34.
***
Scott was more than a little worried that he was going to lose Lynette.
She was huddled in the back of the car, whispering "I am the moon" over and over to herself, and try as he might he could elicit no other response from her no matter what he said.
He looked over at Kevin. The boy was in his pajamas, looking out at the dead of the night as they drove. "You okay, son?" asked Scott. Kevin did not reply, but held out a single small hand, his thumb up.
"Good," said Scott. "At least that makes one of us."
He drove as fast as he could, not driving with any destination in mind, but solely with the goal of putting as many miles between them and that damned alley as he could.
He adjusted the rearview mirror so that he could look at Lynette's form, dark and curled in on itself in the back of the car. "Lynette," he said. No response. "Lynette?"
"I am the moon," she whispered.
"Nice to meet you, Miss Moon," he answered back. "Could you let Lynette know I called?"
He didn't mean to be sarcastic, and certainly didn't want to be nasty to Lynette. After all, she had just saved his life, and at great risk to her own safety. But he needed her present, not locked away in a fear-induced coma of some kind.
He reached into the back seat with one hand, fumbling around until he touched Lynette's own hand. He clutched at it. "Lynette," he said again. "Honey, come back to us, we need you." She didn't speak, but after a moment, he felt her hand come alive in his, holding it back in a tight grip. He felt like their joined hands were a source of sudden heat in the cool of this dark night, warming him from the inside out, giving him a sense of hope for the first time since Mr. Gray had appeared in the street outside the alley.
"Still the moon?" he asked with a trace of a smile in his voice.
There was a long moment of silence, and then, thank God, Lynette spoke again. "Not the moon. Just a very scared woman."
"I can work with that," he said.
Then the car jogged suddenly forward. There was a shriek of twisted metal, and Lynette screamed at the same instant that Scott let go of her hand and grabbed onto the steering wheel, which was jumping back and forth in his hands like it had a mind of its own.
There was another crash of metal on metal, and Scott heard something shear off the car. He had barely a moment to spare, still struggling to keep the car on the road, but he managed to look back over his shoulder for a split second.
A split second was all he needed.
It was Mr. Gray. The old man was following them in Scott's own car, using the vehicle to ram into them from behind. The good news was that Scott's car was hardly a powerful vehicle, and under normal circumstances he would not have worried too much about its ability to harm them. The bad news was that Lynette's car was hardly a tank, either...and these were nothing resembling normal circumstances.
Slam, the car jogged forward and then shimmied to the side as the gray man gunned his engine and slammed into them again. Again Scott heard something tear in the back of the car, and suspected that they had just lost their rear bumper. It was nothing critical, but it meant that there were now fewer inches of protective metal between the occupants of this car and the madman driving the one behind them.
Scott tried to remember his combat driving training from his time in the LAPD, but he knew that he was out of practice and underprepared. Worse, he suspected that the assassin's own skill set did encompass using a moving vehicle as a weapon, thus giving the advantage firmly to their pursuer.
Lynette was whimpering behind him. He couldn't blame her. He had been terrified enough when Mr. Gray got the drop on him, only his anger at the loss of his family giving him the strength to stand up to the man. But Lynette, he knew, harbored no such resentment - at either Mr. Gray or the universe that had spawned him. Her heart was uncluttered by such ugly emotions, so she must have felt the fear in a much more raw, visceral way when she crept into the alley to confront the killer and save Scott's life.
"Hey," he said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror again. It was hardly the time to do this, with a trained assassin in a car directly behind them, out for blood and willing to kill, but he needed Lynette to pull herself together. For all their sakes. He didn't know if he could do what needed to be done on his own.
Slam, and the car again shuddered as Mr. Gray attacked from the confines of Scott's car. Lynette's own car started to shimmy and shake, as though something in the frame had been bent with that last hit, and Scott knew that they wouldn't have long before they lost control of the vehicle and were again at Mr. Gray's mercy.
"Lynette, snap out of it," he said. She continued sobbing. "Please, honey, please snap out of it."
No dice. The woman had apparently used up everything she had in the nightmare trip from her house to the bowels of the alley that Mr. Gray had somehow called forth from the depths of Scott's memories.
"Shit," he said. He looked at Kevin, who was still looking out the side window complacently, as though they were out for a Sunday drive instead of being pursued by a maniac with otherworldly powers and a will to destroy them. "Don't suppose you could help me out here, bud," he said, but it was mostly to have some noise to compete with the distressing sound of Lynette's whimpering in the backseat.
To his surprise, however, Kevin moved. He began unbuckling his seat belt.
"Hey, son, don't -" began Scott, but at that instant Mr. Gray smashed into the car again, and Scott felt his teeth click together hard as he was jarred and bounced. He looked at the speedometer. They were going ninety eight miles per hour, and the tachometer was deep in the red. There was no way they could go any faster than they were going.
And Kevin was still unbuckling his seat belt. Scott felt a new thrill of fear. At this speed, some kind of accident was not just a possibility, it was almost inevitable. Most likely was that a tire would blow - he doubted that Lynette had purchased racing tires for her economy car, so he knew that the friction caused by the speed they were moving at was already probably causing the tires to partially melt, growing softer and softer and exposing the cables that were the tires' last line of defense before they gave way and popped. And a tire popping at this speed would be tantamount to instant death for all of them, rolling the car over and over and leaving nothing left but a much-reduced shell of a car with so many spots of jelly inside where people once had been.
Or perhaps they would just hit a bad bump in the road and go flying. Again, the outcome - a rolled car with nothing left of them but a few wet smears - would be the same.
