Fifteen yards, ten.
In the southern sky the lightning and thunder passed, as before She topped a rise, and the pavement ended halfway down the hill ahead of them. She stopped weaving, accelerated. When the Jeep left the blacktop, it shimmied for a moment, as if surprised by the change in road surface, but then streaked forward on the snow-spotted, ice-crusted, frozen dirt. They jolted across a series of ruts, through a short hollow where trees arched over them, and up the next hill.
In the side mirrors she saw the Mercedes cross the hollow on the dirt lane and start up the slope behind her. But as she reached the crest, the car began to founder in her wake. It slid sideways, its headlights swinging away from her. The driver overcorrected I instead of turning the wheel into the slide, as he should have done. I The car’s tires began to spin uselessly. It slid not only off to the side, but backward twenty yards, until the right rear wheel jolted into the drainage ditch that flanked the road; the headlight beams were canted up and angled across the dirt track. “They’re stuck!” Chris said.
“They’ll need half an hour to get out of that mess.” Laura continued over the crest, down the next slope of the dark ridge road. Although she should have been exultant over their escape, or at least relieved, her fear was undiminished. She had a hunch that they were not yet safe, and she had learned to trust her hunches more than twenty years ago, when she had suspected the White Eel was going to come for her the night that she would have been alone in the end room by the stairs at McIlroy, the night when in fact he had left a Tootsie Roll under her pillow. After all, hunches were just messages from the subconscious, which was thinking furiously all the time and processing information she had not consciously noted. Something was wrong. But what?
They made less than twenty miles an hour on that narrow, winding, potholed, rutted, frozen dirt track. For a while the road followed the rocky spine of a ridge where there were no trees, then traced the course of a declivity in the ridge wall, all the way to the floor of the parallel ravine, where trees were so thick on both sides that the headlights bouncing back from their trunks seemed to reveal phalanxes of pines as solid as board walls.
In the back of the wagon, her guardian murmured wordlessly in his fevered sleep. She was worried about him, and she wished that she could go faster, but she dared not.
For the first two miles after they lost their pursuers, Chris was silent. Finally he said, “At the house … did you kill any of them?”
She hesitated. “Yes. Two.” “Good.”
Disturbed by the grim pleasure in the single word that he spoke, Laura said, “No, Chris, it isn’t good to kill. It made me sick.” “But they deserved to be killed,” he said. “Yes, they did. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to kill them. It’s not. There’s no satisfaction in it. Just . . . disgust at the necessity of it. And sadness.”
“I wish I could’ve killed one of them,” he said with tight, cold anger that was disturbing in a boy his age.
She glanced at him. With his face carved by shadows and the pale yellow light from the dashboard, he looked older than he was, and she had a glimpse of the man he would become.
When the ravine floor became too rocky to provide passage, the road rose again, following a shelf on the ridge wall.
She kept her eyes on the rude track. “Honey, we’ll have to talk about this lateral more length. Right now I just want you to listen carefully and try to understand something. There are a lot of bad philosophies in the world. You know what a philosophy is?”
“Sorta. No . . . not really.”
“Then let’s just say people believe in a lot of things that are bad far them to believe. But there are two things that different kinds of people believe that are the worst, most dangerous, wrongest of all. Some people believe the best way to solve a problem is with violence: they beat up or kill anyone who disagrees with them.” “Like these guys who’re after us.”