Husk (41 page)

* * *

Melissa and Frank jumped out of the Blazer, weapons drawn.

“
On the ground—” Melissa yelled, but the looming figure standing beside the Mercedes collapsed into a heap before she could finish.

Then the vehicle beside it roared forward.

“
It’s in the car,” Frank bellowed, climbing back behind the wheel.

Melissa followed his lead, keeping her gaze on the fleeing car as it raced away amidst a flurry of dust and gravel tinted orange by the roaring barn fire.

“
It can do that?” she exclaimed, then remembered the scene in the Pattersons’ garage.

Frank put the SUV in gear and they lurched forward in pursuit, almost taking off the right side-view mirror of the State Patrol cruiser beside them. “Be thankful that’s all it did,” he said. “If it were at full power, it could use its telekinetic abilities to crumple this vehicle into a wad of scrap. It’s saving what power it has. Each time it changes form it’s using up more energy. If we can keep it on the move, force it to keep switching bodies, we might wear it down.”

The Mercedes swung a wide circle around the barren lot before the barn, then tore off past the opposite side from where she and the others had approached. It burst through a small cluster of bushes and scraped past an ancient maple tree, shooting between the forest and the silo, mauling a path toward the driveway. Frank followed.

“
But how?” Melissa asked. “It’s so damn fast and nothing hurts it.”

“
Same as at the car crash with those teenagers,” Frank replied. “We’ll destroy whatever it leaps into.”

Melissa looked forward. “It’s going for the cemetery, isn’t it?”

Frank nodded. “It’s going to kill that guy’s daughter, then use her energy to complete the spell on Kane.”

He swerved the Blazer left, around a tree stump, then right, thundering over a rotten log. “Children are more susceptible to the supernatural than adults; animals, too. They can sense things we’ve lost the ability to detect.”

Melissa held tight to the door and dash, stabilizing herself and squinting against the rushing wind coming through the open windshield.

Only yards away, she could just make out one of the teenagers through the Mercedes’s back window—a young girl—staring back at her with a pleading, frightened gaze.

* * *

Paul chased after Officer Hale’s cruiser when he took off in pursuit of the two detectives and their retreating suspect. They passed in front of the devastating inferno the moment the barn’s roof cracked and caved in, causing an exhale of fiery breath out the open forward doors. The blazing walls toppled inward. Paul shrank away from the heat radiating through the paneling of his door, but he couldn’t pull his gaze from the cloud of hot embers that rose skyward like a mob of angry spirits.

He exchanged a glance with Rebecca after it happened, not daring to voice the dread he knew they both shared.

Instead, he focused on navigating the woodland terrain and following the others, praying that Mallory and Tim were two of the people inside the Mercedes.

CHAPTER 49

Mallory bounced in her seat when the Mercedes plowed out of the woods and onto the farm’s main driveway, low-hanging tree branches scraping her window like a dozen inhuman hands groping for her throat.

The car fishtailed when it hit the gravel, and the wild movements hurled Mallory against her door. A sharp pain manifested within her wound, but still nothing like she’d expected from such a serious injury. She couldn’t help but wonder if the lack of sensation resulted from the shock her body had taken, or if it meant she’d lost such a dangerous amount of blood that she was sliding placidly toward death.

Free of obstacles, the Mercedes shot forward.

Although lightheaded and groggy, Mallory remained coherent enough to be aware of the situation, almost wishing she’d black out.

Beyond the windshield, the flanking foliage blurred past on the periphery of the headlights. The narrow dirt driveway rushed toward them at such a nerve-ripping pace that fear prompted her to let go of her chest wound and feel for her seat belt.

Then, suddenly, she froze.

Out of the darkness, a T-intersection became visible at the end of the drive where it connected with another road, nothing but large trees and weeds on its opposite side. The perilous junction flew toward them, raising shouts of panic from the other passengers, everyone bracing for what would surely be a fatal impact.

Then the car began to slide

“
Hang on,” Tim yelled.

The vehicle swung to the left and somehow held to the ground, its rear end careening onto the paved road with a squeal of abused rubber and the firecracker-sound of loose gravel pelting its undercarriage. A second later they accelerated again, their phantom driver racing even faster into the black land that lay ahead.

Mallory straightened up a little further, wincing when another flash of pain pulsed through her chest. She struggled to remain focused, resisting the urge to simply close her eyes and allow the chaotic world to disappear from her perception.

Beside her, in the driver’s seat, Tim busied himself with the vehicle’s controls. Though his facial features betrayed his inner fears, he appeared to be the calmest member of the group.

“
Where are we?” Mallory asked.

His head jerked up at the sound of her voice, and his eyes locked on her as if viewing a reanimated corpse. “We just passed Hamel Road, onto Pioneer Trail. How do you feel?”

“
S-scared.”

“
Yeah, me, too.”

Lightning throbbed across the sky, and the automobile rattled over a craterous section of asphalt, paralyzing Mallory until the jarring motion ceased.

Even in her current condition, she recognized the futility of disputing how the Mercedes operated on its own. She still had no idea what was controlling the car, but she knew it had to be the same creature from the barn.

“
Where’s it taking us?” she groaned.

“
I’m not sure,” Tim replied. He shifted sideways in his seat so he could look beneath the steering column.

“
What are you doing?”

“
Trying to stop us,” he said. “Maybe there’s an anti-theft kill switch?”

The vehicle dipped on its shocks in response to soaring across a wide depression in the road, then rose again when it crested the other side, barely keeping contact with the ground.

“
Hit the brakes,” Becky shouted for the twentieth time.

“
Don’t you think I already tried that?” Tim countered. “They’re no good.”

“
Then, pull the keys out.”

“
There aren’t any.”

“
What about yanking the fuses or something?” Lisa cried. “Will that work?”

