Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

  Dryden was a hundred feet out from the house now. Watching his step. The gas was visibly thinning already.

  Over the ringing that still throbbed in his ears, he heard the chopper coming in. Far south yet, not even visible.

  He picked up his speed.

  One hundred fifty feet from the house. The cloud was slipping away by the second.

  He saw Audrey and Rachel. Straight ahead, a few dozen yards. Lying facedown in the grass. He broke into a run, his feet kicking up swirls of chalky gas residue.

  It came to him even before he reached them that something was wrong. Something was missing. He realized what it was in the last five yards: no chill at his temples.

  Their minds should’ve generated that sensation even if they were asleep.

  What did it mean? That they were more than asleep?

  Comatose?

  Worse than that?

  “Goddammit.” Through the mask, the mutter sounded almost animal.

  The chopper was louder now. He looked up and saw it coming north over the city lights, less than two miles out.

  He got to Rachel and knelt down beside her. Her hair lay in a tangle around her neck. He reached through it, to her jawline, and pressed his finger to the carotid artery pulse point.

  Her pulse was strong.

  Still no chill touching him. Not even a trace.

  Understanding hit him a second before he rolled her over. He thought of the silhouettes’ movements in the field, before the barrage started. Something strange in the way they were walking. All at once he knew what it had been.

  They had only been moving one at a time.

  He let go of the pulse point, grabbed the shoulder, and shoved hard. The unconscious body rolled onto its back, the hair cascading away from its face.

  Which wasn’t Rachel’s.

  He was on his feet in half a second, tearing off the mask, pulling his phone from his pocket as he sprinted into the wind—into the thinnest reaches of the gas. He pulled up the recent call list, stabbing Gaul’s number even as the sound of the rotors swelled.

  One ring. Two. It connected.

  “Turn the chopper around!” He screamed it without even listening for a reply. “Turn around! She sprung the trap! Turn the fucking chopper around!”

  He saw it happen even as he shouted, the aircraft passing over a point maybe a mile south of the farmhouse—well within Rachel’s reach, wherever the hell she was. The chopper’s pitch and attitude changed abruptly, and as they did Dryden heard men screaming over the phone’s earpiece. He pictured the pilot or copilot—it really didn’t matter which—taking his hands off the controls and attacking the man beside him. Either way, there was suddenly no one flying the aircraft. It tipped steeply to one side, the tail whipping around like a boom, and a second later the chopper simply plunged. It dropped three hundred feet and exploded in the city sprawl like a percussion bomb. Orange flame and thick black smoke rolled up and away.

  Dryden stared. He still had the phone at his ear, but the call had gone dead. He watched the flames seethe and curl.

  Five seconds passed.

  He had no idea what to do.

  What was there to do, under the circumstances?

  He thought about it a few seconds longer and found he had an answer. He turned off the phone and slipped it back into his pocket and let the gas mask fall at his feet. He glanced at the crash site one last time, then turned and faced east across the field. Around him the gas haze had thinned to nothing, but fifty yards east it was as thick as ever. Thick enough to put him to sleep, if he simply walked into it.

  He couldn’t say why it made sense to do that—only that he wanted to. It was all he wanted.

  He got moving, each stride putting him deeper into the cloud, sucking in breath after breath as the air thickened around him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  He woke with his heart pounding, his body spasming under a surge of ice water. A bucket clattered to the floor. He opened his eyes and found himself handcuffed to a chair in the farmhouse’s dining room. The table had been shoved aside. The room was clear, and he was sitting in the middle of it.

  Rachel stood before him, watching him.

  For a second Dryden couldn’t understand how he’d gotten here. He remembered seeing the chopper crash, with Gaul on board, and he remembered walking into the gas cloud afterward because—

  Because why? Why the hell had he done that?

  The answer settled over him. He shut his eyes for a long beat, getting his head around it. When he opened them again Rachel was still watching him, her eyes large, maybe curious.

  Was she in there somewhere? The girl who’d fallen asleep on his shoulder? The hope felt like a blade twisting in his chest.

  Rachel blinked, and the curiosity was gone. In its place Dryden saw only cool appraisal.

  “Had to let Holly drive away,” she said. Her voice was soft, but there was no emotion in it. “If I’d stopped her, you would’ve had time to warn off the chopper.”

  She went to a chair near the wall and picked up a cell phone; Dryden realized it was his own. She turned it on and opened the call list and showed it to him.

  “One of those is Holly’s number,” she said. “I want you to call her and tell her it’s okay to come back.”

  “I’m not doing that. Force me if you want. I’m not doing it on my own.”

  She stared at him, impassive. For a second he expected her to simply lock him again. He waited for the change of mind to come over him—the desire, out of nowhere, to make the call.

  Seconds passed. Nothing happened.

  Rachel turned aside. She stared off at empty space as if considering options.

  “It comes out better if I don’t have to make you say it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Did Holly show you the notes? I bet she did.”

  Dryden nodded.

  “Her hand,” Rachel said. “My handwriting.”

  Dryden started to ask what the point was, but stopped. He thought he saw it.

