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.