“
Try the emergency brake,” Becky suggested.

“
Take it out of gear,” Adam demanded. “Put the fucker in park!”

Tim bolted upright. “It’s locked up, all right, just like the brakes. I’ve tried everything and nothing works, so quit yelling at me!”

The car took another wide but risky turn, the speedometer tipping just past eighty miles per hour. Mallory listened to the others fall silent while they balanced themselves against the centrifugal force, hearing a banshee wail arise from the agonized tires.

She cringed with the ache in her chest, but managed a sigh when they safely completed what should have been a suicidal turn. When she looked up again, she saw lights twinkling through the trees ahead—other cars—and in seconds, they emerged from the back road and shot down an entrance ramp onto Highway 55.

“
Where are we going?” Lisa asked, once again igniting an explosion of questions from the back seat.

Wailing pleas of who, what, where, when, and why assaulted Mallory’s ears in combination with the roaring engine, screaming tires, and blaring car horns of other motorists. But above the discord, from behind them, she detected the wavering scream of a siren, only then recalling the others mentioning something about a police car.

“
The police are behind us?” She turned to look over her shoulder and stiffened in pain.

Tim glanced to the rearview mirror for a moment, then nodded. “There are three vehicles following us. There was a Blazer behind us earlier, but now it looks like they’ve let the cop pull ahead to clear traffic. I think the third car is your dad’s.”

“
My dad?” she repeated. Once again she tried for a look, twisting around far enough to make herself shout.

Tim looked to her and began to ask if she was okay when a blinding flash exploded throughout the Mercedes’s interior. A white bolt of energy blasted away from them with the speed of a comet, soaring forward, straight into oncoming traffic. The next thing Mallory knew, Tim was battling with the steering wheel, trying to pull them out of a deafening skid. He cursed between clenched teeth with the world screaming in circles around them.

* * *

Jimmy “Dirty Dog” Gibbs had a spectacular view of the oncoming police chase from the lofty cab of his International 9900
i
-semi. It was awesome. He saw a sleek black Mercedes tearing like hell away from a State Patrol squad car, zipping past what little traffic blocked its way. The driver was a full-blown lunatic. He cut onto the shoulder to pass a minivan towing a trailer full of junk, then dodged between some dude on a Harley and an old red station wagon, forcing the guy on the Harley to nearly bail into the grass ditch separating the east and westbound lanes.

“
Hope you eat a tree, asshole!” Jimmy shouted out his window, simultaneously blasting the rig’s horn once the car neared.

He followed the fugitive auto with his gaze when it raced past in the opposite direction, hoping to catch a glimpse of the driver. Instead, a fiery, white ripple of light sprung off the Mercedes’s hood, exploded across the median and rammed into his windshield.

“
Holy—”

Jimmy braced for impact, crossing one arm over his face. But nothing happened. No crash, no shattered glass. When he looked, he discovered the windshield undamaged.

“
Jesus,” he breathed.

Before he had a chance to digest what happened and formulate an explanation, the big truck roared with increased power. It bound forward, acquiring speed free of his command.

The steering wheel slid through his hands like an enlivened serpent, angling the rig left, directing it into the shallow ditch divider.

“
Shee-it!
”

Jimmy heaved back and forth in his seat as the truck drove off the road and plunged into the weedy channel separating the lanes. Grass and dirt blasted upward where the front bumper bottomed out and gouged into the earth, spraying soil to each side like a boat bursting through a wave. But it didn’t stop there. The truck surged onto the opposite roadway just as violently, and no matter how hard he struggled to correct its course, the machine wouldn’t respond.

Flashing lights whipped across the windshield glass. A siren whined.

Jimmy looked ahead and saw the speeding police cruiser fall in line with the truck’s chrome hood ornament.

“
Aw, hell!”

The officer slammed on his brakes, and his vehicle slanted to the right. Blue-white plumes of smoke screamed off the tires.

But Jimmy knew it was already too late.

The two vehicles came together and the patrol car disappeared in a cloud of destruction. Jimmy jolted with the collision, but his seatbelt held him in place. He gaped in surrealistic wonder at the sight of fractured pieces of colored plastic from the cruiser’s flasher coverings tumbling across the cab’s hood in slow motion.

Despite the force of the crash, the semi didn’t slow.

Its Herculean 600 horsepower Detroit Diesel engine roared onward, pushing through the cruiser’s wreckage, growling like a wild beast charging toward its next kill.

* * *

Rebecca couldn’t believe her eyes when she first saw the huge semi lunge into the wrong lane of traffic, but the explosion of sound when it collided with Sam’s squad car confirmed its deadly presence.

A scream escalated in her throat. Before she could voice it, the police cruiser’s forward end vanished into the big rig, its rear tires lifting off the pavement. The patrol car spun into the ditch amid a cloud of debris.

Transfixed on the accident, imagining poor Sam behind the wheel, Rebecca flinched in surprise when Paul slammed on the brakes and swerved toward the shoulder.

Then she registered the grating noise of a second collision.

Ahead of them, the truck had swerved to ram Frank Atkins’ Blazer. The big rig’s front bumper clipped the Chevy’s rear end as Frank tried to veer around it. The SUV leapt away from the crash like a cat with a broken tail, its rear bumper torn askew. Its wheels skipped off the asphalt, and the whole vehicle almost rolled before skidding onto the grassy divider.

Now nothing stood between Paul’s sport utility and the massive truck except a scant portion of open road that all but vanished in a second. Rebecca’s cry finally escaped her when Paul swung around the truck’s mangled front bumper, aware they were still too close to escape from danger. Less than halfway past the rig’s cab, the two vehicles scraped together with a squawk of colliding metal. The unmovable mechanical monster edged into them on the left, forcing the Expedition to rise up on its two right tires, off the highway’s shoulder.