Stalked (40 page)

He shot around the corner of the shack and spied a snow-covered sedan, its door ajar, and the boxy outline of a van parked twenty yards from the shanty door. The wind had blown the snow clear, and he recognized the Byte Patrol logo. It was a caricature of a nerd dressed like a cop, with a laptop in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. The cartoon laughed at him.

Someone half-limped, half-ran toward the front of the van. He was tall and huge, and Stride saw his long hair flowing madly in the wind.

“Stop!”

The man froze and swiveled to look at him. Blue Dog’s eyes gleamed with recognition across the short distance that separated them.

“
Where is she
?” Stride shouted.

The man gestured his head at the burning fish house and smiled. Stride ran for the door of the fish house, which was already a ring of fire. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Blue Dog’s right arm coming up, and he reacted by instinct, diving to the ground and rolling as two bullets ricocheted off the ice around him. Stride twisted in the snow, yanked his gun from his jacket, and fired back. His bullets thudded into the side of the van. Blue Dog jerked open the van door, and Stride fired again, four more times, missing the man’s head by an inch and turning the window into popcorn. Blue Dog ducked, spun away from the van, and weaved as he ran through the blizzard, using the vehicle as cover as he headed for the trees.

Stride let him go. He scrambled back to his feet and pounded on the steel wall of the fish house. “Serena!”

The heat and intensity of the fire drove him back. His boots splashed in a foot of cold lake water where the ice was melting. The walls of the shanty were beginning to bow.

“Serena!”

He got on his knees and doused his head in the freezing water and lay down so that his whole body was soaked and frigid. Hypothermia was the least of his worries now; he just wanted to slow down the fire from taking hold on his skin. The wind bit at him, the heat burned, and the banshee screamed.

Stride stared into the maw of the devil.

As he prepared to jump through the doorway, he heard something that made his heart stop. Rising above the noise of the storm and the fire came the sharp crack of a single gunshot.

Maggie steered for the fire.

As she rounded the jagged edge of a peninsula, she saw the fish house burning like a pagan bonfire, ushering up a sacrifice to the storm god. The fire illuminated the entire inlet. She could see the twisting of windblown snow, the tin boxes of other shanties hunched against the blizzard, and the outline of birch trees like stick figures on the coast. As she navigated around the other fish houses and got closer, she could see a man outside the shanty, and even at that distance, she recognized Stride.

He was getting ready to go inside, and Maggie could see from the monsterlike size of the fire that doing so was no better than suicide. She honked her horn frantically, trying to stop him, but if he heard her, he ignored her.

“No!” she shouted inside the car and banged her fist on the steering wheel.

As she watched helplessly from fifty yards away, Stride took three steps and dove into the center of the doorway, through the flames, disappearing inside.

Maggie didn’t see Blue Dog until it was too late. She never even heard the report of the gun. A bullet ripped through her windshield and embedded itself in the headrest on her seat, so close to her head that when she reached up instinctively to cover her ear, she felt blood on her fingers. The windshield held together except for the perfect, circular round hole and a spiderweb of cracks carved into the glass. Even so, she instinctively turned over the wheel, and the truck spun, the rear end leading it around in circles as she tapped the brakes.

When she finally stopped, another bullet screamed through the far side of the windshield, which finally gave up and rained down in a shower of glass. Maggie saw a man running at the truck, right arm in the air, firing wildly. She knew what he wanted—the truck, not her—something he could use for his escape. She grabbed the keys out of the ignition and hunched down, then scooted across the seat and pushed the passenger door open. She spilled out of the Avalanche.

Maggie dropped to her chest on the ice and stared under the truck, where she could barely see Blue Dog’s legs through the driving tornado of snow. He was moving carefully and silently, step-by-step, about forty feet from the driver’s door. She thought about running, but she wasn’t going to do that. Not from this man. Not after what he had done to her.

She needed a weapon. Her pockets were empty, and the only thing in the glove compartment was a tire pressure gauge. In the covered bed of the truck, she kept an emergency radio, a forty-pound bag of sand, a medical kit, jumper cables, bungee cords, and a shovel. The shovel was made of durable plastic, designed to push snow out of the way, and wasn’t the kind of blunt object she could use to beat a man unconscious.

