Patrick Lee: Ghost Country

Paige tried to see if the two men in the front seats were conscious. She couldn't tell. The vehicle had pancaked just enough that the headrests up front were touching the roof, and between the seats she could see only darkness.

The bullet impacts were very close now. Chewing apart the vehicle just ahead. Paige turned toward Crawford again. They shared a look. Almost certainly good-bye.

"It's already started," he said. "Whatever it is, it's started. And the president's part of it."

Paige nodded. Understanding settled over her. With it came anger. Enough to balance out her fear.

Then something in her chest let go and her lungs were free to expand again, and she sucked in a deep breath of air, and half a second later the bullets started hitting the vehicle.

She shut her eyes. The sound was louder than she'd expected. Metal screams that raked her eardrums. She couldn't tell them apart from human screams. Couldn't tell if she was screaming herself. Somewhere in the middle of it she felt liquid gushing over her. She wondered if it was her own blood, but didn't think so. Trauma survivors said their blood felt like warm water on their skin. Whatever this was, it was cold. She sucked in another breath, tasted gasoline vapor, and understood.

And then the shooting was over.

She was still there.

She opened her eyes in the silence. The gasoline was coming down from everywhere. Pooling in the concavities of the crumpled roof.

She looked at Crawford. Crawford was gone. Eyes wide open and staring at her, but gone. A shot had hit him in the chest. It looked like some giant animal had bitten away half of his rib cage, taking a lung and most of his heart with it. Past Crawford, through the open space where the window had been, she heard voices calling to one another. Then the flat crack of a pistol, maybe a.45. More voices. Coming closer. She couldn't actually see anything through the window. Because of her angle she could only see a few feet of the roadbed nearby.

She found her seat belt release and pressed it. Her body dropped hard against the underside of the roof. She was down level with the window now. She could see straight through it, all the way up the length of the crippled motorcade. Doors hung half open. An arm extended from one, blood streaming off the fingers in rivulets.

The shooters were advancing along the vehicles, carefully inspecting each one. She saw one man with a pistol and another with a PDA. The device's screen painted his face bright white in the darkness. The two of them moved from the first vehicle to the second. They stared in at someone on the passenger side. The man with the PDA pressed its buttons rapidly, and the light on his face flickered through a progression of shades. Paige guessed he was looking at a series of photographs.

"Keeper?" the man with the pistol said.

The other man looked at half a dozen more photos, then stopped and shook his head. "Just security."

The shooter leveled the gun through the vehicle's window and fired once. Then he and the other man continued checking the rest of its occupants.

Paige felt her breathing accelerate. In the fume-choked space, she thought she might pass out before long. The killers found another survivor in the second SUV, determined he was also no one important, and executed him.

Paige turned herself over and got up on her elbows. She looked around. The window facing away from the shooters, the one direction in which she might get out unseen and run for it, was compressed to four inches of space. No way through. Likewise for going forward or back. If she went between the front seats and out the windshield, they'd see her at once. And she couldn't reach the rear window: the back of the middle-row bench seat, where she'd been strapped in, was almost touching the roof now. There was maybe a one-inch gap below it.

The entity.

If she could get to it, she might get away. She'd need room to actually use the thing-ten feet at least. That meant she'd still have to go out the windshield into open view. But after that she would only need a few seconds to switch the entity on, and then if she moved quickly, she'd be long gone.

She shoved her arm through the gap between the seatback and the roof. The padding gave a little, and so did the soft tissue of her arm, but she could still only reach about ten inches into the space beyond. She swept her arm left and right, fingertips extended as far as possible.

It wasn't there.

It might be only an inch out of reach, but that was enough. She made another sweep. Nothing. Her eyes were watering now. She wanted to think it was only because of the fuel vapor.

Another pistol shot. Closer. She looked. The killers were at the third vehicle. Maybe thirty seconds from finding her.

There was one other move to make. She didn't think she had time. She also didn't have a hell of a lot to lose in trying. She withdrew her hand from the gap below the seatback, rolled on her side and took her cell phone from her pocket. She switched it on and navigated to the macro list. You couldn't just speed-dial into Border Town. You had to call and then enter a code, then an extension and another code. A macro could do it all in about a second. She found the one she needed and selected it. She waited. It rang.

"Be there," she whispered.

She watched the shooters examine another victim in the third vehicle. They seemed to be debating whether the body was alive or dead. The one with the PDA looked through the photographs anyway.

The call rang again. And again.

The man with the PDA stopped on an image. Nodded at his partner. They reached inside the vehicle to drag the victim out.

The fourth ring was cut off by an answering click. Paige started talking before the other party could finish saying hello. The words came in a rush. She hoped to hell she was even understandable. There just wasn't time to say it all. It would've been tight even with a full minute, and she had nowhere close to that long. She found herself trying to prioritize even as she spoke. Trying not to leave out anything critical.

But she was leaving something out. She could feel the absence of it gnawing at her.

"Shit, what else…?" she whispered.

She saw the killers turning toward her now, drawn by her voice, and a second later they were running, their footsteps slapping the wet pavement.

What the hell was she forgetting?

The other party began to speak, asking if she was okay.

She remembered.

She composed it into the simplest form she could think of and screamed it into the phone, and even as she finished she felt hands reaching through the window and grabbing her. Getting her by the calves, pulling her from the vehicle. She gripped the phone with both hands and snapped it in half. Heard the circuit boards inside break like stale crackers.

Then she was out on the pavement, turned over, pinned, the pistol aimed down at her. The PDA's glow on the killers' faces strobed through the photo sequence again. She looked past them and saw the body they'd pulled from the third SUV. She saw why they'd discarded it after all: one of its legs had been nearly severed by a bullet impact just above the knee. It hung on by only skin and a bit of muscle. The open femoral artery had already pumped a thick sheet of blood onto the pavement. Very little was still coming out. Very little was left to come out.

The killer with the PDA continued cycling through his pictures. Paige heard other men somewhere behind her, at the back of her own vehicle. Heard them kicking aside the crumbs of glass there, kneeling, cursing softly as they rummaged inside. Then came the clatter of the entity's plastic case, scraping over concrete as they pulled it free. She heard their footsteps as they sprinted away with the thing, back toward where the shooting had come from.