down. Mary might get away from her, but she knew Mary's destination. Mary wasn't going to be driving very fast or far in this storm. She might even pull off I-80 and try to sleep. The important thing was to get to Freestone before Mary and find Jack Gardiner, if indeed he was one of the three men on Didi's list.
The wind shrieked like discordant violin notes around the Cutlass. Laura leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The image of Didi's face came to her: not the face of the woman who lay dying in the snow, but her face as she worked carefully on the splints for Laura's hand. She saw Didi in the pottery workshop, showing the items that had been created from a tormented mind. And then she saw Didi's face as the woman might have looked when she was much younger, a teenager in a black-and-white high school yearbook picture, something from the late sixties. Didi was smiling, her hair sprayed and flipped up on the ends and her face freckled and healthy-looking with a little farmgirl chub in her cheeks. Her eyes were clear, and they gazed toward the future from a place where murder and terror did not live.
The picture began to fade.
Laura let it go, and she slept in the
arms of the storm.
The tasks of a mother done, Mary put Drummer on the passenger seat and zipped up the parka around him again. For a few minutes she brooded on the distance she had yet to go — two hundred miles across Utah, then into Nevada for more than three hundred miles, passing through Reno into California, down to Sacramento, and then through the Napa Valley toward Oakland and San Francisco. Have to buy more diapers and formula for Drummer. Have to get some pain pills and something to keep me awake. She still had plenty of money from her mother's ring and forty-seven dollars and some change she'd taken from Rocky Road's house. She would have to change her jeans before she went into a store, and getting her swollen thigh into fresh denim was going to be a job. She had another pair of gloves somewhere in her belongings, so she could hide her bloodied hand. How long would it be before the pigs got on her case? Not very long, she figured. Have to haul ass when she got over the mountains, maybe find a place to lay low until the heat passed.
She couldn't deal with these things right now. Her fever had returned, her body a raw pulse, and she realized she was fading fast. She found the baby's face in the dark, kissed his forehead, and then reclined the driver's seat back. She closed her eyes and listened to the wind. God's voice was in it, singing "Love Her Madly" to her.
Mary heard only the first verse, and then she was asleep.
6
A Harley Man
TAP TAP.
"Lady?"
Tap tap. "Lady, you okay?"
Laura woke up, the effort as tough as swimming through glue. She got her eyes open, and she saw the man in a hooded brown parka beside her window.
"You okay?" he asked again, his face long-jawed and ruddy in the cold.
Laura nodded. The movement made the muscles of her neck and shoulders awaken and rage.
"Got some coffee." The man was holding a thermos. He lifted it in invitation.
Laura rolled her window down. She realized suddenly that the wind had died. A few small snowflakes were still falling. The gray sky was streaked with pearly light, and by its somber glow Laura could see the huge white mountain ranges that marched along I-80. The man poured some coffee into the thermos's cup, gave it to her, and she downed it gratefully. In another life she might have wished for Jamaican Blue Mountain; now any pot-boiled brew was delicious if it got her engine running.
"What're you doin' out here?" he asked. "The road's still closed."
"Took a wrong turn, I guess." Her voice was a froggish croak.
"Lucky you didn't wind up askin' directions from St. Peter. It was a damned mess between here and Rock Springs. Drifts higher'n my head and wide as a house."
Was a mess, he'd said. The noise of machinery came to her. "My wipers are out," she said. "Could you clear my windshield off?"
"Reckon I can." He started raking the snow away with a leather-gloved hand. The powder was almost five inches thick, the last inch iced to the glass. The man dug deep, got his fingers hooked, and wrenched upward, and the plate of ice cracked like a pistol shot and slid away. The windshield on her side was clear, and through it she could see a yellow snowplow at work forty yards ahead, smoke chugging from its exhaust pipe. Another plow was shoving snow aside over on the interstate's eastbound lanes, and a third plow sat without a driver twenty feet from the Cutlass. Laura realized she must've been dead to the world not to have heard that thing approaching. Behind the plows were two large highway department trucks, their crews shoveling cinders onto the patches of ice. Gears clicked and meshed in her brain. "You came from Rock Springs?"
"My men got on at Table Rock, but the drifts are broke up from here on. Hell of a mess, I'm tellin' ya."
The snowplows had come from the west. The way to California was open.
"Thank you." She returned the cup to him. The Cutlass's engine was still idling, the gas tank down almost to the E. She figured by the amount of daylight that she'd been asleep at least four hours. She released the emergency brake.
"Hey, you'd better find a place to pull off!" the plow's driver cautioned. "It's still mighty dangerous. Nobody ever tell you about snow chains?"
"I'll make it. Where's the nearest gas station?"
"Rawlins. That's ten miles or so. I swear, you're about the second luckiest woman in this world!"
"The second luckiest?"
"Yeah. At least you don't have a little baby that could've frozen to death."
Laura stared up at him.
"Woman and her baby caught in the drifts couple of miles ahead," he told her, taking her silence for curiosity. "Worked herself in good and tight. She didn't have no snow chains neither."
"She was in a van?"
"Pardon?"
"A green van? Is that what she was in?"
"Nope. One of them Jeep wagons. Comanche or Geronimo or somethin'."
