Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [103]
Behind them the truck skidded on a patch of gravel. They could hear the tires sliding, then some banging as the vehicle struck rut after rut on the unimproved road. Zak still didn’t know which truck it was, or whether Scooter was hanging out a window with a rifle, but it didn’t matter. He could feel the hot wind on his face and in his hair. In their rush to leave, all except Stephens had forgotten their helmets at the mine.
At each of the shallow rain-diversion culverts engineered across the road, Zak dropped his weight down onto the shocks and jumped up at just the right moment to hop the culvert at full speed. Stephens and Giancarlo were both out of sight in front now. The shallow rain ditches that obstructed the road every couple of hundred yards would play havoc with the truck’s undercarriage, while a good cyclist with some nerve could jump them without losing any speed at all.
The descent took longer than Zak thought it would, but then time played funny tricks when you thought you were going to die. Even though the events around him seemed to have sped up, this descent was taking forever.
When Zak whizzed down the last leg of the hill and carved the curve that fed onto the flats, feeling the g-forces as he hit the dip, he spotted Giancarlo far ahead. Between them Stephens was glancing back over his shoulder.
Zak caught Stephens in the woods on the Lake Hancock plateau, Stephens pulling in behind, drafting, letting Zak do the work. Zak pedaled hard for a good minute before swinging to his right so Stephens could take a turn, but Stephens pulled over with him and remained in Zak’s slipstream. Giancarlo had been too far out in front for Stephens to catch, so Stephens had waited for Zak, who now put his head down and steamed along, towing him up to Giancarlo in less than half a mile. Muldaur was closing in, too. It showed just how strong Muldaur was that he could make up that much distance once they hit the flats. The truck was still out of sight.
It was smokier and windier than an hour earlier when they’d last been on this plateau—bad enough that the air seared Zak’s throat with each breath. The poisons would affect his legs if they hadn’t already, slowing him down and making the ride even more painful than it already was.
They passed the cutoff to the lake in a blur and were heading through thick woods toward the three-way intersection near the edge of the mountain. The road was flat in these woods, so the bikes quickly lost any advantage they’d had over the chasing truck.
Zak heard the truck reach the bottom of the hill, tires slapping at the potholes. It was coming right up on them. It was going to run over them.
All four cyclists were bunched together now, Giancarlo in the lead.
As the truck grew louder, Giancarlo detoured into the woods on a single-track game trail Zak hadn’t noticed. One by one they veered into the woods. Closing in fast, the truck sounded as if it were going a hundred miles an hour. The driver was clearly determined to kill them. Zak followed Giancarlo, while Stephens, who’d been behind Zak, grew anxious about escaping the road in time to avoid the truck and came up alongside him on the narrow trail, nearly forcing Zak into a tree. The clumsy maneuver came close to bringing them both down.
Once in the woods, Zak stopped and watched Muldaur dive off the road a split second before the Porsche Cayenne rushed past at around fifty miles per hour. The SUV missed Muldaur by three feet at most. Obviously, the plan had been to run him down—to run them all down. The Porsche braked hard, skidded in the dirt, and reversed. By then the first three cyclists had traveled thirty yards into the woods. Muldaur, who’d gained a mere ten yards, threw his bike down and stood behind the bole of a tree, the rifle braced against the tree and trained on the road. When he fired, the gunshot was incredibly loud in the woods. For the longest time, nobody moved, the Porsche idling in the road in a skein of dust and smoke. The bullet had shattered the