The train had rolled to a stop, and I hoped that Lorna was following my instructions. I’d told her that when the train stopped again, she should get out of the railcar with Leah and Kane and start heading forward to the cab. I didn’t want the driver to know they were there – after all, as far as I knew, nobody had seen them get on in the first place – and keeping close to the train would keep them as much out of sight as possible. Darwin and the cops might suspect they were still with me, but without proof, they might waste resources looking elsewhere.

  I tapped the driver with the Beretta. “Just remember,” I told him. “Keep this thing going, okay?”

  The driver stared at the gun and nodded rapidly again. “You got it,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  I opened the door and jumped out, swinging it shut behind me. I checked down the train, saw Kane leading Lorna and Leah toward me, Lorna struggling under the weight of my backpack; and then I banged on the door, telling the driver to go.

  The beast pulled away slowly, and the others caught up to me as we watched it go. There were bushes and trees leading down to the road, and we headed to them quickly, hiding ourselves.

  “I thought that was it,” Lorna panted, eyes wide. “Back there, the first time we stopped, and I heard the shooting, I –”

  “Keep focused,” I told her, not wanting her fears to have an effect on her daughter. The whole affair might give the pair of them nightmares for years to come, but they had to keep it together if they ever wanted to see those years.

  “Yes,” she said, controlling her voice, “okay. Okay.”

  I pointed to the road, which ran down a long, gentle slope to a small two-lane road that cut through the surrounding landscape. “We’re going to go down there,” I told her, “and find a car.”

  She looked at the gun in my hand. “You’re going to steal one?”

  I shook my head. “We’re going to steal one.”

  Chapter Three

  We had to wait a few painful, nerve-wracking minutes for a car to actually come down that rural road, but when one did, the driver stopped just as I’d hoped.

  But most people did, when they saw a woman unconscious on the asphalt, a small girl sobbing next to the body.

  The driver – a lone male, aged in his sixties – jumped out of his car to help, and I almost felt bad when I appeared from behind a tree, Beretta aimed toward him.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, my polite words at odds with the menace presented by the gun, “but we’re going to need to use your car.”

  “Wha . . . What is this?” he stammered, before a flash of recognition crossed his face and he gasped. “It . . . It’s you!” he said. “Those people they’re talking about on the news!” His hands went up in the air, and he seemed genuinely terrified by the sight of Kane as he appeared beside me. My buddy’s work back in the cemetery was obviously getting a lot of airtime. “Please, don’t hurt me!”

  “Just do as I ask,” I said reasonably, watching Lorna and Leah get up from the floor and make their way to the rear of the car, flashing apologetic looks at the man as they went, “and nobody’s going to get hurt. Now, get back in the car. You’re driving.”

  It would mean his hands would be on the wheel, where I could see them. If we passed anyone, we could also hunker down in our seats, and they’d just see the elderly driver, the same guy that actually owned the car. If we were stopped for any reason, there might be a problem, but there was no reason we would be stopped.

  The man got in, and I took the seat next to him, Kane jumping in back with the ladies.

  “Okay,” I told him, “let’s go. And just remember, you’ve got a Beretta aimed at your side, and my friend back there with his eyes on your neck. So don’t try anything funny, you understand?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice impressively calm. “I understand.”

  “Good,” I said, as he pulled away. “Now, we’re all sorry about this, believe me. All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

  The guy almost chuckled, despite the situation. “You and me both, son. You and me both.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked the guy.

  “Mark,” he said.

  “Where were you headed, Mark?”

  “Been to the grocery store,” he said, gesturing to the rear, “and I was just heading home.”

  I turned, and saw Lorna looking over the rear seats into the trunk, where the parcel shelf had been removed. She turned back and nodded her head, confirming that there were grocery bags there.

  “How far’s home?”

  “Oh, just a couple of miles along this road.”

  “Who lives there?”

  “Just me,” he said. “My wife died last year. Cancer.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, wondering if we should use his house to hide out in. Was he telling the truth about his wife? I figured that he probably was; he seemed smart, and had maybe figured out that I might want to use his house, and it would seem more attractive if it was empty. If he did have a wife there, would he put her in harm’s way? But maybe there was someone else there, someone he trusted to sort the problem out, a son who was a cop, or similar. I didn’t think so, but I was unwilling to risk going there anyway; there were too many unknown variables, and hiding out wasn’t going to get us any nearer to New York, and a new life for Lorna and Leah.

  “What are your plans for the rest of the day?” I asked next.

  “Are you trying to find out if anyone’s gonna miss me?” he asked right back. Like I thought, the guy was smart.

  “Yeah,” I answered honestly, “I guess I am.”

  “You’re going to kill me?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t want to kill you at all. Can I be honest? What you’ve heard on the news, some of it’s true. I did kill a few people back in Nashville, and so did my dog. Okay? But it was in self-defense. I don’t kill people in cold blood.”

  “So if I stop this car, or drive it to the cops, you’re not going to use that gun on me anyway?”

