The truck shifted gears. Brakes shrieked. The vehicle departed the pavement, angled toward the grove of cottonwoods, and jolted to a halt in a cloud of dust, the headlights slashing through the trees, cutting away some of the shadows, possibly revealing the Explorer. I heard what might have been a segmented steel door rolling up on the back of the truck, and, peering through the many trees, I glimpsed men spilling out of the cargo box.
Not being bulletproof, as is the average man of action in the movies, I holstered the Glock, turned from the Explorer, and ran deeper into the cottonwood grove, trying not to think about trees, lest my psychic magnetism lead me face-first into one.
Thirty-six
Never before had I relied on my gift to guide me through a dark woods by concentrating on the idea of open land. Not until that very morning, of course, had I used it to find my way through a pitch-black shopping mall, and that had worked out all right. Perhaps this was a day of firsts. The day one dies, of course, is a first in any life.
I held my right arm in front of my face, hoping to avoid having an eye poked out by a branch. With my left hand, I felt from tree to tree, hurrying because enough thin blades of light from the truck’s headlamps sliced through the grove to suggest where the cottonwoods relented a little. No undergrowth inhibited progress, but a thick carpet of dry leaves crunched noisily underfoot, so that if my pursuers stopped now and then to listen, they would have a pretty good idea of where I was headed.
Instead of pausing to listen, however, they opened fire. For an instant, I thought they must see me. Within a few steps I would be riddled. But then the Explorer’s windows shattered, sheet metal cried out pock and pong as bullets tore into it, a couple of tires popped, and there could be no doubt that they were trashing the SUV with the expectation that I might be inside. The barrage was so ferocious that I couldn’t tell if they were using fully automatic weapons or if there were so many gunmen firing with such enthusiasm that it only sounded as though they were spraying the Ford with a couple of Uzis.
Inevitably there were ricochets and wild shots, and I heard a round thwack into a tree. If I could discern that particular sound separate from the crackle and roar of gunfire, the hit had to be nearby, mere inches away. Another bullet tunneled through sprays of leaves, spitting bits of bark and vegetation onto my head, into my face, and a third round impacted with a sound like an axe blade biting wood, which probably meant it was a high-velocity round and perhaps a hollow-point.
The land sloped slightly, and if I remembered the neighborhood, there was an aquifer not too deep underground, so that the soil grew damp again each night, no matter what heat the Mojave sun blistered down on the land during the day. The aquifer slaked the thirst of the cottonwoods and made it possible for farms in this area to draw enough water from wells to grow crops. The assault on the Explorer ended, and although my ears were ringing, I could hear that the dead leaves underfoot had lost most of their crunch. Surface roots became more prominent, and the air grew moist and thickened with the smell of moldering forest mast. I rushed off the slope into a wide swale, where the trees opened a little and where the detritus underfoot squished.
Voices echoed through the woods. Although I couldn’t make out their words over my own hard breathing, I imagined that the cultists—for who else could they be?—were calling to one another, probably one of them giving directions to subordinates, each of those then answering, everyone getting on the same page. They would come through the woods in a search line, maybe ten feet between them, depending on how many there were.
After weaving through twenty or thirty yards of trees, through the swale, to where the land began to rise, I stopped and looked back and saw that they had switched off the truck’s headlights. I waited to see flashlight beams, hoping to estimate their numbers, but the woods remained dark. They no longer called to one another. The entire crew couldn’t have gotten back into the truck and driven away, not that quickly. Besides, I would have heard the engine starting. And they hadn’t come after me so aggressively only to retreat when they didn’t nail me in the Explorer.
They were still out there among the cottonwoods. In the dark. Being quiet.
What were they doing?
Listening? Reloading after their exuberant reenactment of the D-Day landing? Taking a collective leak?
