EYESHOT: The most gripping suspense thriller you will ever read

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  “Get down. This is gonna be bad.”

  15

  James had run along the unprotected side of the Toyota and hurled himself over the passenger seat, his legs dangling out the door. A Fritos bag crackled under his knee. One foot skimmed the road and kicked pinging rocks against the doors. He pressed Elle down into the driver seat, his palm to the back of her neck, crushing her low beneath the dash, low, low, low, as low as they could possibly squeeze.

  “James—”

  Even injured, the Soviet had closed the distance quickly. He reached Shady Slope Road’s left shoulder and took a firing stance, machine pistol wrapped in beefy hands, his lips curled, trail duster flaring out like a cape. That was the last thing James had seen through the broken windows – a man shaded Rottweiler black and brown, flash-burnt into his mind – before he slammed his head down to the seat beside Elle’s. There was an uneasy silence where he was expecting a gunshot and nothing happened. Then it did.

  The subgun screamed a shrill rattle, like a soda can filled with pocket change and violently shaken. Swarms of little impacts peppered the Rav4 above and around them, ripping frothy tunnels in the seats and headrests, punching holes in cardboard and finished wood, and pulverizing the windshield in a crystal shower. The air thickened with splinters and tufts of bright yellow seat foam. It went on and on – like furniture tumbling down endless stairs – as more and more bullets, more than James ever imagined could fit inside a handheld weapon, growled and hissed through the air. Another window imploded. The back passenger door warped and snapped open. The rearview mirror dropped to the seat beside his cheek, fissured with cracks. In all the noise and violence, he held his head close to Elle’s, his scalp against hers, because she was the only thing in this disintegrating world that mattered.

  Finally, silence. He smelled burnt plastic, burnt fabric, burnt hair.

  “Everyone still alive?”

  Elle picked gummy glass shards from her hair. “Alive.”

  “I’m okay,” Roy called from the back seat.

  James bounced upright and clicked the passenger door shut. It had two blistered holes punched through the handhold. With his nose to the dashboard, careful to keep his scalp below Tapp’s sight, he spotted the Soviet in the side view mirror. He had turned and was running back to his jeep. He flicked his subgun sharply to the right, throwing a spent magazine, and plucked a new one from his left.

  The Rav4 hit a dirt bank and jolted. The mirror flashed sunlight.

  “We almost lost the road.”

  “I got it.” Elle twisted her body and raised one eye over the dashboard, correcting the wheel with gritted teeth.

  He pressed the rearview mirror into her hand. “Use this to see.”

  “I am so tired of being shot at today.”

  “Don’t touch the brakes. Don’t slow down. We can’t lose our momentum,” James said. The chassis banged against another pothole and something tore loose and dragged underneath with a vibrating metal scream. The rest of the glass fell out of the rear passenger window. The car was rattling apart, one piece at a time.

  And worse, it was definitely slowing. Then what?

  “Not fast enough,” Elle said. “We’re stopping.”

  Roy contributed his obligatory bitch: “I could get out and run faster.”

  “Feel free.” James brushed a pool of glass off the speedometer but the needle hung at zero. He estimated they were rolling five, six miles an hour at the very most. And bleeding more precious momentum every second on the mucky road, which might as well have been made of sand.

  “The road steepens.” Elle braced the rearview mirror against the curve of the dashboard like a periscope. “I can see it gets steeper, going down into the valley. We’ll pick up more speed, if we can just get to it.”

  James nodded hopefully.

  “Then what?” she asked. “We crash into the gully?”

  “Crash isn’t the best word.”

  “It hasn’t been the best day.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her, because now seemed like an appropriate time to do so – in a powerless car guided only by a mirror, with one murderer somewhere behind them and another concealed a mile ahead. He had no plan. He wouldn’t dare think more than thirty seconds ahead. Every idea and every move was an improvised reaction to a world under Tapp’s command and closing on all sides. James whispered a little prayer somewhere in the back of his mind. He wasn’t even sure he believed in a higher power but here it was, a simple, modest plea: God, please keep me thirty seconds ahead of the curve.