  “It’s the same with talking,” Rachel said. “I can force you if it comes to it, but—” She stopped. She turned to him. “It won’t be as convincing as I’d like. I’d rather you did it yourself.”

  “I’m not going to. You’re wasting your time asking.”

  “I think you will,” she said. There was something almost like sadness in her voice.

  She set the phone back down on the chair. As she did, Dryden glimpsed a surgical scalpel next to it.

  “You’ve tortured people before,” Rachel said. “You’ve been there, at least. You’ve stood and watched it happen.”

  Dryden said nothing.

  “You’ve also been trained to resist torture,” Rachel continued. “But I have to think this is one of those areas where training is different than the real thing.”

  “I’m not calling her,” Dryden said. “Nothing you do to me is going to change that.”

  “It’s not what I’m going to do to you. It’s what you’re going to do to me.”

  She came forward and sat astride his knees, facing him with her arms draped behind his neck. Her face hovered six inches from his own.

  “You were very good to me,” she said. “Even I can appreciate that. I don’t really want to see you hurting. I think you should call her, before this gets bad.”

  She waited for a response.

  He offered none.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Her arms slipped down behind him, to the handcuffs binding him to the back of the chair. He heard the lock disengage, and then his arms were free.

  Rachel stood and stepped back from him. She reached behind her and picked up the scalpel, studying its blade in the light.

  Dryden considered the distance between himself and her. Five or six feet. He could cross it in far less than a second and knock her unconscious with a blow to the head. Audrey, wherever she was, would be armed, but he’d deal with that problem in its own—

  The will
to do any of that simply left him. Blew away like a piece of lint in the wind.

  “Not even worth thinking about,” Rachel said. “Any plan you come up with, I can stop you from even wanting to try it.”

  He looked up at her. What he’d heard in her voice earlier—that edge of sadness—was in her eyes now. Just barely, but it was there.

  “In a few seconds you’re going to take this scalpel out of my hand and attack me with it,” she said. “You won’t be able to help yourself.”

  Dryden stared. There was no point pleading out loud.

  “All you have to do is call her,” Rachel said.

  “You can hear what I’m thinking. Can’t you already tell I’m not going to do this?”

  “I know what you’re thinking right now. I have no idea what you’ll be thinking in thirty seconds. Neither do you.”

  “I’m not going to call her.”

  “We’ll see.”

  It happened before he could say anything more. The change came over him so quickly it altered the color saturation of his vision, as if the blood vessels in his eyes had distended. Then contemplation itself was gone and there was only the girl, standing before him, flinching back as he exploded from the chair and grabbed the scalpel from her hand. Her eyes were huge and terrified, her breath rushing in. He grabbed her and pivoted and threw her across the table, slamming her onto it, feeling it buckle and snap beneath the two of them. Her arms came up, fighting him, both of her hands grappling for one of his—the one that held the scalpel. He broke the grip and slashed the top of one of her forearms, shirt fabric and skin opening up, blood spilling fast. He could hardly think of it as blood, though. It seemed more like nectar, her whole body a vessel full of it, pulsing with it, intense as her desperation to live. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and wrenched her head back, baring her throat, and his teeth had just touched her skin there when—

  As quickly as it had come, the mindset vanished. As if she’d pushed a button and released him from it. Dryden threw himself off of her and fell backward, propelling his body across the floor until his back hit the wall. Not stopping even then; pushing away until he’d reached the corner, the farthest he could physically get from her.

  He could remember it all: the intensity of the compulsion, the almost erotic craving to put his teeth into her skin, to feel her blood gush inside his mouth.

  Tears now, stinging his eyes, the first tears he’d cried since the day he buried his family. Within seconds he could see nothing but the swimming colors of the room.

  Rachel sat up. She turned sharply toward the sound of footsteps crossing the house, stopping just out of sight.

  “I’m fine,” Rachel said. “Go back to your watch. Now.”

  The footsteps retreated. The screen door opened and banged shut.

  Rachel stood. She pulled back her shirt sleeve and studied the slash wound. It was bleeding steadily, but she seemed unfazed. She went to the chair in the middle of the room. She spun it around and sat in it, leaning forward and staring down on him.

  “Call Holly,” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.”

  Dryden shook his head and looked down, still trying to get control of the tears.

  For a long time Rachel didn’t speak. When she finally did, her voice was softer than before.

  “Ever heard of a place called Lucero, Colorado?”

  Dryden shook his head again.

  “My mom told me about it, in Building Sixteen. In our cell. She talked about it all the time. Her own mom and dad took her camping there when she was a little girl. It’s up in the mountains, and there are horses you can ride, and trails you can walk on. But what my mom really liked was that you could rent canoes at the lake above town. You could rent them even at night, and that was the best thing, because at night all this cold air would come spilling down out of the mountains higher up, and the lake water would still be warm, so this little fog layer would rise up off the surface, just about as high as the canoe. It would cover the whole lake, and in the moonlight it looked like you were riding on a cloud. The last thing my mom said to me, before I sent Holly those messages, was that we were going to go there, to Lucero. Soon as we got out we were going there, and we were going to rent a canoe and go out on the lake the very first night.”