  “That’s a good point,” I said. “Well, it’s true that I won’t shoot you, unless you actually try and attack me. Like if you’ve got a gun stashed somewhere, and try and use it, I might shoot you. Like I said, self-defense. If you just refuse to cooperate, I’ll still use the gun, only I won’t shoot you, I’ll probably crack you in the head with it, knock you out, put you in the trunk, cover you with the bags and drive myself. You’d live, but I think you’d be better off just driving like I ask.”

  Mark nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “So, where are we going?”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What are your plans later? You meeting anyone, is there anywhere you need to be?”

  Mark shook his head. “I’m retired, and I live by myself. I’ve got no plans except for cooking some lunch, cracking open a beer, and maybe watching the game later on the TV.”

  “Do you have a phone?” I asked, and he fished it out of his pocket and handed it over. It was an old model, and basic, but it had a calls list and I scrolled through the names and numbers. The last call had been yesterday, and incoming call from “Scott”. “Who’s Scott?” I asked.

  “My son.”

  “He live around here?”

  “No, he’s in Connecticut.”

  I accepted the answer and checked his text messages, although they were few and far between.

  “If you’re checking my messages, I’m a bit of a technophobe, I’m afraid. Sometimes my sons text me, but I just call ’em back.”

  He certainly seemed to be telling the truth, and I put the phone away in the glove compartment. I saw a map in there, and pulled it out.

  “You don’t know where you’re going, do you?” Mark asked, a wry smile on his lips.

  “Sure I do,” I told him. “We’re going away from here.”

  He chuckled as I studied the map, seeing that we were close to Fayetteville. “Get us onto the Sixty-Four,” I told him, “and we’ll head for Chattanooga.”

  “You got it,” he said, and I started to relax for the first time as I settled in for the long-haul.

  Chapter Four

  By the middle of the afternoon, we were past Chattanooga and were on US-74 heading east into the huge forests that surrounded the Tennessee-North Carolina border.

  Mark had actually turned out to be a decent traveling partner; he’d served with the 82nd Airborne and had seen action in Grenada, Panama, and the first Gulf War. I supposed that was why he’d been so cool, calm and collected after we’d stopped him – seeing actual combat put you in a different state of mind to most regular people. When you’d had enemy soldiers doing their best to shoot you, it either destroyed you or made you stronger. Mark was one of the ones who’d been made stronger.

  He’d even listened to our story about what had really happened back in Bartlett and Nashville, and while I didn’t think he believed everything, at least he didn’t cast complete doubt on it all. So that we didn’t have to stop at any diners of cafés, he’d also suggested we eat some of his groceries, and Lorna and Leah had made some pretty decent sandwiches out of what they’d found. But I still didn’t tell him what our plans were, or where we were headed; there was, after all, no point in tempting fate by trusting him too much.

  I’d thought about going south to Atlanta and skirting the forests and mountains, thinking that the faster speeds might make up for the extra distance; but then I’d figured that the cops were less likely to go patrolling these smaller roads, that if they were going to set up roadblocks or traffic checks, they would probably keep to the main highways and interstates.

  The plan was, therefore, to keep heading east, through the national parks into North Carolina, and then go up into Virginia, with New York in our long-term sights beyond that. I wasn’t sure if we’d keep mark with us all the way, or if we’d swap cars at some stage; but the situation was working quite well for now, and I was happy to keep going as we were.

  We’d had the radio on for most of the drive, and the news had focused almost exclusively on our recent adventures. The Congregation of Christ in America – and evangelical Christians in general – were being lionized in the media for their assistance in the chase, and for their “selfless sacrifices” in the fight against what appeared to be the “Devil Himself”, along with his “Evil Queen”. The reports could hardly be described as evenhanded. But I supposed, if you bought the original accusation against us, that we had killed Ron Allen, then the rest of it didn’t look too good. Cops had been injured, God-fearing Christians had been killed, and even the beloved Little Bobby had been injured, while bravely trying to bring us to justice and rescue the girl. Kane, a “hound from Hell itself”, was also receiving some pretty bad press after his role in the proceedings, and it looked like a full-blown media circus had descended on Tennessee.

  It also seemed that I had been linked to the incident at Graceland, and although it hadn’t been confirmed, there were plenty of rumors to suggest that the same person was involved. This basically made me the most wanted man in Tennessee, despite nobody knowing exactly who I was. But listeners were being encouraged to visit the radio station’s website – or the websites of the Nashville PD, the Bartlett PD, the state police, or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation – to see images of all of us, including Kane. I assumed they had built up a picture from the various CCTV cameras we’d passed, as well as composite sketches from eyewitnesses.

  The latest news was that roadblocks were going up all over the state, and the authorities were setting up chokepoints at all major routes. That was bad, I knew, but at least we weren’t on a road that could be truly classified as major; it was barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other comfortably.

  The good news, if there was any, was that nobody seemed to know exactly where we were now; David Traynor had driven the train right through several stations where the cops had tried to get him to stop, until he’d eventually been forced to halt by an armed contingent of National Guardsmen who’d been called out, blocking off the tracks with an armored vehicle. Not a tank, by all accounts, but close.

  This was, I saw, getting out of control, and fast.

