how they would feel when a policeman showed up at their door and told them that their only daughter was dead. Her father would crumple like a tissue—he’d always been the soft one of the two—and her mother would stand there stone-faced and pale, as if this were a burden she was destined to carry.
It had been months since she’d been back to Waco, and she’d never thought to call them, even when all that stuff about her came out in the news. Her mother had called the day after her name had been revealed to the press. Cait had seen the missed call after her shift, but she’d never returned it. What could she possibly say? Her parents were good people, had worked hard to keep their family afloat, had taught her and her brothers right from wrong, had raised them right, and what had she done to thank them? Left for the city and never looked back, then dragged the family name through the mud. She knew the way that people at church would have looked at them afterward, the whispers and the pitying looks. And she hadn’t even had the courage to let her mother say that she was disappointed in her.
She had let them down, and now she was going to break their hearts. The policemen would hold their hats in their hands, would stand respectfully on the threshold of the little house on Pine Street, and her father would weep and her mother would nod and thank them for their time and then she would call Cait’s brothers and tell them the news that their sister had been killed.
That’s if they found her body. They were out in the middle of nowhere, and from the look of it, Adam seemed determined to drive them even deeper into it. In the distance, she could see the faint crest of a distant mesa. A good place to hide a body, in the canyon below. Was that what he had planned?
She had to get away. Like Rebecca had said when she chased after that kid at the gas station, she was a good runner. He would have to stop the truck sometime. She would get out and run as fast as she could. Her legs started tingling at the thought. Yes, that’s what she would do. She would run and run until her lungs gave out on her, run until she could no longer see him, and then she would keep running. As soon as her feet hit the ground, she would never stop running again.
Her ankle, though. She’d twisted it pretty bad when they flipped. Her ribs ached, too—one of them might even be cracked. She wouldn’t know what kind of shape she was in until she got out of the truck, and by then it might be too late. If she was too weak, or too slow, he would be able to catch her. And then he would kill her for sure.
Who was she kidding? She’d been a dead woman as soon as that truck appeared on the road behind her. It was just a matter of time now.
Cait’s eyes trailed to the rearview mirror. In the distance, about a half mile back, a cloud of dust gathered on the road, a boxy shape lurking behind it. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her—a mirage in the desert, pretty fitting—but then she saw the glint of metal off the grille and she knew it was real.
She would know that Jeep anywhere.
Adam
He didn’t know what she was smiling about. Just trying to make him feel small, probably, like the rest of them. He could feel her worming her way into his head, burrowing into the soft tissue of his brain. She was laughing at him. After everything he’d done, she was still laughing at him.
He was still that little boy standing in Roller Kingdom, watching his mother hide her tears because she knew her son was a loser. He was that pimply teenager getting chased through the parking lot by a bunch of jocks. He was that guy in the bar whom women turned their backs on when he approached them. He was one of life’s rejects. Pathetic. A maggot.
Then he saw that Jeep in the rearview mirror, and the power surged through him again.
Remember the mission, he told himself. This was a war they were fighting, and he was their soldier.
He and his brothers had spent a lifetime being told that they