Christ, the man isn’t human.
Screams — this time from multiple people and directions — and stampeding footsteps from the dining room behind her made the decision for her.
She took one, two, then three steps backward before spinning and darting out of the hallway. She instantly collided with a wall of people — men, women, and children — trying to flee the large room. Half of them were pouring out of the diner doors, the other half flooding into the connecting store on the other side.
Allie slipped her gun inside her jacket flap and let herself be carried toward the closest door with the flow of human traffic. A woman holding a young boy by the wrist ran next to her, eyes wide and hair flailing like streamers. The boy glanced at Allie and smiled, oblivious to what was happening. She smiled back, her heart beating faster and faster as she waited for Reese to come out of the hallway behind her and open up.
But he didn’t, and soon the cold night air swarmed her as she stepped outside. The woman with the boy went right while others went left and forward. She hesitated for a moment, got pushed in the back, staggered, and had to right herself and get her bearings.
Now what?
There, across the parking lot — the black and red semitrailer parked in front of the white Ford. Both vehicles looked so far away, and maybe that was because they were. But she knew exactly where to look for them, especially the big rig, which hadn’t moved an inch. She couldn’t make out Dwight in the shadows, but he would be nearby. That is, if he wasn’t already headed toward her in reaction to the chaos.
She stopped thinking about Dwight and focused singularly on the semitrailer. It was the only thing worth a damn right now — stopping it here, now, before it could leave with Sara and the others. She hated to abandon her original mission, but twenty-three lives was twenty-two more than just Faith’s. Maybe, eventually, she could pick up Faith’s trail again, but in the here and now there was only one choice, especially in light of what Reese had said back inside the diner.
“Our employers. They want us to cut our losses.”
She knew exactly what that meant, because to the men behind all of this, Sara and the others were just assets to be used and thrown away. They were just numbers — money, specifically — and not human beings, easy to divorce from.
“Our employers…”
She would find them, one of these days. Sooner or later, she would uncover their identities and she would show up at their front doors. She was good at that — finding people who didn’t want to be found. And the operation was large enough that there would be cracks, soft spots to exploit. And she had time. A lot of time and money.
But that was for later, because right now the only thing that mattered was making sure the black and red semitrailer stayed exactly where it was.
She started moving, then sprinting, then full-on racing across the parking lot, all the while willing the big rig to remain still, to stay there, stay there and don’t you goddamn move—
It came out of nowhere — a powerful hand latching onto her right arm, almost at the elbow, and snapping her out of her stride so suddenly she thought her entire arm might rip off. Allie lost her balance and almost fell down, but by some miracle her shoes managed to find the hard pavement and she spun around, her gun hand coming out from inside her jacket where she had hidden it since exiting the diner.
“What the fuck happened?”
Dwight, standing behind her (How the hell did he get back there?) with his hand on her arm, the two of them surrounded by fleeing truckers and diner employees and civilians alike, the sound of car engines firing up around them forcing Dwight to shout.
She didn’t get a chance to answer him because Dwight saw the gun in her hand and—
She couldn’t finish bringing her gun hand up because of his grip around her elbow, so Allie was forced to swing with her left fist, but she was right-hand dominant and although she’d spent a lot of time strengthening both hands, she didn’t quite have the power in the punch that she would have wanted, something she was woefully aware of as soon as she made contact with his right cheek. His head turned slightly from the blow, but there was zero chance he was going to go down, so instead of (pointlessly) swinging again, she threw her right shoulder at his chest. Dwight was still holding onto her right arm, so he had no defenses when she launched into him.
He stumbled back, letting go of her at the same time he collided with a trucker in a red ball cap that was running past them. The man fell to the hardtop with Dwight on top of him even as more people swerved around them. The trucker might have screamed, but against the chaos of thundering footsteps, shouts, and car engines revving up all across the parking lot, Allie wasn’t even sure she could hear a gunshot—
Dwight, still sitting on top of the shocked trucker, was swinging his hand out from behind his back, somehow having managed to draw his weapon between the time she punched him and when he fell back down.
But Allie already had her gun out, and she lifted it, saw his eyes go wide — at this range, she couldn’t have missed even if she wanted to, and he knew it — when something crashed into her from the side and sent her flying to the parking lot floor. The concrete bit into her flesh despite her clothes, but thank God she had the presence of mind to keep her head up, or else she might have bounced it against the pavement like a bowling ball.
Large, meaty fingers grabbed her right wrist and someone (a man) shouted, “I got ’er! I got the crazy bitch!”
Crazy bitch? she thought, even as she struggled to turn over onto her back, the hand refusing to let go of hers. Worse, there were now two hands on her wrist and one of them was trying to pry her fingers off the gun’s grip.
A man at least a hundred pounds heavier than her was sitting on top of her chest trying to wrestle the gun away, his face contorted in intense concentration, his lips greasy with whatever he had been eating before he fled the diner. He was huge, and his weight on top of her was like a house-size boulder pinning her to the ground, and Allie had no delusions she was going to win this wrestling match.
“I got ’er!” he shouted again. “Someone give me a hand! Hey, someone give me a friggin’ hand!”
You idiot! she thought, and wanted to shout at him but simply didn’t have the strength. Getting blindsided by a man his size had knocked more than just the breath from her; it had dazed her, and being sat on by him afterward hadn’t helped. Her head was still swirling from the shock, and he had already managed to pry two fingers off the Sig Sauer’s grip and was working on the third.
The one bright spot was that absolutely no one had stopped to lend the man the assistance he was shouting for. Everyone kept running, going for their parked cars. She could smell plenty of burning rubber as vehicles continued taking off around them. It made sense, of course, why everyone was fleeing. Who was going to stick around when someone was shooting up the place? It might have just been one gunshot (hers), but she doubted if anyone realized that once the stampede began.
She didn’t care about any of them at the moment. The fact that they were fleeing was good because it meant less possible collateral damage. Right now she had to focus on the fat man on top of her trying to pry her fingers off her gun even while his weight threatened to shut off her ability to do something as simple as breathe.
“Let go!” the man shouted, spittle flying from his mouth and hitting her in the face. “Let go of the gun, you crazy bitch!”