swung around another corner and went up through the deserted streets in the middle of town, headed for the highway going north. When I passed the city limits I was doing sixty and gaining speed. The road dipped down in a long grade, across a valley two or three miles wide, and over the hill on the other side. Darkness was fading, with the sky growing pink over to the east, as we shot across the valley and started up the hill. They won’t know which road we took, I thought. There are four of them out of town. Just before we topped the hill I looked back and the road was empty.
It was thirty miles to Woodley. That was a highway junction too, and if we got past it before they got the alarm on the air, the chances were against their having all the roads blocked. They wouldn’t have enough cars. In a few minutes I shot another look behind me and felt the terror again. Headlights had just topped a hill, far back. I hadn’t passed anybody, and if a car was overhauling us at this speed it was chasing us. It was nearly full daylight now, and I cut the headlights as we went over another rise and slowed to swing into a country road running west. At the first crossroad I turned south. About fifteen miles down there it should bisect the highway running west from Harrisville. It did, but just as I approached I saw a patrol car go careening past, headed west. I’ll be behind him, I thought desperately, and they’re going to plug it somewhere up ahead. When he was out of sight I shot across the highway, still roaring south on the secondary road.
I could feel the panic closing in. They were plugging them fast now, too fast. North was shut off, and west was being cut. About thirty miles south I’d hit the east-west highway out of Bigelow, but could I get west on that one now? They were turning me inward in a big circle, and again I had that awful sensation of going around and around in a big whirlpool and sliding toward the center I slammed around a turn and was nearly on top of a farmer in an old Ford. He was in the center of the road, and I swung down into the ditch and clawed my way back up just before I hit a culvert. The sun was up now, and I could feel it burning the side of my face. Everything looked unreal, like an impressionistic painting, all the farmhouses and barns too sharp-angled and light-struck, so they hurt the eye, and then suddenly I thought with amazement that it was Sunday morning and people would be going to church and that sometime before long I was going to unwind like a broken clock spring because I couldn’t remember what it was like to sleep.
The last highway going west was the one out of Bigelow. I made the turn, throwing gravel across the pavement, and then hit the brakes. A half mile up ahead a patrol car waited, sitting beside the road. I shot into reverse, swung, and was going east before he could get turned around. We were trapped now. No, I thought wildly, maybe not. It may be wide open to the east and south, because all these cars had to come from somewhere. They pulled them off the lake when they heard I was in Harrisville. If I can get through Bigelow I might get on down to Colston and shake them going east. But I had to pull away from him to get through town. It was fifteen miles and he was almost out of sight by the time I hit the city limits. I cut down side streets and missed the square, not even recognizing anything because by now it was all an endless mad race through a dream with this part just like any other and having no connections with the town I’d lived in all my life.
Then we were clear of town on the highway going east. The car chasing us was nowhere in sight; I slowed a little to make the turn four miles beyond, where I had wrecked the other car, then began to let it out. The pines began to blur and run together on both sides, with the highway a straight groove down the middle; the car was a projectile in a