She couldn’t lift herself off the ground far enough to hit him in his bloated face, so Allie went for the next best thing — his groin. It was squatting on her chest, within easy reach, and completely unprotected.
You’re such a cliché, she thought, and swung again with her left fist.
He gulped, cheeks ballooning as if he was going to vomit, before he leaned forward and raised himself slightly off her. Better yet, his grip on her right wrist lessened, which allowed her to jerk her arm, and the gun, away.
Of course she couldn’t just shoot him — he was, after all, just being a (vulgar and sexist pig) Good Samaritan — but that didn’t mean she couldn’t grab him by the shoulders and throw him off her. He offered little resistance and landed face-first on the concrete beside her even as she struggled to her knees.
She expected to find Dwight standing over her, having waited with a smug grin on his face all this time as she struggled with the Good Samaritan. But Dwight was gone and so was the man he had crashed into. There was just a hat where the two of them had been, and as she stared at it, red and green lights splashed across it and the parking lot floor around her.
When she looked up, Allie was surprised to see two squad cars pulling into the truck stop. She recognized their colors. State troopers. Their sirens were blaring so loudly that she couldn’t fathom how she hadn’t heard them until now. She guessed she was concentrating so hard on trying not to lose the gun to the Good Samaritan that the cops could have parked right next to them and she wouldn’t have been aware of it until their tussle was over.
The fact that they were coming in with sirens wailing surprised her, but that quickly gave way to reality — she had fired off a shot in the diner and someone had probably called 911 as a result. That, combined with what she had told Lucy to tell the troopers and someone, somewhere, had put two and two together and decided, as Lucy would say, “shit had gone down.” That meant taking the truck stop quietly and cautiously was no longer possible.
Or she hoped that was the case anyway, and that she wasn’t just dealing with a bunch of idiots who responded to her message like a bunch of Rambos. Either way, the squad cars were tearing through the parking lot only to slam on their brakes as fleeing vehicles blocked their path. Sedans, trucks, and semis were all moving at once, so many that they reminded her of fishes in a pond, each and every one of them heading for the multiple exits.
Block the exits, you idiots! she wanted to shout at the squad cars, but knew how stupid that was. There were only two so far, and it was going to take a hell of a lot more cruisers to do that. But right now, there was only one vehicle that she cared about.
She looked across the parking lot at where the black and red semitrailer and the Ford would be and immediately caught a glimpse of a running figure as it dodged a station wagon that nearly ran it over.
Dwight.
She scrambled to her feet and jumped over the Good Samaritan still rolling around on the floor, cupping his crotch. She focused on Dwight — he was moving fast, even as the red and green lights of more state troopers began filling the truck stop, flickering across the parking lot around her and turning the place into some kind of wild discotheque.
“Dwight!” she shouted.
She was hoping he would slow down at the sound of her voice and look back, and maybe lose a precious second or two (or five) and allow her to make up some ground. But he didn’t, and kept running. He might not have even heard her over the sirens and car engines and horns honking as people came dangerously close to colliding. It was a madhouse if she had ever seen one, except this one just happened to involve hundreds of tons of moving metal.
Then she saw it and instantly forgot all about Dwight: The black and red semitrailer’s headlights had turned on, the stream of bright lights cutting through the shadowed edge of the lot drawing her eyes.
No. No, no, no, no.
She was forty yards away and closing fast, but it wasn’t going to be quick enough. She knew it without having to think about it. She would never reach it in time, and when the driver finally put the rig in gear it was going to leave with Sara and the other girls in the back and she would have failed both Faith and Sara—
No!
No, no, no, no!
The ceiling light inside the semi’s cab flickered on as someone opened a door. It had to be the passenger side, since the driver was already behind the steering wheel and she could make out his form struggling with his seatbelt. The new light gave her something to focus on — more importantly, it gave her a target.
She fired, again and again, using the cab’s light as a marker, even as she willed it to stay on, stay on, goddammit, stay on just a little longer. She ran and fired and could feel the gun getting lighter in her hand, but she didn’t stop.
She couldn’t. She couldn’t.
Allie mouthed a curse when the cab light finally blinked out of existence, but there was also relief because the semi had still not moved. She concentrated on the headlights, the most visible part of the vehicle, and every second that it stayed frozen — even as she got closer — was a victory for her, for Sara, for all the other girls inside that long trailer, probably terrified to death of what was happening.
She eventually stopped shooting, but she never stopped running. Her breath hammered out of her, her heartbeat racing out of control from exhaustion and adrenaline and fear the rig would start moving. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left in the P250, but the gun felt remarkably light even as she swung her arms back and forth as she sprinted faster, faster, faster.
Allie was almost there, close enough that she could see the cab’s broken driver-side window, the bullet holes in its door, when it came out of nowhere — a new pair of headlights, blinding her from the right — and caught her as she was still in mid-stride. She might have jumped at the very last second, but she couldn’t be certain, because she was overwhelmed with a feeling of weightlessness, as if she were…flying?
She didn’t really feel the impact of slamming back down to the parking lot floor, or know which part of her hit first, never mind where the gun went. Allie was only vaguely aware of voices far and near shouting, police sirens that seemed to drown out everything, and tires screaming and screaming and screaming louder. There was also the thick smell of rubber and spilled motor oil everywhere.
Then someone was grabbing her by the arms and dragging her across the pavement before she found herself flying again, except this time it was a much shorter flight. She also landed on much, much softer material this time, almost like lying down on a cloud or something equally absurd.
After that it wasn’t very hard to close her eyes and let go, to allow herself to give in to the numbness that was flooding her senses. The alternative was to embrace the pain, and although she wasn’t a stranger to that either, she made it a general rule to opt out when presented with the option.
The blare of police sirens continued to dominate everything — at least for a while, because even that started to fade into the background until, finally, she couldn’t hear them anymore. It was instead replaced by the sting of sweat and heavy breathing, though she couldn’t be certain it was coming from her or somewhere else inside—
Where the hell was she?
She had no idea, except she could hear voices, and they sounded remarkably close.
“She dead?” someone asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” a second one said.