Seven seconds later, the first motorcycle came cruising through the gap. Zachary had just enough time to see the stopped H4, Sophie in ambush, the cover of wrecks and the deep pools of water. Then he must have gone blind in the high beams’ glare. He slammed his brakes, tilted his body as his Harley was forced into a right-hand tilt and he tried to bring his pistol around, but the combination of frantic movements was too much for anyone to deal with. Especially, it seemed, a rider who had been following taillights, a man almost blinded by the rain. The Harley’s front tire caught a crater-puddle’s edge, lurched at a twisting angle and tilted down into water, sending the cycle’s back end up into the air. Zachary’s arms pin-wheeled as he stumbled off the fallen bike, his legs pumping and wrenching in mad swirls as he spun over his falling Harley, trying to run at forty-five miles an hour.
He went down hard, his shins cracking and one leg popping open, sending a bright white shard of blood-laced bone out through his sodden jeans. There was a loud crack over the sound of thunder as his helmeted forehead slammed down into the asphalt. The three other riders, getting their first glimpse beyond the wrecks then going blind, hitting the brakes of their own cycles, each came to wobbling halts just on the other side of the wreck-gap. They could not yet see Sophie’s from that vantage, but they must have seen their leader’s broken body tumbling out over the spinning Harley, skidding across the road in a bloody funnel of mud and water.
Zachary raised his head, just as the other riders parked their cycles and were creeping through the wreck-gap with pistols raised. Very soon, their helmet tints would adjust, or visors would be raised, and they would be in range to shoot at Sophie, but they were still marveling at Zachary’s shattered leg and frantically pumping arms as he tried to raise himself out of a filthy puddle.
Sophie had been taking aim as Zachary was falling. As he raised his head, she could see that one side of his tilted helmet had fractured off of his face in that first impact. There was exposed skull, and a rain-spattered flap of skin hanging into his bloodied eye socket. He could not see his allies raising their guns behind him, he could barely see Sophie but he was staring at her with one rolling and terror-filled eye. The shotgun was gone. He had a gloved hand clutched up in a broken fist, holding his shattered nose together, and the other hand’s fingers were splayed up shivering in the air, reaching out for her.
He had time to cry out only: “Mercy!”
There was none. Sophie, knowing she would need every bullet, had already adjusted the SMG’s trigger configuration from full automatic to burst. She took careful aim at Zachary’s face, and gunned him down.
The clutching hand and then the face behind it ruptured and exploded. Zachary’s left broken leg twitched up in a spasm of a kick, and Sophie was instantly reminded of the face-caged girl whose blood and gore she was wearing still. Zachary’s gloved hands flopped down, his ruined face hit hard and splashed up a scarlet dash from the pooling rain. Behind him, some twenty yards farther on, the other three riders were standing in front of their motorcycles, helmets open, mouths wide open in disbelief and horror. One of the young men had two automatic pistols out, but they were pointed at the ground while he looked down on Zachary’s shattered body. Another had dropped his gun and raised his arms in a shielding pantomime of abject surrender, and the third was staring directly at Sophie in the light, with a sopping trash bag partially wrapped around his shoulders. The wind-blown plastic was flapping in his face. Sophie selected this man next, and with a rising scream of fury she crouched down further in her seat behind the H4’s open door, aiming the SMG at the man’s leather-clad panting chest as he was firing almost blind.
His first shot went over Sophie’s head. Sophie fired a burst at the same time, but only kicked up spurts of water near the gunman’s feet. The man’s second shot hit the carryall ten inches above Sophie’s head.
She fired again, another two-shot burst that dashed smoking jets of sparks off the wreck of a Buick, but still to the left of the man’s now-crouching silhouette. She hadn’t meant to give any warning shots, only to kill. He dove and went crawling away, and the other two men ran off in the other direction behind the wrecks, back the way they’d come. The youngest one of them gave a last frantic signal of submission, then all three ran back to their cycles.
No cycle headlights. No more shots, no shadows. Sophie waited, switching the SMG’s fire configuration back to full automatic. I can’t believe I missed. I… If she had fired full auto from the very first and missed, she would have emptied out her magazine in three or four seconds and would probably be dead by now. She waited, ready to spend her entire clip if the three surviving men dared to charge out at her again. Very likely, at least two of the men and she herself would die.
But after a few more seconds engines rumbled, headlights fumed on in reflected and turning jets of amber and bluish light, and there were only the sounds of rain, and thunder, and then three motorcycle engines fading far away. Sophie waited there for another full and tortuous minute, staring numbly at the growing crimson pool draining out of the jagged top of Zachary’s shrapnel- and hair-draped skull.
A dart of lightning, distant thunder. After the rumbling had cleared, there was only the sound of distant engines. Even that was more a memory than anything real. She rummaged for the loaded hunting rifles, brought them both into the front. She waited a little longer, taking cover on the other side of the Hummer’s hood, but the men did not return.
Gone. She sobbed a breath of sheer relief. I can’t believe it.
And so it ended.
It seemed to Sophie as if the Fates themselves had judged the relentless chieftain of Pearson’s Corner, and found him wanting. Young master Rollins — for Sophie had recognized the man who had given the signal to retreat, it was the first cowardly boy she had almost killed back in the fuel bay, a very brave and reckless boy until she had pointed her gun into his face — would perhaps ensure that none of the other fools would chase after the crazed and deadly Sophie ever again. Not that night, at least. The ruinous thirst of hatred had already exacted a terrible price from the men of Pearson’s Corner, and nothing had been gained but freedom from Zachary, two further men’s deaths and a few scraps and cans of food. And the food would last longer, with so many dead. What else was there to fight for?
In disbelief, sopping wet and listening between growls of thunder to the ringing in her ears, Sophie finally got back into the H4. She secured the rifles, stashed the SMG. It was time to drive a little farther to be sure, to hide the Hummer between the looming shadows of two or more enormous wrecks, to crawl into the back and to see if she could save her Silas’ life.
“How?” she whispered to no one. She burrowed behind her seat for a bottle of water. “How am I alive?”
Deep inside her, a distant girl was laughing, in terror and in pain and breathless ecstasy. The spirit of Patrice, having at last beheld the death of many men through her still-living sister’s eyes, began to exhale illusory clots of darkness into Sophie’s mind, like almost-carnal sighs of satisfaction. It felt to Sophie as if Patrice St.-Germain was at last crawling from off her throne, a bulbous spider, sated of blood and gore. You did it, sister mine. I knew you could kill in the name of love. I knew!
Sophie swallowed. The taste of coppery blood where she had bitten the inside of her mouth, the water, the bittersweet lingering of horror scarcely fallen into the past.