“You’re not going out that door,” Lincoln says to Snake. “I’ll shoot right through her to kill you.”
“No, you won’t,” Snake says, edging sideways. “The mayor’s not gonna let you. He wants this dried-up hag on the witness stand, saying what she just said. He’ll do everything he can to keep telling himself that his old man’s innocent. But now you know the truth.”
“Don’t kill her,” I tell Lincoln. “And don’t listen to that bastard. He’s poison.”
“I’m the only truth teller in here,” Snake says, nearly to the door now. In one sinuous motion, the old man shifts the knife into the hand of the arm locked around her throat, while his free hand searches blindly for the doorknob.
“Don’t let him take me!” Wilma screeches. “Now that I said what I did, he’ll kill me for sure!”
As my eyes dart from Snake’s hand to the knob, Alois lunges off the sofa onto his dead comrade, grabbing for the pistol that the dead man never reached.
“Shoot him!” Lincoln shouts, but I can’t bring myself to do it while the kid is vainly scrabbling beneath his friend’s corpse.
Fixing my aim on Alois’s back, I yell for Alois to stop, but he doesn’t.
Lincoln’s pistol bucks with a deafening blast, and a bullet punches into the corpse only inches from Alois’s head.
“Goddamn it!” Lincoln bellows, and a split-second shift of focus tells me Snake and Wilma have vanished through the door.
Lincoln fires two rounds after them, then charges outside, leaving me to deal with Alois, who has finally got his hands on the butt of his friend’s pistol.
“Don’t do it!” I scream, but he doesn’t listen.
As the long-barreled revolver appears from beneath the corpse, I shoot Alois Engel high in the back. The impact drives him into the body beneath him, but after a couple of seconds, he thrusts himself up once more and tries to lift the gun. His eyes slowly track around to me, and the gun follows—
I close my eyes and fire again, this time into the center of his chest, where I know his heart is pumping violently. My second bullet slams him to the floor and keeps him there, while a pool of blood spreads quickly from beneath him.
With a curse of fury and guilt, I turn, grab my rifle, and crash through the door after Lincoln.
Chapter 77
Outside, I see Lincoln walking slowly after Snake, who has one arm tight under Wilma’s chin while his other holds the long-bladed knife to her throat, beneath his forearm. Snake has nearly reached a pickup truck parked about twenty feet from the house.
“Help me!” Wilma cries. “Don’t let him take me!”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Lincoln says, keeping pace with Snake.
“I’m here!” I shout.
“Get around to the side of him!” Lincoln orders. “Flank him. Don’t let him in the truck.”
“Easy now,” Snake says, his voice surprisingly steady. He sounds like he’s trying to calm a spooked horse.
“Is the blond kid dead?” Lincoln asks me.
“Yeah.”
Snake winces, but he doesn’t utter a word in anger or regret. “Cage just killed my son,” he says in the tone of a man laying casino chips on a green baize cloth. “He already killed my nephew. Let my son be enough.”
“It ain’t the same,” Lincoln says, cutting his eyes at me. “Get around him!”
As I try to do that, a low rumble reaches my ears. In five seconds the sound doubles in volume.
“You hear that?” I ask sharply.
“Motorcycles,” Lincoln says. “Goddamn it.”
Triumph dances in Snake’s eyes. “You boys are in the shit now. Things turn quick, don’t they? You better haul ass.”
Lincoln’s going to kill them both—
The rumble has become a thundering bellow, reverberating off the abandoned buildings on Rodney’s main street. Headlight beams spear the darkness a hundred yards behind us, growing brighter by the second.
“We’ve got to go!” I yell, darting to the truck, which looks like an old International Harvester.
“You can’t leave me!” Wilma cries. “He’ll kill me for sure.”
“Those bikers don’t know which house it is,” Lincoln says.
If I open the door to the truck, its interior light will go on, pinpointing our location. From the passenger side, I squint into the dark and see there’s no key in the ignition.
“Snake’s got the keys!” I call to Lincoln. “Or one of those kids.”
“Not for long.”
