“Adam,” she said, “Adam,” and it was like a plea, a prayer, an invocation to get them out of there, and she couldn’t leave him, she couldn’t, but her heart was going into overdrive and she actually had her hand on the gearshift to shove the thing into reverse and back away from him when the door pulled open and he slid into the seat and slammed the door shut again and she hit the accelerator with a foot that really didn’t know what it was doing beyond finding that place where the tires would grab and the car would hurtle off into the tunnel the high beams carved out of the night.
“Kill the lights,” he said, and it was the first thing either of them had said since he’d got in the car. They were out on Route 20 now, heading back down the hill, and there was nobody behind them as far as she could see, but then that didn’t mean anything, did it? They had helicopters, whole fleets of cruisers, guns and more guns. She was going too fast, she knew it. The tires screeched. She jerked at the wheel. She was in a state, close to breaking down and screaming her head off, susceptible, fully susceptible—but this didn’t make any sense to her. Shut off the lights? Now? On the highway? In the dark?
He repeated himself, his voice honed and hard: “I said, kill the lights.”
She swung wildly through a turn and then looped back the other way, through the next one, her palms sweating and her eyes jumping at the road ahead. “I can’t,” she said, “we’ll go off the road. I can hardly see as it is—”
“Here,” he said, and he was thrusting something at her—what was it? Heavy plastic, slick glass: the night-vision goggles.
“I can’t—what are you doing?”
“Slow down,” he said. “Watch the road.”
And then they both froze, the sound of the siren riding up on them out of nowhere. A whoop, a scream. It jabbed right into her, shoved itself up under her flesh like a hypodermic scoured with acid. This was it, she knew it, she was done, doomed, everything she’d built in her life gone out the window—she wasn’t going to have to worry about being a slave to the system anymore because she was going to be a prisoner of it. In a jail cell. With what—a tray of mush and insta-food shoved through a slit in the door three times a day? She wanted to pull over, wait for the inevitable, but she didn’t. She just kept on driving, kept on going down, one turn, then the next, but where was the siren coming from—behind them or out in front?
There was a whoop, another whoop, then it faded, then whooped again. “Are they—?” she asked, but never got to finish the question because here came the sheriff’s dead-black cruiser hurtling up the hill in the opposite lane, lights flashing, one suspended moment as the thing rocked past them, Adam motioning with the gun and she furious and spitting “No, no!” at him, and then it was gone and vanished round the next bend.
“The pigs,” he snarled. “The fucking pigs.”
She didn’t feel as if she was driving anymore but sailing, and not across some calm picture-postcard bay, but into a dark maelstrom dragging her down to some darker place still. She stabbed at the brakes, hard, and the force of it threw them both forward—seatbelts, who needed seatbelts?—and he hit the windshield with a sudden heavy wet resonance she could feel like a blow to her own body, the car careening toward the trees, everything held in the balance before it caught on the hard compacted dirt of the shoulder and straightened itself out, and still she was driving and still they were going downhill.
When she could talk, when the words came back to her, stingy, squeezed, caught in her throat, she asked him if he’d hurt himself, was he okay, was he bleeding?
He didn’t answer. But she could feel him there at her side, glowering, outraged, all his jets on high. A minute passed. Two. The trunks of the trees flipped past like cards in a fanned deck.
“Here,” he said suddenly. “Stop here. Turn.”
She saw a dirt road rushing up on the right, a wide mouth of nothing cut between a ragged avenue of trees, and for once she did as she was told.