"Still the moon?" he asked with a trace of a smile in his voice.
There was a long moment of silence, and then, thank God, Lynette spoke again. "Not the moon. Just a very scared woman."
"I can work with that," he said.
Then the car jogged suddenly forward. There was a shriek of twisted metal, and Lynette screamed at the same instant that Scott let go of her hand and grabbed onto the steering wheel, which was jumping back and forth in his hands like it had a mind of its own.
There was another crash of metal on metal, and Scott heard something shear off the car. He had barely a moment to spare, still struggling to keep the car on the road, but he managed to look back over his shoulder for a split second.
A split second was all he needed.
It was Mr. Gray. The old man was following them in Scott's own car, using the vehicle to ram into them from behind. The good news was that Scott's car was hardly a powerful vehicle, and under normal circumstances he would not have worried too much about its ability to harm them. The bad news was that Lynette's car was hardly a tank, either...and these were nothing resembling normal circumstances.
Slam, the car jogged forward and then shimmied to the side as the gray man gunned his engine and slammed into them again. Again Scott heard something tear in the back of the car, and suspected that they had just lost their rear bumper. It was nothing critical, but it meant that there were now fewer inches of protective metal between the occupants of this car and the madman driving the one behind them.
Scott tried to remember his combat driving training from his time in the LAPD, but he knew that he was out of practice and underprepared. Worse, he suspected that the assassin's own skill set did encompass using a moving vehicle as a weapon, thus giving the advantage firmly to their pursuer.
Lynette was whimpering behind him. He couldn't blame her. He had been terrified enough when Mr. Gray got the drop on him, only his anger at the loss of his family giving him the strength to stand up to the man. But Lynette, he knew, harbored no such resentment - at either Mr. Gray or the universe that had spawned him. Her heart was uncluttered by such ugly emotions, so she must have felt the fear in a much more raw, visceral way when she crept into the alley to confront the killer and save Scott's life.
"Hey," he said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror again. It was hardly the time to do this, with a trained assassin in a car directly behind them, out for blood and willing to kill, but he needed Lynette to pull herself together. For all their sakes. He didn't know if he could do what needed to be done on his own.
Slam, and the car again shuddered as Mr. Gray attacked from the confines of Scott's car. Lynette's own car started to shimmy and shake, as though something in the frame had been bent with that last hit, and Scott knew that they wouldn't have long before they lost control of the vehicle and were again at Mr. Gray's mercy.
"Lynette, snap out of it," he said. She continued sobbing. "Please, honey, please snap out of it."
No dice. The woman had apparently used up everything she had in the nightmare trip from her house to the bowels of the alley that Mr. Gray had somehow called forth from the depths of Scott's memories.
"Shit," he said. He looked at Kevin, who was still looking out the side window complacently, as though they were out for a Sunday drive instead of being pursued by a maniac with otherworldly powers and a will to destroy them. "Don't suppose you could help me out here, bud," he said, but it was mostly to have some noise to compete with the distressing sound of Lynette's whimpering in the backseat.
To his surprise, however, Kevin moved. He began unbuckling his seat belt.
"Hey, son, don't -" began Scott, but at that instant Mr. Gray smashed into the car again, and Scott felt his teeth click together hard as he was jarred and bounced. He looked at the speedometer. They were going ninety eight miles per hour, and the tachometer was deep in the red. There was no way they could go any faster than they were going.
And Kevin was still unbuckling his seat belt. Scott felt a new thrill of fear. At this speed, some kind of accident was not just a possibility, it was almost inevitable. Most likely was that a tire would blow - he doubted that Lynette had purchased racing tires for her economy car, so he knew that the friction caused by the speed they were moving at was already probably causing the tires to partially melt, growing softer and softer and exposing the cables that were the tires' last line of defense before they gave way and popped. And a tire popping at this speed would be tantamount to instant death for all of them, rolling the car over and over and leaving nothing left but a much-reduced shell of a car with so many spots of jelly inside where people once had been.
Or perhaps they would just hit a bad bump in the road and go flying. Again, the outcome - a rolled car with nothing left of them but a few wet smears - would be the same.
But no matter what happened, if Kevin was not buckled up, Scott knew that the boy would have no chance of survival. So he tried to grab the boy and pull him back to his seat. But Kevin threw Scott's arm away from him, and when Scott tried to grab him again, Kevin actually gritted his teeth and growled at him, growled like a dog that had just been threatened and was about to bite back.
The car began to shudder in his hands, and Scott had to put all his attention on his driving, letting Kevin do what he wanted, which apparently was to flip himself over into the back seat beside his mother.
Scott juked left with the car, the move barely keeping him out of range as the gray man again tried to ram them, but this time missed. Still, the odds were that Mr. Gray was going to bring them down. And sooner rather than later.
Scott cranked the car suddenly to the left, straining the vehicle to the limits of its endurance as he pulled into the wrong side of the street. It was the middle of the night, almost morning, in fact, so his chances of meeting someone on the road and having a head-on collision were slight. Slight was not the same thing as nonexistent, however, a fact that he was keenly aware of as he moved the car into the wrong lane. But he needed to do it in order to try to get them out of this mess.
