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 have 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.