Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

  Rachel flinched. She blinked away the moisture and looked at Audrey.

  “It has to happen,” Audrey said. “You know it. There’s no reason to keep listening to all this.”

  For a moment Rachel didn’t respond. Then she took a hard breath and nodded.

  Audrey looked relieved. “How do you want to do it?”

  Rachel pointed to the shotgun. “Put it in her hands.”

  Audrey smiled at the idea. She turned, crossed the dooryard, and shoved the weapon at Holly.

  Holly made no move to take it. She continued staring at Rachel, her eyes searching. Begging.

  Then they simply went slack.

  She turned and took the shotgun from Audrey.

  Dryden doubted Holly had ever touched a firearm in her life, but she cradled this one with casual ease. She turned it in the light spill from the house and clicked off the safety, pressed the slide release, and opened the action just enough to see that there was a shell in the chamber. She racked it back shut with authority.

  Then she shouldered the weapon, swung it to the side, and blew the top half of Audrey’s head off.

  She’d cycled another shell into the chamber by the time the body dropped. She turned toward the steps then and leveled the weapon straight at Rachel.

  “No!” Dryden shouted.

  Rachel spoke just above a whisper. “It has to end.”

  The girl had her eyes closed. She sank to a sitting position on the top step. Drew her knees against herself. Bowed her head.

  Holly advanced with the shotgun shouldered and aimed at her.

  Dryden crossed to Rachel in two long steps. He dropped himself in front of her, shielding her from the gun’s firing angle.

  Holly changed her position in response. She ascended the broad steps along the opposite handrail, keeping the gun out of Dryden’s reach. Its barrel stayed centered on Rachel’s head as she climbed.

  It was impossible to keep Rachel shielded from all sides. Dryden settled for simply pulling her against himself, her head to his chest, so that any shot pattern that hit her would also hit him.

  “It has to end,” Rachel whispered again. It came out high and cracked, and Dryden felt her body begin shaking with quiet sobs. “I want it to end. I’m sick of it all.”

  The shotgun trembled in Holly’s hands but remained leveled.

  “Let Holly go, Rachel,” Dryden said softly. “You’re going to be okay now. Audrey and Sandra are both gone.”

  Holly was on the plank surface of the porch, the shotgun aimed down at Rachel’s face from three feet away. Dryden saw her snug it tightly into her shoulder.

  “Let her go,” he whispered to Rachel. He kissed the top of her head. “It’s already over. Let her go.”

  He felt her tears soaking through his shirt. She was shaking harder. Losing control.

  “It’s over,” he said.

  Holly gripped the shotgun tighter—then faltered.

  Rachel took her arms from around her knees, turned, and hugged Dryden. She held on with what must’ve been all her strength.

  A second later Holly exhaled deeply and lowered the gun. Her body sagged as if she’d just been cut from restraints. She went to the rail and pitched the weapon into the grass, then turned and stared at Rachel. For a moment she hesitated, unsure what to do—maybe unsure what to feel. Then she crossed to the top of the steps and sat down against the two of them. Sensing her, Rachel turned in place and put her arms around her. Holly pulled the girl close and held her as she cried.

  * * *

  For the next minute none of them spoke or moved. Dryden heard Rachel’s breathing become rhythmic, regular, as if she’d fallen asleep. He guessed it was something more than that, though. He thought of the surveillance video from outside Building 16: Rachel being carried out to the car, in the first moments after the nightmare part of her life had begun. Brain-locked, Gaul had said. Maybe this moment was the other end of the tunnel she’d entered that night. Maybe she would sleep for a day and a half. She had every right to.

  Somewhere inside the house, a ringtone sounded. Dryden’s phone, in the dining room where Rachel had left it.

  It rang a second time, the sound filtering out through the screen door and into the night.

  “I’ve got her,” Holly whispered.

  Dryden nodded, separated from the two of them, and got to his feet. He crossed the porch and entered the house and got the phone on its fifth ring.

  “This is Dryden.”

  Cole Harris’s voice came over the line. “Sam.”

  “Cole. Where are you—”

  “Please just listen,” Harris said. “I’ve heard from Dennis Marsh, and I need to tell you something. No matter what happens, you have to sit tight there at the farmhouse. Don’t leave. Okay?”

  Dryden had made his way back across the house to the front door. He pushed it open and stepped out onto the porch planking. Holly was staring at him. Rachel was still unconscious in her arms.

  “Sam?” Harris said. “Did you hear me?”

  “Don’t leave the farmhouse,” Dryden said. “That’s the whole message?”

  “That’s the whole message.”

  “I understand,” Dryden said.

  He ended the call, pocketed the phone, and went to the porch rail. He looked at the road to the south. He turned left and right to study where it led to the horizon in each direction.

  The glow of headlights appeared beyond a low rise, a mile west. To the east was a more diffuse light, farther out, but definitely there—another vehicle or more coming in.

  “We need to get out of here,” Dryden said. “Right now.”

  He was already moving, crossing to where Holly sat with Rachel.

  “What is it?” Holly asked.

  Dryden crouched and got Rachel in his arms, lifting her and cradling her as Holly stood. The girl remained unresponsive.

