But she drove between the posts to a two-lane blacktop highway that led left and right. No car was visible in either direction.
To the north, left, the highway climbed into a forested night, toward ragged moon-frosted clouds and stars, as if it were a ramp that would carry them right off the planet and up into deepest space.
To the south, the lanes descended, curving out of sight through fields and woods. In the distance, perhaps five or six miles away, a faint golden radiance lay against the night, like a Japanese fan on black velvet, as if a small town waited in that direction.
Chyna turned south, leaving Edgler Vess’s gate wide open. She accelerated. Twenty miles an hour. Thirty. She held the motor home at forty miles an hour, but she found it easy to imagine that she was going faster than any jet plane. Flying, free.
Although she was suffering uncounted pains and was plagued by a degree of bone-deep exhaustion that she’d never before experienced, her spirit soared.
“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive,” she said, not as a prayer but as a report to God.
They were in a rural stretch of countryside, with no houses or businesses to either the east or the west of the road, no lights except the glow in the distance, but Chyna felt bathed in light.
Ariel continued to clutch her head, and her sweet face remained tormented.
“Ariel, untouched and alive,” Chyna told her. “Untouched and alive. Alive. It’s okay, honey. Everything’s going to be okay.” She checked the odometer. “It’s three miles behind us and getting farther behind every minute, every second.”
They crested a low hill, and Chyna squinted in the sudden flare of oncoming headlights. A single car was approaching uphill in the northbound lane.
She tensed, because it might be Vess.
The clock showed three minutes to midnight. Even if it was Vess, and though he would be certain to recognize his own vehicle, Chyna felt secure. The motor home was a lot bigger than his car, so he wouldn’t be able to run her off the highway. In fact, she’d be able to smash the hell out of him, if it came to that, and she wouldn’t hesitate to use the motor home as a battering ram if she couldn’t outrun him.
But it wasn’t Vess. As the car drew nearer, she saw something on the roof, first thought that it was a ski rack, but then realized that it was an array of unlit emergency beacons and a siren-bullhorn. Last night, as she had followed Vess north on Highway 101 toward redwood country, she had hoped to encounter a police car—and now she had found one.
She pounded the horn, flashed the headlights, and braked the motor home.
“Cops!” she told Ariel. “Honey, see, everything’s going to be all right. We found ourselves some cops!”
The girl huddled forward, snared in her harness.
In response to her horn and the flashing lights, the police officer switched on his emergency beacons, although he didn’t use his siren.
Chyna pulled to the side of the road and stopped. “They can get Vess before he discovers we’re gone and tries to run.”
The cruiser had already passed her. She had glimpsed the words SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT in the crest on the driver’s door, and they were the two most glorious words in the English language.
In the sideview mirror, she watched the car as it hung a wide U-turn in the middle of the road. It came past her in the southbound lane now, and it coasted to a stop thirty feet ahead, on the graveled shoulder.
Relieved and exhilarated, Chyna opened her door and jumped down from the driver’s seat. She headed toward the cruiser.
She could see that only one officer was in the car. He was wearing a trooper’s hat with a wide brim. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get out.
The revolving emergency beacons cast off gouts of red light that streamed across the moonlit pavement, and splashes of blue light as in a turbulent dream, while the tall trees by the side of the road appeared to leap close and then away, close and then away. A wind came out of nowhere to harry dead leaves and clouds of grit across the blacktop as though the strobing beacons themselves had disturbed the stillness.