  The Toyota spent its last gasp of momentum and scraped to a halt. Everyone gasped. The trailing dust cloud caught up, swept past, and settled.

  James punched the glove box. “Shit.”

  Elle sighed. “So . . . we relocated ourselves a hundred feet closer to the sniper.”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Goddamnit.”

  “We have to . . .” James felt words gunk up in his throat, thick as peanut butter. “We need to get out and push the car again.”

  Roy moaned. “Aw, hell.”

  James almost asked what it was, and then he recognized the familiar throaty roar of the Soviet’s jeep, pounding pistons and spurting hot oil, rumbling up on them from behind. He wasn’t far back up the road, and rapidly gaining.

  “Push us,” Elle whispered. “Push us now.”

  Something pinged off the hood, like a small rock thrown impossibly fast.

  * * *

  Tapp threw the bolt and ejected a twirling .338 casing. That was his final shot in this magazine, harmlessly stopped somewhere in the Toyota’s engine block. He didn’t have an angle on them. Even though they were rolling directly toward him, surging on a breathless wave of nuthouse adrenaline, he had no shot on them. James had turned the vehicle into a moving shield because of the goddamn fucking engine block—

  No matter.

  Breathe.

  The Toyota had groaned to a halt again, ragged and peppered with dark holes. He guessed that James and the other two were still alive in there, since most of Svatomir’s piss-poor shooting had gravitated over the vehicle’s roof under the Mac-11’s notoriously wild recoil. His jeep was racing up behind the Toyota right now to finish them off, smoothly gliding through glass and prairie like a black shark fin.

  See?

  It’s fine.

  Breathe.

  Tapp forced a good ol’ boy chuckle as he peeked through his rangefinder and squirted off an invisible laser at the Toyota’s grill. It bounced back at the speed of light and the digital readout pulsed: 1,402 meters. They had rolled over a hundred meters closer, enough to wreck his presets for elevation and bullet drop. He click-click-clicked his scope and adjusted for eighteen meters of vertical rise. The incline made it trickier because his rangefinder only tracked distance as a straight line, not in relation to the parabolic tug of gravity—

  Breathe.

  This is what you do.

  Let’s not be . . . gun-shy.

  He changed magazines without looking; a reptilian muscle memory that lived somewhere low in his brain stem. He knew that with Svatomir bearing down on them, James and the others would need to step outside and push their car again, and this time they would need to push from the sides, not the tailgate. Further, their angle of approach had straightened to follow the road into something damn near perpendicular, giving him a clean shot at both the driver and passenger sides. He didn’t have to wait long. To his delight, the shadows unfurled like twin jack-in-the-boxes, two doors swung open, and in the delicious hot panic that followed, Tapp fired at the first human shape he saw.

  * * *

  “Fast enough. Get back in!” James shouted with grit in his throat. They had given the passenger doorframe two heaving pushes on the inclined road and (thank God) that was all it needed. They were rolling again. Roy fell back into his seat screaming. Something guttural, howling, deep in his throat. The car bounced off another pothole. Elle cracked her cheekbone on the steering whe
el and cursed.

  “Roy!” James tucked the door shut behind him. The sun visor dropped on him and he swatted it away. “Roy, did he get you?”

  The back seat was silent.

  “Roy!”

  Nothing.

  “Roy, talk to me—”

  “James.” Elle’s voice was low, all business. “Where’s the jeep? How close?”

  He checked the side view mirror and saw the evil black thing bank hard and hungrily accelerate behind them, rapidly closing the distance to ten yards. Then closer, and closer still, the bruised silver slats of its grill becoming teeth in the sunlight. “He’s . . . he’s right on us. Coming up.”

  “We’re not going to outrun him,” she said with icy calmness. “We can’t.”

  “I know.”

  She swerved to dodge another hole but hit it anyway. The Rav4 nosed skyward, glass shards snow-globed everywhere, and furniture groaned and shifted. Roy gasped something muffled back there, meaning he was fortunately still alive, or at least not quite dead yet. James watched the Soviet’s jeep draw closer and hit the same dip, smoothly rising and falling on titanic shocks like a speedboat on choppy water. The unpainted bumper touched down with a fireworks splash of sparks. The tinted windshield stuttered flashes of mottled sunlight – just like at the Fuel-N-Food, it afforded only a silhouette of the man inside.

