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 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.