Rain washes the smell of lightning down through the night. Two scents of power, lightning and redwoods-electricity and time, fierce heat and stolid endurance-are offered to him now, and he inhales deeply with pleasure.
Taking this county road through the redwoods, along the coast, and reconnecting with Highway 101 south of Eureka will add between half an hour and an hour to his travel time, depending on the pace he sets and the strength of the storm. But as eager as he is to get home to Ariel, he could not have resisted the power of the redwoods.
Headlights appear behind him, visible in the angled side mirror. A car. For nearly an hour, one followed him on the freeway, hanging at a distance. This must be a different vehicle, because this driver is more aggressive than the one on the freeway, closing the distance between them at high speed.
Recklessly, the car-a Honda-pulls around the motor home, into the lane reserved for oncoming traffic, though this is not a passing zone.
There is no other traffic, and they are on a straightaway, but the Honda has insufficient distance to complete the maneuver before the next blind turn in the road, especially on the treacherous rain-slick blacktop.
Vess reduces speed.
The racing Honda pulls alongside him.
Looking down through the windshield of the car, Vess has barely a glimpse of the person behind the steering wheel, because the rain and the high-speed windshield wipers inhibit his view. Nothing more than a suggestion of a deep-red shirt or sweater. A pale hand on the wheel. The wrist is slender enough to indicate that the driver is most likely a woman. She appears to be alone. Then the car moves far enough forward so that Vess is looking down on the roof, and the windshield is out of sight.
They are rapidly approaching the curve.
Vess further reduces his speed. Through his open window, he listens to the shriek of the Honda as the driver accelerates. All the formidable power of that engine seems pathetically weak in these majestic groves, like the angry buzz of a gnat among a herd of elephants.
With so little effort that he would not increase his heartbeat, Vess could pull the wheel to the left, slam the motor home into the Honda, and force the car off the road. It would either roll and then explode or shatter head-on into one of the twenty-foot-diameter redwood trunks.
He is tempted.
The spectacle would be gratifying.
He spares the woman in the Honda only because he's in a mood for subtle-rather than explosive-sensation. This gratifying expedition has brought him not merely the Napa Valley family that he originally set out to destroy, but the hitchhiker now hanging in the bedroom closet like Poe's lover of Amontillado in the stone wall of a wine cellar, as well as the two clerks at the service station. This is already a satiating richness. The reef of the soul is built from varied experience, not from repetitive sensation. Right now he doesn't need the somber music of blood and the spurting warmth of screams; instead, he needs to smell the wetness of the rain, feel the towering mass of the trees, and listen to the cool pendulousness of the night-hidden ferns.
He applies the brakes, cutting his speed.
The Honda streaks past him, kicking up a high spray of dirty water. It enters the curve ahead with a flash of brake lights: red in the black storm, red glimmering off the damp gray bark of the big conifers, apocalyptic tracers of red rippling across the pavement. Then gone.
Edgler Vess is alone again, behind the wheel of his ark, in a colorless world of gray rain, black shadows, and sparkling white headlight beams, at peace to commune with the redwoods and draw from them a measure of their power.
He thinks of Christ on the vertical bed of dogwood, and the idea of the meek inheriting the earth makes him smile. He doesn't wish to inherit anything. He is a raging fire, powerful and hot; he will burn all the color out of this world, consume every scintilla of sensation that it has to offer, and he will leave behind a realm of ashes. Let the meek inherit ashes.
Passing the motor home, going too fast to prevent the Honda from straddling the double yellow line all the way around the curve, Chyna had been afraid that the parched engine would cough and choke and fail. Now that she had seen the red warning light, she was aware of it-a peripheral radiance-even when she wasn't looking at the instrument panel. But the Honda ran confidently on dregs, on fumes, on some strange grace.
She needed to put distance between herself and the killer, and gain time to set her plan in motion. She pushed the car as hard as she dared on the storm-greased pavement.
The narrow road rounded another bend, straightened out, entered a gradual descent, took another curve, rose on a gentle slope, but descended again, and in spite of the intermittent interruptions of these extremely low inclines, the land was generally monotonous in its contours, making its way steadily down toward the Pacific, not many miles to the west. Now low ramparts of soft earth flanked the blacktop just beyond both shoulders, and this wasn't suitable for her purposes. But then the road returned to the same level as the surrounding forest, and she entered another almost imperceptibly declining straightaway and found the ideal circumstances she required.
She figured that she had gained a full minute on him, maybe a minute and a half, depending on whether he had appreciably increased his speed after she passed him. Anyway, a minute should be long enough.
She slowed to thirty miles an hour and nonetheless seemed to be hurtling through the woods. She let the speed decrease to twenty-five, wondering again about her headlong rush to heroism but still unable to fully understand it. Then she drove off the roadway, flew across the right shoulder, thumped through a shallow drainage swale, and rammed into the fortress base of one of the biggest of the redwoods. The left headlight burst, the impact-absorbing bumper cracked and crumpled and collapsed as it had been designed to do, and metal shrieked briefly.
Because she was wearing a safety harness, she wasn't thrown into the steering wheel or through the windshield. But the diagonal strap tightened so hard across her breasts that she grunted with shock and pain.
The engine was still running.
With no time to get out and inspect the front of the car, Chyna was afraid that the damage wasn't sufficiently impressive to convince the killer that someone could have been injured in the crash. When he came upon this scene a few seconds from now, he must take everything at face value without hesitation. Otherwise, if he was suspicious, nothing would work as she had planned.
Immediately she shifted the Honda into reverse and backed away from the tree, which stood inviolate. The ground was carpeted with wet redwood needles on which the tires spun before gripping, but not enough rain had fallen to churn the earth into mud. Rattling and clinking, the car bounced across the shallow drainage swale, which ran with only an inch or two of muddy water, and backed onto the pavement again.
Chyna glanced toward the top of the gently ascending slope down which she had just driven. As yet there was not even a faint glow of approaching headlights from beyond the curve.
He was coming. No doubt about that.
Soon.
She didn't have time to reverse even part of the way up the slope. But she needed to build a little speed.
With her left foot, she tramped the brake pedal as far toward the floorboards as it would go, and with her right foot she eased down on the accelerator. The engine whined, then shrieked. The car strained like a spurred horse pressing against the gate of a rodeo chute. She could feel it wanting to surge forward, as if it were a living thing, and she wondered how much acceleration would be too much, enough to kill her or trap her in wreckage. Then she gave it a little more juice, smelled something burning, and raised her left foot from the brake pedal.