Dean Koontz - Intensity

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.

Almost halfway to the car, where the policeman still sat behind the steering wheel, Chyna remembered the files in Vess’s study, and suddenly they meant something far different from what they had meant before, as did the handcuffs.

She stopped.

“Oh, Jesus.”

She knew.

Chyna spun away from the black-and-white and sprinted back to the motor home. In the flashing blue and red light, weighed down by the fat moon, she felt as if she were running slow motion in a dream, through air as thick as custard.

When she reached the open door she glanced toward the patrol car. The cop was getting out.

Gasping, Chyna climbed up into the driver’s seat, pulling the door shut behind her.

The officer had gotten out of the cruiser. Edgler Vess.

Chyna released the emergency brake.

Vess opened fire.

Sheriff Edgler Foreman Vess, youngest sheriff in the county’s history, watches the side mirror as Chyna Shepherd hurries along the shoulder of the highway toward his patrol car, and he wonders if this woman is, after all, his blown tire, the destroyer of his bright future. When she abruptly stops, whips around, and races back through the flashing lights toward the motor home, Mr. Vess’s alarm increases.

At the same time, he is enormously taken with her and is not entirely sorry that they met. He says aloud, “What a clever bitch you are.”

Getting out of the black-and-white, he draws his revolver, intending to put a round in one of her legs. He still has some hope of salvaging the situation. If he can disable her and get her into the motor home before another motorist comes along, all will be well. What fun he will have when he wraps her in chains again. Ariel won’t lift a hand to help this woman, and if she tries, he’ll pistol-whip the little bitch into submission; that will spoil the plans he has for her, but he’s been looking at her beautiful face for a year, wanting to smash it, and the smashing will be enormously satisfying even in these circumstances.

Although Vess is quick getting out of the car, Chyna is faster. By the time he raises the revolver, she is behind the wheel of the motor home, drawing the door shut.

He can’t take any chances now, can’t risk merely wounding her to have fun with her later. She has to be wasted. He pumps six rounds through the windshield.

When Chyna saw the gun coming up, she shouted, “Get down!” She pushed Ariel’s head below the windshield, throwing herself sideways, half out of her seat, across the open console. She covered the girl as best she could, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and shouting at the girl to close hers too.

Gunshots cracked, one right after the other, as fast as Vess could squeeze them off, and the windshield imploded. Sheets of gummy safety glass crashed into the front seats, spilling over Chyna and the girl, and things split and shattered farther back in the motor home as the slugs found stopping points.

She tried to count the shots. She thought she heard six. Maybe only five. She wasn’t sure. Damn. Then she realized that it didn’t matter how many rounds he’d fired, because she hadn’t gotten a good look at the weapon. She didn’t know for sure that it was a revolver. A pistol wouldn’t have just six rounds; it could have ten or more, a lot more if it had an expanded magazine.

Risking a bullet in the face, Chyna sat up, shaking off cascades of gummy-prickly glass, and looked out through the empty windshield frame. She saw Edgler Vess by the patrol car, thirty feet away. He was tipping the expended cartridges out of his piece, so it had to be a revolver.

Already she had released the emergency brake. Now she shifted the motor home out of park.

Standing tall, appearing cool and unhurried but nevertheless nimble-fingered, Vess plucked a speedloader from the dump pouch on his gun belt.

Thanks to her mother’s criminal friends, Chyna knew all about speedloaders. Before Vess could reload, she took her foot off the brake pedal and stomped the accelerator.