Prowlers: Wild Things (16 page)

Molly held her breath, afraid her heart would burst from the terror that spiked through her.

The Jeep skidded off the highway, onto the soft shoulder, and then they were rolling, glass was shattering, airbags exploded into their faces as it turned over once, and then again, and came to rest at the bottom of the gulley along the side of the highway.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The crash seemed to happen in some kind of drag time, not slow motion, but a surreal version of time where Jack could mark each passing second. He felt the seat belt constrict across his chest as the windshield shattered and glass fragments made tiny, sharp cuts on his face and hands. The airbag slammed him back against the seat, held him there even when the Jeep came to rest upside down. He heard Molly scream and he prayed it was fear, not pain, that made her cry out that way.

Then they were upside down and the engine cut out and all Jack could hear was the wheels of the Jeep spinning and screeching tires and car horns and shouts up on the highway. Time seemed to skip the way he remembered vinyl records doing on his mother's turntable when he was very small. Images and sounds seemed to fade in and out, lurching forward as though seconds of his life were being snatched away in ragged handfuls. It took Jack nearly a full minute to realize that he had been fading in and out of consciousness, yet at the moment that understanding dawned on him, his awareness seemed to come back to him fully.

"Molly," he rasped.

He hung there, upside down, trying desperately to orient himself. The airbag held him firmly against his seat, but he could feel a little give in it. With great effort, he craned his neck to get a look at Molly. Her hair hung beneath her and her face was dotted with tiny cuts, but from what little he could see of her past the white of her airbag, she seemed unharmed. Molly's arms hung akimbo, dangling toward the roof of the inverted Jeep, and her eyes were closed. Unconscious. Which meant she might have sustained more damage than he thought.

"Molly," he said again. "Hey, Mol! Wake up."

She did not stir and the spark of hope that had bloomed in him when he had seen no obvious injuries was snuffed. Jack cursed silently as he began to wriggle behind the airbag. He knew the Jeep had them, of course, but he had never fully appreciated the miracle of airbags, or even given any thought to their presence when he bought the vehicle. They were just another item on the list of things that came with the car, like the tow bar on the back that he had never used. At the moment, though, he regretted that lack of appreciation. Indeed, he felt like dancing a little jig and singing a hymn of praise to the divine airbag. And he might actually do that, just as soon as he was certain Molly was all right.

The blood rushed to his head and his skull started to ache but he ignored that pain and glanced down at the ceiling of the Jeep. One of the nine millimeters and both shotguns lay there. That was bad. Cops and EMTs would be along in a few minutes. Also bad was that the guns were in the midst of a sea of shattered glass, the dome light peeking out from amongst the tiny square shards. That was safety glass. It broke like that, into a million little pieces, so nobody got impaled on huge chunks of windshield. But those tiny pieces were still sharp, could still cut, as his face and hands had found out. Small cuts, yes, but they stung. The idea of dropping down onto that broken glass had absolutely no appeal whatsoever, but the alternatives were equally unpleasant. If something was wrong with Molly and he just hung there waiting for EMTs to arrive, that could be bad for her, never mind them going to jail for the guns.

Then there were the Prowlers. He had no way to know if the monsters would come back to see if they were still alive.

"Screw it," Jack muttered.

He had a light jacket on, thick enough to protect him as long as he didn't stick his hands in that pool of broken glass. With effort he reached out and grabbed the door latch, tried to push it open and found it jammed. The frame of the Jeep had protected them, but it had buckled enough to wedge the doors tight. Grunting with effort he worked his body against the airbag and managed to slip his right hand up beside his hip to the catch of his seat belt. He braced his knees on the airbag, thinking it might help hold him up, then stretched his left arm out to hold on to the armrest control panel that jutted from his door.

After a deep breath to steady himself, Jack released the belt and then he was falling, shoving, sliding, while hanging onto the door as best he could. He poked his head out of the shattered driver's side window just as his back slumped down onto the ceiling full of broken glass. The impact jarred him and a spike of pain shot up from his right knee. He glanced down at his jeans but there didn't seem to be any blood.
Must have hit the dashboard
, he thought, hoping that it was only bruised or twisted.
A shattered knee cap would be very bad.

