“Dude. I don’t climb. I pop. And I’m on it.” Taylor disappeared.
“I’ll probably get used to her doing that someday,” Sam muttered.
He took a deep, shaky breath. It was his first big tactical decision of the coming battle. He hoped it wasn’t a mistake.
Jack had kept the SUV hidden in a patch of trees all through the day. He had slept fitfully, crunched in the driver’s seat, all the doors locked, too scared to think about stretching out more comfortably in the back.
Jack didn’t care how big a hurry Diana was in for him to reach Sam, he wasn’t going to die for her.
Only when the sun set at last did he turn the key and creep from his shady hiding place.
Down dirt roads with no signposts, lights off, moving at a crawl. Around blind corners, up, down, left, right. The SUV had a compass built in to the rearview mirror, but the directions never seemed to make sense. One second it would read south and the next minute east even though he hadn’t turned.
It was impossible to know where he was going. He could drive with the lights on and see the road, but then others could see him as well. So he drove in the dark at little more than walking speed. Even at such low speed, the SUV bounced and lurched so badly that Jack felt like he’d been beaten up.
That he absolutely had to get to Sam was clearer than ever. Caine would never forgive Jack for this betrayal. His only salvation lay with Sam. But only if Sam survived the poof. If Sam stepped outside, Caine would win. And then the FAYZ would be too small a place for Jack to hide from Caine and Drake.
Jack checked the dashboard clock. He knew the day and hour of Sam’s poof. Just over two hours left.
The moon rose and the road straightened so that he motored along at a somewhat higher speed than before, anxious to reach safety. A rabbit darted in front of him. Jack jerked the wheel and missed the rabbit but bounced off the road into a field.
He yanked the wheel hard and swerved back onto the road just as a pickup truck shot by coming from the other direction.
Jack cursed and turned in his seat to look back. Brake lights flared and the pickup screeched to a stop.
Jack stepped on the gas. The SUV leaped forward. But now the truck was turning around and coming up fast.
In the darkness it was impossible to see who was driving the truck, but in Jack’s mind it could be only one person: Drake.
Weeping, Jack accelerated. The gas tank needle edged closer to empty. But still the pickup truck came on.
The only escape would be to drive into the field where the truck might not be able to follow. Jack slowed just slightly and steered into the fallow field. The ground was plowed up, soft, and the SUV bounced madly across the rows.
The truck kept pace.
In the field ahead of him, powerful headlights snapped on. A tractor was moving with surprising speed to cut him off. Beyond the tractor a dark, dilapidated farmhouse was set far back from the road.
Jack was sick inside. They had him. Somehow, impossibly, they had him trapped.
Jack never saw the dry creek bed. The SUV went airborne for a few feet, he felt weirdly weightless, and then the SUV hit the far bank of the creek and stopped hard. There was a loud bang, the air bag deploying, and a sickening crunch, and Jack found himself lying flat on his back in the dirt, not hurt but too stunned to move.
The SUV’s headlights illuminated the field where he lay. Two kids, a boy and a girl, were silhouetted by the glare. Neither of them was Drake Merwin.
Jack dared to breathe. He didn’t dare stand up.
“We saw you driving around out here with your lights off,” the girl said accusingly.
Jack wondered how she could have seen him on a pitch-black night. He didn’t ask, but she provided the answer, anyway.
“Even if you have your headlights off, your brake lights still come on. I guess you didn’t think of that.”
“I’m not very experienced at driving,” Jack said.
“Who are you?” the boy, who looked to be Jack’s age, asked.
“Me? I’m…Jack. People call me Computer Jack.”
The girl had a shotgun in her hands. She aimed the barrel at Jack’s face.
“Don’t shoot me,” he begged.
“You’re on our land, and we protect our land,” the girl said. “Why shouldn’t we shoot you?”
“I have to…if I don’t…Listen, if I don’t get to Perdido Beach, something awful is going to happen.”
The girl had an odd combination of pigtails and a hard face made even harder by the harsh white light from the SUV. She seemed unimpressed. She was maybe eleven or twelve and it occurred to Jack that there was so much resemblance that the boy had to be her brother.
The boy said, “He doesn’t look dangerous.” To Jack, he said, “How come they call you Computer Jack?”
“Because I know a lot about computers.”
The boy thought awhile and said, “Can you fix a Wii?”
Jack nodded violently, digging dirt into his hair. “I could try. But really, really, I have to get to Perdido Beach. It’s really important.”
“Well, my Wii is important to me. So if you fix my Wii, I won’t let Emily shoot you. I guess not getting shot would be as important as you getting to Perdido Beach, huh?”
“Hi, Mary,” Quinn said. She met him at the door of the day care classroom. “I’m heading up top.”
Mary closed the door quickly behind her. “I don’t want the kids to see the guns,” she said. She herself was staring at the weapon.