Page 74

Pat. Pat.

His feet hit the pavement again. He wasn’t coming straight for us—probably because he couldn’t remember or tell which way we were hiding—but he was advancing all the same. Dana closed her eyes, but I lifted my face up off the ground and saw, through the soup-thick mist, a humanoid shadow.

I was certain then that it was a living, breathing man: He moved in a top-heavy way, and the vague proportions I could make out implied hips that didn’t sway.

I couldn’t discern anything else. Not a hairstyle, not a distinguishing feature of his face, not a color of clothing. He was a nebulous blob, nothing more; and I hoped that we were less than that to him.

I was wearing dark jeans and a black shirt with my customary black boots. I didn’t know what Dana was wearing, but a cautious glance told me it was fairly dark. I hoped we blended into the ground, a gravelly mix of cast-off asphalt and deep green grass.

Two more shapes formed in the fog. At first I held my breath; then I realized that these two were not like the shooter. They were dead.

Before us stood two soldiers in bulky, poorly cut uniforms—I couldn’t see what color—but they saluted in sync, and dashed in front of the man with the gun. I don’t know whether he could see them. God knew I barely could.

They left a trail, though—a wake of swirling air that pulled the fog into patterns of action. Maybe the man felt them, even if he couldn’t hear them. They got his attention, at least. His heels swiveled in a full circle, and he fired a shot at no one who would care.

Dana whimpered under my arm, very softly, but he didn’t hear her. He stepped forward, lurching away from us. His legs went swishing back into the grass, charging away in fits and starts, well out of my view.

I squeezed Dana’s shoulder and slowly rose. I pulled her with me, but she hesitated, still clutching the form on the ground. We’d dropped down closer to Tripp than I thought. She must have been holding onto him while we were lying there.

I tugged a second time and she stood up, carefully.

She reached up to put her hands on my face, and I was struck by how small she was. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked, in words so quiet I couldn’t hear them—but I felt them all the same.

While she had her hands on either side of my jaw I nodded. I wanted to say something more, but we both knew there weren’t any words that would help.

We listened. The murderer was somewhere across the road, in the grass.

&nbs

p; We looked around, trying to get our bearings. It was impossible. We couldn’t see more than three or four feet in any direction. If it were only dark, we might find a way out of the park; or if it were only foggy.

Between the two, we were pretty much screwed.

Huddled together, we took a few steps in each direction until we spied the edge of a cement picnic table. We crouched to take hold of it, and felt our way around it until I guessed we were facing the road, if the setup was the way I remembered it.

Still hanging on to Dana’s forearm, I tried to orient myself.

If I was correct and we were facing the road, then off to my right would be the way we came in, and to the left, along the road, would be the way back to the front of the park. Behind us, more woods. Around us, a fog so thick I could reach out and grab a handful of it…blended thoroughly with the lovely pitch dark that happens out in the middle of nowhere at nearly two in the morning.

The moon was out, but it may as well not have been.

I didn’t know where Jamie and Benny were, and I was still bleeding. A warm trail of wet worked its way down my shirt, and the burning sting was spreading into a humid, nasty pain across my chest. But when I rubbed at the source it was numb, and what had at first seemed a ferocious scrape felt less disastrous.

Dana must have sensed my movement, because she reached out and touched me—landing a hand squarely on my chest and working her way up.

“You’re hurt too,” she said, though I didn’t know who else she could mean besides her husband, who was well beyond hurt.

I nodded, and gripped her hand. “It’s not bad. Come on. ”

“Where?”

“This way. ” We were both whispering and holding close. I had to lean down to reach her ear.

We would move most quietly if we could walk on the road, and if we followed the road far enough we would eventually hit the front of the park. Though the visitors’ center would almost certainly be deserted, there was a main road right outside the entrance. One way or another, we’d flag somebody down for help, if Jamie and Benny hadn’t done so already.

Together we crept off the grass onto gritty gravel, and then on to the asphalt.

A sliding wrong step brought us both to a halt, ears perked with fear.