But when he hauled himself out onto the prickly brush on in the roadside gulley, the pain in his knee had reduced to a dull throb. Up in the breakdown lane, three cars were pulled over and it looked like more traffic had started to slow down and rubberneck for a glimpse of the carnage. Jack's memory of the minutes before the crash were only flickering images in his head, but he thought he remembered a couple of other cars getting into a fender bender as well. The good news was there was no sign of Ford's truck, or the Toyota with the other Prowlers in it.

Guess we were asking the right questions
, he thought.

One of the people up in the breakdown lane started down the incline toward the overturned Jeep. Jack's mind flashed to the guns and he waved the guy back.

"Just stay there!" he shouted. "I think I smell gasoline. Somebody up there have a cell phone?"

A woman in a business suit held hers up and pointed at it to indicate that she was already on the phone, then she resumed speaking into the phone. Jack was relieved, but also panicked. He would have to hurry. The guy who had begun the descent was still partially down the hill into the gulley and Jack waved him back again.

"Stay back. I'm just gonna check on my girlfriend," he said, hoping they would all listen. Then inspiration struck him. "And for God's sake, nobody smoke!" he cried with an air of melodrama that sounded false to him but seemed to have the desired reaction as the Samaritan scampered back up to the supposed safety of the pavement.

That taken care of, Jack started around to the other side of the Jeep, beyond which there was nothing but forest. His knee felt swollen and he figured he had torn something but nothing was broken. Still, he was forced to limp as he hurried to Molly's door, and instead of kneeling he sat down beside her. There were a lot of tiny cuts on her face, and safety glass in her hair and on her clothes. One of the cuts, right on her cheek, had bled enough that a tiny tear of blood ran from it and down along her temple and into her hair. Though Jack tried not to think, tried to push away his fear for her, the sight of Molly hanging unconscious like that tore into him. His breathing became shallow and he felt as though his whole body were made of glass. And not safety glass, either, but the kind that really made some music when you broke it, long, delicate razor shards of ice.

"Molly," Jack said, and his own voice sounded far away.

He reached for her, and the moment he touched her dangling arm it was as though a spell was broken. He slid closer on the brush, reached down to touch her throat with one hand even as he felt for her pulse with the other.

A pulse.

"Molly!" he snapped.

She moaned and shifted slightly, her arms pulling up toward her body, toward the air bag. Her eyes began to flutter open.

In the distance, police sirens wailed, echoing across the highway and into the trees. Jack wanted to get Molly out of that car, but first things first. He had no idea where the other nine millimeter was, but he reached in through the shattered back window and withdrew the one on the ceiling along with the two shotguns. If he stood up, despite the darkness, the people up on the road might see him toss them. Even now they were shouting down to him, telling him that the police and ambulances were on the way, that if there's no gasoline leakage he should just leave her there, that it was going to be all right.

The trees were very close. Jack scuttled toward them on his knees with one hand on the ground and the other cradling the guns. The throbbing in his knee increased to a spike of pain that lanced through him again with every foot, but in a few seconds he was slipping between trees and into the underbrush.

The sirens came closer. He thought that he might even have seen blue lights against the night sky. One by one he threw the guns as far into the woods as he could without drawing attention to himself. Then he scrambled back toward the Jeep. He had not responded and so now the voices from up on the highway were calling even louder, asking if he was all right. Any second now, if the police didn't arrive, that Samaritan whose instinct had tried to get him down here in the first place was likely to come running to the Jeep thinking he was in trouble.

It was all right now, though. He hoped that the other gun had been thrown from the Jeep while it rolled, and that the cops wouldn't open the trunk. With a grunt he sat down again beside Molly, who moaned again as she heard him and her eyes fluttered open.

"We're not dead?" she asked.

"Not dead. Are you all right? Anything broken?"

