Cambry Nguyen knows from experience that without Blake’s trailer, her Corolla can last roughly thirty miles on a low fuel light. That’s the farthest she’s ever pushed her luck. From Fort Myers to Fargo, she’s always been diligent to watch her maps, mind her location, and never stray far from a population center. Whether it’s a few bucks at a gas station or a quick siphon from a parking lot, she’s never been careless enough to let her tank run empty too far from civilization. But she wasn’t counting on that asshole reaching through her window and grabbing her backpack.
Thirty miles. That’s the known limit.
Polk City is forty-two miles ahead, according to the next sign she sees. A twelve-mile difference. She wonders—what’s the fuel reserve of a 2007 Toyota Corolla?
Thirty miles. Plus twelve more.
She stares at the dim orange fuel pump icon just below the E. Driving to Polk City is a major gamble, she knows. If she’s wrong—even a mile short of forty-two—she’ll coast to a halt in a dead car and he’ll catch her defenseless on the road. A knife won’t save her. He’ll shoot her or strangle her or rape her. Whatever he was planning to do when he first asked her to step out, barely twenty minutes ago.
But maybe . . . maybe cell signal will resume sooner than forty-two miles? This is likely, since Polk City is a population center. There’s bound to be some sprawl. But it won’t solve her gasoline problem. Getting a successful 911 call out won’t help her if he murders her on the spot.
“Shit.” She punches her steering wheel.
The cop car still tails her. Plenty of gas in his tank.
Time is not on your side. Her heart sinks. Not at all.
The cop switches off his light bar behind her. Another act discarded. Maybe it was interfering with his night vision? It’s still something of a relief on Cambry’s nerves. Now it’s a clearer, simpler world of black night, headlights, and racing pavement.
She tries to collect her thoughts. It’s already been a minute since she passed that green sign, so now it’s forty-one miles to Polk City. She has one less mile in her tank. The engine itself is a ticking clock. Burning her finite supply of fuel, slurping away at a descending total every minute, every second—
Think, she urges herself. Just think.
This is a bad bet.
She can keep driving the remaining forty-odd miles to Polk City, and make it the entire way if she’s lucky. She has no idea how much spare fuel she has. Her odds could be a coin flip. Or they could be significantly worse.
Magma Springs, she remembers with a jolt. Twenty miles away. Maybe twenty-five, now? It’s directly behind her. There won’t be a cell signal—at least not until she’s right in the middle of whatever their Main Street is—but she has enough gas to get there, for certain. The town itself is roughly the size of Polk City. Maybe larger. There should be a sheriff’s department or a grocery store or a gas station or something with living, awake people inside it. People who can be eyewitnesses.
“Okay,” she whispers.
If you turn around . . .
“Okay, okay, okay . . .”
Another hard turn comes up—she holds her speed at seventy this time. The world banks like a racetrack. Loose change rattles in the console. She twists to avoid the panic strip and nearly overcorrects into the oncoming lane.
Coming out of the turn, the black Charger is still pinned on her tail. Headlights burn into her rear window. Just like the last turn. Raycevic is a trained pursuit driver; he knows exactly how these chases unfold and he’s barely lost an inch on her.
She’s already preparing for it, and she hasn’t fully thought it through yet. But yes, she knows what she needs to do. Staying the course to Polk City is a mistake. She needs to turn around, to go back to Magma Springs, which is a safer bet and half the distance. She needs to slam on her brakes and turn around. Somehow, without getting caught. Or shot. Or rammed off the road.
She decides: She’ll do it on the count of three. Just like Raycevic, standing outside her car with that wide smile, strawberry antacids caked on his teeth, his hand on his Glock.
“One.” Her foot hovers on the brake pedal.
The speedometer needle hovers, too, at seventy-one. She can’t slow down now, because that will be a tell. The cop will match her speed. And if she takes the turn too slowly, he’ll seize his chance to ram her right off the road. She’ll be vulnerable taking that turn, facing him broadside.