“No!” Wilma screams. “Don’t shoot!”
Lincoln has taken two steps forward and steadied his aim.
“Don’t do it!” I shout. “A gunshot will bring those bikers right to us!”
I’m moving toward Lincoln when Wilma Deen snaps. She drives her elbow into Snake’s ribs, but not hard enough, because his knife rakes over her throat and a rush of black blood runs down into her blouse. Wilma’s hands fly to her throat. She staggers a couple of steps, then holds her bloody hands in front of her face and shrieks like a madwoman.
Deprived of his human shield, Snake turns to flee into the dark, but Lincoln closes the distance in three seconds. At the limit of my sight, Lincoln swats Snake’s knife hand away, grips him by the throat, lifts him off his feet, and slams him against a poplar tree. Snake’s feet kick wildly, like those of a man being hanged, and the eyes that always looked either cool or crazy bulge as though they’ll burst from their sockets. Without knowing how or why, I find myself yanking on Lincoln’s arm, trying to tear it free from Snake’s neck.
“Quit!” Lincoln bellows. “This has to happen!”
I might as well try to rip an arm-thick limb from a tree with my bare hands. If Lincoln were strangling Snake in open space, I might be able to break his grip, but with his feet planted and all his weight wedging Knox against the tree, I don’t have a prayer. Snake’s face has gone purple, his eyes dim, and not even a choked gasp passes his throat.
“Don’t kill him!” I plead hopelessly, my hands on the iron muscles of Lincoln’s forearm. “We’ll never be sure what happened.”
This gives Lincoln pause. His arm stays rigid, but his eyes cut toward me. “I thought you were sure.”
“I don’t know, man! What’s the difference between killing him now and five minutes from now? If we don’t get out of here, we’re dead.”
“You want to bring him?”
“Her, too. Throw him in the truck.”
Lincoln looks back at the headlights, which have grown from a set of cones into an ambient glow that silhouettes the buildings on our side of the main street. “Our only chance is the river.”
Shoving my pistol into my waistband, I grab at Snake’s pockets. A key ring jangles in his left front one. When I dig it out, I find not only a GM key for the truck, but a small key with an orange float wired to it.
“We’re golden! Let’s move.”
Lincoln’s big forearm relaxes, and Snake slides just far enough down the tree for his feet to touch the ground. The old man coughs, then desperately sucks for air. When the oxygen hits his bloodstream, his eyes open, and I see life in them, awareness even. An instant after Lincoln sees the same thing, he pulls Snake away from the tree, then slams him back against it. The light in the old eyes goes dark, and Snake’s body slides down the tree as if it has no bones in it.
“Get the woman,” Lincoln says.
While Lincoln whips off his belt and ties Snake’s hands, I go to Wilma Deen, who’s lying on the ground, gripping her throat and staring at the sky with horror in her eyes. She’s still breathing, but she’s lost a good bit of blood. In this light it’s not worth pulling her hands away to try to gauge the severity of the wound. We’re twenty-five miles from Natchez by boat, but at least she stands a chance with us.
The truck door opens, and when I turn, I see Lincoln stuffing Snake onto the floor of the backseat.
“Dome light!” I hiss. “Goddamn it, they’ll see it!”
?
??Get your ass in here!”
Taking Wilma by the feet, I drag her to the Harvester, where Lincoln helps me lift her into the passenger seat.
“Why not the backseat?” I ask, my eyes on the headlights back on the town road.
“Somebody’s gonna have to keep pressure on that neck if she passes out. And somebody’s gonna have to shoot to keep them off us. You want to drive or shoot?”
“I’d better drive.”
“You know where the river is?”
“It’s a straight shot west, right? Two miles?”
“Yeah. But it ain’t much of a road.”
“I’ll find it. Let’s go.”
We close the doors with a creak of rusty hinges, but my heart sinks when I crank the truck. There’s nothing to be done about the noise.
“It’s a standard shift,” I think aloud, stepping on the clutch and throwing the truck into first gear.
“The river road’s about a hundred yards that way,” Lincoln says, pointing out to my left with his gun hand. “If you go out to the main road, they’ll see us. You’ve got to drive through these trees.”
