Serena put the gun in her mouth.
Stride sprinted toward the shanty from the west. Half of the shack was fully immersed in flames, and the lake was slowly pooling around it and drawing it back into its grasp. He could feel the wave of heat from where he was. He had seen these gas fires before, and they were always deadly and complete, reducing metal, wood, glass, and tissue to a flat, smoldering wreck, nothing more than a black rectangle on the ground. It never took long, never more than a handful of minutes.
He shot around the corner of the shack and spied a snow-covered sedan, its door ajar, and the boxy outline of a van parked twenty yards from the shanty door. The wind had blown the snow clear, and he recognized the Byte Patrol logo. It was a caricature of a nerd dressed like a cop, with a laptop in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. The cartoon laughed at him.
Someone half-limped, half-ran toward the front of the van. He was tall and huge, and Stride saw his long hair flowing madly in the wind.
"Stop!"
The man froze and swiveled to look at him. Blue Dog's eyes gleamed with recognition across the short distance that separated them.
"Where is she?" Stride shouted.
The man gestured his head at the burning fish house and smiled. Stride ran for the door of the fish house, which was already a ring of fire. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Blue Dog's right arm coming up, and he reacted by instinct, diving to the ground and rolling as two bullets ricocheted off the ice around him. Stride twisted in the snow, yanked his gun from his jacket, and fired back. His bullets thudded into the side of the van. Blue Dog jerked open the van door, and Stride fired again, four more times, missing the man's head by an inch and turning the window into popcorn. Blue Dog ducked, spun away from the van, and weaved as he ran through the blizzard, using the vehicle as cover as he headed for the trees.
Stride let him go. He scrambled back to his feet and pounded on the steel wall of the fish house. "Serena!"
The heat and intensity of the fire drove him back. His boots splashed in a foot of cold lake water where the ice was melting. The walls of the shanty were beginning to bow.
"Serena!"
He got on his knees and doused his head in the freezing water and lay down so that his whole body was soaked and frigid. Hypothermia was the least of his worries now; he just wanted to slow down the fire from taking hold on his skin. The wind bit at him, the heat burned, and the banshee screamed.
Stride stared into the maw of the devil.
As he prepared to jump through the doorway, he heard something that made his heart stop. Rising above the noise of the storm and the fire came the sharp crack of a single gunshot.
57
Maggie steered for the fire.
As she rounded the jagged edge of a peninsula, she saw the fish house burning like a pagan bonfire, ushering up a sacrifice to the storm god. The fire illuminated the entire inlet. She could see the twisting of windblown snow, the tin boxes of other shanties hunched against the blizzard, and the outline of birch trees like stick figures on the coast. As she navigated around the other fish houses and got closer, she could see a man outside the shanty, and even at that distance, she recognized Stride.
He was getting ready to go inside, and Maggie could see from the monsterlike size of the fire that doing so was no better than suicide. She honked her horn frantically, trying to stop him, but if he heard her, he ignored her.
"No!" she shouted inside the car and banged her fist on the steering wheel.
As she watched helplessly from fifty yards away, Stride took three steps and dove into the center of the doorway, through the flames, disappearing inside.
Maggie didn't see Blue Dog until it was too late. She never even heard the report of the gun. A bullet ripped through her windshield and embedded itself in the headrest on her seat, so close to her head that when she reached up instinctively to cover her ear, she felt blood on her fingers. The windshield held together except for the perfect, circular round hole and a spiderweb of cracks carved into the glass. Even so, she instinctively turned over the wheel, and the truck spun, the rear end leading it around in circles as she tapped the brakes.
When she finally stopped, another bullet screamed through the far side of the windshield, which finally gave up and rained down in a shower of glass. Maggie saw a man running at the truck, right arm in the air, firing wildly. She knew what he wanted-the truck, not her-something he could use for his escape. She grabbed the keys out of the ignition and hunched down, then scooted across the seat and pushed the passenger door open. She spilled out of the Avalanche.
Maggie dropped to her chest on the ice and stared under the truck, where she could barely see Blue Dog's legs through the driving tornado of snow. He was moving carefully and silently, step-by-step, about forty feet from the driver's door. She thought about running, but she wasn't going to do that. Not from this man. Not after what he had done to her.
She needed a weapon. Her pockets were empty, and the only thing in the glove compartment was a tire pressure gauge. In the covered bed of the truck, she kept an emergency radio, a forty-pound bag of sand, a medical kit, jumper cables, bungee cords, and a shovel. The shovel was made of durable plastic, designed to push snow out of the way, and wasn't the kind of blunt object she could use to beat a man unconscious.
That was all she had.
She decided to bluff. "Stop right there!" she screamed, and she saw him freeze in his tracks, trying to pinpoint the faint sound of her voice. "Take one more step, and I'll blow you away."
A long silence followed, then he fired several more times, shattering the rest of the windows in her truck and spraying the snow with bits of glass.
"If you had a gun, I'd be dead," he shouted back.
Maggie crawled quickly to the back of the truck. She hoped he couldn't see the tailgate as she unlocked and lowered it. She reached in and gently slid out the heavy bag of sand, taking care not to rock the chassis.
She squatted down and saw that he was twenty feet away. Cursing silently, she closed the tailgate, put the bag of sand down, and scrambled back to the open passenger door of the truck. She kept low and slid back inside, hoping he couldn't see her as she replaced the keys in the ignition. She backed out carefully, retrieved the forty-pound sandbag, and positioned it on its side under the truck, directly behind the right front tire. She relied on the wail of the storm to cover any noise she made.
Maggie retreated behind the truck bed and crouched down to watch him approach. He veered wide to check the front of the truck and went all the way around to the far side. She dodged backward, staying out of view. She saw him lift one leg and kick the passenger door shut and immediately fire three bullets into the earth. One bullet hit the rear bumper with a metallic clang. She prayed he didn't see the bag of sand hidden behind the tire.
He waited. He had to know where she was-in the back, behind the truck bed. The question was whether it was worth the time for him to track her down, knowing they could circle each other as long as she wanted. She watched him retrace his steps slowly to the front of the truck and back toward the driver's door. He hesitated there.
In the distance, she heard something beautiful. Sirens. Lots of them.
He opened the driver's door and climbed in and slammed it behind him. He turned over the engine, and Maggie pushed herself off her feet and ran toward the front of the truck. She knew he could see her coming in the sideview mirror, but that was okay. She wanted him to rush. He stepped on the accelerator, and the truck ground away at the ice and leaped forward.
Ten feet later, the Avalanche jerked to a stop as the rear wheel slammed into the bag of sand. Maggie reached the driver's door at the same second. She wrenched it open, grabbed him by his hair, and slammed his skull repeatedly against the metal frame of the door. He groaned and fell out of the truck. She looked for the gun, but it wasn't in his hand; she saw it on the far end of the dashboard where he had dropped it during the impact.