  “Roy.” Elle looked back but couldn’t see past the blossomed driver seat. “Are you okay?”

  Through the gap over the center console, James could see Roy’s scalp buried under debris and shifting shadows. He was shaking his head, eyes clenched to slits. “My hand,” he said hoarsely. “It’s messed up.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.”

  James checked the side mirror for the jeep but the Soviet was too close. The hulking vehicle pulled up alongside them, matching their speed, as if preparing for a drive-by shooting. He chewed his lip thoughtfully. “We’re . . .”

  Elle looked at him. “What?”

  He had an idea. “We’re going to pit him.”

  “Pit him?”

  “Yeah. The P.I.T. maneuver.” James leaned back against the bullet-riddled dashboard, head hunched, watching the roof of the Soviet’s jeep over a window frame lined with glass daggers. “I . . . I saw it on an episode of Cops once.”

  “What do the letters stand for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not reassuring.”

  Beside him, just a few feet away, passenger door to driver door, the Soviet was pulling closer to make his kill. The motor gave another cycling roar and James felt it vibrating the fillings in his molars. “Basically,” he shouted over the noise, “we’ll bash his car at just the right point on the back end, so he loses traction with his back two wheels and spins. He’ll fishtail.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll tell you when.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Okay?”

  She nodded fast.

  The cars were perfectly side-to-side now. If she missed, or hit the jeep at the wrong spot, they would stall and lose their momentum. Or worse, pivot and spin like a stunt car, leaving them disoriented and defenseless from Tapp’s scope. This would need to be precise. Impossibly precise. Like performing brain surgery while riding a jet ski.

  “Alright.” He steadied himself. “Lose some speed, Elle.”

  She pressed the brake with her knee.

  Nothing happened.

  “Huh.” She pumped the pedal with her hand. “So, there’s that.”

  James cursed under his breath.

  “This’ll work, too.” She swerved onto the left shoulder. The driver side tires dug into coarse dirt and fought the passenger side, throwing the SUV into an indecisive skid. More boxes crashed around Roy and he moaned again. The television stand dumped a shelf into the console, where it sliced down an inch from James’ knuckles like a guillotine blade. Elle cranked the wheel hard to the other side, overcompensated, and the rear passenger door swung open and slammed shut like a gunshot. Had Roy not been holding on back there, he could have been thrown out the side like a ragdoll.

  “You got it?” James asked, breathless.

  “Yeah.”

  It worked. The jeep crept a few feet ahead. Through thick glass, James saw the Soviet’s unmistakable profile, head down, fumbling busily with something in his lap. What else? That wicked little subgun.

  “Ram him?” Elle asked.

  James shook his head. It didn’t feel right yet.

  Over the passenger window frame he watched the jeep inch further ahead. The Soviet reached for the window crank (of course he would have those dinosaur hand-powered windows) and scraped the glass down. It cried as it lowered, a brittle squeal, and the man’s bloodshot eyes came into view. The rest of him was still shrouded in shadow except for those wet eyes. It was absurd, but James would have sworn that the Soviet was still somehow looking at Elle, only Elle, forever Elle, like she was a campfire in a dark forest and all the creeping things were drawn to her.

  She tensed. “Ram him?”

  “Do it!” Roy shouted. “He’s going to shoot us—”

  “Don’t.” James dug his fingernails into the door. “Wait a second more.”

  The Soviet shoved his hand out the window, holding that vicious scratched machine pistol. His entire arm was slimy with rusty blood now, like his skin was sloughing off inside his sleeve. He leaned out, cocked his head to face them with the wind tugging his beard, and pulled the sights up to align with his red eyes. Finger on the trigger, curling—

  “Shit,” Roy screamed. “Now! Now! Now!”

  “Now?” Elle looked at James, her eyes wide. Her calm sarcasm was gone. She was terrified, her jaw quivering, her stomach rising in her throat, waiting for her husband to say it, to please just say it.