That was all she had.

She decided to bluff. “Stop right there!” she screamed, and she saw him freeze in his tracks, trying to pinpoint the faint sound of her voice. “Take one more step, and I’ll blow you away.”

A long silence followed, then he fired several more times, shattering the rest of the windows in her truck and spraying the snow with bits of glass.

“If you had a gun, I’d be dead,” he shouted back.

Maggie crawled quickly to the back of the truck. She hoped he couldn’t see the tailgate as she unlocked and lowered it. She reached in and gently slid out the heavy bag of sand, taking care not to rock the chassis.

She squatted down and saw that he was twenty feet away. Cursing silently, she closed the tailgate, put the bag of sand down, and scrambled back to the open passenger door of the truck. She kept low and slid back inside, hoping he couldn’t see her as she replaced the keys in the ignition. She backed out carefully, retrieved the forty-pound sandbag, and positioned it on its side under the truck, directly behind the right front tire. She relied on the wail of the storm to cover any noise she made.

Maggie retreated behind the truck bed and crouched down to watch him approach. He veered wide to check the front of the truck and went all the way around to the far side. She dodged backward, staying out of view. She saw him lift one leg and kick the passenger door shut and immediately fire three bullets into the earth. One bullet hit the rear bumper with a metallic clang. She prayed he didn’t see the bag of sand hidden behind the tire.

He waited. He had to know where she was—in the back, behind the truck bed. The question was whether it was worth the time for him to track her down, knowing they could circle each other as long as she wanted. She watched him retrace his steps slowly to the front of the truck and back toward the driver’s door. He hesitated there.

In the distance, she heard something beautiful. Sirens. Lots of them.

He opened the driver’s door and climbed in and slammed it behind him. He turned over the engine, and Maggie pushed herself off her feet and ran toward the front of the truck. She knew he could see her coming in the sideview mirror, but that was okay. She wanted him to rush. He stepped on the accelerator, and the truck ground away at the ice and leaped forward.

Ten feet later, the Avalanche jerked to a stop as the rear wheel slammed into the bag of sand. Maggie reached the driver’s door at the same second. She wrenched it open, grabbed him by his hair, and slammed his skull repeatedly against the metal frame of the door. He groaned and fell out of the truck. She looked for the gun, but it wasn’t in his hand; she saw it on the far end of the dashboard where he had dropped it during the impact.

She didn’t bother fighting fair. When she bent over him on the ground, she realized his shoulder was bloody and torn, and she hammered her fist over and over into the wounded limb until he screamed. She jabbed her fingernails into both of his eyes. He clawed blindly for her with his other hand, and she reached out, took his wrist and twisted it, and bent his index finger back until it broke with a sickening snap. He gave a strangled, gurgling cry.

“Not like last time, is it, you sack of shit,” she hissed.

His eyes closed, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She reared her left fist back as if she were nailing in a spike and drove it deep into his gut. He didn’t move; he didn’t open his eyes; but his abdomen lurched, and he began to throw up. Vomit bubbled out of his mouth. He was a limp elephant to move, but she managed to turn him over and make sure he wasn’t choking. She slid her belt out from her jeans and used it to bind his wrists together. She got up and went to the truck bed and found a bungee cord and secured his ankles.

Maggie retrieved the gun from the Avalanche and put it in her pocket.

She heard a metal crash boom across the ice, and she looked up and hated what she saw. The shanty was entirely engulfed in flames. The walls were crashing down.

Serena heard Jonny shout and realized he was inches away from her, on the other side of the fiery wall. At that instant, she changed her mind. If the fire wanted her, if the lake wanted her, they would have to come and get her. She also realized there was another way to use the one bullet left in the revolver, and without hesitating, she reached her left arm as far across her body as she could, stretched her right hand to the limit of the cloth that bound her, and fired. The bullet tore through the fabric. Her right arm stung with powder burns, but when she yanked her hand, it came away from the bed frame. Both arms were free.