The loud attack on the Explorer seemed crazy to me, even if they thought that I was inside that vehicle. We were in a rural area, but it wasn’t on the dark side of the moon. There were woodlets and large fields, some weedy and some cultivated, but there were also a few ranchettes where horses were bred and raised, not Thoroughbreds but quarter horses and various special breeds for sale to enthusiasts, which meant people were living in these parts. People who didn’t usually hear barrages of gunfire in the night. If even one of them called the police, the Odd Thomas hunt would be interrupted by the authorities before I could be properly shot in the head and ritually dismembered.
I knew it was dangerous to stand there listening, that I was wasting time, but I stood there listening, anyway, because I didn’t understand what they were doing, what was happening. In a life-or-death struggle with a formidable enemy, you had to make decisions based on accurate information. You couldn’t always rely on intuition even if your intuition, like mine, would probably make you a fortune at a roulette wheel or a blackjack table.
Half a minute passed before one of the hunters put a foot wrong, thrashed through foliage, and cursed. Another voice ordered, “Quiet!” Somehow they were coming without lights to guide them.
There was no accurate information to be gotten, no explanation for their stealth that wouldn’t have to be puzzled out, and the only kind of analysis I had time for was the simple kind that could be done on the fly. Striving to focus my attention on the concept of open land—open land—I wove among the cottonwoods, ascending the slope that rose out of the moist swale. Moving quickly. As fast as I dared. Not as blind as I was in the mall that morning, but definitely hampered by the gloom.
Immediately above me, maybe a double score of birds exploded from their night roost, racketing through the trees and skyward. If my pursuers were experienced trackers who could get a directional bead on a sound in this environment, the flock erupting into flight would confirm for them my approximate position in the woods. At once I turned sharply to the left, which I thought must be east, angling up the easy incline, hoping that their search line would re-form to center on the place where the birds had spooked away from me. If I could get past the last man at the east end of their formation, while they were adjusting their hunt toward the southwest, I might be able to put some ground between me and them, maybe escape them entirely, but at least gain time to think.
Open land, open land, open land. I wanted out of the trees as badly as any swimmer might want to get out of the water when spying the fins of a dozen schooling sharks. Even with psychic magnetism, however, even though I was not entirely blind in the night woods, I couldn’t proceed as quickly as I had at moments in the pitch-black mall. Tree trunks complicated this darkness. Low-hanging branches. Exposed roots. I kept moving, aware of crisp dead leaves crunching underfoot again, hoping that the men behind me were making their own noises that masked mine.
Maybe it would prove to be paranoia, maybe it would prove to be true, but I sensed that my pursuers weren’t nearly as hampered by the cottonwoods as I was. Maybe they had military night-vision gear. One explanation. Logical. The cult’s resources, a treasury built up over four and a quarter centuries, since their early days in Oxford, would enable them to acquire pretty much anything they wanted. Or they could steal it, as they had stolen the C-4. I didn’t know much about night-vision goggles. In fact, nothing. I thought such devices needed at least starshine, a minimum of ambient light to magnify into an enhanced field of vision, but I could be wrong.
More worrisome was the possibility that they could track me with the assistance of a supernatural power beyond my comprehension. No other quarry in my circumstances would ha
ve leapt to that suspicion. But because of my experiences, I had an open mind. Some might say that it was as open—and empty—as a wind tunnel. Nevertheless, in Nevada, the past March, I’d seen that the cultists could conjure entities not born of this world. In the court of Odd, even the most preposterous suspicion was admissible.
Concentrating on open land while trying to evade the searchers probably established a conflict of needs. The emotional need for more light—more hope—versus the base animal need for cover, camouflage, a bolt-hole. In the open, I might be more easily spotted, therefore less safe than if I remained in the woods. Such a conflict could explain why I stumbled, clipped one tree trunk with my left shoulder, another with my right, slipped and fell to one knee, thrust up and took only a dozen steps before foundering against a projection of rock, over which I clambered as gracefully as if I had been wearing clown shoes.
