Page 33 of Her Last Refuge

Novak did the same, shielding his eyes as he took another step forward into the brightness.

Rachel heard a slight buzzing noise, an electrical noise like a saw or a drill. Whatever it was, it made her incredibly nervous. This was only heightened when the noise drew closer, and she heard Novak scream.

Whatever happened to him caused him to stumble back, colliding with Rachel. They both stumbled outside again, their eyes temporarily free of the intense white light. The bastard blinded us, she thought. And then he attacked Novak with…with something.

Rachel had to reach out and grab the splintered doorframe to keep from falling over. She sensed and heard rather than saw it when Novak fell down, hitting the concrete pad hard on his back. He wasn’t screaming anymore, and Rachel wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Novak…”

“I’m…good,” he grunted. “But he went running…”

Rachel looked down and made herself focus on the grass, blinking furiously to readjust her eyes. Slowly, her vision returned in fragments. When there were little more than errant white flecks in her vision, she quickly glanced back into the workshop, making sure they left no stone unturned. The space inside resolved into shapes once the worst of the glare faded. She saw a pegboard covering the back wall, a workbench running the length of one side, tools hanging in ordered rows. And there plugged into the wall and sitting on the floor, was the massive light that had been used to blind them; it looked like the kind mechanics used while working under the hood of a car, just larger.

“Rachel…he’s getting in his truck. Come on…”

She wheeled back around and saw Novak getting to his feet. Blood was soaking the left side of his shirt and he was holding his arm close to his body. She looked near the front of the house and saw the Toyota she’d spotted earlier but no one was running toward it.

“No…there,” Novak said, nodding toward the tree line to their right. There, at the back corner of the property, a newer truck—but still beat all to hell from the looks of it—was parked partially inside the trees. She couldn’t be sure because of the angle, but she thought there was some sort of road there. Maybe a logging road or service road of some kind. Even as she spotted this, Alcott was getting into the truck. The engine caught with a rough start.

“Shit!” Rachel spat.

She dropped to one knee beside Novak. Blood showed along the upper part of his right arm near the shoulder where the impact had landed. The wound looked shallow once she got a clear look at it. The fabric of his shirt was torn and the skin beneath looked like someone had shot him with a small bullet.

Behind them and to the left, tires spun on the gravel and then caught. The truck accelerated hard and disappeared down the narrow road that ran behind the lot, leaving only dust and the sound of the engine fading.

“I’m fine,” Novak said before she could ask. “It barely got me. Drill or something. It went in but I jerked back. He was more interested in running than hurting me.”

“It looks bad. You’re bleeding all over the place.”

“I swear I’m fine. Let’s go.”

As if to convince her, he got to his feet with a slight hiss. “Fine, it hurts. But I swear, I’m okay. You think you can get a bureau sedan down whatever God-forsaken track he’s escaping down?”

“Hell yes, I can,” she said as they hurried in the direction of their car. “Let’s just hope the car can take it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Rachel gunned the car across Roy Alcott’s slightly overgrown yard toward the service road at the back of the property. The smell of churning rubber on the grass was oddly sweet, something she didn’t get the chance to truly appreciate before she came to the service road. At the mouth of it, it looked awful—nothing more than ruts in the ground, partially covered by grass and weeds. But after bumping the car along (and hearing the undercarriage scrape against the grass and rough terrain) it levelled out into something more passable. It wasn’t thoroughly smoothed over, like something between a logging road and a state-maintained service road. There was no gravel but the dirt tracks she followed were smooth enough so that the car didn’t sound like it was going to fall to pieces.

She went as fast as the car would allow on the terrain as she drove directly into the cloud of dust Alcott had left in his wake.

“One of the things I hate about this city,” Novak said, “is just how quickly the actual city dissolves into fucking woodland. It’s ridiculous.”

Rachel thought so, too, but she was too focused on the dust-choked road to comment. Dust rose in a thick gray cloud all around them, in fact. She was vaguely aware that at some point she could hear light amounts of gravel crunching under their tires. She hoped this meant an actual road was coming up and within another thirty seconds of bumping along the dirt track, she was rewarded.

A secondary back road appeared ahead as the piss-poor service road came to an end. She lurched the car to a stop, looking both ways to see which way Alcott had gone. He had a good enough head start that the truck was already out of sight so she had to guess.

“Any thoughts?” she asked, looking over to Novak.

He was sitting forward, his right hand covering the wound on his left arm. His entire left sleeve was soaked in blood. “No,” he said. “But if you look really hard to the left, you can sort of see what might be fresh dirt on the pavement.”

She looked in that direction, too, now well aware that Novak’s eyes—about eight years younger than hers—were sharper than her own. But she did sort of see what he was talking about, so she turned in that direction.

She gunned the engine again and Chesterfield’s outskirts gave way faster than she liked. The last of the modest houses dropped off, replaced by stands of pine and mixed hardwood that pressed close to both sides of the road. The pavement narrowed without warning and the shoulders disappeared into soft dirt and undergrowth. While this was a paved road indeed, it was also unmarked and not exactly standard. Rachel kept the speed high anyway, the wheel jumping in her hands each time the tires hit a seam or a patch of loose stone.

Novak braced one hand on the dashboard and scanned the road ahead. “There. Left again.”

She saw the turn a second later and cut the wheel. The car slid a few feet before the tires caught. The truck was still nowhere to be found and it occurred to her that Alcott would know these roads much better than they did. One wrong turn and they would lose him.