He hollers something unintelligible over the wind, raises a fist in the direction of his buddies.
Watching Thor has distracted her. Her foot drifts down on the accelerator, defaulting to habit.
The Escape rockets up to ninety right as one of Thor’s buddies swerves to cut her off.
Almost gracefully, the man’s body flies upward onto the hood, then crashes into her windshield, leaving a mosaic of cracks. When he flips up and away, going over the roof with a sound like tumbling boulders, she sees the blacktop has been replaced by open desert. She tries to regain control, but the steering wheel’s been pulled almost entirely apart, the ring cracked on top and bottom. A bulge of wires protrudes from a mouthlike fold where the horn should be.
No way could the biker’s impact have done this.
She did it while holding on to the thing for dear life during the collision.
The Escape slams into a saguaro cactus with such force, the hood flips up and turns into something that looks like a wadded-up napkin. Only then does she realize she never put her seat belt on. But it doesn’t matter. She experiences the impact like a kid being jostled by her friends in a bouncy house. She can see everything with the slow-motion clarity of shock—the shattering windshield, the Beretta going airborne and disappearing out the passenger-side window—and then it all comes to an end.
Even though she should be either unconscious or dead, she’s sitting upright behind the wheel, her breathing rapid but barely strained.
There’s a loud thud. The Escape’s roof gives her scalp a sudden kiss. The top half of the giant cactus has fallen onto her hissing SUV.
She feels as if she’s belly flopped into a swimming pool. The car crash has left her with a rash of tingles across her flesh and dull aches here and there. But it should be worse. Much worse given the state of the car and the fact she was bounced around like a rag doll. The music in her bones has grown more intense, as if the trauma of the accident kicked up the tempo. Whatever this thing is that’s happening to her, it’s hooked to adrenaline. But that can’t be the only explanation.
She gives the door a push, and the entire thing comes free of its hinges and falls to the sand.
As they roar toward her through the darkness, the two remaining bikers make hairpin turns around rocks, bushes, and other knee-high obstructions. They’re coming with predatory fury.
Thor pulls around to her right; his friend dismounts at her left and draws a sawed-off shotgun from his back.
Her ears still ring from the crash. But she can hear some of their shouts. They’re gesturing to their feet, gesturing for her to get down, either to her knees or her stomach—they don’t seem to care which. The words bitch and cunt jump out at her from their threats like hot pebbles glancing across her cheeks.
She feels as though she’s observing herself from a distance, and she’s astonished to watch herself sink to her knees. Just as her foot defaulted back to its normal pressure on the gas pedal moments before, she now defaults to fear and submission.
But it’s a big shotgun, and she doesn’t know if this altered state renders her impervious to buckshot.
Then she sees the flex-cuffs in Thor’s left hand.
In his right, he’s got a gun, boxy enough to be a Canik TP9, but she’s not sure. She is sure that he’s aiming at her, lowering it only slightly as he approaches. He’s going to cuff her out here in the middle of nowhere. She thinks she can break the cuffs. Still, the ease and confidence with which he approaches her ignites a fire deep in her belly.
“. . . fucking gave you an order, bitch,” Thor’s saying. “Clear as fucking day, I gave you an order to pull over, and what did you fucking do? What did you fucking do, huh, bitch?”
The Daniel and Abigail Bannings of the world are few and far between, thank God. But men like this one, men who will run you off the road because they have cast you in their paranoid fantasies, are far more common. And the tyranny of their appetites is so woven through every woman’s world that imagining life without it is the same as imagining life without ground underfoot.
“Don’t you fucking move—got it, bitch?” Thor snarls. There’s about a foot of space between them now. He’s going to step behind her to cuff her wrists. His friend raises his shotgun. “We can either have a nice long conversation about what the hell you’re doing all the way out here, or Axel can put a load of buckshot in you and save us all the trouble.”
Axel is a silhouette backlit by the headlight from his bike. But his aim looks steady. Thor is behind her now.
“I live out here.” Her voice sounds vacant, numb.
“Oh yeah? Are you a snake?” He grabs the back of her hair and pulls it like a leash. It should hurt. He wants it to hurt. But it doesn’t. “I said, are you a fucking snake, bitch?”
“Get off me,” she says.
“What?”
“I said get off me.”
“You don’t give me orders, you stupid fucking cu—”
A few seconds later, he’s careening toward his friend like a drunken idiot trying to dance at a wedding reception. It wasn’t the most complex of moves on her part. Just a pull of his arm and a thrust really. But the strength she put behind it is otherworldly; it’s like a blast of air has sent him hurtling through the dark toward Axel’s shotgun. There was no preparing for it.
Axel, it turns out, is too prepared.
There’s an explosion of light and a deafening boom. Drifts of torn denim snowflake through the air in front of her. Over the ringing in her ears, she hears Axel bellowing as he realizes he’s just blown a hole in his friend.
Thor’s drop is decisive and sudden.
Before Axel can raise the shotgun again, she runs for him, hands out, gives him what would have been a light shove just hours before. He hurtles backward into the bars of his Harley-Davidson. The impact of his spine cracks the headlight. The shotgun hits the dirt. He and the bike fall over to one side together, their dark silhouette like a time-lapse of melting snow.
The ringing in her ears drowns out the sounds he’s making now, but if his spread arms, trembling hands, and shaking head are any indication, they’re probably stomach churning, and she’s willing to bet he’ll never walk again.
There’s a cold caress around her ankles. Her stopping power punched shallow holes in the ground. When she steps out of them, the holes widen, chunks of caked desert earth tumbling off her sneakers.
There should be regret, she knows. Somewhere within her there should be some primal remorse.
But the music in her bones is at a fever pitch now, and so vivid are the nightmare images of what these two men might have done to her out here, they white out all her other thoughts. And there was a glimpse of something, just a glimpse in Axel’s eyes before he cracked the bike’s headlight with his spine, a glimpse of something that satisfied a thirst in her she didn’t know she possessed—fear.
There’s no sign of the biker she hit with her car. Did they leave him for dead, or is he crawling back to their hideout to get help? How many of them are there?
The darkness seems to close in around her now.
The thought of digging in their pockets for their phones sends a rush of revulsion through her that makes her feel suddenly ordinary again. Do they have satellite phones? They’re well outside the boosters at her house that could provide decent service.
The police station’s too far away to head for on foot, especially if the guy who destroyed her windshield has called for help. She had good luck against two of these guys. Against four or five? She’d need more than this impossible strength.
There’s only one place she can go right now. Home. If more bikers are on the way, better to face them from behind her security system, with her guns and with some chance of repairing her phone line. Besides, maybe they’ll never find her house.
In the emergency kit in her Escape she finds a flashlight.
On the other side of the wrecked car she finds the Beretta.