She imagines her car wrecking in the trees, tumbling and blossoming into a fireball—“Two”—and she grinds her molars. Her toothache is back.
You’re going too fast.
No, she’s going just fast enough.
And if he rear-ends you by mistake? And knocks you off the road?
A risk, but an acceptable one. Certainly better than running out of gas ten miles from the outskirts of Polk City, dead on the road with an armed psychopath on her tail. Better odds than anything else right now. That’s an objective fact, she tells herself as his headlights scorch the edges of her vision.
Three?
She’s afraid to say it. It’s trapped in her throat like a cough. But she forces it through, forces her lips to part, to form the word:
“Three—”
She stomps the brakes.
The entire world seems to drop anchor. A brain-jarring impact without impact. The metal shriek of locking brake pads in her left and right eardrums. The seat belt whips out of nowhere and clotheslines her, punching the air from her lungs.
A flurry of shifting light—the Charger swerves hard to his left. His high beams flash as intensely as sunlight, and Cambry knows in the pit of her gut that he’s not dodging her fast enough, that he’s going to clip her tail and wreck them both. But the instant passes. He doesn’t. He didn’t. Her Corolla squirms right, skidding toward the road’s shoulder with a scrape of gravel—she fights the wheel now—still sliding sideways on locked tires. Then another bracing impact-without-impact spills her against her seat, noisily tipping the cooler in the back seat, and then airy stillness. Her headlights stare at dark pines.
A complete stop.
No time to breathe. She thrashes forward in her seat, tasting the acrid odor of burnt rubber, heaving the steering wheel right and flooring the gas (the faraway scream of the Charger’s brakes, too, slamming in enraged response), and she swerves into the eastbound lane, completing her turn.
A one-eighty, at seventy miles per hour.
“Holy shit.”
Even her furies are impressed: Not bad, girl.
She brushes her hair from her eyes, accelerating. The road unfurls. Her path to Magma Springs, to civilization, to safety.
She flips her rearview mirror back into position—Raycevic is still fumbling his vehicle through a one-eighty turn of his own back behind her, shrinking into darkness. Fifty yards. A hundred. His reaction time was even slower than she’d dared hope. Maybe he’d been on his radio or something? She’d caught him off guard. She’d done the one thing he couldn’t possibly anticipate in a life-or-death chase: she slammed on the brakes.
She feels like she’s gained a full quarter-mile lead when she finally sees his headlights rejoin the pursuit behind her. Tiny faraway pinpricks of light.
“Fuck you,” she whispers.
It feels good. It’s a minor victory, but it feels monumental. She’s changed direction, toward a closer town. That’s something. She takes the road’s previous curve—now a hard left—and the Charger’s headlights momentarily vanish behind the sloped land. She’s gained considerable distance, and he’s struggling now to close it. Hell, yes.
A sign races past, catching a fiery glint: MAGMA SPRINGS 22.
Even better than she expected! Twenty-two miles is doable, with eight to spare. The Corolla is certain to have that much gas in its tank. Better odds than making it forty-two to Polk City. Much better. But she’ll still have to contend with an armed pursuer every mile of the way there, and when he gets desperate, he’s liable to start shooting. She doesn’t have a plan for that yet.
It’s been a few seconds, and the cop’s headlights haven’t yet reappeared around the turn behind her. Something else occurs to her, just a whisper.
You can hide.
The cop is following her brake lights, which must be tiny red dots from his distance. The rest of the countryside is now pitch black. While visual contact is broken by the terrain, she could skid off the road, cut all of her lights, and let Raycevic barrel on past her to the next bend.
Do it, Cambry.
His headlights reappear. Still distant. Tugging closer.
Okay. The next turn.
She’ll need there to be an access road, or at the very least a flat patch of earth, or else she’ll just crash into a ditch. That would be bad. And she’ll need to be cognizant of her dust trail. Anything that can give her location away in his passing headlights.