  “Get the shotgun,” Dryden said. “And get in the car.”

  He descended the steps to the dooryard, jogging for the Malibu. Holly, coming down right behind him, picked up the 12-gauge as she followed.

  “Passenger side,” Dryden said.

  Holly went past him, rounding the front of the car. She opened the door and got in and rested the shotgun across the console and the backseat. Dryden hunched down and eased Rachel into her arms.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” Holly said.

  “That was Harris on the phone.”

  “And?”

  “And he didn’t say goldenrod.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  They were halfway down the long gravel drive when the twin pinprick of headlights finally crested the rise to the west. It was clear at a glance the vehicle was approaching fast, from a distance of maybe a quarter mile. A second later another set appeared just behind them.

  Dryden looked east in time to see the lights in that direction break into view. Half a mile away, give or take.

  In both directions, the incoming vehicles were closer than any available cross street.

  Dryden pictured the road as he’d seen it when he and Holly had first arrived here. It was like a million others out in farm country: two-lane blacktop with waist-deep runoff ditches on either side. If he pulled out onto that road, they would be trapped on it as if it were a suspension bridge.

  “Hold on to her,” Dryden said.

  He jammed his foot hard on the brake. The Malibu skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, swirling gray in the moonlight—Dryden had kept the car’s headlights off.

  Now he dropped it into reverse and stepped on the gas. The vehicle shot backward. When it was doing twenty, he took his foot off the accelerator, jerked the wheel counterclockwise, and shoved the selector to neutral. The front end went sideways and the nighttime fields spun 180 degrees around them. When the world stabilized, the car was pointed back toward the farmhouse. Dryden put it in drive and accelerated again, as fast as the vehicle could go. He veered to the right at the top of the drive, passing the garage on its east side
and heading north into the grassland behind the farmhouse.

  He considered the viewpoints of the approaching drivers; at their distance they couldn’t have seen the Malibu yet—a dark shape against dark terrain—but they would see the dust above the driveway when they turned in, and the tire tracks denting the grass beyond. They would follow. No question of that.

  “Who are they?” Holly asked.

  In her arms, Rachel still had her eyes closed.

  Dryden glanced in the mirror; the nearest of the vehicles braked and slowed before the foot of the driveway.

  He had only a hunch as to who they were. He hoped he was wrong about it.

  * * *

  Hager was in his favorite spot again. The big window in his office, overlooking the work floor with its glass-walled stations.

  The place was hopping tonight. All twelve stations were occupied. Within each of them, in the deep bloody light, lay a controller, eyes closed and focused on the work. Each was connected to a human subject—a mark, to use the popular term—down there in rural Kansas.

  More than a week ago, after Martin Gaul had gotten in touch to lay out his proposal, each controller had chosen a mark from one of the three test areas—the unlucky little towns hosting the antennas. The controllers had given their marks special instructions, sending them on road trips to the boondocks north of Topeka, to hole up in run-down motels or to pitch tents in campgrounds, and to await further instructions.

  Hager had been more than a little nervous about the whole thing. Once the marks actually left their hometowns and got out of range of their respective towers, there would be no way to get into their heads again until Gaul called with the go-ahead.

  Until the airborne asset got into position.

  More than a few nights, Hager had lain awake wondering if the marks would really be there when the controllers tried to reach them again. Maybe they would all slip away into the ether, after a week or more of freedom from the voices in their heads. Time and again, he’d found his mind full of Yeats’s falcon in its widening gyre.

  Watching the controllers now, Hager felt the deepest kind of relief—and a little amusement. Every last one of the marks had turned up where they were supposed to. Any dog trainer would’ve been proud.

  * * *

  Dryden turned on the headlights a hundred yards beyond the farmhouse. There was no advantage in leaving them off any longer—the pursuers couldn’t miss the Malibu’s trail through the grass—and there was plenty of risk in going without them.

  The moment the beams came on, a distant line of trees appeared out of the dark, a quarter mile ahead.

  Ahead was north. They were driving toward the back of the property the farmhouse sat on. Presumably there was someone else’s property butted up against it—some other plot of farmland stretching farther north, until it tied into the next blacktop two-lane.

  By the time they’d covered half the distance to the trees, it was clear they would never reach the next road north. The dense tree line ran unbroken across the landscape ahead of them. A perfect barricade marking the back of the property. Dryden veered left and right, sweeping the headlights like search beams. There was no gap visible anywhere in the woods.

  Behind them, the first pair of lights rounded the farmhouse and came on straight toward them. A second and third set followed.

  Dryden swung the Malibu left, toward the west edge of the property. Another farm bordered it there, and beyond it should be a road running north to south. There would be a ditch before the road, but with any luck there would be a break in it somewhere—a place meant for tractors and other vehicles to come and go. The trick would be finding one of those points before the pursuers caught up with them.

  Dryden checked the mirror. Four sets of lights back there now, strung out in a line, snaking their way up the field.

  He turned his attention forward again—

  Something was wrong.

  He couldn’t place it, but the grass straight ahead was different in some way that made his scalp prickle. Something in how it caught the headlights.

  “What is that?” Holly asked.