In spite of this increasingly slapstick performance, I angled eastward until I staggered out of the cottonwoods, near the crest of the slope. Breathing too noisily. I strove to quiet myself. More but shallower inhalations. Draw air and exhale through the mouth only. Heart hammering, but they couldn’t hear that. I ascended the last of the rise to a flat width of dirt and wild grass, beyond which a white-plank-and-chicken-wire fence ran east-west, barring my way.
Under the unrelenting low cloud cover, the rural landscape offered better visibility than the woods, although it, too, was dim. And more than dim. I felt as if the night and the place held within them some recondite meaning that my eyes could not quite resolve out of the gloom, that my mind could not interpret.
I peered west along the fence, toward where the posse might emerge from the trees if I had indeed angled past the outermost man on the search line. No one. In case they had not re-formed their line toward the eruption of birds that I had caused, if they were instead close behind me, I needed to get off this open strip of land, where I would be an easy target. I scaled the five-foot-high board fence, snagged Mr. Bullock’s sport coat on a twist of wire, tore the fabric getting free, and dropped into whatever might wait on the other side.
Thirty-seven
Although I hadn’t remembered what I would find when I put the cottonwoods behind me, I knew at once where I was: Maravilla Valley Orchards. Row after long row of almond trees running north-south, precisely spaced to accommodate the harvesting equipment that would shake the ripe nuts from the branches. The alleys between the rows were likewise calculated, not merely to allow tractor-drawn harvest bins to pass but to ensure that one rank of trees did not shadow the next for too much of the day, so that every side of every tree received a wealth of light as the sun traveled from dawn to dusk. Like dutiful sentinels standing watch, the trees dwindled into the dark, across a couple of hundred acres.
Eager to put more distance between myself and the searchers before they might climb into the orchard to scope it out, I ran east along the barrier of boards and chicken wire. I had gone only thirty or forty feet when I saw black-clad figures scaling the fence perhaps sixty feet ahead of me, far from where I’d thought they would be. In the woods, the posse had not re-formed in the direction of the flock of birds that scattered skyward. Instead, as though anticipating my actions, they had angled east.
No one called out. I hadn’t been seen.
In a crouch, I scurried six feet to the south, to the first tree in the nearest row, and took cover there, frantically trying to think what to do next, which way to go, according to what strategy.
Peering east, around the tree, I attempted to count them as they gathered by the fence. All in black, they were darker than the night, contrasted with it, but they milled around, making it difficult for me to tally them. There were at least six. Maybe eight. Either number was too many, bad odds for me.
We were in a kind of forest again, but one that was regimented, geometric, offering less cover than the wildwood. They could spread out more here, maintaining a longer search line, yet each man would still be within sight of those to either side of him. Not yet one flashlight. With night-vision gear, they wouldn’t be foiled by the density of the trees, as they had been among the cottonwoods. They would have clean lines of sight. If I raced along one of the open alleys, I would be quickly spotted. Even crossing an alley from one rank of trees to another, I would draw attention to myself, because from their perspective, I would be the only moving thing in the warm stillness of the almond grove.
I had to stay to a single row of trees, close to the trunks, head down to avoid taking a low branch in the face or across my throat. And I had to get moving. They were already forming a line, getting ready to come into the grove on a north-south hunt. I set out to the south, keeping to my single-row tactic. I moved fast but not nearly at a sprint, not at first. This close to them, my pounding footfalls would locate me in seconds. I needed to put some distance between us before I could run flat-out. Taking short quick strides, almost gliding across the ground, I tried to recall how far it was to the southern end of the orchard. The grove was much longer from north to south than from east to west. Hundreds of acres. A mortal distance under the circumstances.
Birds worried me, the possibility of another mass exodus from branches overhead, a flare of sound that would declare, Here he is! After I had gone thirty yards or so, an owl loudly questioned the night. From elsewhere in the grove, another owl replied, and almost at once yet another. Every orchard attracted field mice and sometimes rats, depending on the crop, and owls considered rodents of any size to be delectable. Wherever owls stood night watch, other birds tended not to roost, because owls also had an appetite for their smaller feathered brethren.