A clearing races by on her left, stalks of tall grass and saplings. Too fast to anticipate.
“Damn it.” That would have worked, too. But the cop is still within eyeshot, and he would have just followed her off the road.
She promises herself: Next time. No excuses.
The next turn is coming up now. It’s the same nasty bend she remembers from minutes ago. It had almost spilled her into the forest. A ribbonlike twist in the pavement, racing toward her in the night.
Her hair is in her eyes again. She sweeps it away. Her speedometer needle touches eighty, ninety. Inefficient fuel management, but necessary now. Her engine roars under the hood, breathlessly chugging its finite supply.
She knows, from a few minutes back, that she can attack this bitch of a turn at fifty and still stay on the road. This time, she’ll try sixty. She’ll need every second of her lead to get her car safely off the road and concealed in the darkness. Without leaving obvious tracks. And giving the dust trail a few critical seconds to settle.
Here it is.
At sixty, she’s already chosen to cross into the oncoming lane to make for as broad a curve as possible. A head-on collision is the least of her fears. The road swerves away underneath her, a hard right, and she fights the wheel. The tires screaming again, the panic strip a furious buzz saw in her ears. She feels it vibrate her locked teeth. Again, the gnarled pine trunks whip past in her headlights, a strobing carousel of freeze-frames. Any one of them could turn her car into a fireball. They feel just feet, inches away. She keeps wrenching the wheel right, harder right, as the two-ton Corolla wrestles out of her grasp and the tight curve keeps going and going, more trees, more and more and more—
Then, abruptly, the road straightens.
She overcorrects, back into her lane. Hitting the panic strip again. Another buzz and a clatter of chewed gravel. But she’s still moving forward, still racing, and she survived the hellish turn. It doesn’t matter that she took the oncoming lane to do it—had another motorist been coming the other way, it would have been an instant murder-suicide—none of it matters, none of it at all, because it’s just an alternative outcome that didn’t happen. She’s still alive.
In her rearview mirror, the Charger’s headlights are gone again. The cop is probably just now cutting his speed to make the same turn. She tries to estimate how much time she has.
You have twenty seconds. Tops.
She searches all sides for a grassy meadow, a flat patch of earth, anything to skid off the highway onto and hide in the dark—and in her haste, she nearly misses something even better.
A gated-off road.
On a dusty little side shoulder, pitted with erosion tracks. A faded white sign—ROAD CLOSED—catches her lights over a locked metal gate. Coming fast, on her left.
She twists the wheel. Still going fifty.
Fifteen seconds now—
Her tires seize and squeal again. The gritty howl of rubber on pavement. She hopes the cop’s windows aren’t rolled down—otherwise he’ll surely hear this, even from a quarter mile back around the bend, and he’ll know she’s stopping.
Ramming the gate is suicide, so she swerves around it, blowing through a six-foot sapling that cracks against her bumper like a gunshot and explodes into a cloud of frizzy leaves. Her vehicle jostles hard on the rough land, hurling coins from the console. Her seat belt yanks her collarbone again. Her mirrors are out of alignment now. Then she’s back on pavement, completing her turn, leaving the locked barrier behind her, still racing—
Ten seconds.
Loose rocks clatter noisily against the undercarriage. Toothpick trees and low brush whip past on both sides. A dust trail obscures her rear window, lit blazing red by her taillights. A pothole bangs underneath her, another startling crash.
She keeps driving, hurtling forward. Putting more and more distance between herself and the main road. For this plan to work, she’ll need to be far enough off the highway that the cop won’t see her in his headlights. She also needs to cut her own lights, obviously, or he’ll spot her in his dark periphery immediately. But when?
Five seconds.
It’s a risk either way, she knows. If she stops too close to the road, he’ll see her and swerve to follow her. If she keeps driving and waits too long to kill her lights, he’ll see her, too. She twists her neck and looks back toward the highway through a shroud of dust. Watching for the Charger’s headlights to reappear around the bend. Although, she reminds herself: if she sees him, it’s already too late.