  He waited a half second, and then a half second more, as the jeep nudged a few more inches ahead, and the Soviet had to cross his arm to track them, and lean up and out his window to follow them down the stubby iron sights, and (yes!) their right tire was just about even with his back tire—

  “Now!” James screamed in her ear.

  She wrenched the wheel hard right.

  16

  To Tapp, they looked like toy cars colliding down a long hallway. Svatomir’s jeep swung a silent jackknife in front of the SUV and its tires lifted free of the road while its right dug into it, spewing dust in a graceful arc, like a handful of sand thrown into the wind. The cloud obscured both vehicles and billowed lazily. Then the Toyota, James Eversman’s goddamn powerless Toyota, punched through the curtain. Still coming, still rolling, still growing inside his scope, leaving Svatomir sideways, stalled, and far behind.

  How the . . .?

  James’ vehicle tore past the nine hundred meter flag, fearless and unstoppable. For a terrible half second, Tapp entered free-fall. A sour tequila shot of panic. He was terrified. This was so wrong. Everything had gone wrong today. He found himself nurturing such an awful thought, he could only whisper it in the back of his mind and approach it from oblique angles, just a meek little voice . . . The situation is slipping out of my control.

  And even worse . . . I might not win this.

  “William Tapp!” James shouted triumphantly into his ear, his voice tinny and crackling. “Are you afraid yet?”

  * * *

  The impact had scooted the Motorola across the floor and James found it by his ankle. He held it to his teeth as he spoke, shivering with a wild adrenaline high. Elle punched the steering wheel and whooped – the sound college girls made when they took shots together – and he saw she was smiling, laughing, and crying all at once. “How’s my driving, asshole?”

  “He almost flipped back there,” Roy said. “He’s off the road, in a ditch. He’s gonna be stuck awhile.”

  Elle looked to James. “Was that the easy part or the hard part?”

  “Not sure yet.” He reached through the broken window and grabbed the side view mirror – crushed by the collision, dangling by bent fib
erglass – and scanned the cracked reflection for the Soviet. No luck. All he saw was a wall of dust, boiling and churning like a Mount St. Helens-esque pyroclastic cloud, sliced by shafts of orange sunlight. He would have to take Roy’s word for it.

  “Four hours left,” Elle whispered cryptically.

  “What?”

  “Four hours left,” she said again, as if it should be obvious. “Remember?”

  “Yeah. Tapp said it on our car radio.”

  “He said it over three hours ago.” She grinned. “And now I know what he was talking about. Daylight. I should have figured – a scope is like any other lens. Camera, binocular, telescope – it needs light to work. He only has so much daylight left to kill us. He has less than an hour, in fact, until the sun is down.”

  James let out a shocked sigh. The sniper’s words whiplashed back at him: You almost made it to nightfall. Of course! How had he missed that? The sun was the timer, the big-ass ticking clock in the sky, dimming behind pink clouds with every passing second. Through the hollowed windows he could see the eastern sky was already fading to a deep purple against jagged crater walls. A shadowed twilight was descending over Tapp’s land as they raced toward the killer. If only it would descend a little faster.

  “That would . . .” Elle’s voice was muffled by something scraping off the chassis and tumbling. “That would explain why he wanted Roy to kill you. He’s getting desperate but he can’t show it, like a poker player with too much on the table and a shit hand. He’s running out of time, out of usable daylight, and he knows it.”

  Tapp, getting desperate. James couldn’t imagine a happier thought.

  “Sundown in a half hour,” Roy said. “Maybe less.”

  “Survive thirty minutes.” Elle waved her hand. “Easy.”

  The world came alive with possibility again. After night fell, would Tapp really be blinded? That would be an incredible reversal. If so, they would only have to outrun the Soviet. In the dark they would have an edge over the injured man, and if he were stupid enough to fire up a flashlight, they’d literally see him coming for miles. They could follow the arroyo east, as far as it went, and cross the valley under cover of darkness to reach the rough hills by the highway. Once they reached the highway they’d be as good as free. Could it really be that easy? Just survive four hours, until the killer ran out of light?