"Not that I can tell . . . I think I hit my head, though. Maybe on the door frame . . . I don't know. Got a big bump."

"If that's all you've got, it's a double miracle. Let's sing the praises of the God of Airbags," he said with a grin. Then he reached out to touch her arm. "I was pretty afraid," he confessed.

"Me too," Molly replied. "Of your driving. Get me out of this."

Jack nodded. The cops would be there in seconds, but Molly wanted out and he did not blame her.

"Can you release your seat belt?"

"I think so." She pushed against the air bag and shoved her hair down to find the catch.

Jack reached into her broken window and got a hold of her shoulders. "Lift your head when you undo the belt. Just keep your hands and your head from hitting the glass."

"Ready?" Molly asked.

"Go," Jack told her.

Suddenly she collapsed into his hands and he hauled her upper body through the broken window. A second later and Molly was helping, scrambling out from under the airbag. They lay on the rough brush, breathing heavily, staring up at the stars that were scattered across the October evening sky.

Something snapped in the woods.

Jack began to turn just as the Prowlers lunged from the trees, keeping low and out of sight of the road, just as Jack had done. He started to get up, Molly cried out, and then the beasts were upon them. One of them struck him a hard backhand across the face that dazed him, then the monster hit him a second and a third time, and Jack slumped to the ground, blackness enveloping him.

As he lost consciousness, he could heard the sirens growing closer, screeching tires as emergency vehicles arrived. And one other sound, even as he felt himself dragged into the woods. The sound was completely incongruous, made no sense at all.

Back in the wreckage of the Jeep, his cell phone rang.

Courtney sat in her bedroom with the phone cradled against her ear and listened to the hollow ringing on the other end. All day long she had tried to occupy her mind with thoughts of anything other than Bill and yet the world had seemed unwilling to cooperate. Business was slow that day, and the staff was more than capable of handling the flow. The passing seconds, minutes, hours had seemed empty and endless to her without crisis to fill them. Each time the phone rang, her ears perked up, her eyes ticked toward the sound and she uttered a small, expectant noise no one else could hear.

Bill had never called. Time and again, as the day passed, she assured herself it was only that Bill was in the midst of his search, that some lead or another had distracted him from checking in. Excruciatingly, the lunch hour passed and the long afternoon dragged on and the dinner crowd appeared. Some of the regulars at the bar asked after Bill. With each tick of the clock her reassurances began to seem less and less plausible.

Panic had threatened so many times and she had beaten it back, denied it as childishness. Bill was more than capable of taking care of himself. Courtney was a grown woman, responsible and secure, and not given to indulging in mercurial emotion.

But Bill's words the day before had been "talk to you in the morning."

Talk to you in the morning
.

And the dinner crowd was already thinning.

Talk to you in the morning.

So even though she did not want her brother to think she was overreacting, she had left the pub and come up to the apartment to sit at the desk in her bedroom and call Jack on his cell phone.

Talk to you in the morning.

It was ringing. The room was scented with a citrus aroma from Courtney's hand lotion, and beneath it a masculine odor that was Bill's
smell
. Hanging over the edge of the bed was a New England Patriots sweatshirt with a few paint stains on it that she had borrowed from him when she redecorated her room. It had been cleaned many times but she could still feel him in it.

Her gaze was roaming about the room, darting from one spot to another. The closet, the carefully made bed, the bulletin boards, the computer, the news stories taped to the walls. Mutilation murders, child disappearances, urban myths, and though for the most part they did not mention Prowlers, still to her eyes each piece of paper said
Prowlers, Prowlers, Prowlers.

Lost in thought, she barely listened to the phone ring. And ring. And ring. It was several moments before it struck her how empty and hollow it sounded. Third ring. Fourth ring.

The dread that had spread out inside her throughout the day blossomed in full then. Normally that apartment was abuzz. Even empty, it echoed with the lives of the people she loved. Now the place felt enormous and hideous around her, far too big and lonesome, a cruel irony considering the dozens of people dining, drinking, working downstairs. And yet who might she call upon? The newly-promoted managers? No.