Zero. Time’s up.
No. She’s not far enough from the highway.
Stop the car.
She slams over another pothole, a trailing metal scrape. She can’t stop yet. She’s too close. The foliage is too low and sparse, the trees too thin. The sweep of Raycevic’s headlights will reveal her Corolla hiding in the low prairie, as plain as daylight.
Stop the car, Cambry. Kill the lights.
She waits another second. And another—
Stop-stop-stop.
Finally, she stomps the brake and twists the key, cutting the engine dead. She swats off the lights and the world goes black. At that microsecond, on the sharp turn of Highway 200 behind her, the pinprick headlights of the cop’s pursuing Charger streak into view, like twin shooting stars.
She holds her breath.
She waits, submerged in darkness. Her dust trail catches up to her and floats past, peppering her roof with grit. She watches the cop car’s faraway headlights complete the turn. His high beams scan the grassland, casting racing shadows among the brush, and their predatory light touches her vehicle’s blue paint, revealing its form in merciless detail.
Cambry’s stomach twists into a knot as the car’s interior lights up around her. For a moment, her dashboard, her steering wheel, her clenched knuckles—all as excruciatingly bright as afternoon sunlight.
Then darkness again.
He’s straightening with the highway. She can hear the distant thrum of his engine. He’s driving fast, making up his lost time.
Her lungs burn. She’s afraid to move.
A new color: arterial red. The Charger’s taillights suddenly light up the road behind it. He’s slowing as he approaches the junction. He recognizes the sign and the gate. He must be familiar with the area. She swallows panic, gripping her key in the ignition. He’s already seen her.
Now, every second she waits is lost time. If she turns on her engine and resumes running, she can still preserve some of her lead. If her cover is already blown, why wait? Why let her time burn away like a lit fuse? She watches the cop car slow further at the junction as a voice in her mind races: He saw you. He’s going to turn left. He’s going to turn left and follow you.
The Charger glides to a complete stop.
Silence.
Well, that’s unexpected.
Her fingers are clenched around the Toyota key now, just a single twist from awakening the engine. Tight enough to imprint a pattern into her palm. Her knuckles ache with pins and needles. She relaxes her fingers, just a little.
He’s parked now, right in the center of Highway 200, about a hundred yards from her. Just a few paces from the gate. His engine idles, a low growl. Lights on.
She watches through her rear window. Still afraid to move. Her lungs bloat inside her chest like hot balloons. She’s getting dizzy, her thoughts starting to swim, but she won’t allow herself to breathe. She can’t. It’s nightmare logic: if she breathes, he’ll see her.
For another torturous moment, nothing happens.
Then the Charger’s door swings open, silent but startling in its swiftness, and Cambry coughs her breath out. She gasps, as if surfacing from deep water.
The cop steps out. He’s a black silhouette against his headlights. Even from a distance, she can discern the same details she remembers: The brim of his hat. His ram shoulders. His barrel chest. He’s a big guy, almost a bodybuilder, and he looks even bigger in profile. It chills her blood, to be chased by a man with the proportions of the Incredible Hulk.
She’s hidden, she reassures herself. He can’t possibly see her in the dark without night vision.
Does he have night vision? Infrared?
The cop leaves his door ajar and strides to the back of his vehicle. He’s in a hurry. He pops the trunk and leans inside. His dark form ducks into the red glow of his taillights, as red as a demon, before he disappears from view again.
He doesn’t see her. He can’t.
Right? The flatlands are lumpen darkness. Sporadic trees and spotty foliage. She wishes she could sink into it. Just melt downward, car and all, like slipping under dark mud.
The cop reappears. Again passing through the red glare of his brake lights, again looking like a muscle-bound devil. He carries a weapon now. Cambry is no expert on firearms. This year, she shot Blake’s pocket pistol a few times, just enough to be believably threatening if they were ever mugged at a campsite. But she’s certain, even across a great distance, that what Raycevic is carrying is an assault rifle.
