She approached Trooper Evans, walked behind him.
“I'm sorry, ma'am,” Trooper Evans said, his gaze and his gun never wavering from Dylan. “I can see you've been injured by these men, and I'll be able to offer medical assistance once we have them in custody. I called for backup already.”
“Look, Trooper Evans,” Dylan tried. He noted that the woman, now behind Trooper Evans, had not entered the car as instructed. Instead, she stared at Dylan, the blood on her face now beginning to dry and crack in the strong Montana wind.
Trooper Evans, obviously caught in the heat of the moment, hadn't noticed her movements behind him. He was too focused on what was in front of him. Too focused on showing Dylan who was boss after all.
“What would your attorney call this, sir?” Trooper Evans said. “I'd say this is very probable cause, wouldn't you? I'd say there may be a few things in that pickup of yours you don't want me to see. Some dope, even.”
“I'm trying to cooperate,” Dylan shouted.
“Then drop to your knees.”
Dylan did as instructed.
“Now, to the other gentleman inside the pickup,” he said. “If you'll step out of the vehicle slowly, andâ”
As Trooper Evans spoke, Dylan watched the woman. She nodded at him, almost imperceptibly, then dropped to her knees and overtook the trooper, cutting him off in midsentence. Dylan heard the sounds of a struggle, then saw the trooper's weapon clatter across the pavement of the road. Immediately after, the trooper's legs began flailing beneath the car door.
He didn't wait any longer. When the woman refused to get into the patrol car, he started realizing why the woman's stalled vehicle and her injury were two puzzle pieces that didn't fit. By the time the woman attacked the trooper, he'd figured out that this woman was an elaborate trap to get him and Webb. Krunk, maybe the Canadians, someone, had put her on their trail. And he'd come dangerously close to escorting her into his own pickup.
He scrambled into the open door, slammed it shut, and slipped the truck into gear. Any moment, he half expected to hear gunshots, but none came.
Spinning the tires, he angled the pickup onto the roadway and watched the scene behind begin to recede.
In that scene, caught in his rearview mirror, the woman ran from the patrol car to her own. A few moments later her car executed a three-point turn and began to follow them. He saw no movement or sign from Trooper Evans, only the thrum of the cruiser's lights alternating red and blue, the headlights winking on and off in a steady pattern.
Webb was babbling gibberish Dylan couldn't understand, and the headlights on the green car chasing them were flashing, as if signaling them to stop.
Yeah. Like he was going to do that.
Dylan went as fast as he dared in the conditions, but she was steadily gaining on them; the green puker obviously had some old Detroit V8 power under the hood. His Ranger was just a 4-banger, and she obviously had little regard for the snowy road.
“Shut up,” he said to Webb, mainly because it was the only thing he could do to control the situation that was increasingly spinning out of control around him. Falling snow raced by their windows vertically as he pushed the speedometer past eighty. Not exactly ideal conditions to be hitting eighty, but the highway was a straight shot through this area, and a thin layer of fresh sand even coated the road surface for traction.
Fresh sand
, Joni's voice said in his mind.
That's a good sign
.
How so
?
Had to come from somewhere, didn't it? Think about it
.
Dylan looked at the roadway ahead, created an imaginary line where the yellow line of the highway would be if it were visible; he colored the left half of his field of vision black inside his mind, as if subtracting it from view, then divided the right half of his vision into two halves itself.
I said think about it, not do your psycho kill box stuff
.
This is how I think. Iâ
And suddenly, he saw what Joni was talking about.
“We can't outrun her,” Webb said, interrupting his internal conversation with Joni.
“I know.”
“So what are you doing?”
Dylan tapped his brakes, felt the pickup slide a bit before the tires gripped. Behind him the woman hit her brakes and slid as well.
No go. Would have been too easy to get her to slide off the road with such a simple maneuver. He had four-wheel drive, which helped his traction, but was also a detriment: it brought down his top speed dramatically. If he ran this fast for much longer, he'd likely drop his drive train on the highway.