"What color?"
"Dark blue, I reckon." He frowned. "How come you're askin'?"
"I know her," Laura said. A thought occurred to her. "Did you give her coffee, too?"
"Yup. Drunk it like a horse."
Laura smiled grimly. They had drunk from the same bitter cup. "How long ago was that?"
"Thirty, forty minutes, I reckon. She a friend of yours?"
"No."
"Well, she asked where the nearest gas station was, too. Rawlins, I said. I tell you, travelin' with a little bitty baby in a blizzard without snow chains… that woman must be crazy!"
Laura put the car into drive. "Thanks again. You take care."
"That's my middle name!" he said, and he stepped back from the window.
She started off, guarding her speed. The tires crunched over cinders. Snow chains or not, she was going to make it to Rawlins. She skidded in a couple of places, the highway climbing and then descending across the mountains, but she took it slow and easy and watched the quivering needle of her fuel gauge. Somewhere along the line Mary Terror had ditched her van; that much was clear. Where Mary had gotten the new vehicle, Laura didn't know, but she guessed more blood was on Mary's hands.
The same hands that held the fate of David.
She turned into the gas station at Rawlins, filled the tank, and scraped the rest of the snow off the windshield. She relieved herself in the bathroom, swallowed another Black Cat tablet — its caffeine equivalent to four cups of strong black coffee — and she bought some junk food guaranteed to make her blood sugar soar. The gas station's small grocery also sold gauze bandages, and she bought some to rewrap her hand with. Another bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin and half a dozen canned Cokes, and she was ready to go. She asked the teenage girl behind the counter about seeing a big woman with a baby, traveling in a dark blue Jeep wagon.
"Yes, ma'am, I seen her," the girl answered. She would be pretty when she got her acne under control, Laura thought. "She was in here 'bout thirty minutes ago. Cute little ol' baby. He was raisin' a ruckus, and she bought him some diapers and a new passy."
"Was she hurt?" Laura asked. The girl stared blankly at her. "Bleeding," Laura said. "Did you see any blood on her?"
"No, ma'am," the girl said in a wary voice. Laura could not know that Mary had awakened, seen the plows coming in the early light, and had removed her bloodstained trousers, blotting up the leakage with the last Pampers and struggling into a fresh pair of jeans from her suitcase.
Laura paid what she owed and went on. She figured she was thirty to forty minutes behind Mary Terror. The snowplows and cinder trucks were out on I-80 like a small army. Except for some flurries, the snowfall had ceased and it was all over but the cleaning up. She began to see more cars on the interstate as she crossed the Continental Divide west of Creston, the mountains looming around her in a rugged white panorama and the sky chalky gray. The highway began its long, slow descent toward Utah. When she passed Rock Springs, she saw state troopers waving tractor-trailer rigs back onto I-80 from a crowded truck stop. The interstate was officially open again, the Rockies stood swathed in the clouds behind her, and she gradually increased her speed to fifty-five, then
to sixty, then to sixty-five.
She crossed the Utah state line and immediately saw a sign that said Salt Lake City was fifty-eight miles ahead. She looked for a dark blue Jeep wagon, spotted a vehicle that fit the description, but when she got up beside it she saw a Utah tag and a white-haired man at the wheel. The interstate took her into Salt Lake City, where she made a gas stop, then curved along the gray shore of the Great Salt Lake, straightened out, and shot her toward the sandy desert wastes. As Laura ate her lunch of two Snickers bars and a Coke, the clouds opened and the sun glared through. Patches of blue appeared in the sky, and little whirlwinds kicked up puffs of dust from the winter desert.
She passed Wendover, Utah, at two o'clock, and a big green sign with a roulette wheel on it welcomed her to Nevada. Desert land, jagged peaks, and scrub brush bordered I-80 all the way to the horizon. The carcasses of road kill were being plucked at by vultures with wingspans like Stealth bombers. Laura passed signs advertising "giant flea" markets, chicken ranches, Harrah's Auto Museum in Reno, and a rodeo in Winnemucca. Several times she looked to her right, expecting to see Didi sitting on the seat beside her. If Didi was there, she was a quiet ghost. The tires hummed and the engine racketed, dark blooms of burning oil drifting out behind. Laura kept watching for Mary's Jeep wagon; she saw a number of them, but none were the right color. On the long straight highway, cars were passing her doing eighty and ninety miles an hour. She got into the windbreak of a tractor-trailer truck and let the speed wind up to seventy-five. Nevada became a progression of signs, the names of desert towns blowing past: Oasis… Wells… Metropolis… Deeth, the second e of which someone had altered with spray paint to spell Death.
She was truly alone now, journeying into frightful country.
At the end of the road was Freestone, fifty miles north of San Francisco. What was she going to do when she found Jack Gardiner? What would she do if none of those three men was Jack Gardiner? What kind of man would he be now? Would he shun Mary Terror or embrace her? Surely he'd read about her in the papers or seen the story on TV. What if — and this thought sickened her — he was still a killer at heart, and he took David as an offering and he and Mary fled together? What if… what if… what if. Those questions were unanswerable. All she knew for sure was that this road led to Freestone, and Mary was on it.