He carries it lightly, like a broomstick. He stops by his ajar door. He looks left, then ahead. Left, then ahead. He’s staring at the locked gate—maybe he sees the sapling she took out—and supposing which direction she fled. His movements are clipped, twitchy. Nervous.
He’s not sure.
Cambry remains frozen in her car. Her Toyota key still tight in her fingers. One twist is all it will take, and then her driving lights will snap on and she’ll light up like a Vegas billboard. She can’t open her door and escape on foot, either—the dome light will go off. She’s trapped inside her car.
The adrenaline of hiding, of being hunted, stirs in her stomach. It’s not an entirely bad sensation. She remembers being the little girl who dominated at hide-and-seek. Even indoors. She’d slip off her shoes and tread silently in her socks. She’d evade Lena and the other kids for what felt like hours at a time, changing positions, sliding out of closets, creeping from room to room of her cousins’ house like a wraith. There’s something exhilarating to not being found.
Meanwhile, the cop scans the distance for her. Too dark for binoculars. He holds that sinister rifle to his shoulder as he searches, ready to fire. Thank God he doesn’t have night vision.
He has to decide, she realizes. One or the other.
Stay on the highway or take a left onto the closed road? He has a fifty-fifty chance of choosing correctly. Cambry has a fifty-fifty chance of breaking contact and escaping. It all comes down to a coin flip, under an anxious black sky. The air builds with electric charge. She can feel it in her teeth.
The Toyota keys rattle in her fingers. Her hand shakes. The apprehension of it is killing her nerves, and it must be killing Raycevic’s, too. He’s losing time. He knows it. She knows it. It all comes down to his choice.
Please choose wrong. She hopes.
Please stay on the highway.
The realization comes to her now. Now, of all times. It comes in on tiny crawling legs, like an insect under a door. She understands now. This cop, Raymond Raycevic, was destroying a body out on that remote property. The four campfires, caged in pyramids of stone, were designed to hold heat. Like little furnaces. To bake human bone into powder. He was cremating a body, one chopped piece at a time.
Cambry’s stomach writhes. Acid in her throat.
This cop, Corporal Raymond Raycevic, is a killer. And she stumbled across his evidence disposal site. She witnessed him in the act. So now he desperately needs to eliminate her before she tells someone else and blows his secret. That’s it. That’s the only realistic explanation for what’s happening.
He sets his rifle on the seat and climbs back inside his Charger. He slams the door with clear anger. The sound reaches her a fraction of a second later, a dry clap delayed by distance. The patrol car’s driving lights change as he shifts into gear. This is it. The moment of truth.
Please stay on the road.
The vehicle lurches forward toward the junction, and Cambry wants to cover her eyes, wants desperately to look away.
Please-please-please—
And Raycevic continues straight down Highway 200. Past the white sign, past the road, past the smashed sapling and the locked gate. Past Cambry’s hiding spot. She doesn’t believe it at first. She can’t.
Yes. He’s leaving.
Watching him go, she cries out, half a scream and half a gasp. So much tension, let out as suddenly as a punctured balloon. A rush of blood to her skin. A seizure of joy in her throat. Yes, it was a coin flip, all right, and she called tails, and he called heads, and thank God, she just won—
Lightning crosses the sky.
A jagged bolt leaps east to west, fracturing the sky into cracks of silent fire. For a microsecond, every inch of the prairie lights up, as if every rock and every tree is X-rayed in a double flash. Even the interior of Cambry’s Corolla ignites as bright as daylight for a single horrible instant.
On the highway, the cop slams on his brakes. His tires squeal.
As he skids back around to turn at the gate and rejoin the chase, it takes a full, disbelieving second for Cambry Nguyen to comprehend what happened. What just happened, against all odds. She twists her key, starting the engine again.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”