She reached the front door and turned the knob and then the door was open and she fell onto the screen door and tore it half off the hinges as she surged through it and into the cold night air.
If she’d been thinking clearly, she would have left the driveway and angled toward the trees, seeking cover immediately, but she wasn’t thinking, just moving, and so she ran ten yards straight out of the door and down the wide-open drive, and it was only the sound of the growling engine on the Chrysler that brought her out of the fog.
Don’t run. Drive, dummy. Driving is faster.
She had her hand on the door when a gunshot cracked and the driver’s window exploded. Glass needled across her hands, and a thin line of blood ran down her index finger as she slid into the driver’s seat, jammed her foot on the brake, and punched the starter button to engage the transmission of the idling car. She kept her head under the dash as she shifted into reverse and pounded the gas, focused on two things—she had to stay down to avoid a bullet, and she had to keep the wheel steady and the accelerator pinned to the floor. Hank’s driveway was a straight shot through the pines and back to the rutted road; she didn’t need to lift her head to drive, not yet.
She kept her foot on the gas and her bloody hands tight on the wheel, driving blind but straight.
You’ll know when you hit the road. And then you’d better get your foot on the brake fast.
It seemed to take longer than it should have—driving blind ruined distance perception—but finally she felt a thunk under the back wheels as the Chrysler left the driveway. She slammed on the brake, sending the tires slaloming through the wet dirt and gravel of the camp road, and managed to bring the car to a stop without sliding into the trees. Now she had to risk looking up.
No bullets came for her, and she didn’t wait to give them a chance, just cut the wheel hard to the left, shifted into drive, and hit the gas again. The decision to go left was simple—the trees were thick to that side, and the right was wide open, making her an easy target. She was expecting more shots. No one fired, though. Even when she passed through a gap between the pines, no bullets came.
She should have understood that the lack of gunfire meant she’d made a mistake.
Instead, all she felt was relief. She was free. Out of sight of the house, out of pistol range, and moving under her own power.
Or the car was moving under its own power at least. Abby, maybe less so. The adrenaline was losing the battle with whatever was in her bloodstream—That’s not just whiskey; what else was in there?—and the windshield was a mess of milky cracks that blurred the road in front of her. The combination was disorienting, and she wanted to stop, get out of the car, and put her feet on the ground.
An engine roared to life behind her.
That sound kept her foot away from the brake.
Just keep going fast, she told herself, go far and go fast, that’s all you need to do.
But she didn’t know where she was going. She’d been on the road to Hank’s a thousand times, but she’d never turned this way coming out of the driveway. What was ahead of her? An intersection? There had to be. She needed a paved road; please, please, let there be a paved road. Give her pavement and nobody would catch her; the devil himself would not catch Abby Kaplan if she had four good tires and a paved surface.
No pavement appeared. The hard-packed dirt road got tighter and rougher. The Chrysler shimmied and shook like it was crossing cobblestones. The trees crept in, branches slapping off both sides of the car. Abby wanted to slow down. Wanted to stop.
No. Hank said to run. You’ve got to run.
But she couldn’t remember what she was running from anymore. Her brain spun, out of sync with her eyes and her hands, and all she could hear was Hank’s voice—or was that Luke’s? Was that Luke telling her to go…
Faster. Faster.
Sure thing. Abby could always go faster.
She remembered her father’s lullaby, the one from the old Robert Mitchum movie about an Appalachian bootlegger with a hot rod, the mountain boy who had G-men on his taillights and roadblocks up ahead. Being the motherless daughter of Jake Kaplan meant that such songs became lullabies. “The Ballad of Thunder Road” had been Abby’s favorite. Her father’s voice, off-key, his breath tinged with beer, singing, “Moonshine, moonshine, to quench the devil’s thirst…” had eased her to sleep many times, the two of them alone in the trailer.
All these years later, the song could resurface clearly when she edged toward sleep.
“He left the road at ninety,” her dead father crooned softly, “that’s all there is to say.”
When the Chrysler left the road, Abby had no idea if she’d missed a curve or simply driven right through a dead end. All she knew was that suddenly she was awake and the car was bouncing over uneven ground and now it wasn’t branches whipping at the windows but whole trees, saplings that cracked with whip-snap sounds. Before she could move her foot to the brake, she hit a tree that did the stopping for her, an oak that slammed the car sideways. The airbag caught her rising body at stomach level, a gut punch that stole her breath but kept her from striking the windshield.
She sat gasping for breath and trying to clear her vision, desperate for just a little time to get her bearings.
Headlights appeared in the rearview mirror.
There was no time.
Abby got the door open and hauled herself out of the car, but her legs were wobbly and uncooperative, her vision spinning. She stumbled forward, trying to fight through the branches with her hands held up to protect her face. Her feet hit wet soil and went out from under her and suddenly she was down on her ass in the muck.
She might’ve stayed there, disoriented and exhausted and near the point of collapse, but she could still see the glow from the headlights, and they triggered whatever primal impulses the brain stem held on to until the very end.
Run. Flee.
She fought ahead on hands and knees, and this was a blessing in disguise because she crawled faster than she could have run. The boggy soil yielded to actual water, cold and deep enough to cover her arms to the elbows. She’d splashed into a creek, and she couldn’t make sense of that. What creek? Where did it lead? She tried to remember and couldn’t. Hadn’t she hiked out here once with Hank and her father? Yes, absolutely. The winter before her father’s heart attack. There’d been snow that day and the iced-over creek had turned into a beautiful white boulevard through the pines and birches, leading down past an ancient stone wall and on toward…
Toward nothing. There was nothing out here but trees and rocks and water. That was the point; Hank had never wanted neighbors. Abby needed a neighbor now, though. She needed anyone who could help, because something was behind her. Who or what was no longer clear. Her flight was now instinctual, not logical. Her body was working better than her brain.
That’s fine, because all I need to do is keep running, she thought just before she slid over a moss-covered rock and bounced into the sinkhole below, where she lay covered in mud and decaying leaves and dampness. There, her body started to quit on her too.
She knew that she needed to get up and get moving, but this hole with its pillow of old leaves and cool moss felt comfortable, almost safe, except for the dampness. There was something about being tucked into the earth like this that felt right.
Like a grave. You are in your grave, Abby.
She thought she could still see the headlights, but it was hard to tell with the fog gliding through the trees. It was a low, crawling mist that seemed to be searching for her. She wasn’t sure if the lights behind the mist were moving or stationary or if they were even out there at all. Her eyelids were heavy and her blood felt thick and slow.
She wondered how long it would take the kid to find her.
The kid. Yes, that’s who you’re running from. He’s a killer.
And he was quick. The way he had ducked that punch? That was more than quick. So it would not take the kid long to find Abby now.
What was his name? Had he said a name? Sure, he had. Gentleman Jack.
Abby burrowed into the soft embrace of the leaves that smelled like death and waited on the arrival of Gentleman Jack.