  When the National Guard were called in, you knew the shit had well and truly hit the fan. It wasn’t mentioned that they would have any further role to play, but you never knew.

  It looked like Traynor was holding up under questioning though, as no mention was made of where we had left the train; all that was reported was that we weren’t on the train when it had eventually been stopped. Unless he had talked, and the media just hadn’t got wind of it yet.

  “We’re getting close to the border,” Mark told me, interrupting my thoughts. “Won’t be long now.”

  I nodded. I knew I would feel a wave of relief as soon as we left Tennessee. It would complicate the pursuit for us, as different agencies would have to get involved – if anyone actually found out where we were – and this would make things a lot more awkward for Darwin. His influence over the cops might be immense in his home state, but it was hopefully less so in NC.

  The narrow, two-lane road we were on was hemmed in by tall trees on either side, and the traffic was light. Every once in a while a car or truck passed us from the other direction, and sometimes we had to slow down for a car in front, or were overtaken by a vehicle from behind.

  Back on the roads outside Chattanooga, we’d seen a few police cruisers, but we’d sunk down low in our seats, and had been completely ignored; and since the small town of Cleveland, we’d not seen a police presence of any kind. Maybe, I thought, it was because the train had been heading southwest, and that was the direction in which the cops thought we wanted to go; at the very least, it would make sense for them to center any search on that vicinity, for want of any further clues. Ron Allen had some family down in Mississippi, and it was possible that they thought we were headed that way.

  “Hey,” Mark said, “what’s this?”

  We’d just rounded a bend, and up ahead, we saw a car slowing down, hitting its brakes. And beyond that, it looked like there were others cars, almost as if they were stopping for a . . .

  “Roadblock,” I said, as a feeling of dread crept through me.

  “Looks that way,” Mark agreed.

  “Oh no,” Lorna gasped from the back, as Kane stretched forward to look through the windshield. “What are we going to do?”

  “Mommy,” Leah asked, “what’s a roadblock?”

  “The cops are stopping vehicles,” I answered for her. “Searching them.”

  “Oh,” Leah said. “That’s bad. But it’s the cops, right? Not the pastor?”

  The fear was back in her eyes again; not from mention of the cops, but from thinking about Darwin, and I asked myself if maybe she’d seen what had happened to her father, back at the house. That would certainly be enough to make anyone scared. Or was there something else?

  “I don’t know,” I said, and it was true; at this stage, I didn’t know exactly who, or what, was stopping the traffic. It could, I suppose, just be roadworks for all I knew; but we had to assume the worst, had to assume that our pursuers had figured out we might try and cross the state border and set up roadblocks at likely places. I hadn’t thought that this route was particularly likely, but maybe I’d been wrong; or maybe Traynor had talked, which might have given the cops a rough idea of where we were heading.

  I saw the lights then, flashing blue ahead of us, and I knew it wasn’t roadworks. It was a police roadblock.

  “What do you want me to do?” Mark asked, as he drew close to the car in front. “Should I turn it around?”

  My head was spinning. What should he do? What should we do?

  “No,” I said, knowing how suspicious it would look; if there was anything guaranteed to grab the cops’ attention, it was a car turning away from a roadblock. I turned to Lorna. “Get in the back with Leah,” I told her. “And pass those bags over, I’ll put them over you to cover you up.”

  Quickly, she did as she was told, passing the bags over first, before climbing over the back of the rear seats into the trunk of the hatchback. I climbed through to the rear seats then, and started to put the bags on top of them. When I’d finished, I was pretty satisfied; the cops would have to move the bags to see any sign of them.

  “What about you?” Mark asked, but I was already climbing down into the rear footwell, squeezing my body into the space there. I whistled softly, and Kane lay down on top of me, stretching right out to cover my body. He then put his head on his paws, and pretended to go to sleep.

  “Mark,” I whispered softly from my hiding place, “I don’t know if you believed my story, but I hope you did. Don’t tell them anything. Please.”

  “Son,” Mark said, “I don’t know if I believe your story either. But this is the most excitement I’ve had in years, so don’t worry, I’m not saying a word.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and I heard the old man’s now-familiar chuckle.

  “Let’s just see if we get through this,” he said. “And maybe you can thank me later.”

  Chapter Five

  I tried my best to control the fear that was building rapidly within me as we edged forward, using the special breathing techniques I’d been taught years before.

  Some people referred to it as “combat breathing”, and it had been developed to help soldiers to perform under the pressure of live conditions. The trouble with combat was that it was inherently terrifying; unless there was something psychologically wrong with you, a normal person would feel a tremendous amount of physiological stress when facing a life-or-death situation. The heart rate would inevitably accelerate, sometimes to dangerous levels, making any action that relied upon fine motor skills – such as aiming and firing a weapon with any degree of accuracy – completely impossible. The “adrenaline dump” that often resulted from such situations actually improved the effectiveness of gross motor skills – such as running, jumping, charging and pushing – but rendered obsolete anything relying on even a mild degree of finesse. Combat breathing was designed to bring the heart rate under control, so that more complex motor functions could still be carried out.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17