Moving quickly, light-footed, moving, moving, anticipating shouts and gunfire, I tried to remember what I’d find at the end of the orchard. I couldn’t recall a farmhouse or trailer, not any kind of living quarters. The operation was owned by a large corporation, not a family, and as far as I knew, no one lived on the property at night. There was an immense processing building in which the green fruit of the trees would be stripped away from the pits, and the smooth almond seeds from their hard, fibrous jackets. Maybe three or four additional structures. Garages for the harvesting equipment and other machinery. Product storage. Offices. If I could survive the orchard and get a few buildings between me and the posse, night-vision goggles wouldn’t be of as much use to them. When the search involved land around buildings, they couldn’t hold to a rigid line. They would have to split up to some extent, and my options would multiply.
There might be a security guard or two at night, not to patrol the orchard, but to prevent thieves from stealing valuable machinery and vehicles. Problematic. Not that a security guard might be rash enough to shoot me first and ask questions in the afterlife. But if the cultists on my trail would be so bold as to chop the Explorer to pieces with automatic-weapons fire in an area where the noise could trigger calls to 911, they might answer a guard’s challenge with bullets. I didn’t want to be responsible for leading them to a victim. I hoped the orchard buildings were protected only by good steel doors and state-of-the-art alarm systems.
The owls, perhaps as many as half a dozen roosting across the length of the orchard, were hooting regularly to one another, their voices echoing eerily among the trees, as if they were urging me on—or cheering those who pursued me. The time had come to run full tilt, without regard to the noise I would make. Remaining close to the same row of trees, I bolted, taking longer strides, feet slamming against the ground, gasping for breath, making enough noises that I could now hear only the closest owl.
I thought they couldn’t run and fire their weapons at the same time. Not effectively. Not even if they caught sight of me. Afraid of losing me unless they matched my pace, they would have to forgo shooting in order to stay close on my trail. Wrong. If they had Uzis or other fully automatic carbines, they could flick a switch from single-fire to burst-fire, which at least one of them did. The hard stutter of a machine gun rattled through the almond grove, no doubt chasing even the fear
less owls from their perches. Full-metal-jacket rounds snapped into the trunks with terrible power, louder than a nail gun driving steel spikes into a four-by-six, loud enough for me to hear those impacts separate from the gunfire.
Dirt and pebbles sprayed across my shoulders and the back of my head, as a low round must have kicked the ground behind me. I dodged from one side of the row to the other, better using the trees for cover, slaloming among them, which increased the chances of being taken down by a branch harder than my head.
A scream. Loud, shrill, prolonged. As the gunfire abruptly ceased, I thought that maybe one of the searchers, hurrying forward too eagerly, had gotten ahead of the gunner and had taken a round or two.
As the hideous screams seemed to slither through the grove with corporal substance, I stopped dodging around the trees and ran only along the west side of the row. My legs on fire. Chest aching. Each exhalation hot as furnace air. I couldn’t keep up that pace much longer. I was no more a marathon runner than I was a man of action.
I thought the need to tend to one of their own injured would bring a couple of them to a halt, improving my odds of survival. I saw a pale geometry in the darkness ahead, the white boards of the southern fence. If they were delaying ten seconds, twenty, I could be up the fence and over, at least temporarily out of sight. A shot rang out, and the screaming stopped. Another single shot perhaps made certain that the screamer had been permanently silenced. They weren’t the type to leave a wounded comrade behind. They were the type who would finish him off and be done with the distraction. I shouldn’t have expected anything else, considering that Jim and Bob executed Wolfgang, Jonathan, and Selene merely because I might have seen their faces. True believers. Fanatics. They didn’t fear death. In their view, death came with a reward. They probably thought they would be royalty in Hell. The execution of their own had set them back no more than five seconds, if at all, but the fence loomed immediately in front of me.