CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The lights died with a gunshot-like crack from somewhere behind the bar, and for half a heartbeat the whole place froze.
Neon signs winked out. The jukebox choked in the middle of a chorus.
Bottles rattled on their shelves as thunder rolled over the roof hard enough to shake dust from the rafters.
Then the power surged back, white and violent, throwing every face into stark relief before plunging the room into darkness again.
Neela moved on the second blackout.
She slipped out the door without anyone noticing.
Someone shouted. Another voice snapped her name.
She did not look back. A flash of lightning poured through the kitchen windows and turned the stainless-steel counters blue.
In that cold instant she saw the exit, the cook flattened against a freezer, and a shadow filling the doorway behind her.
Darkness swallowed them again.
Neela hit the crash bar and the back door flew open.
Wind seized it and ripped it from her hand.
Rain struck her face like thrown gravel.
She stumbled onto the loading slab, shoes skidding across grease and water, and heard the storm erase the noise from inside.
The bar door slammed against the brick wall, bounced, and slammed again.
She ran before anyone could force it closed around her.
The parking lot had become a broken mirror. Lightning splintered across every puddle. The flood lamps over the rear entrance fluttered weakly, painting the dumpsters, weeds, and parked trucks in sickly yellow bursts. Between flashes, nothing existed but rain and the deep black wall of the swamp.
Neela splashed through ankle-deep runoff and dropped beside it. Her fingers slipped on the key. She jammed it into the ignition, twisted, and kicked the starter. The engine gave one hollow cough. She kicked again. Nothing.
“Come on.”
She leaned over the bike, shielding the controls with her body while rain streamed from her hair and down her sleeves.
The fuel line hung loose beneath the tank.
Not shaken free. Cut. A clean slice showed pale in the lightning.
The spark-plug lead had been pulled and nicked through as well.
Whoever had done it had taken the extra seconds to make certain she could not repair it in the dark.
A shape crossed the bar’s rear doorway. Neela abandoned the bike and plunged into the trees.
The ground dropped sharply beyond the lot, and the first step sank to her shin.
Mud clamped around her foot with the grip of a hand.
She wrenched free, leaving a shoe half off her heel, and caught herself against the slick trunk of a cypress.
Bark tore the skin of her palm. The wind bent the canopy overhead until branches ground together like teeth.
Behind her, the rear door banged open again.
“She went that way!”
Ham’s voice tore through the storm. A commanding voice that understood the circumstances, the risks and benefits of everything. Neela ran harder.
There was no path, only the memory of one.
A narrow track used by hunters and men who preferred not to be seen had once cut from the bar to an old service road.
Now rainwater rushed along every depression, disguising roots and holes under a skin of brown foam.
Saw grass whipped her cheeks. Thorn vines caught her jacket and snapped her backward.
She tore loose, heard fabric rip, and kept moving.
Lightning struck close enough to fill her mouth with metal.
The thunder followed at once, a crushing blow that seemed to lift the earth beneath her.
For one blinding second the swamp stood exposed around her: black pools swollen over their banks, cypress knees rising like broken bones, curtains of rain slanting almost sideways, and farther back several figures spreading through the trees.
Ham was broad enough to recognize even at a distance.
Rush moved beside him in quick, sharp bursts, one hand raised against the rain.
Christian and Iggy followed, bent into the wind.
Jean’s pale shirt flashed between trunks.
More lights bobbed behind them—powerful beams carried by the men of the Swamp Rats.
Nutt, Plum, and Wood knew this ground. That frightened her more than the others. She veered away from the old trail and drove deeper into the flooded timber.
Her remaining shoe vanished in the mud ten yards later.
The muck sucked it clean from her foot, and when she reached back for it her fingers found only cold water and a tangle of grass.
She left it. One bare foot slapped through the mud while the other dragged the half-loosened shoe, ruining her balance. She kicked that one off too.
The earth cut back immediately. Shell fragments and buried sticks bit into her soles. Something sharp opened the ball of her foot. Warmth spread between her toes, then vanished beneath the cold rain.