Mr. Gray followed him into the lane, staying close on his tail, sticking to him like glue.
Scott cranked the wheel again, and again Mr. Gray followed, staying right behind.
Scott became aware that the road they were on was lined on both sides by irrigation canals. Unlike the arid desert of Los Angeles, where water rarely flowed freely unless instigated by the surge of a sprinkler head, Idaho had enough water and to spare. Water was, in fact, deemed a public property, and so irrigation ditches could often be found on the sides of roads, gathering rainwater and stream runoff and shunting it through the rural areas that dotted even cities such as Boise and Meridian. The water was used to feed livestock, to water crops, and for a million other things that an agrarian area needed water for.
Usually the irrigation ditches were a thing of beauty to Scott, quietly burbling and bubbling along, bringing life-giving water to any and all who needed it. But tonight, with a three foot wide and two foot deep ditch on either side of the road, Scott was keenly aware that the water features represented just one more possible way they could be killed: dropping into one of the irrigation ditches at the speed they were holding at would surely result in the total destruction of both the ditch, the car, and the car's occupants.
The wobbling of the wheel under his hands intensified, and Scott could tell that he had only a matter of seconds to put some plan into action that would save them. They were well out of the more densely populated areas of Meridian, driving down a long road that had nothing but farms and farmhouses on either side, no hope of any kind of help that Scott could see.
And Kevin was still unbuckled, trying to get into the backseat of the car with his mother. He finally made it, though Scott thought for one horrible moment that the boy was going to be ejected from the car when Mr. Gray hit them again right as Kevin was passing into the backseat.
The boy made it, though, climbing into his mother's arms. He threw his own arms
around her, then whispered something to her. Scott could hear the whispering, but could not hear any detail, so he hoped whatever the boy was saying to his mother, it was something along the lines of "Please snap out of it and try to figure out some way for us to get out of this mess before we end up dead."
Surprisingly, he must in fact have said something very much like that - or at least like the first part of that - because a moment later Lynette stopped whimpering, and Scott heard twin clicks as she belted herself and Kevin into the backseat. She wasn't helping much, but at least she wasn't just curled up in a ball on the seat waiting to die, so he counted this as a definite improvement.
He turned the wheel again as Mr. Gray slammed into them. But this time, the wheel spun out of control in his hands. He saw them heading straight at one of the irrigation ditches, and braced for a watery impact that would signal the end of their flight and very likely the end of their lives.
But the impact never came. With a thud and a thump, Scott felt the car pass over one of the small bridges that crossed over the irrigation ditches every fifty or sixty feet. They had hit with exactly the right angle to get over the ditch. To survive.
Not so Mr. Gray, however. Scott heard a shattering sound, like a world of metal imploding on itself, and half-turned in his seat in time to see his car - the car that Mr. Gray had been driving - smack directly into one of the irrigation canals. The front end of the car dipped down, and then stopped instantly as it hit the bank of the canal. Scott could actually see the car ripple with the force of the impact.
Then the car started to flip over.
Scott kept one eye on his rearview mirror, even as he stomped on the brakes and struggled to bring his own car under control and get it down to a less-deadly speed. So he saw the back of the car rise up in a perfect arc, flipping the car end over end, and out of the irrigation canal.
The car did not simply come to rest, however, but continued to flip end over end. The vehicle quickly stopped resembling anything like a car, and quickly began to look like a spray of glass and metal orbiting around some gravitational field in deep space.
Then there was another crash, and Scott's heart leapt as he saw something that warmed his heart.
He saw Mr. Gray. Flipping out of the side window in a jumble of loose skin and bone, flying out of the car just as Scott had worried that Kevin would do.
Mr. Gray was flying, flying, flying through space, tumbling through the air like a rag doll.
Scott finished braking, and the car halted. Mr. Gray was still flying through the air.
Scott could hear a thin scream, a cry of pain and terror. And he smiled.
Good, he thought, it's over.
But then in the next instant, he felt that strange feeling that he had felt before, that feeling of the world twisting around him, as though a giant musical string had been plucked so hard that the entire universe resonated with its frequencies.
And in that instant, Mr. Gray disappeared.
Scott's car continued its self-destructive flight, and finally came to rest in several large pieces about a hundred feet from where Scott had finally battled Lynette's car to a stop. The car was dead; there was no doubt about that.
But, once again, their futures were still uncertain. Danger still lurked. Because Mr. Gray had managed to do the impossible. He had again cheated death, and had disappeared before he smashed into the ground and died.
Scott did not know where Mr. Gray was now, but he knew that the assassin would not rest - would never rest - until he had killed Kevin, Lynette, and Scott.
He put the car back into drive. The car strained and screeched, but Scott knew he couldn't listen to the vehicle's protestations. He knew that they had to get moving.
Because the gray man was still alive.
