Michael Prescott - Blind Pursuit

The barn doors, still closed. She rammed them with her rear bumper. They exploded open, and she was outside.

Spin of the wheel, a clumsy U-turn, her headlights sweeping toward the barbed-wire fence yards away.

In the rearview mirror, a man with a flashlight, sprinting toward her.

Gunshot. The rear window blew apart in a shower of tempered glass.

She gunned the engine. The Ford plowed over weeds, over gravel, and slammed into the fence.

The impact uprooted the posts on either side, snapped the wires. The Ford fishtailed onto the road, straightened out. She sped away from the ranch as her speedometer needle climbed.

Looking back, she saw her abductor disappear inside the barn.

The road was narrow and rough. Pebbles clicked and pinged against the chassis, making tuneless music.

She kept pushing her speed-fifty, then fifty-five, then sixty. Dangerously fast for a pitted desert road lit only by her high beams, a road that at any second might coil into a cul-de-sac or dive into a flood-control depression.

Dangerous, yes, but not as dangerous as caution would be.

Behind her, headlights.

The van.

Her high beams splashed across a dotted yellow line perpendicular to the road she was traveling. Intersection.

She spun the wheel, veering to the left.

Now she was on a major thoroughfare, smooth and well maintained, but empty of traffic at this hour. No lights of houses or stores were visible along the roadside, only bleak miles of desert and, in the distance, the jagged humps of mountains, a dark, broken line against the blue-black sky.

She thought she could identify the mountains to her right as the Sierrita range, west of the city. If so, she was heading south.

Flare of headlights behind her. The van again, swinging onto the main road, frighteningly close.

Ahead… the interstate.

She saw the elevated roadway rippling with distant lights.

Get on there, and she would be safe. With other people around, her abductor couldn’t do anything.

But the highway was at least a half mile away. And the van was pulling close to her tail.

In the rearview mirror she saw him at the wheel. Blurred face, hairless scalp. No beard-the red one he’d worn in the lobby must have been fake.

Her speedometer needle was pinned to eighty-five. She might be traveling faster; the gauge only went that high.

His headlights flooded the Ford’s interior with their harsh white glare, brightening steadily. The car rocked with an impact from behind.

He had rammed her. The car wobbled drunkenly. She gripped the wheel to steady it, and then he butted her again.

“Stop,” she muttered, teeth clenched, knuckles bloodless.

The twin globes of his lights expanded as he punched the gas pedal a third time. She manhandled the wheel, and with a scream of tires the Ford veered into the other lane.

The van accelerated, trying to pull alongside her. If it did, the driver could shoot out the side windows, kill her in a hail of ammunition.

She ground her foot down on the gas pedal, straining for every increment of speed the motor could deliver. The road dipped, descending at a steep grade, and at the bottom of the hill a service station came into view.

An Exxon station, near the interstate’s on-ramp, its illuminated sign bright against the night sky, the service court floodlit, fuel islands gleaming.

Open for business. Had to be.

The van hooked sideways, crunching her rear passenger door, chewing metal like a hungry mouth.

The pavement slid out from under her. The Ford skidded onto the shoulder, plowing up a spray of gravelly earth as the steering wheel jerked and ticked under her hands.

She had almost regained control of the car when the van mashed her again, its fender gnawing at the front door on the passenger side, the door buckling in its frame, the window shattering as the frame bent, and for a wild hysterical moment she was a diver in a shark cage, and a great white was chomping insatiably at the steel bars, crushing them out of shape, forcing its huge head deeper inside Rows of mesquite bushes flew past on her left, branches whacking the windshield, scraping the doors. She was screaming-she couldn’t help it-screaming as the van plowed her sedan off the shoulder into an untended stretch of cacti and weeds.

The car bucked like a skittish horse, her seat lurching wildly forward and back, her hands slapping the horn.

Should have worn your seat belt, a voice in her head admonished irrelevantly. Most accidents occur on trips of less than one mile.

A massive columnar shape materialized in her high beams. Saguaro cactus, huge, multi-armed like Shiva, armored in needles and leather-tough skin.

She had time for one more scream before the Ford slammed head-on into the saguaro at full speed.

The windshield exploded. The hood popped open as the Ford’s front end caved in. That hideous grinding noise was the sound of the van punching into the passenger side like a mailed fist.

Erin was conscious of none of it. Her sole awareness was of white, a field of white, endless white, expanding before her, swallowing her up with a lover’s sigh.

The airbag, erupting out of the steering wheel to cushion the collision’s impact.

It caught and held her. Dazed, she lay in its soft folds, a captured insect in a napkin.

A heartbeat later the bag automatically deflated. She fell back against the headrest, blinking at a whirl of stars.

She wasn’t dead. Didn’t think she was even hurt. The airbag had saved her.

Did the van have an airbag?

Her gaze ticked to the rearview mirror.

The van’s front end loomed impossibly close. A zigzag crack bisected the windshield. Behind the glass, movement. Her abductor, pulling himself upright.

He’d been thrown sideways in the crash, but he wasn’t dead, wasn’t even unconscious.

Why couldn’t he have cracked open his head on the dashboard, flown through the windshield, broken his neck? Something, anything, it didn’t matter what, just so he’d been stopped and she could be safe.

No time to dwell on that. He’d survived, and now he was groping on the floor of the van for some item he’d dropped.

The gun, of course.

Couldn’t miss her at this range.

She fumbled at the door handle, wrenched the door ajar, pulled herself out. Light-headedness made her stumble.

Loose desert soil sank under her boots. She staggered forward, slipping and sliding on scattered rocks strewn like ball bearings in her path.

Steam hissed from under the sedan’s folded hood. She nearly fell again, caught herself by grabbing the car’s front panel, then jerked her hands away. Hot.

Behind her, movement in the front seat of the van. He was leaning out the side window, the pistol in his hand.

Down.

She flung herself on hands and knees at the front of the car, then froze, waiting tensely for the pistol’s report.

Nothing happened. She’d ducked in time. He couldn’t hit her with the wreckage of the car blocking his aim.

Gasping, she clambered over the saguaro, prone in the glare of the Ford’s one remaining headlight, its arms outstretched as if in a silent plea. The hundreds of spiny needles encrusting the fallen giant poked and jabbed her, spotting her legs with pinprick dabs of blood.

Then she was half running, half crawling toward the road, afraid to rise fully for fear of making herself a target, afraid to stay on all fours because her progress that way was too slow.

At the edge of the road she dared a backward glance, expecting to see the man with the gun racing after her out of the gloom.

Astonishingly, he was still in the van. She saw him pushing on the driver’s door with no response. The frame must have buckled slightly, wedging the door shut.