She ducked under a fallen limb and nearly impaled herself on a snapped branch. Its jagged end scraped beneath her ribs, tearing her shirt and scoring a hot line across her skin. She twisted away and staggered onward, one arm clamped to her side.
“Stop running!” Rush shouted. “You can’t outrun the storm.”
She could not.
They were not friends, and they were not coming to help. They knew what she was capable of and what she had already done. The sabotaged bike proved they had planned for her tricks, cutting off the fastest escape before closing in. Or at least Tank knew what she’d planned.
Neela did not fear betrayal. She feared judgment—and the people behind her had come to deliver it.
Mud swallowed her elbows and chest. Water flooded her sleeves. The beam of light passed over the brush, paused, then swung back. Neela crawled beneath a tangle of wax myrtle, pressing her body into the black slurry while ants and grit moved against her neck. She held her breath.
“Tracks split here,” Christian said.
“No,” another man answered. Plum, perhaps. His voice carried the slow certainty of someone reading a language written into the ground. “One set. She doubled sideways through the palmetto.”
Neela clenched her teeth to stop them chattering. A flashlight lanced through the leaves inches from her face. She could see each raindrop crossing the beam, bright as sparks. Then the light moved on.
“Tank!” Iggy called somewhere behind them. “Circle toward the high ground!”
The name drove a new pulse of fear through her. She turned away from the voices and entered water to her thighs. The swamp opened beneath her without warning. One step found soft bottom. The next found nothing.
She plunged to her waist, then her chest. Black water closed around her with a dead, oily chill.
She flung both arms outward and caught a submerged branch before the channel took her.
The current pulled at her legs, dragging them beneath a mat of floating leaves.
For an instant something smooth and muscular brushed her calf.
Neela bit down on a scream and hauled herself along the branch.
The bank crumbled under her hands. Mud packed beneath her fingernails as she clawed for purchase.
A root tore loose. She dropped back into the water, swallowed a mouthful, came up coughing, and lunged again.
This time her forearm hooked across a cypress knee.
She dragged herself onto the bank and lay there gagging while rain drummed against her back.
Lights scattered behind her again.
“She crossed!” Wood shouted.
“Current’s running too fast,” Jean called.
“There’s a log ten yards east,” Nutt answered. “Move!”
“Keep moving,” she whispered. Her voice sounded small and strange.
“I found blood,” Iggy said.
Water rose from her knees to her hips. Wind chopped its surface into black scales.
She held her hands before her, feeling for submerged obstacles.
The bottom sucked at every step. When lightning flashed, she saw the far side perhaps forty yards away.
She also saw the wake moving across the clearing.
It came from her right, wide and deliberate. Neela stopped breathing.
A shot cracked through the storm. Water jumped ten feet from her. The hidden body thrashed, tail battering the surface, and the clearing exploded into foam. Neela screamed and hurled herself toward the nearest tree stump.
“Cut left!” Rush yelled from the bank. “Drive her toward the far bank!”
Another shot sounded, swallowed by thunder, forcing the animal away while narrowing Neela’s only path of escape.
Branches lashed her face. She tasted blood where her lip split.
The clearing’s terror had burned through the last of her strength, leaving only momentum.
She climbed because the ground rose. She turned because trees blocked her.
She breathed because her body refused to stop, although each breath had become a ragged scrape in her chest.
The pursuit broke apart behind her.
Rain hammered her eyes shut. Wind shoved against her chest until she had to lean forward like a climber.
Leaves, bark, and small branches flew past in the dark.
A length of rusted tin ripped from some distant shed sailed over the road, turning slowly, its edge shining in a lightning flash before it disappeared among the trees.
The next gust knocked Neela sideways. She caught herself on both hands.
Gravel and broken shell drove into her palms. She rose, fell, rose again.
Her ankle had swollen inside the mud caked around it.
Each step sent a bright pulse up her leg.
“There!” Wood shouted.
Neela crawled beneath a curtain of vines.
The ditch narrowed into a culvert clogged with branches and storm debris.
Water thundered through the remaining gap.
She squeezed between the concrete wall and a knot of roots, scraping skin from her shoulder as she forced herself through. Then she shoved into the culvert.