He slammed the pedal down farther and did his best to ignore the speedometer. They were going way too fast for conditions, way too fast for his old Ranger. The stench of panic filled his nostrils, a stench he recognized from his tour of duty in the sandy desert. But just as quickly, he pushed it back down. When you were EOD, panic only got you killed. This situation was no different.
The puke-green car started to pull up beside them, and Dylan recognized what the woman intended to do: if she could bump into the pickup at just the right spot, behind his door, she could spin them out of control. Her own car, heavy early-seventies Detroit iron, would win that battle over his lighter half-ton pickup with no payload in the back.
Dylan hit the brakes again, harder this time, and the woman overshot the pickup, glancing across their front bumper and sliding sideways in the middle of the road.
The front of the pickup arced to the right as Dylan felt the tires on the right side come off the ground for an instant. He corrected and turned into the swerveâthe opposite reaction for most driversâand felt the pickup right itself. Punching the gas again, he regained speed and passed the green car as it came to a stop backward on the highway.
Somehow the woman had managed to stay in the road. Dylan caught a glimpse of her bloody face, her vacant eyes, as he sped by. Behind him, the woman wasted valuable seconds getting her car turned again before giving chase once more.
Just as she started to gain ground, Dylan saw what he'd been hoping for: ahead of them, the hulking form of a giant MDT snowplow pushing snow off the roadway in a giant plume while throwing down sand behind it.
Hallelujah
, said Joni in his mind.
Amen
, he answered.
Think it'll work
?
No
.
Thanks for the vote of confidence
.
Dylan pulled up behind the snowplow, blinded by the billow of snow leaping from the giant blade.
“You're gonna hit him!” Webb screamed. But at the last moment, calculating the distance of the woman closing the gap, Dylan slipped out into the passing lane.
He hoped no vehicles were approaching from the opposite direction. If there were, he'd drive into a head-on collision; this chase would end suddenly and messily. But would that be so bad? Problem solved.
He saw the surprised plow driver through the windshield, gesticulating wildly as they passed.
Dylan floored the gas to get around the plow as quickly as possible, relieved to see no other vehicles on the horizon as he broke the plane of cascading snow from the plow's blade. He popped back over into the right lane just ahead of the plow, took a breath, and hit his brakes hard again.
Behind him, the driver of the snowplow also hit his brakes. His huge plow needed much more room to stop than their compact pickup, and would need to make an evasive maneuver to avoid hitting them.
That's just what Dylan was hoping as he punched the gas and squirted away again, fishtailing for a few moments as the four-wheel-drive bit into fresh snow untouched by the plow.
The plow's driver had somehow lifted his blade, and its giant V-shape came agonizingly close to their rear bumper before the plow swerved to the left and into the passing lane they'd just occupied.
On the outside of the plow, the green car, trying to pass and keep up the chase, was forced into the ditch. Its front bumper pushed up a fresh cloud of white as it bounced off the road and came to a shuddering stop.
Dylan accelerated again, leaving the plow and the green car behind forever.
He hoped.
“I think you're ready,” Quinn heard Paul say. She opened her eyes, brought herself back. Next to her, his hands still on the motionless body, Paul was staring at her. Inside the hotel room where they hunched in the darkness behind drawn curtains, a mist of water covered the ceiling and walls. Outside, the dry Arizona heat was parched, devoid of any moisture. But inside this room it was moist, wet, sticky. That's the way the exorcisms always worked.
“Ready for what?” she asked, even though she knew the answer.
“To go out on your own.”
Paul took his hands off the man who called himself Brandon and stood with some effort. Quinn remained on her knees, kept her hands on Brandon, continued uttering prayers. She didn't need to, specifically; the exorcism, the purging, had already drawn the disease from Brandon's body. The moisture that now clung to the ceiling and walls was the evidence of that cleansing. But she didn't want to move yet; once she disconnected, once she stopped what she was doing, she would begin to feel all the pain and hate she'd drawn into her own body. She would begin to feel the pressure build, and she would have to relieve that pressure.
