Michael Palmer - The Society

Patty followed her kick by trying to dive over Susan toward the gun, but the surgeon moved with the quickness of a gymnast, striking her with a backhand fist flush against her skull flap, while in the same motion spinning and lunging toward her weapon. Patty cried out from the blow and dropped to her side. Dazed, she remained composed enough to grab on to one of Susan’s legs. Absorbing kicks to her face and chest, she hung on for a few precious seconds, but there was no way she could beat the woman to where the machine gun lay.

“Run, Will!” she shouted, losing her hold and rolling over and over toward the open door. “Run!”

Will grabbed her by the arm as he raced past and dragged her to her feet and through the doorway. They were sprinting down a long corridor toward what seemed to be the back of the house when they heard a burst of gunfire from behind them. Will risked a glance over his shoulder. Susan had fired wildly from inside the room and hadn’t yet reached the hallway.

“Straight ahead,” Patty gasped, pointing to a windowed doorway that led outside.

They charged past a richly appointed conference room and a vast, gleaming, brilliantly lit kitchen. Neither held any hope of protection or concealment. Getting outside was their only chance. Will dropped back a step to allow Patty to reach the door first. If only one of them was going to make it, he wanted it to be her.

Please don’t be locked. Please. .

Patty had already considered the possibility. With her left hand, she slid the dead-bolt lock aside and simultaneously pulled open the door with her right. The aluminum storm door, with a full pane of glass, was also locked. Without hesitation, she drove her knee and forearm into the pane, shattering it outward onto a small unlit porch.

“Stay low!” she screamed.

Without hesitating, she stepped onto the shards of glass with her bare right foot, then leapt over three stairs and onto the lawn, finishing with a perfectly executed roll. It was an incredibly athletic move, and not one Will had any chance of duplicating. Instead, he pulled the inside door nearly closed behind him and was carefully stepping through the storm-door frame when a staccato of bullets snapped into the wood. One of them ripped into the muscle overlying his right hip. He fought through the intensely burning pain and drove ahead. Susan had to be wondering whether she could chance leaving her lover to go after them, or whether any risk was worth taking to keep them from getting off the farm alive. The longer they could keep moving, the more they could increase her indecision, the less effective she was going to be.

By the time he reached Patty, she was braced against a tree, pulling a two-inch-long stiletto of glass from the sole of her foot. He moved to help, but she waved him off, then raced with him toward the barn. The night was black and raw, the grass unpleasantly cold and slick, and she was barefoot and battered. Still she ran. It was as if by example she was willing him not to be hesitant or afraid.

Ignoring the searing in his hip, he hobbled along beside her until they had rounded the small corral and flattened themselves against the far side of the barn. Clouds of their breath hung in the chilly blackness as they gasped for air. Ahead and to the left of them, all was dark and quiet, but to their right, not too far away, were the lights of another house.

“What. . happened. . to your leg?” Patty asked between breaths.

Will needed several seconds before he could answer.

“My hip. . well, my butt really. . I took a bullet there. . for the home team.”

Patty squeezed his arm.

“Be tough.”

“That was. . amazing what you. . did back there. Does your. . foot hurt. . badly?”

“It’ll hold me.” Patty inched back to the corner of the barn and peered around it. “She’s out there, just beginning to move this way.”

“I guess she decided that getting us is more important than staying with Marshall.”

“That choice is a no-brainer. If we get away, life as they have known it will be over.”

“Let’s hope so. What do you think that house is over there?”

“Probably belongs to the farmer who actually works this place.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know what his landlord does when he’s not looking like a respectable health-care provider.”

“Maybe. It’s either go there or head across the fields and try to find a way out of here.” Patty risked a second look around the corner of the barn. “Watkins is with her now. No handcuffs. We’ve really got to move.”

“You’ve got to take my sneakers.”

“I don’t-”

“No argument!”

She sighed and did as he insisted, muttering about clownshoes. Moments later, she shuddered and then began to shiver intensely. Will held her, and for a few seconds she allowed him to. Then she pulled away.

“If I had known we were actually going to make it out of that room,” he said, “I would never have taken my jacket off. Hopefully the people in that house over there will help us out. Your hands are like ice.”

“They’re okay. My head’s the problem. It’s like a kangaroo’s in there, bouncing through a minefield, setting off explosions.”

“That settles it. Let’s go meet the farmer.”

Much of their path to the house was obstructed from their pursuers by the barn. Over the final twenty-five open yards, they kept low and moved steadily ahead until they were flattened against the house. In the distance they could still hear faint snatches of Susan’s voice and see the beam of a flashlight piercing the night. They turned and were peering through the window into a small, cluttered kitchen where a grizzled man in his fifties sat at the table in overalls and a narrow-strap T-shirt, drinking beer from a bottle and watching a small countertop TV. Beside him, a disheveled, silver-haired woman sat in a wheelchair, a beer in the cup holder by her right hand.

“American Gothic,” Will whispered. “They look friendly enough. I think we should go in.”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have any other ideas?”

“We’ve got to get away from here quickly, or get inside and make a nine-one-one call.”

“I think those two will be able to help us. I’m a great judge of character by people’s faces.”

At that moment, they heard the phone start ringing inside.

“Shit!” Patty whispered.

The farmer’s conversation lasted only a few seconds. He hurried out of the kitchen and returned with a shotgun, which he held on to as he pulled on a red-and-black-checked hunting jacket, and a rifle, which he handed to his invalid wife.

“I forgot to add that sometimes I’m a lousy judge of character,” Will said.

They stayed pressed into the shadows and worked their way to the far end of the house. There was a broad expanse of fields, perhaps a quarter mile or more, between them and the forest.

“We’ve got to try it,” Will whispered.

At that moment, the farmer, shotgun at the ready, clunked across the back landing and made his way into the field a short distance from where they were standing. The move effectively cut them off from any kind of race to the woods.

“Now what?” Will asked.

They were peering back at the barn, expecting any instant to see Susan and Watkins come around the corral and the other corner, cutting them off even further from any escape.

“We have one chance,” Patty said.

“What?”

“The tractor. Did you see it? Just past the barn. If we can somehow get around that side of the barn and onto it, we can try and drive it around the house and down the drive.”

“What about the key?”

“People always leave the key in tractors, especially on a place as isolated as this one. And if there’s no key, I’d be surprised if I couldn’t hot-wire it.”