But no matter what happened, if Kevin was not buckled up, Scott knew that the boy would have no chance of survival. So he tried to grab the boy and pull him back to his seat. But Kevin threw Scott's arm away from him, and when Scott tried to grab him again, Kevin actually gritted his teeth and growled at him, growled like a dog that had just been threatened and was about to bite back.
The car began to shudder in his hands, and Scott had to put all his attention on his driving, letting Kevin do what he wanted, which apparently was to flip himself over into the back seat beside his mother.
Scott juked left with the car, the move barely keeping him out of range as the gray man again tried to ram them, but this time missed. Still, the odds were that Mr. Gray was going to bring them down. And sooner rather than later.
Scott cranked the car suddenly to the left, straining the vehicle to the limits of its endurance as he pulled into the wrong side of the street. It was the middle of the night, almost morning, in fact, so his chances of meeting someone on the road and having a head-on collision were slight. Slight was not the same thing as nonexistent, however, a fact that he was keenly aware of as he moved the car into the wrong lane. But he needed to do it in order to try to get them out of this mess.
Mr. Gray followed him into the lane, staying close on his tail, sticking to him like glue.
Scott cranked the wheel again, and again Mr. Gray followed, staying right behind.
Scott became aware that the road they were on was lined on both sides by irrigation canals. Unlike the arid desert of Los Angeles, where water rarely flowed freely unless instigated by the surge of a sprinkler head, Idaho had enough water and to spare. Water was, in fact, deemed a public property, and so irrigation ditches could often be found on the sides of roads, gathering rainwater and stream runoff and shunting it through the rural areas that dotted even cities such as Boise and Meridian. The water was used to feed livestock, to water crops, and for a million other things that an agrarian area needed water for.
Usually the irrigation ditches were a thing of beauty to Scott, quietly burbling and bubbling along, bringing life-giving water to any and all who needed it. But tonight, with a three foot wide and two foot deep ditch on either side of the road, Scott was keenly aware that the water features represented just one more possible way they could be killed: dropping into one of the irrigation ditches at the speed they were holding at would surely result in the total destruction of both the ditch, the car, and the car's occupants.
The wobbling of the wheel under his hands intensified, and Scott could tell that he had only a matter of seconds to put some plan into action that would save them. They were well out of the more densely populated areas of Meridian, driving down a long road that had nothing but farms and farmhouses on either side, no hope of any kind of help that Scott could see.
And Kevin was still unbuckled, trying to get into the backseat of the car with his mother. He finally made it, though Scott thought for one horrible moment that the boy was going to be ejected from the car when Mr. Gray hit them again right as Kevin was passing into the backseat.
The boy made it, though, climbing into his mother's arms. He threw his own arms around her, then whispered something to her. Scott could hear the whispering, but could not hear any detail, so he hoped whatever the boy was saying to his mother, it was something along the lines of "Please snap out of it and try to figure out some way for us to get out of this mess before we end up dead."
Surprisingly, he must in fact have said something very much like that - or at least like the first part of that - because a moment later Lynette stopped whimpering, and Scott heard twin clicks as she belted herself and Kevin into the backseat. She wasn't helping much, but at least she wasn't just curled up in a ball on the seat waiting to die, so he counted this as a definite improvement.
He turned the wheel again as Mr. Gray slammed into them. But this time, the wheel spun out of control in his hands. He saw them heading straight at one of the irrigation ditches, and braced for a watery impact that would signal the end of their flight and very likely the end of their lives.
But the impact never came. With a thud and a thump, Scott felt the car pass over one of the small bridges that crossed over the irrigation ditches every fifty or sixty feet. They had hit with exactly the right angle to get over the ditch. To survive.
Not so Mr. Gray, however. Scott heard a shattering sound, like a world of metal imploding on itself, and half-turned in his seat in time to see his car - the car that Mr. Gray had been driving - smack directly into one of the irrigation canals. The front end of the car dipped down, and then stopped instantly as it hit the bank of the canal. Scott could actually see the car ripple with the force of the impact.
Then the car started to flip over.
Scott kept one eye on his rearview mirror, even as he stomped on the brakes and struggled to bring his own car under control and get it down to a less-deadly speed. So he saw the back of the car rise up in a perfect arc, flipping the car end over end, and out of the irrigation canal.
The car did not simply come to rest, however, but continued to flip end over end. The vehicle quickly stopped resembling anything like a car, and quickly began to look like a spray of glass and metal orbiting around some gravitational field in deep space.
Then there was another crash, and Scott's heart leapt as he saw something that warmed his heart.
He saw Mr. Gray. Flipping out of the side window in a jumble of loose skin and bone, flying out of the car just as Scott had worried that Kevin would do.
Mr. Gray was flying, flying, flying through space, tumbling through the air like a rag doll.
Scott finished braking, and the car halted. Mr. Gray was still flying through the air.
Scott could hear a thin scream, a cry of pain and terror. And he smiled.
Good, he thought, it's over.
But then in the next instant, he felt that strange feeling that he had felt before, that feeling of the world twisting around him, as though a giant musical string had been plucked so hard that the entire universe resonated with its frequencies.
And in that instant, Mr. Gray disappeared.
Scott's car continued its self-destructive flight, and finally came to rest in several large pieces about a hundred feet from where Scott had finally battled Lynette's car to a stop. The car was dead; there was no doubt about that.
But, once again, their futures were still uncertain. Danger still lurked. Because Mr. Gray had managed to do the impossible. He had again cheated death, and had disappeared before he smashed into the ground and died.
Scott did not know where Mr. Gray was now, but he knew that the assassin would not rest - would never rest - until he had killed Kevin, Lynette, and Scott.
He put the car back into drive. The car strained and screeched, but Scott knew he couldn't listen to the vehicle's protestations. He knew that they had to get moving.
Because the gray man was still alive.
And that meant that they were still on the run for their lives.
***