Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (34 page)

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 weapon, 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.

He shouldered the rifle again and took aim high on the windshield of the nearest of the two cars—no need to kill anyone, he just wanted them to bug the fuck off.

He fired. The top of the windshield cratered and pulled loose from its frame. From inside the car someone screamed.

“Get out of here!” Marcus shouted. He racked the rifle’s bolt again, and past the glare of the car’s headlights he saw the driver fumbling for his gear selector. A second later the vehicle lurched backward, turned clumsily around, and then sped away across the field. The second car had come to a stop thirty yards shy of the pond. Marcus swung the rifle toward it and simply waited. He could almost sense the driver struggling against himself in there. Or struggling against the Ghost, maybe. Which Marcus could sympathize with. He meant to send the jackass away all the same. He kept the rifle leveled, watching for a response.

*   *   *

Rachel had only the smallest part of her attention on her surroundings inside the car. She knew her head was above water now. Sam and Holly had pulled her up. They were asking if she was okay, and she was nodding, but she was only barely aware of doing so. All the rest of her attention was outside the vehicle, locking the big man with the rifle. Through his eyes she watched the last car suddenly reverse itself, its tires briefly spinning in the grass before they dug in. The vehicle backed around in a half circle and lumbered away toward the farmhouse. Rachel watched it go, then turned the big man toward the pond again. She regripped the rifle, holding it like a spear, and chucked it far out into the weed-filled pond. She heard the splash with her own ears as well as his.

There wasn’t much left to do. This man, and the one who’d brought the shotgun, could be sent away without any more trouble—

Rachel cut herself off in the middle of the thought.

The big man had something strange going on in his head. The effect was hard to notice; Rachel had missed it at first, but it was there. It seemed almost that his mind had a second doorway leading away from it, different than the one she’d entered through. This second doorway was open. She had no real sense of what lay on the other side of it, but—

She’d encountered something like it before. Only it hadn’t been in a person’s head. She’d felt it … at the tower. In Utah. That day in the desert, with Sam.

The thing beyond the door was a kind of tunnel. The one in the desert had seemed to plunge away beneath her, deep into the ground. This one went up. It stretched up like a kite string, toward something high in the night above the dark farm fields.

Rachel followed it, her mind climbing through it like a bullet along a gun barrel. She caught a mental glimpse of some sort of airplane, and then she was shooting away down another tunnel, which connected the plane to some distant place—this second tunnel was very long.

She had done this in the desert, too. She had found a man’s mind at the far end of the long tunnel, but—

But that day, she’d had no idea what any of it meant. This time was different. She had her memory back. She knew who the people at the other end of the tunnel were. She knew the sorts of things they did—how they treated the people they took control of.

Most important of all, this time she had her old tricks handy.

*   *   *

Hager had just turned from the window to pick up his phone from his desk—Gaul should’ve long since gotten back to him—when he heard someone yelling down on the work floor.

He spun to face the window again.

The shouting was coming from one of the stations; it belonged to a controller named Leonard Bell. But it was an assistant who was making the noise—a young woman standing in the station’s doorway.

Leonard Bell was no longer lying down with electrodes pasted to his forehead. He was up on his feet, and his face was covered with blood; it looked black in the red light of the workroom. Hager wondered for only a moment where the blood had come from—it was obvious a second later. Calmly, even methodically, Bell was digging his own fingernails into his face and raking deep gouges into the skin. Hager could see the muscles in his forearms strain under the force he was using—like a man applying steady but immense pressure to a wrench handle. Tearing open his own face as if it were a simple chore to be done.

All at once Bell seemed to notice the assistant. He pivoted and lurched toward her, and the girl turned and ran, screaming.

Hager was already moving. He shoved open his office door, crossed the landing, and took the stairs down to floor level, three at a time. He saw the assistant coming more or less in his direction; he dodged past her and crashed head-on into Bell, bear-hugging the guy and bringing him down onto the concrete floor. Christ, the man’s face was a shredded mess. He strained and bucked against Hager’s hold, little red droplets flying as he shook his head.

“What the fuck’s wrong with him?”

Hager looked up. The question had come from Seth Cobb, standing in the doorway of his own station, nearby.

Before Hager could answer, Bell went slack in his arms. In almost the same instant, the man seemed to become aware of the damage to his face—aware of the pain. He took a hissing breath, worked a hand free, and put it delicately to one ripped-up cheek. He made a low moaning sound, full of fear and confusion.

Cobb stepped out of his doorway. He seemed to be coming to help, but then he stopped. He turned in place and surveyed his surroundings. His eyes settled on a steel support column that came up out of the floor and rose to the ceiling, forty feet above. The column was an I beam standing upright, each of its flat faces about twelve inches wide. Cobb took two long strides to the beam and grabbed the edges of the nearest side, like a karate student holding a pine board he meant to break with his head.

