her ears as she flew. She hit him square in the chest and knocked him to the ground, sending the gun skittering out of his hand into the brush.
Their two bodies were locked together, fingers clawing, elbows gouging, knees pinning each other tight. She sank her teeth into the soft flesh of his forearm and he screamed. He grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled until she felt it tear from the roots. Her thumbs searched for his eye sockets. She wanted to hurt him as much as she could. She wanted him to suffer.
He was strong, though. Stronger than he looked. His hands found her neck and started to squeeze. When she tried to pry his fingers away, he smashed her head against the ground, hard. The blue sky began to darken. She heard her breath in her ears, too loud, gasping. He squeezed harder.
“How does it feel to suffer?” he hissed, eyes burning into hers. “How does it feel to die?”
Her hands and feet went numb. All of the struggle drained out of her, and she lay there, limp, as he bore down on her and the world began to fade. She closed her eyes as a strange warmth spread through her body. This was a place beyond pain.
She didn’t hear the gun go off. She felt his weight collapse onto her heavily and the wet warmth of his blood as it poured through the hole in his neck and the muffled rasp of his breath as it left his body for the last time. But she never heard the gun.
She opened her eyes to see Rebecca standing above her, the sun haloed around her face.
It was morning, and they were alive.
Moriarty, New Mexico—284 Miles to Lubbock
They left Adam’s body on the mountainside for the police or the vultures to find. If it was the latter, in a few weeks, there would be nothing left but bleached bones. The desert was a hungry scavenger, and it wouldn’t waste time.
They left his truck there, too, its charred body wrapped around the scorched remains of the pine tree. Cait had never seen him drive a pickup—he had an old Corolla with a Longhorns decal on the window—so she wasn’t sure it was even his. Probably a rental, which meant that someone would miss it eventually. They might even come looking for it. It wouldn’t matter. She and Rebecca would be long gone. She had already decided that if the police came knocking at her apartment door, asking about her missing neighbor, she’d tell them she didn’t know anything about him. In a way, it would be the truth. He was more of a mystery to her now than he ever had been.
The Jeep’s engine took a couple of tries to turn over, but it managed in the end, and together they wound their way down the dirt track and back onto the main road.
Cait didn’t look back. Her ribs were bruised and her face bloodied and swollen and her left arm throbbed, but what had happened back in the desert already felt like a dream. She knew she’d left part of herself back there on the mesa, too, next to the body and the burnt-out truck. She didn’t think she would miss it.
They found an auto body shop attached to a gas station just shy of Moriarty and pulled in. Just in time: the Jeep was limping hard, and Cait could feel it was about to give up. She parked around back and they went straight to the ladies’ room to clean themselves up as best they could. Cait’s mouth was swollen and sore, and Rebecca had a nasty-looking gash above her eye, but the rest of their injuries could be hidden. Cait had a couple of changes of clothes in the backseat: leggings and baggy sweatshirts that made them look like a pair of sorority sisters on their way to a cleansing retreat. They stashed their bloodied clothes under the seat for Cait to get rid of later, once they were back in Texas.
They’d fixed their story on the way. If anyone asked—and the mechanic did, as soon as Cait pointed to the Jeep parked in the back of the lot—they would say that a fox had run in front of them and she’d swerved off the road trying to avoid it. The best stories are always the ones rooted in the truth: sure enough, there was a tuft of fur lodged in the grille, and a faint