  Her voice had changed pitch, just noticeably. Her throat was constricting.

  “That’s all she wanted,” Rachel said. “A regular life, with her little girl, where she could take her to see a place like that when she felt like it.”

  “Holly didn’t know what would happen to your mom, Rachel. How could she have—”

  “All she had to do was what I begged her to do. Just talk to someone, any reporter in the world. That e-mail address, the things they would’ve seen in it—”

  “She was scared out of her mind. Anyone else would’ve been, too.”

  “I didn’t ask anyone else. I asked her.”

  “She regrets what she did. She’d take it back if—”

  “I finally went there, you know. To Lucero. About a year ago. They still rent out canoes. Even at night.”

  “Holly Ferrel didn’t kill your mom. The people who made all that happen are dead. You got them. It’s over.”

  Rachel swallowed and forced resolve back into her voice. Her eyes hardened again.

  “Call her,” she said.

  “You know I’m not going to.”

  “You might change your mind. There are other things I can make you do to me. Some of them, you’d rather die than do.”

  Dryden understood. At the thought of it, his insides seemed to contract. Like filthy rags being twisted.

  “You better call her,” Rachel said.

  “Please don’t do this—”

  “It’s up to you—”

  “I’m not going to fucking betray her!”

  Rachel took a deep breath. Steadied herself.

  “Don’t,” Dryden said.

  “Sorry.”

  Dryden fixed in his mind the image of Rachel in the first moment he’d met her, pleading with him to trust her, to protect her. Maybe if he could hold on to that picture, maybe—

  “Headlights!”

  Audrey’s voice, out at the screen door.

  Dryden felt the change of mind brush past him like a wing. There and gone. Rachel had already let it go. She rose from the chair.

  “Chevy Malibu,” Audrey said. “Coming up the driveway.”

  Rachel crossed toward the doorway to the living room.

  “This isn’t you,” Dryden said.

  She stopped. Looked down at him.

  “This is only what those two trained you to be,” he said. “You wouldn’t be this person if your mom had raised you.”

  If it stung her, she didn’t show it. She held his gaze and spoke evenly. “She didn’t, though.”

  Headlights washed through the house as the car pulled up in front. Rachel turned back to the doorway, and a second later she was gone.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Dryden got to his feet and followed. He entered the living room in time to see Rachel reach the screen door. Audrey was holding it open with her shoulder; in her hands she had a 12-gauge shotgun. Looking past Rachel, she saw Dryden start across the room.

  “We’re done with him, right?” Audrey said. She was already turning, raising the weapon toward him.

  “Leave him alone,” Rachel said.

  Audrey looked at her. “Why?”

  “Because I told you to.”

  Rachel said it like she was used to giving orders. Audrey reacted like she was used to taking them. After Rachel went through the doorway, Audrey turned to face Dryden again, the gun falling away to her side.

  “Keep your distance,” she said, then followed Rachel.

  Dryden crossed to the door as it banged shut. He pushed it open and stepped out into the darkness and the cool air of the porch. A mile south, several blocks of the town had become a sea of police and fire respo
nse flashers. Tendrils of smoke still rose from the crash site. Closer, the field had cleared entirely of the gas. There was no sign of the two decoys where they’d been lying. There’d been more than enough time for them to wake up and leave, no doubt confused as all hell.

  The Malibu was parked and idling in the dooryard, its lights stabbing through the dust it’d kicked up.

  Rachel stood at the top of the porch steps. Audrey had descended them and stood five feet out from their base, training the shotgun on the car.

  The headlights cut out.

  The engine died.

  Holly Ferrel shoved open the driver’s door and stood. She ignored Audrey and stared up at Rachel.

  Seconds passed.

  Holly stood there, saying nothing. Her arms were low at her sides, her posture the embodiment of defenselessness.

  Dryden couldn’t read Holly’s thoughts, but he knew what she had to be thinking. It occurred to him that he was watching the most honest apology a person could offer. Words could be bullshit. Thoughts and feelings couldn’t. Holly was just standing there, letting Rachel take it all in. Here’s what’s in my head. Take it for what it is.

  Down in front of the steps, Audrey was looking back and forth from Holly to Rachel. She seemed unnerved, and Dryden thought he knew why: Though Audrey could hear everything coming out of Holly’s mind, she could only guess what Rachel might be thinking in response.

  To Rachel, Audrey said, “What are you waiting for?”

  Rachel didn’t answer.

  Dryden moved to the porch rail near the old swing, putting himself ten feet to Rachel’s right. He could see her in profile. Could see her eyes reflecting the distant city light.

  They were filmed with tears.

  Audrey crossed to the foot of the steps and looked up at the girl. “This is what you wanted. It doesn’t matter if she feels bad. It doesn’t even matter if she means it—that doesn’t undo what she did.”

  Rachel made no reply. She didn’t even look down at Audrey. She was staring at Holly, and Holly was staring back.

  “Hey,” Audrey said.