storm runoff had exposed a spine of bedrock under the hills. With no rain in over two weeks, this rocky course was dry.
I paused to catch my breath. Leaning back into the brush, I parted the tall cordgrass to see how far down into the rose gardens the searchers had descended.
Four of them were already climbing the fence. Their flashlight beams slashed at the sky, stuttered across the pickets, and stabbed randomly at the ground as they clambered up and over the iron.
They were unnervingly quick and agile.
Were all of them, like Sandy Kirk, carrying weapons?
Considering their animal-keen instinct, speed, and persistence, perhaps they wouldn’t need weapons. If they caught me, maybe they would tear me apart with their hands.
I wondered if they would take my eyes.
The drainage channel—and the wider declivity in which it lay—ran uphill to the northeast and downhill to the southwest. As I was already at the extreme northeast end of town, I could find no help if I went uphill.
I headed southwest, following the brush-flanked swale, intending to return to well-populated territory as quickly as possible.
In the shallowly cupped channel ahead of me, the moon-burnished bedrock glowed softly like the milky ice on a winter pond, dwindling into obscurity. The embracing curtains of high, silvery cordgrass appeared to be stiff with frost.
Suppressing all fear of falling on loose stones or of snapping an ankle in a natural borehole, I gave myself to the night, allowing the darkness to push me as wind pushes a sailing ship. I sprinted down the gradual slope with no sensation of feet striking ground, as though I actually were skating across the frozen rock.
Within two hundred yards, I came to a place where hills folded into one another, resulting in a branching of the hollow. With barely any decrease in speed, I chose the right-hand course because it would lead more directly back into Moonlight Bay.
I had gone only a short distance past that intersection when I saw lights approaching. A hundred yards ahead, the hollow turned out of sight to the left, around a sweeping curve of grassy hillside. The source of the questing beams lay beyond that bend, but I could see that they must be flashlights.
None of the men from the funeral home could have gotten out of the rose gardens and ahead of me so quickly. These were additional searchers.
They were attempting to trap me in a pincer maneuver. I felt as though I were being pursued by an army, by platoons that had sprung sorcerously from the ground itself.
I came to a complete halt.
I considered stepping off the bare rock, into concealment behind the man-high prairie grass and other dense brush that still bracketed the drainage swale. No matter how little I disturbed this vegetation, however, I was nearly certain to leave signs of my passage that would be obvious to these trackers. They would burst through the brush and capture me or gun me down as I scrambled up the open hillside.
At the bend ahead, the flashlight beams swelled brighter. Sprays of tall prairie grass flared like beautifully chased forms on a sterling platter.
I retreated to the Y in the hollow and took the left-hand branch that I’d forgone a minute earlier. Within six or seven hundred feet, I came to another Y, wanted to go to the right—toward town—was afraid I’d be playing into their assumptions, and took the left-hand branch instead, although it would lead me deeper into the unpopulated hills.
From somewhere above and off to the west arose the grumble of an engine, distant at first but then suddenly nearer. The engine noise was so powerful that I thought it came from an aircraft making a low pass. This wasn’t the stuttering clatter of a helicopter, but more like the roar of a fixed-wing plane.
Then a dazzling light swept the hilltops to the left and right of me, passing directly across the hollow, sixty to eighty feet over my head. The beam was so bright, so intense, that it seemed to have weight and texture, like a white-hot gush of some molten substance.
A high-powered searchlight. It arced away and reflected off distant ridges to the east and north.
Where did they get this sophisticated ordnance on such short notice?
Was Sandy Kirk the grand kleagle of an antigovernment militia headquartered in secret bunkers jammed with weapons and ammo, deep under the funeral home? No, that didn’t ring true. Such things were merely the stuff of real life these days, the current events of