Race the Darkness (Fatal Dreams, #1)(11)
No way had the grandmother survived. His thoughts shifted into hyperdrive, searching for options to keep him and Isleen alive. He wasn’t the type to turn pussy and run. He was the type who enjoyed a good ass stomping. Didn’t matter if he was the victor or the loser—either way was more satisfying than walking away with a limp dick. His hope sputtered and stalled. There were no options. But there was nothing to do. No way to fight. Here, in this situation, when he had to think about more than himself, the only fucking choice was to run.
With Isleen still pinned to his chest, he sprinted toward the cover of the cornfield. Maybe he could lose the bitch in the hundreds of acres.
The stalks weren’t even as tall as he was and yet they stood as a formidable guard, blocking his entry into the field. He fought through the first row of corn, through another, and another—bashing, smashing, using his body and Isleen’s to penetrate the field. The coarse leaves sliced at his face, his neck, his arms, leaving stinging cuts in their wake. He couldn’t tolerate the thought of what they must be doing to Isleen’s naked skin.
He glanced through the leaves, back to the yard. The truck broke free from the trailer and shot directly for where they had entered the field. Of course, it came right for them; he’d carved a nice path to their location.
He hunched over and changed direction, turning left to follow the row instead of going against it. The space wasn’t wide enough for him, and certainly not for both of them. He ran in an awkward sidestepping motion.
The truck hit the corn in the spot they’d vacated less than ten seconds ago. For one fist-pumping moment, it sounded like the bitch was going to drive around in the middle of the field searching for them, but then the banging of stalks against the truck grille turned in their direction and got closer and closer as if she knew exactly where they were.
Xander bashed back through the sentry rows into the yard and sprinted toward the trailer. If he could just get to the structure and hide inside, maybe the bitch would think they were still in the field. The angry growl of the engine was suddenly, inexplicably, obscenely close. The truck jumped out of the field no more than fifty feet behind him.
They weren’t going to make it.
Not unless he suddenly sprouted blue tights and a red cape. The hope of escape morphed into despair and resignation and finally reckless pissed-off-ness. No fucking way was he going to die running. He stopped, turned, and faced the truck barreling toward them. The tires ate up the ground at an indecent rate. He clutched Isleen tighter to his chest. For her sake, he wanted it to be a quick death. No more lingering. No more pain.
That thought infuriated him. None of this was right. They shouldn’t be on the verge of death. Again.
The truck kept coming—now twenty-five feet away.
Everything slowed, happening as if through the quicksand of time. A white dandelion floaty meandered on the breeze directly between them and the truck. His heart no longer ran a staccato rhythm. Duh…dum. Pause. Duh…dum. Pause.
His life didn’t flash before his eyes. The future did. Isleen’s future. In an ethereal dream beyond time, her skin was gilded by firelight, her eyes devoid of sadness and fear, her body whole and healthy. She smiled, an expression so full of warmth and tenderness and undiluted joy that it plunked itself down inside his heart and wouldn’t leave.
He ached to create that kind of smile on her face, but their lives were over. It all could’ve gone so differently if he’d only listened to her, believed in her, found her years before now.
The air changed, displaced by the truck only a few feet from them. Heat from the engine blasted his face, smelling of burning oil, gasoline, and a scent reminiscent of popped corn. He locked eyes with the bitch. Her pudgy lips ripped back over her teeth in a snarling scream.
Xander knew anger—his best friends were fury and rage—but the look on the bitch’s face went beyond mere anger all the way to unholy.
The truck imploded.
The sound was supersonic, a resonation that rippled through his skin and muscle to rattle his bones and shake the earth underneath his feet. Metal and glass and fire shot outward, skyward, backward, in a near-perfect arc of destruction. Flaming debris rained around them.
He stood there holding Isleen, watching it happen, not believing the message his eyes sent to his brain.
“What the…?” The last of the truck parts hit the ground. The pieces burned. That’s all that was left—pieces. Nothing touched them, like they resided under an invisible dome of protection.
He glanced down at Isleen for an answer, but she was unconscious, her head lolling so limply on her neck it looked as if he was carrying a corpse.
*
The buzzing and drilling of unrelenting noise—conversations, beeping machines, TV, the rumble of the overworked AC—all threatened to shatter Xander’s two-fisted grip on sanity. He sat in the emergency room waiting area, elbows on knees, hands cupped over his ears to filter out some of the chaos. The only consolation was that no one spoke to him. Tuning in on top of everything else would be a formal invitation for the Bastard to make a guest appearance.
The day had already gone to shit, but Xander didn’t need the lowlight to be the Bastard going on an angry rampage that ended with him either in jail or in a hospital room recovering from bashing his face through a concrete wall. Been there. Done that. Twice. He didn’t want to see what kind of charm the third time would offer.
It’d been four hours since the officer who’d found them had rushed them to the emergency room. Xander had tried listening in only to the conversations about Isleen, but trying to filter out all the noise to follow one thread was exhausting and overwhelming. The only thing he knew for sure—she could just as easily live as die.