I might as well try to rip an arm-thick limb from a tree with my bare hands. If Lincoln were strangling Snake in open space, I might be able to break his grip, but with his feet planted and all his weight wedging Knox against the tree, I don’t have a prayer. Snake’s face has gone purple, his eyes dim, and not even a choked gasp passes his throat.
“Don’t kill him!” I plead hopelessly, my hands on the iron muscles of Lincoln’s forearm. “We’ll never be sure what happened.”
This gives Lincoln pause. His arm stays rigid, but his eyes cut toward me. “I thought you were sure.”
“I don’t know, man! What’s the difference between killing him now and five minutes from now? If we don’t get out of here, we’re dead.”
“You want to bring him?”
“Her, too. Throw him in the truck.”
Lincoln looks back at the headlights, which have grown from a set of cones into an ambient glow that silhouettes the buildings on our side of the main street. “Our only chance is the river.”
Shoving my pistol into my waistband, I grab at Snake’s pockets. A key ring jangles in his left front one. When I dig it out, I find not only a GM key for the truck, but a small key with an orange float wired to it.
“We’re golden! Let’s move.”
Lincoln’s big forearm relaxes, and Snake slides just far enough down the tree for his feet to touch the ground. The old man coughs, then desperately sucks for air. When the oxygen hits his bloodstream, his eyes open, and I see life in them, awareness even. An instant after Lincoln sees the same thing, he pulls Snake away from the tree, then slams him back against it. The light in the old eyes goes dark, and Snake’s body slides down the tree as if it has no bones in it.
“Get the woman,” Lincoln says.
While Lincoln whips off his belt and ties Snake’s hands, I go to Wilma Deen, who’s lying on the ground, gripping her throat and staring at the sky with horror in her eyes. She’s still breathing, but she’s lost a good bit of blood. In this light it’s not worth pulling her hands away to try to gauge the severity of the wound. We’re twenty-five miles from Natchez by boat, but at least she stands a chance with us.
The truck door opens, and when I turn, I see Lincoln stuffing Snake onto the floor of the backseat.
“Dome light!” I hiss. “Goddamn it, they’ll see it!”
“Get your ass in here!”
Taking Wilma by the feet, I drag her to the Harvester, where Lincoln helps me lift her into the passenger seat.
“Why not the backseat?” I ask, my eyes on the headlights back on the town road.
“Somebody’s gonna have to keep pressure on that neck if she passes out. And somebody’s gonna have to shoot to keep them off us. You want to drive or shoot?”
“I’d better drive.”
“You know where the river is?”
“It’s a straight shot west, right? Two miles?”
“Yeah. But it ain’t much of a road.”
“I’ll find it. Let’s go.”
We close the doors with a creak of rusty hinges, but my heart sinks when I crank the truck. There’s nothing to be done about the noise.
“It’s a standard shift,” I think aloud, stepping on the clutch and throwing the truck into first gear.
“The river road’s about a hundred yards that way,” Lincoln says, pointing out to my left with his gun hand. “If you go out to the main road, they’ll see us. You’ve got to drive through these trees.”
There’s a moon out, but not enough to drive through trees at any speed. As we roll forward, man-thick trunks loom out of the darkness every few yards, sometimes in pairs. About seven miles an hour is all I can risk. Glancing to my right, I see that Wilma has braced herself against the passenger door. She’s got both hands clenched to her neck, and her face is the color of skim milk.
“Looks like two Harleys pulling up to the main house,” Lincoln says, peering back through the windshield. “Three now. Shit, four. Can’t you go any faster?”
“Not without hitting a tree.”
“Christ. If they shut off their engines, they’ll hear us from there.”
Progress is maddeningly slow, and I’m afraid of missing the river road in the dark. From curiosity, I risk one glance over the backseat. Snake is laid out on the floor like a sack of sticks, dead to the world.
“You’ve got to keep separation between us and them,” Lincoln says, “or we’ll never make it into the boat, even if we reach the river.”
“Is Snake alive?” I ask, my right hand riding the vibrating gearshift.
“Who gives a fuck? Watch where you’re going.”
“I think I see the road!”
“Good, because they’ve seen us—or heard us. Get ready. They’ll be coming fast on those bikes.”
I press harder on the gas pedal, and black tree trunks flash out of the night like darkness incarnate.
“Turn the headlights on!” Lincoln cries. “If you hit a tree now, we’re dead.”
A pale line of earth stretches westward through the trees to my left. As soon as I’m sure it’s the river road, I gun the Harvester, fishtail onto sandy mud, and hit the headlights. We pick up speed fast, at least by the standard of the previous two minutes, but the instant I feel encouraged, Lincoln smashes out part of the rear windshield with the butt of his pistol in preparation for a gun battle.
“They’re coming,” he says, his voiced edged with fear and anticipation. “Don’t stop for anything. Not even if you’re hit or blinded. Just keep your foot on the gas.”
Once I get the Harvester in fourth gear, I focus on keeping the big truck on the narrow dirt road. But at the edge of my vision I see that Wilma Deen has slid down the door with her hands limp in her lap.
“Goddamn it,” I mutter, reaching out and pressing hard against the laceration on her bloody throat. Her skin is so slick, it’s hard to keep my hand in place.
Lincoln’s first rifle shot hammers my eardrums so hard that I swerve on the road.
“That slowed ’em down!” he roars. “Gun this old bitch! Go! Go! Go!”
At sixty miles per hour, the truck begins launching itself into the air when we top random humps in the road. Every time we crash back to earth, the bone-rattling impact makes it seem the truck is about to fall to pieces.
“Here they come again! Gonna give ’em a few this time—”
Lincoln empties four rounds from my rifle, the noise shattering in the cab of the truck.
“You hit anything?” I ask, watching for sinkholes in the rutted dirt.
“I hit one guy dead in the chest,” he says, sounding dazed. “If those freaks catch us now, they’ll skin us alive.”
“They still coming?” I ask, trying in vain to see behind us in the jouncing rearview mirror. All I see is distant lights.
“Oh, yeah. Faster now. There must be ten bikes back there.”
A bolus of fear blasts through me, raising every hair on my skin. As I struggle to coax some more speed from the old truck, a drumroll of lead slams into the tailgate.
“They’re shooting back,” Lincoln says. “That sounded like a goddamn machine gun.”
“What can I do?”
“Can you kill the lights?”