They climbed from the Tahoe, Ty from the opposite side since his door was jammed shut from the crash. The ringing hadn’t left Quinn’s head, and he shook it as he paced down the center of the sunlit road, cradling his rifle in both hands.
The truck ticked and pinged as the overheated metal cooled. Antifreeze and oil pooled beneath the hood, mixing into an evil, dark-orange puddle. He found the first body in the ditch. The man had struck the road and slid for a dozen yards before coming to a stop. Any features with which Quinn could’ve determined his age had been scraped away by the pavement. As he made to move past the corpse to the next body in the ditch, a rattling came from the cab of the pickup. Quinn moved closer and crouched beside the ruined vehicle.
Glass shards glittered everywhere on the roof of the truck. The driver’s face was a mask of blood, his body hanging in a hunched lump from the seatbelt. At least he thought to put his on, Quinn thought absently. The noise came again, definitely not from the driver but from behind him in the less-crushed rear seat.
A woman, her eyes wide with shock lay bound and gagged on the roof of the truck. A huge, purple bruise spanned the right side of her face.
When Quinn leaned in through the broken side window, her gaze found him, and she began to moan through the simple white cloth yanking her mouth into an obscene grin.
“Nahnahnah.” The woman shook her head as she tried to speak through the gag.
“It’s okay; you’re safe; you’re safe now,” Quinn said. He reached into the crushed cab, but she tried to inch away, her eyes flitting around the space searching for escape. “Here,” Quinn said, kneeling further down. He held out a hand, beckoning her closer. “I won’t hurt you. They were trying to kill us.”
The driver unfolded from his bloody cocoon, one hand holding a pistol, blistered eye sockets two red orbs.
Quinn grabbed the man’s arm and pushed it up, folding it over the rumpled door panel. The man’s finger squeezed the trigger, and the gun barked once, twice. The woman screamed against the cloth. Somewhere, Quinn heard Alice yelling his name. His free hand scrabbled at the holster near his side. The XDM was there, sliding free, pushing through the open window against the man’s temple.
He pulled the trigger.
He didn’t hear the report, but the man went slack, his struggling arm going limp in Quinn’s grasp. The pistol fell to the pavement, spinning once on its grip before falling still. He sat back and slid a few feet away from the truck, looking at the dark hole in the driver’s skull, not wanting to imagine the exit wound that was surely on the opposite side, but imagining it anyway. Then Alice was there. Her lips were moving, but there was no sound, just like the gunshot. She shook him, hard, and all his senses rushed back.
“Are you okay?” she said. Her face was so close to his, her hair tickling his cheek.
“Yes.”
“Can you stand?”
“I think so.”
Alice got him on his feet, and he avoided looking at the driver again. Instead he focused on the woman in the backseat. There was a little blood on her white t-shirt and blue jeans, but there was no way of telling if it was hers or not. She still regarded them with frantic eyes, shifting from Alice to him and back again.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Alice asked him again.
“Yeah, pretty—”
She slapped him full across the face.
The blow caught him completely off guard, and his eyes immediately watered, the imprint of her narrow palm like a whip on his cheek.
“You almost got us killed, my son, killed!” she yelled. She was pure fury, vibrating with it, and he took a step away from her.
“I’m sorry, it was the only thing I could think of.”