Behind her, she heard Paul check the shades on the hotel room's window, let them close again. Then he settled onto one of the beds.
“Been wondering when it was going to happen.”
Paul sighed. “Yeah. Probably should have happened before now. You've been ready.”
At last she stood and turned to look at Paul. He was already feeling the effects of the cleansing, she could tell. His face was gaunt, ashen; his hands, even beneath the nitrile gloves he always wore, were dry and cracked. Soon he would need to shower, scrub himself, replace his clothing with fresh items he kept in sealed packages.
She was a natural, just as Paul had promised. Often she could recover without embedding. That was, in many ways, why embedding was better than cutting. Many times she could relieve the pressure created by the disease just by pressing on one of the objects beneath her skin. No fresh wounds. In the last year she'd only embedded two new objects; both she and Paul knew it was because she was harnessing the power of what they did. Which was why both she and Paul knew it was time for her to go out on her own.
They were in Phoenix, about ninety miles from the headquarters of a cult calling itself 2012.
Cults tended to fall into different categories. Some were wish-fulfillment cults, trading on the hopes and dreams of people who felt something was missing from their lives. Some were doomsday cults, focused on the end of the world and the need to hoard supplies. Some were escapist cults, trying to create their own artificial existence away from outside eyes.
Most cults, of course, shared many of those characteristics. But 2012 was mostly a doomsday bunch; they believed the world would end in 2012, as foretold by the Mayan calendar. Out in the middle of the Arizona desert, they built bunkers and stored supplies, biding their time. Or waiting for it to run out, as the case may be.
Currently, Paul and Quinn were two of about a dozen members of the Falling Away who were monitoring ten cults in the western United States. There were many more cults than these in the region, of courseâprobably dozensâbut these particular cults were of interest to the Falling Away because they were demonic infestations. Literally.
At the center of any demonically infested cult, you always found a powerful, magnetic leaderâmade powerful and magnetic by the demon he or she carried inside.
Be they wish-fulfillment cults or escapist cults or doomsday cults, the demon-infested compounds had one major function: they sent out infected members, who would in turn infect other people.
Quinn smiled. Out on the interstate just a few months ago, she'd seen a bumper sticker: Love, Not Hate. That's what the Falling Away was about, really; killing the disease carried by cults before they could spread it to others. Killing the hate.
Paul spoke again, drawing her out of her reverie. “I've talked with some of the others. We think you should monitor the HIVE.”
“Up in Montana?”
HIVE was mostly an escapist cult, appealing to people who wanted to leave behind their corporate lives and return to nature. Of the ten cults she had studied while training with Paul, HIVE was the fastest growing.
“Yeah,” he said. He smiled feebly. “Get out of this heat.”
She nodded, secretly started to press at a small paper clip embedded in the meat of her palm. The growing pressure inside subsided.
“But there's more to it,” Paul said.
“More to what?”
“HIVE. The reason we need you there.”
“What's that?” The Falling Away was a small group, really. Quinn had only met a few of the other members, and Paul himself only knew about a dozen people in the organization. They were spread thin, and getting thinner all the time. Recruitment wasn't exactly easy; members had to have odd compulsions they could turn into tools for coping. And the welcome speech about demons and infectious spiritual disease wasn't exactly an easy sell. Quinn knew that, all too well; she'd heard that speech a couple years ago now, and she still had a hard time believing all of it.
Even though she experienced it, time and again.
“There's a chosen in Montana now,” Paul said simply.
She felt her breath catch. “A chosen?” People who were called chosen had many things in common with those who were in the Falling Away, but they tended to be even larger magnets for pain and suffering. Chosen were particular targets for demonic cults, rare prizes.
At their most basic level, chosen were puzzle pieces in human form. They fit part of a larger picture, and if they found their placeâif they discovered who and what they wereâthey held great power. But more often, chosen people went through life never fitting in with their surroundings, because they never discovered they were part of the larger puzzle. Far too often, they were destroyed by the power inside them.