The cable snapped tight across his path, flying up and toward the truck with liquid speed.
It sunk into and through the grille, slamming him to a stop. The Raptor’s tires screeched as boiling anti-freeze geysered skyward. The airbag deployed, sending a chemical dust into his eyes and mouth, choking him even as he crashed into it. He rebounded, bashing the back of his skull off the headrest.
The world fluttered, and the engine died.
He tasted blood.
His vision spun, and his ears hummed with the impact.
Quinn fumbled for the pistol even as the sounds of a motor reached him, but the gun was gone, lost somewhere in the crash. He tried to sit up, but the air bag pressed against his chest. It was full of air and his lungs had none. His leg hurt where the stitches were, the ones Alice had put in so carefully, twice. She’d be angry with him if he’d tore them again. He nearly laughed. The buzzing in his ears faded, but with it came a new sound.
Footsteps.
There was someone on the bridge. Someone outside the door, looking in through the window at him, but their features were indistinct, like the figures in his dream two nights before. The door opened.
“What in God’s name are you?” a gravelly voice said.
“Please,” Quinn said, trying to focus. And as his vision straightened, all he could see was the butt of a rifle. Then darkness.
Chapter 19
Sacrifice
Quinn came awake to blinding pain in his face and the douse of ice water cascading over his head and shoulders.
Reality blazed into existence as he rose from unconsciousness. His hands were bound together behind a wooden chair he sat upon. He was in a room made of cinderblocks stacked together, their borders gapped, daylight pouring between them. Crude crosses were drawn on several of the blocks in what looked like charcoal. The roof was a single chunk of ribbed steel, and there were two people standing before him. One was a middle-aged man with a gray goatee and cold eyes holding an empty ice cream pail. And the other was a woman with long, straggly, blond hair, her age somewhere near the man’s but harder to determine because of the taut skin covering her face, stretched tight by high cheekbones and a broad smile.
“Can you hear me?” the man asked, and Quinn remembered his voice as the last thing he’d heard before being knocked unconscious.
“Yes.”
“And it can speak, too,” the blond woman said. Her voice was velvety soft, a frigid purr that sent a splinter of ice down his spine.
“You can have my supplies,” Quinn said.
“Thank you, we’ve taken them already,” the woman said.
He waited a beat, shifting his eyes between the two of them.
“Then what do you want?”
“We want our world back, demon.”
“What?”
“Oh come now. We were doing so well. I’ll ask the questions and you answer them. Okay?” the woman said tilting her head to one side. She came closer and Quinn could smell her, a molding flowery scent competing with rancid body odor. He looked at the man who merely glared back at him, freezing stare, eyes half-lidded.
“I was just trying to cross the bridge.”
“Jimmy, can you refresh its memory on how this works?” the woman said, stepping to the side, her smile unwavering. The man lunged forward, and Quinn didn’t have time to flinch.
Jimmy’s fist drove into his solar plexus, and his lungs caught fire. He gasped then gagged, stomach acid racing into his mouth. He coughed and spit, the cramped muscles in his midsection slowly loosening.
“There. That’s better. Now, where did you come from?” the woman asked.
“Maine,” Quinn managed, though the word was more of a moan.
“Hmm, you’re not fooling us, harbinger. You crawled from the cracks of the earth, divulged from the stinking bowels of the underworld.”
“What?”
“Jimmy?”