There’s a moon out, but not enough to drive through trees at any speed. As we roll forward, man-thick trunks loom out of the darkness every few yards, sometimes in pairs. About seven miles an hour is all I can risk. Glancing to my right, I see that Wilma has braced herself against the passenger door. She’s got both hands clenched to her neck, and her face is the color of skim milk.
“Looks like two Harleys pulling up to the main house,” Lincoln says, peering back through the windshield. “Three now. Shit, four. Can’t you go any faster?”
“Not without hitting a tree.”
“Christ. If they shut off their engines, they’ll hear us from there.”
Progress is maddeningly slow, and I’m afraid of missing the river road in the dark. From curiosity, I risk one glance over the backseat. Snake is laid out on the floor like a sack of sticks, dead to the world.
“You’ve got to keep separation between us and them,” Lincoln says, “or we’ll never make it into the boat, even if we reach the river.”
“Is Snake alive?” I ask, my right hand riding the vibrating gearshift.
“Who gives a fuck? Watch where you’re going.”
“I think I see the road!”
“Good, because they’ve seen us—or heard us. Get ready. They’ll be coming fast on those bikes.”
I press harder on the gas pedal, and black tree trunks flash out of the night like darkness incarnate.
“Turn the headlights on!” Lincoln cries. “If you hit a tree now, we’re dead.”
A pale line of earth stretches westward through the trees to my left. As soon as I’m sure it’s the river road, I gun the Harvester, fishtail onto sandy mud, and hit the headlights. We pick up speed fast, at least by the standard of the previous two minutes, but the instant I feel encouraged, Lincoln smashes out part of the rear windshield with the butt of his pistol in preparation for a gun battle.
“They’re coming,” he says, his voiced edged with fear and anticipation. “Don’t stop for anything. Not even if you’re hit or blinded. Just keep your foot on the gas.”
Once I get the Harvester in fourth gear, I focus on keeping the big truck on the narrow dirt road. But at the edge of my vision I see that Wilma Deen has slid down the door with her hands limp in her lap.
“Goddamn it,” I mutter, reaching out and pressing hard against the laceration on her bloody throat. Her skin is so slick, it’s hard to keep my hand in place.
Lincoln’s first rifle shot hammers my eardrums so hard that I swerve on the road.
“That slowed ’em down!” he roars. “Gun this old bitch! Go! Go! Go!”
At sixty miles per hour, the truck begins launching itself into the air when we top random humps in the road. Every time we crash back to earth, the bone-rattling impact makes it seem the truck is about to fall to pieces.
“Here they come again! Gonna give ’em a few this time—”
Lincoln empties four rounds from my rifle, the noise shattering in the cab of the truck.
“You hit anything?” I ask, watching for sinkholes in the rutted dirt.
“I hit one guy dead in the chest,” he says, sounding dazed. “If those freaks catch us now, they’ll skin us alive.”
“They still coming?” I ask, trying in vain to see behind us in the jouncing rearview mirror. All I see is distant lights.
“Oh, yeah. Faster now. There must be ten bikes back there.”
A bolus of fear blasts through me, raising every hair on my skin. As I struggle to coax some more speed from the old truck, a drumroll of lead slams into the tailgate.
“They’re shooting back,” Lincoln says. “That sounded like a goddamn machine gun.”
“What can I do?”
“Can you kill the lights?”
“Sure. It’s staying on the road that’s the problem.”
The trees that lined our escape route to this point have vanished. Now water stretches away from both edges of the road. My margin for error is gone. With a pang of guilt, I release Wilma Deen’s neck and clench both hands on the wheel. If we go off into swamp water with those bikes behind us, we’re going to die, one way or another. Drowning in slime, or getting shot trying to crawl out of it.
Another staccato burst of lead slams into the truck. With a silent prayer, I kill the lights.
“Only two rounds left in the rifle,” Lincoln says. “I’m going to let them get closer, make these count.”
