The Overseer (41 page)

High above the ground the drooping orange sun cast strange shadows across the desert wastes.

“Do you see anything?” Devin asked over his headset.

John looked down at the Arizona desert, watching it race by beneath them in its golden hour. The chopper blades pounded at the air. He shook his head. “No,” he replied into the headset, hearing his own voice in his ear.

John focused, reaching out to the source of all his knowledge. “Come on, God,” he whispered into the headset.

The copilot glanced over at John, confused.

John closed his eyes, feeling the chopper carrying them along through the sky, flying at incredible speed. Muttering a prayer, he let himself go into the sensation of vertigo.

His eyes opened, and he looked down. Miles away, on the highway, he saw a car tearing across the pavement at top speed. “That’s her. That’s Hannah.”

Misha sighed. They were maybe four miles from the border.

“Huh,” the driver said to himself, looking in the rearview mirror. “Somebody’s in a hurry.”

Misha frowned, leaning forward enough to see out the rearview mirror, and saw what he was talking about—a car, silver and midsized, was racing toward them, fast. Something clicked in her mind. She recognized the car.

“That’s the car that the girl came in,” she said.

“Is that Dominik? Maybe he needs something.”

Misha squinted, trying to make out who the driver was. It wasn’t Dominik.

The car moved so fast she thought it might shake apart.

Hannah saw the truck come into view ahead of her, maintaining her breakneck speed, ripping past the barren countryside.

Something flashed in the rearview mirror. Police lights. She’d been spotted. But it didn’t matter. Speeding tickets and prison didn’t matter. There was only the threat of losing the girls.

The size of the truck grew exponentially in the front windshield as she began to catch up. There were only a few choices now. Her first instinct was to ram the truck and run them off the road—but who knew how the girls were situated. Maybe they were buckled in, but probably not. Running the truck off the road might hurt or even kill the girls. She wasn’t taking that risk.

That didn’t leave much in the way of options.

She was gaining fast, pulling up alongside the truck. Hannah looked up at the driver, and he made eye contact with her—he recognized her.

The truck swerved, smashing into her from the side.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Misha shouted. “There’s a policeman back there! They’ll pull us over too!”

“They won’t pull us over when she’s the one driving so fast,” the driver argued.

“They may stop us at the border if they see strange damage,” Misha countered.

The driver groaned as he watched the pursuing car fall back a short way. “Then what do we do?”

“Just get to the border,” Misha ordered. “We’ll figure things out once we’ve crossed!”

John watched as the chopper swooped, getting closer to the ground faster than he’d expected.

“The silver car,” Devin said to the pilot, directing the man where to go, “and the truck it’s following. We need to get down there and stop them!”

“We may not be able to do that,” the pilot said. “If we do anything to endanger citizens, law enforcement, or military property, we will be in violation of our orders.”

“Just get close,” Devin ordered.

John watched as Hannah’s silver car accelerated, trying to pass the truck, only to get hit from the side again. He gasped, holding his breath. If whoever was driving that truck wasn’t careful, they were going to crash, and the girls were inside there. He could feel it.

The ground below ripped past, highway lines sleeting by.

Hannah’s car backed off for a second, the police car behind her coming up fast. John could feel people start to panic. It was only a matter of moments before one of them—any of them— did something stupid and got somebody killed.

“Pull over to the side of the road and…”

Hannah ignored the policeman’s words as he blared them over his speakers. If he wanted to stop her, he would have to make sure they closed the border—but there was still the chance they would only stop her and the truck would get through. And she couldn’t risk that.

Hannah accelerated again, pulling up close to the truck. It swerved again, blocking her from passing. Far in the distance two other police cars were joining the chase. Where had they come from? What were they doing patrolling a moonscape like this area? Her eyes dropped from the rearview mirror, and she saw the sign. The border was only a mile away. The police must have had something to do with border patrol. At this speed that was less than a minute to stop the truck.

Fewer than sixty seconds.

A helicopter buzzed overhead. She must have been causing more of a stir than she had realized.

“Pull over to the side of the road, and stop your engine!” the police car ordered again.

Less than half a mile.

Hannah jammed her foot into the accelerator and pulled to the right of the truck. The vehicle swerved again, and she dropped off the side of the road, hitting the rocky dirt. Dust exploded up around her in a cloud.

The truck hit the rumble strip and stopped its swerve—ill equipped to deal with the soft shoulder that would suck it off the road.

Hannah lay into the gas, fighting to keep the car up to speed despite the drag of the dirt, the vehicle threatening to slide out of control. A gut-wrenching moment, and she was past the truck, blasting by. She adjusted the car and pulled back onto the road.

The tires hit the pavement, and the car began to fishtail. Swinging dangerously into the oncoming traffic—a pickup truck’s horn blasting.

It was like driving on ice. She’d done it before in the Colorado winters. The key was to not panic. To keep a still mind.

Everything seemed to slow as the vehicle straightened out, racing forward. Somewhere in another world she hit the brakes, and the car peeled out—the back end swung to the left. Tires screamed against highway. Thick clouds of white leapt upward as the rubber of the tires flash-boiled on the pavement, laying black streaks and throwing up the stench of scorched petroleum. The car jerked perpendicular to the road, directly in front of the truck rushing toward her passenger side. They tried to slow, horn screaming, brakes locked, rubber shrieking.

The passenger’s side exploded as the truck hit her.

“
No!
” John shouted across the headset, words clipping and crackling. The truck plowed into Hannah’s car, twenty yards from the border crossing.

“Bring us down,” Devin ordered, quieter than John, but equally intense, and the chopper began to lower.

The only sound was the hissing of the burst radiator. The only smell was the nauseating combination of burnt rubber and the sweetness of leaking antifreeze.

The only sensation was that of pain and disorientation.

Misha recovered slowly. Her eyes lifted painfully, looking up at the smashed windshield. The girl had succeeded in stopping them. But they were close to the border—close enough to get across on foot.

Flashing lights in the mirror caught Misha’s attention. The police would search the truck. They would find the girls, and they would all go to prison. She was struck with a second wind. The instinct to survive. Misha reached for the glove box and opened it fast, digging out the pistol. She didn’t know what it was called, but she knew how to use it, and she would if she had to.