She was dizzy as the fire and smoke choked out the oxygen from the tiny space. She braced both hands against the side of the bed frame and pushed herself up. A scorching wave of heat slapped her in the face. She leaned all the way forward until her fingers grasped her left ankle and frantically tore at the tape that bound her to the frame. She squeezed her eyes shut, unable to keep them open in the face of the heat. The torn tissue in her stomach and shoulder split further, and she felt blood dripping onto her thighs. The duct tape clung as if it were nailed to her skin. Blue Dog had wrapped it tightly, and the tape resisted when she tried to saw it with her fingernails. She couldn’t believe she was this close and still imprisoned.

Her air ran out. Black, tarry poison filled her lungs. She gave up and threw herself back down, hoping there was still something to breathe in the lower section of the fish house, but the smoke had descended there, too. She heard herself gasping and wheezing, and it was as if she went outside herself and watched her labored breathing from afar. She knew she would only remain conscious for a few more seconds.

With both hands free now, she grabbed the bed frame and jerked to the right and felt the frame tilt six inches off the ground before teetering and falling back down. Expelling her last breath, grunting with the huge effort, she tried again, and this time, the cot rose straight up into the air and went tumbling over. The cot was a crushing weight on her back. Her bare skin was pressed against the floor, like a piece of raw meat tossed on the grill. Somewhere right near her lips, though, she smelled a trickle of cool air.

She clawed at the floor with her fingers and realized she was over one of the trapdoors that fishermen used to access the ice. She felt a loop of metal catch under her fingernail, and she pried the small door open and nearly sang with joy as a rush of cold air blew up from the lake water into her face. Her lungs gagged, trying to cough out the remnants of smoke and replace them with oxygen. After a few deep breaths, she felt alive again.

The flames were now circling her like wolves. She felt a singeing heat on her back that told her the cot itself was now on fire. She began to think she had saved herself just to die in the worst way.

The shanty took a heavy jolt, and she heard a voice not even four feet away. “
Serena
!”

It was Jonny. Inside.

Stride took two steps and ripped something off the wall. The
whoosh
of compressed air exploding in a burst of foam filled the space. The nearest flames fell back and died. He sprayed until the fire extinguisher was empty, beating back the fire and creating a temporary bubble of safety around them.

He attacked the tape on her ankles. Serena saw the glint of Blue Dog’s knife within reach, and she grabbed it and waved it in the air. “Jonny, use this! Hurry!”

She felt him quickly cut through the tape where it tied her to the steel legs of the cot. In seconds, her legs came free. He flung the bed frame away from her and pushed aside the mattress, which was smoldering. She tried to turn over but found she didn’t have the strength to do so. Her legs were leaden. The blood flowed back to her feet slowly.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

“No.” Her voice was ragged.

Jonny squatted in front of her. “Grab onto my shoulders. Hang on.”

She wrapped her arms around his torso from behind and clung to him as he pushed himself off his knees. He swayed, holding her weight.

“Don’t let go,” he said.

Then she heard him say, “
Shit
.”

As the two of them watched, half the ceiling of the shanty collapsed. A wall of fire came down like a steel curtain in front of the doorway. The fish house lurched again, a dying ship slipping under the water. The lake spread in a deepening pool across the floor. Steam and smoke mingled. There was no way out.

Stride squatted down again and eased her back onto the hot floor. She hid her face under the trapdoor. There was still fresh air blowing below the shanty, but the ice was weakening, and the pool of water was rising and threatening to flood inside. When she looked up, she saw Jonny with a wet scarf wrapped around his face. He kicked furiously at the tin wall behind them with the bottom of his boot, but the metal hung tough. Sparks landed on his clothes and started to catch fire. He spotted a gas-powered auger in the corner and lugged the three-feet steel coil to the wall. He pulled the crank cord, and the motor coughed and sputtered. The shanty swayed; it was sinking fast. The fire raced over their heads. He yanked it again, and again, and finally the whiny engine roared to life. Stride plunged it against the wall, and the metal screamed and gave way, and then he pulled it back and punched another hole and twisted his body to drill a jagged tear down to the bottom of the wall. When that was done, he brought the drill back up and cut sideways and down, until the gap in the metal formed a three-feet square.