The van careened toward the sprinting figures, Doyle fanatically gripping the steering wheel, determined to run down at least one of the bastards. He expected them to split and dive off to either side—in which case he was ready to swerve and hit one at least—but they didn’t: they came straight on.
“Die, motherfuckers!” he screamed as the van closed in, the two men running side by side at him down the center of the road. He braced himself for the impact—and then nothing. He was past them. No blow or crash—they seemed to have dodged away at the last minute. But where?
He looked in the rearview mirror and was horrified to see one of the masks leering back at him from only a few feet away—the brute was clinging to the side of the van. And from the opposite mirror he could see the other bastard. They’d somehow clutched onto the van as it passed. How had they done it? It was the kind of thing only a highly trained stuntperson could do.
“They’re on the van!” Ballou screamed. “Do something!”
Doyle swerved the van, weaved it back and forth, trying to shake them off, but the two figures clung like limpets. The van had a railing on top for property stowage, and they were holding onto that while making their way along the running boards, hand over hand toward the front. The one on his side reached down and grabbed the door handle—locked. He turned and with his arm cocked slammed his forearm into the driver’s-side window, the muffled thump turning it into a spiderweb of cracks.
Doyle would scrape them off. His headlights illuminated the road ahead, lined with bushes and little trees. He swerved to the left side of the road and ran into the vegetation, the shrubbery slapping and scraping the sides as he floored the accelerator, the wheels spinning and the van lurching and fishtailing. Then he jerked the wheel to the right and brought the van back to the road.
The son of a bitch was still there. The brush had ripped off his mask and some of his camouflage covering, and what Doyle saw frightened him more than anything—a pale, bloody face of freakish ugliness, with massive brow ridges and a giant grimacing mouth full of huge flat teeth, the man’s long, blond hair in braids whipping about in the wind like some crazy Viking’s.
“What the fuck?” he screamed as the figure slammed his forearm again into the window, knocking it partway in, the glass held together only by the layer of sealant. Then the crazy pulled and scratched away the gummy glass fragments and reached in and down to unlock the door.
“Fucker!” Doyle, keeping his right hand on the steering wheel, grabbed the door handle with his left and jerked the door open, slamming it into the man and partly knocking him off, the son of a bitch hanging onto the railing at the top of the van with his legs swinging free.
He shut and opened the door, again and again, battering the man’s body as he clung to the roof, but he just wouldn’t let go.
“No! No!” Ballou screamed on the other side, where something was happening, but Doyle was too busy trying to knock the man off on his side and pay attention to the road to see. The van swerved and fishtailed, almost going off the road as Doyle jerked the wheel back and forth.
“Fucker!” Doyle screamed again, shutting the door and pounding down the lock. He would do another off-road detour, scrape the man off. But now the bastard, still gripping the railing, reached inside again and managed to grasp the door handle, and yanked the door open, trying to climb in.
One hand still gripping the wheel, Doyle tried to grapple with the man, swatting at him several times and trying to shove him back out with his shoulder, the van careening along, but he was like a damn octopus, his hands everywhere grasping and pulling himself in, and Doyle couldn’t reach the handle of the open door to shut it.
While he was struggling, he heard a scream come from Ballou and felt a spray of hot blood on the side of his face. Ballou’s scream abruptly cut off.
He swerved again and stomped on the accelerator, driving off the road and straight into a brush thicket. The van plowed into the vegetation, crashing and bucking through it before striking a tree stout enough that it threw the van sideways, and it rolled up and over. Simultaneously, there was an explosion, and Doyle felt himself punched back, momentarily stunned as the van came to a rest. For a moment, he was in a panic, clawing at the thing in his face, when he realized it was the airbag having gone off. He gasped for breath, trying to recover his sanity. Everything hurt, but as he moved, nothing felt like it was broken—and the airbag had finally knocked off the bastard who had been trying to climb into his side of the vehicle. He felt something dripping on him and looked up, and nestled amid a deflated airbag in the passenger seat now above him—the vehicle lying on its side—he saw a horrible sight: Ballou, his throat cut. Behind, he could hear scrabbling in the brush and a grunting sound.
Get up and out and run.
He reached up and, grasping first the seat rest, the deflated airbag, and then the door handle, he managed to climb up past Ballou’s body and crawl out the broken passenger-side window, hoisting himself up onto the side of the overturned van. Kneeling, he saw that one of the brutes was twenty feet behind the van, impaled on a broken tree trunk. The other—where was the other? Doyle looked around wildly. Was he gone? Was he the one grunting earlier? The forest was quiet.
Just get the hell out.
He jumped down from the side of the van and thrashed his way through the vegetation, heading away from the road and into the densest part of the forest. It was dark, he couldn’t see, he had no idea where he was going, everything hurt like hell, and he was being scratched to pieces—but he was so focused, so pumped up with adrenaline, that he felt nothing, only the drive to run, to escape, to get away from those murdering freaks.