And that meant that they were still on the run for their lives.
***
35.
***
"How exactly are we supposed to stop a guy who can disappear and reappear at will?" said Scott.
They were driving along in Lynette's embattled car, trying to keep moving on the basic premise that a moving target was one that was slightly harder to catch. But Scott knew that merely moving was no guarantee against destruction. Not when the enemy was Mr. Gray.
"I don't know," whispered Lynette. She was still sitting in the back of the car, clutching Kevin tightly to her. Kevin was staring to the side again, as though by looking out the window where all appeared normal he might perhaps will normalcy into being for all of them once again.
"Me neither," said Scott. "Kevin?" he added. "You're the boy genius, you have any ideas?"
But though Kevin might have been a person of extraordinary ability when it came to string theory and mathematical formulations of how the world worked, and though he may have some connection to another version of himself in some other dimension, a place where he was not autistic at all, for now he was nothing more nor less than a silent passenger.
Scott turned the wheel. It wobbled beneath his hands and he knew that they couldn't drive the car much longer. If nothing else, police would be on the lookout for a car with the same color paint once they found the wreck that was all that was left of Scott's car, and analyzed the paint scrapings that would have rubbed off on it when Mr. Gray slammed into them repeatedly. More than that, though, he was fairly certain that the car was on the verge of falling apart beneath them.
"What do you think we should do?" asked Lynette.
Scott sighed. That was the million-dollar question, he knew. And it was also one that he was completely unprepared and unqualified to answer. He just didn't know.
"What about John Doe?" asked Lynette.
"What about him?"
"Well, he seems to be helping, doesn't he? Maybe he'll show up."
"Maybe," agreed Scott, though he did not feel at all sanguine about the possibility. "But even if he did show up, what do you think he could do?"
"I don't know," admitted Lynette. "But he saved you once before, didn't he?"
Scott thought about it. He thought back to the first day that he had met Mr. Gray after the assassination of his family eight years before. Mr. Gray had been about to kill him, there was no doubt of that, but instead of dying that day with a bullet in his head, John Doe had appeared and - to all appearances - somehow taken the bullet that was intended for Scott.
"Maybe," he finally said. "But even if he did, I don't feel comfortable putting my hopes in some guy who swoops in like a karate-kicking angel when we least expect it." He grimaced at Lynette in the rearview mirror. "If nothing else, angels aren't famous for showing up when you need them so much as when they want to."
Lynette whispered something then, hushed words that issued forth from the darkness of the back seat like some kind of prayer.
"What was that?" asked Scott, though he knew full well what she had said.
"You're so angry," she repeated. "Why are you so angry?"
Scott thought about any of the dozen answers he could have given her: because they were on the run from a homicidal maniac, because their predator had some serious mojo that allowed him to escape certain death, because he had just seen his only set of wheels turn into something that roughly resembled a lump of Play-Doh, and on and on and on. But instead he said something that surprised him: he told her the truth.
"Because God sucks," he muttered, "and I don't want anything to do with Him or with any guardian angel that He may have sent."
Lynette sat forward in the seat as though a shock had just gone through her from toe to head.
"How can you say that?" she said.
"Easy," answered Scott. "I just move my lips and the sound comes out."
He got the sense that Lynette would have said more, but at that instant a horrible grinding rent the air as something inside the car began to shred itself to pieces, metal on metal grinding away to nothing.
"What's that?" asked Lynette.
Scott shrugged. "Car's been through a lot tonight. We should find so
meplace to turn in."
"Like, go home and rest?"
"Not if you want to survive the night," answered Scott. "I was thinking someplace a little bit more off the grid than going home right now."
"Like what?' asked Lynette.
He turned then, hoping without much hope that the car would make it at least far enough that he could get it off the road and bury it in some brush somewhere. When he told this to Lynette, she looked askance at him. "Why are we hiding from everyone? From Mr. Gray, I get, but why hide from everyone? Wouldn't it be safer to get somewhere crowded and stay there?"
Scott smiled grimly. "First of all, if you know a place that's crowded in Meridian in the middle of the night, I'd be very interested to hear about it. More important though: the only reason to get to a crowd is if you're being chased by someone who doesn't want to make a scene. I don't think Mr. Gray cares much about that type of thing."
"Well, do we even know he is coming back?"
Scott was silent for a moment when she said that. She had a point: Mr. Gray's appearances, though terrifying and dangerous, were also sporadic. Months or even years had gone by in between visits.
There was a sound from the backseat that Scott couldn't place for a moment. Then he realized what it was: Kevin was typing on his computer.
A moment later, Lynette sighed. "I guess we do have to hide," she murmured.
"Why? What happened?" asked Scott.
"Kevin just wrote, 'He's coming again. Soon,' on his computer," said Lynette.
Scott felt a sinking in his stomach. And it grew greater as he turned the car and heard the grinding again. "We better find somewhere quickly," he said.
More typing. Then Lynette, clearly speaking for Kevin again, said, "Soon."
The Meridians Page 23