  Dryden knew the answer half a second later. Which was too late.

  The Malibu’s front end dropped sickeningly, and water surged up over the hood onto the windshield. Holly screamed as she and Rachel were thrown forward by the instant deceleration. Dryden reached for them; he caught some of their momentum with his arm as his own body was slammed against the steering wheel.

  Then everything was still—or almost still. The car was bobbing in place, rocking side to side and front to back.

  All around it were the tops of the weeds that fully choked the shallow pond, their height just about perfect to match the ankle-high grass in the surrounding field. There was no open water at all. In the headlights, the pond had been all but invisible.

  The car settled another six inches and touched bottom; the water level was midway up the side windows. The engine stuttered and then died; its intake ports were underwater. The beams from the headlamps shone out through the murk beneath the surface.

  But already there was other light playing over the tops of the weeds. Brightening by the second as the pursuing cars closed in.

  “What do we do?” Holly asked. She pulled the handle and tried to shove open the door on her side. It wouldn’t budge. There were thousands of pounds of water pressure working against it.

  Rachel’s breathing remained steady and slow. She clung to Holly unconsciously, like a sleeping infant.

  Dryden twisted in his seat and got hold of the shotgun. In the tight space of the car it was almost impossible to maneuver the thing; before he’d even gotten it past the seatback, he heard the first of the other vehicles come to a stop somewhere close behind them. Its engine went idle, and a door opened and closed.

  Both he and Holly went quiet. They turned and looked at each other, listening.

  A rifle cracked like a stick of dynamite going off almost on top of them. The bullet whined off the car’s roof and hit the water twenty feet ahead.

  “Down!” Dryden said. “Flat as you can get.”

  Holly was already moving, shoving Rachel even lower than herself, down into the footwell on the passenger side. She lay her own body flat on the seat, curled fetal.

  The rifle fired again. The bullet punched through the back window near the top, went through the seatback above Holly, and smashed into the glove box. In the same moment Dryden heard another vehicle brake and slide to a stop. Another door opened and shut, and the sound that followed was unmistakable: a pump shotgun being cycled. A second later the passenger window exploded, and water surged down into the space where Rachel lay.

  * * *

  Rachel had been hovering somewhere warm inside herself. She had a vague memory of a feeling she associated with fireplaces. A feeling that rolled off somebody and pressed comfortably around her, like a hot bath. Was it Sam? Yes—Sam had sent out that feeling from almost the moment she’d met him. Now there was someone else doing that. Someone holding her, protecting her.

  Holly. It was Holly.

  Coming from her, the feeling had a different flavor. It took Rachel back to a time when someone else had held her this way. It felt wonderful, and for minutes on end she’d simply clung to the sensation of it. She’d let the rest of the world fade out to nothing. This was all she wanted, for now. This was—

  Freezing cold.

  Rachel blinked. Her eyes stung.

  What was happening?

  She was underwater, and hands were grasping for her, pulling at her while voices screamed.

  Something boomed, like a sharp drumbeat, though she knew that wasn’t it.

  She blinked again and shook her head, and the world came all the way back to her, crisp and hard and clear.

  She was with Sam and Holly in the car. The car was stuck in deep water, which was flooding in through a broken-out window. Another gunshot sounded—a high-powered rifle, she thought. She turned toward the sound of the weapo
n, and felt her mind automatically running the complex formulas for locking.

  * * *

  Marcus Till worked the bolt action of his Winchester 70. He heard the spent casing land in the grass to his right, not far from the man with the Mossberg 500, who’d just arrived.

  That there might be other people working in the service of the Ghost had never crossed Marcus’s mind until ten minutes ago, when he’d found he wasn’t alone on the backcountry roads leading to this place. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that development, though in some deep part of himself he seemed to be relieved at it. It meant there were other hands to help carry the weight of guilt. He supposed it might even mean he could let himself off the hook entirely, looking back on a night like this: He would never know for sure that his bullets had killed the people in this car, whoever they were. It was possible the Mossberg’s shots would actually do the killing. It would be something to tell himself, anyway.

  Marcus shouldered the Winchester. He just had to buckle down and do this, that was all. He lowered his eye to the sights and took a steadying breath—then cocked his head.

  He turned to the man with the shotgun. The guy had it braced on his thigh for reloading. He hadn’t so much as glanced in Marcus’s direction, and yet—

  There was something grating about the man.

  Something in the way he carried himself, or maybe in the look on his face. He seemed like a smug little son of a whore, the kind that’d lipped off to Marcus in bars, back in the day, and gotten his blood up. Marcus stared. He couldn’t say why he suddenly felt so riled, only that he did, and that he had a mind to do something about it.

  Sensing eyes on him, the guy turned. “What?”

  Marcus stepped forward, drew his arm back, and brought one fist looping down into the guy’s face like a ten-pound sledge.

  He felt the bridge of the man’s nose crunch like a walnut shell. The guy screamed, but only briefly—he blacked out and flopped on his back in the short grass. Still pissed at him, Marcus swiped up his shotgun, turned, and heaved it out into the pond. Even as he did so, the headlights of the next two arrivals swept the ground around him. He turned to them, the glare of their high beams only fanning his anger.