Hager saw what he planned to do, absurd as it was.

“No!” Hager shouted.

Cobb reared back and swung his whole upper body forward, like an upside-down pendulum. He didn’t take the impact with his forehead; he took it with his face. His nose and chin and cheekbones hit the steel with a sickening crack. To Hager it sounded like ceramic coffee mugs being crunched under a tire.

Cobb’s grip on the steel didn’t so much as falter. He leaned back—there was blood coming out of his mouth and nose like a trickle from a tap—steadied himself, and rammed his face once more into the steel, harder than before. Hager saw a tooth skitter onto the concrete at Cobb’s feet, and a second later the man blacked out and dropped in a heap where he’d stood.

All the controllers were watching now, along with the assistants and the few technicians present. Everyone stood frozen, unable to process what they were seeing.

Hager, still lying on top of Bell, looked around and found all eyes turning to him for answers. Never in his life had he felt so unable to offer any.

Except—

Well, there were a
few
things he could do, he supposed, now that he thought about it. Yes, he did have the answers. They were all coming to him, just like that.

He let go of Bell, pushed himself up, and got on his feet.

“Everybody out!” he shouted. “Right now. That’s a direct order.”

Thirty seconds later he had the building to himself; the others had even carried Cobb and Bell away. Hager went to the metal staircase that led to his office and climbed halfway up—just high enough that he could see out above the tops of the glass-walled workstations. He swept his gaze over the vast chamber and found it drawn to something in the far corner, in the shadows near the restrooms and the supply closet.

It was the fuel tank for the furnace and the generator. The thing was massive—it was, in fact, simply the trailer of an 18-wheel tanker truck, flown up here aboard a C-5 and rolled into position. Various hoses now connected it to the building’s heating and power systems. Hager descended the stairs again and sprinted across the huge room toward it.

The hoses were secured to the tank’s outflow ports with heavy-duty clamps, and though Hager had no expertise working with any of this hardware, he could see at a glance what it would take to unfasten them. There were bolts securing the clamps. The tools to loosen them—no doubt the same tools that had been used to tighten them—lay on utility shelves twenty feet away. Hager went to the shelves, grabbed the only three wrenches he could see, and took them to the nearest port sticking out of the tank. The first wrench he tried fit snugly and turned the bolt with no effort at all.

A dozen turns later, the clamp gave way. Fuel erupted from the port like a sideways geyser, blasting the hose and clamp away and spraying in a gush toward the open space of the work floor. The stink of it filled Hager’s sinuses and lungs. It made his eyes water. Some kind of alarm began sounding at the front end of the tank. It was like the beeping of a forklift backing up, only deeper and maybe a bit faster. It sounded frantic.

None of it was any cause for concern. Hager had never felt so confident of purpose before.

He dropped the wrenches and walked away from the tank, back the way he’d come from. The shower of fuel soaked his back as he crossed through it. He paid the sensation no mind. He sloshed through the puddles that were filling every concavity in the concrete floor. The first glass-walled workstations went by on his left. He ignored them. He was headed for one station in particular, the one where he was sure to find what he needed.

Cobb’s station.

Hager reached it and passed through the open doorway. Even this far from the tank, a film of the spreading fuel had begun seeping under the walls.

Hager went to the desk on the far side of the station. He opened the shallow tray drawer at the top, and saw immediately what he was after.

A Bic cigarette lighter.

*   *   *

Dryden watched Rachel. It was clear her attention was directed somewhere far away, though who or what she was focusing on, he couldn’t guess.

The shooting had stopped more than a minute ago. Since then, there’d been no more sounds from outside the submerged car. Dryden and Holly had simply waited, keeping Rachel above the water and letting her do whatever she was doing.

All at once the girl blinked. She looked around, meeting Holly’s eyes and then Dryden’s.

“That’s the end of that problem,” Rachel said.

Before either of them could ask what she meant, she turned her focus away again. After a moment, Dryden heard movement out at the edge of the pond. Little grunts of exertion and words of encouragement. One man helping another to his feet.

In succession, two car doors opened and closed. Engines, already running, revved and slipped into gear. Less than a minute later the vehicles were gone, and there was nothing to hear but the chirping of night insects in the field.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The Ford Escape was still in the farmhouse’s garage. They changed into dry clothes in the house. Holly’s shirts and pants, though too big for Rachel, worked well enough with the cuffs and sleeves rolled. Before they left, Dryden took his phone from his soaked pants and dried it out the best he could. It still worked. He pulled up the recent call list and tapped Harris’s number at the top.

“Remember the cop that was going to nail you for public intoxication,” Dryden said, “and she let you go because you sang her Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’”

“Sure.”

“You remember the exact place it happened?”

“Yes.”

“Meet us there Wednesday at two in the afternoon. And bring Marsh.”