In my mind I see a God’s-eye view of our predicament: a lumbering beast being pursued by hunters on steel horses down a narrow causeway, the hunters rapidly closing the gap—
“Come on, come on,” Lincoln murmurs.
As I brace for his next shot, something slams into my seat back, then cracks against my head. Jerking forward, I risk a look behind me. Two booted feet are flailing around the cab. It’s Snake, kicking wildly from the floor of the truck. Now he’s trying to hook a foot around my head.
“Make him stop!” I yell. “I’m gonna wreck!”
“What?” Lincoln asks, still aiming the rifle through the back windshield.
He doesn’t even know Snake is conscious. While I try to keep the old man’s feet off my head, his boot glances off the seat and connects with the dome light, which flashes on again, illuminating Lincoln as he aims his pistol down at Snake’s thrashing body. I’m not going to stop him this time, but before Lincoln can fire, another fusillade rips out of the dark behind us, and he flies forward with an explosive grunt.
“Lincoln!”
Panic hits me with a force that makes fear seem trivial. Twisting in my seat, I scrabble in vain at the dome light with my right hand, then hammer it with my fist until it breaks. Blessed darkness envelops the cab once more.
Lincoln’s breath is a shallow wheeze in my ear.
“Talk to me, man! Where are you hit?”
“Shoulder blade,” he croaks. “Smashed it, I think.”
“Right or left?”
“Left . . .”
Before I can think of anything to tell him, the Harvester’s left rear door flies open and a rushing wind fills the cab. At first I’m certain that a biker somehow managed to dive into the bed of the truck, then work his way around to the door. Then I realize Snake must have done it—
“He jumped!” Lincoln yells, pushing himself off my seat back with a roar of pain. “Snake’s out of here! Stop!”
“Are you crazy?”
“The bikers slowed down . . . they don’t know what happened, or who he is. Let me shoot him. Stop!”
With a supreme act of will, I pump the brakes until we manage to stop without sliding off into the swamp.
Cursing in pain, Lincoln somehow gets my rifle up on his right shoulder and braces it on the frame of the shattered windshield.
“Can you see him?” I ask, looking down at Wilma once more. Her entire chest and abdomen are covered in blood, and her eyes are closed. br />
“I’ve got him. He’s silhouetted in their headlights. You see him?”
Twisting in the seat, I’m startled to see a triangular shadow against living arcs of light. Snake must be on his knees, about forty yards behind us, well within the point-blank range of the .308.
“Say a prayer, Penn. I’m sending him to hell.”
I don’t think Lincoln has ever used my first name, and I don’t have time to reflect on it because my thoughts are blasted into oblivion by another burst of gunfire from behind us, which tears into the metal and glass of the Harvester.
Lincoln jerks backward, clawing at his face with both hands. “I can’t see! There’s glass in my eyes!”
Behind us, the triangular silhouette wavers against the light, then a taller shadow joins it. The pack will be after us again in seconds. With a violent yank on the gear lever, I manhandle the transmission into reverse.
“Get down,” I yell, “they’re going to shoot again.”
“What are you doing?” Lincoln cries. “Get to the river!”
“We won’t make it. Get down!”
When I jam the gas pedal to the floor, Lincoln covers his head with both hands and rolls onto the floor. Heeding my own warning, I slide as far down as I can without losing sight of my target. The Harvester gains speed, and the air rushing through the side door builds to a buffeting wind inside the cab.
The bikers don’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late to get out of the road, but Snake hears us. The silhouette stutters against the lights, doubles in height as Snake struggles to his feet, but before he takes two steps our rear bumper plows him over at fifty miles per hour. The heavy metal Harvester doesn’t even slow down until it smashes into the first Harley. The momentum of the old truck carries implacable force, and three motorcycles crumple in the face of it. After the fourth collision, the Harvester finally judders to a stop.
Screams of rage and pain reach my ears, but before anyone has time to react, I shift back into first and floor the accelerator again.
“What happened?” Lincoln croaks from the backseat.
“Snake’s dead.”
“You saw him go down?”
“He’s gone. Obliterated. How bad are you hit? Can you get to the boat?”