No. He was only a man.
And now she had a revolver. She was no longer helpless.
The worst was past.
Lightning traveled the northern sky again, but this time it was not pale or diffused through cloud layers. The bolts were as bright as though the naked sun were breaking through from the other side of the night.
In those stroboscopic flashes, the motor home seemed to vibrate, as if divine wrath would shatter it and its driver.
In this world, however, retribution was left to mortal men and women. God was content to wait for the next life to mete out punishment; in Chyna’s view, this was His only cruel aspect, but in this was cruelty enough.
Explosions of thunder followed the lightning. Although something above should have broken, nothing did, and the rain remained bottled higher in the night.
She hoped to spot a sign for a highway patrol depot, where she could seek help, but none appeared. The nearest town of appreciable size, where she might be fortunate enough to find a police station or a cruising squad car, was Eureka, which was hardly a metropolis. And even Eureka was at least an hour away.
As a child, flat under beds and curled in the backs of closets, perched on rooftops and balanced in the upper reaches of trees, in winter barns and on warm night beaches, she had hidden and waited out the passions and the rages of adults, always with dread but also with patience and with a Zen-like disconnection from the realities of time. Now impatience plagued her as never before. She wanted to see this man caught, manacled, harried to justice, hurt. Desperately she wanted this and without a single additional minute of delay, before he could kill again. Her own survival wasn’t currently at stake but that of a teenage girl whom she had never met, and she was surprised—and made uneasy—to discover that she could care so ferociously about a stranger.
Perhaps she had always possessed that capacity and simply had never been in a situation that required recognition of it. But no. That was self-deception. Ten years ago, she would never have followed the motor home. Nor five years ago. Nor last year. Perhaps not even yesterday.
Something had profoundly changed her, and it hadn’t been the brutality that she’d seen a few hours earlier at the Templeton house. Viscerally she was aware that this unsettling metamorphosis had been a long time coming, like the slow alteration in a river’s course—by imperceptible fractions of a degree, day after day. Then suddenly mere survival was not enough for her any longer; the final palisade of soil crumbled, the last stone shifted, and the destination of the river changed.
She frightened herself. This reckless caring.
More lightning, more ferocious than before, revealed redwood trees so massive that they reminded her of cathedral spires. The steeple-shattering light was followed by quakes of thunder as violent as any shift in the San Andreas. The sky fissured, and rain fell.
In the first instant, the drops were fat and milky white in the headlights, as if the night were an extinguished chandelier in which were suspended an infinite number of rock-crystal pendants. They shattered into the windshield, against the hood, across the blacktop.
On the highway ahead, the motor home began to disappear into the downpour.
In seconds the drops dwindled drastically in size even as they increased in number. They became silver gray in the headlamps, and fell not straight down as before but at an angle in the punishing wind.
Chyna switched the windshield wipers to their highest setting, but the motor home continued to slip rapidly away into the storm as visibility declined. The killer was not lowering his speed in respect of the worsening weather; he was accelerating.
Afraid to let him out of her sight for as much as a second, Chyna closed the gap between them to about two hundred feet. She was worried that he would attach the correct significance to her maneuver and realize that somehow she was onto him.
Southbound traffic had been sparse to begin with, but now it declined in direct proportion to the power of the escalating storm, as though most motorists had been washed off the highway.