Intensity

grinding of the starter, as the killer tried to get the engine to turn over.
        Then another noise came to Chyna. Much closer than the car. Behind her. A rustle, a snap, a soft snort like a startled horse exhaling.
        Frightened, she turned.
        In the backwash of light from the motor home out on the highway, Chyna saw angels in the redwood grove. Or so it seemed for a moment. Regarding her were gentle faces, pale in the darkness, eyes luminous and inquisitive and kind.
        But even in that meager moonlike glow, she was unable to sustain a hope of angels. After a brief initial confusion, she realized that these creatures were a breed of coastal elk without antlers.
        Six stood together in a fifteen-foot-wide space between this outer row of trees and the deeper growth, so close that Chyna could have been among them in three steps. Their noble heads were lifted, ears pricked, gazes fixed intently on her.
        The elk were curious, but although timid by nature, they seemed oddly unafraid of her.
        Once, for two months, she and her mother had stayed on a ranch in Mendocino County, where a group of well-armed survivalists waited for the race wars that they believed would soon destroy the nation, and in that doomsday atmosphere, Chyna had spent as much time as possible exploring the surrounding countryside, hills and vales of singular beauty, groves of pines, golden fields where scattered oaks stood-each alone and huge and black-limbed against the sky-and where small herds of coastal elk appeared from time to time, always keeping at a distance from human beings and their works. She had stalked them not as a hunter but with awkward girlish guile, as shy as the elk themselves but irresistibly attracted to the tranquility and the peace that they radiated in a world otherwise saturated with violence.
        In those two months, she had never managed to get closer than eighty or ninety feet to the elk herds before they had reacted to her nonchalant approach, whidding to farther fields and ridges.
        Now they had approached her , vigilant but not frightened, as if they were the same elk of her childhood, at long last willing to believe in her peaceable intentions.
        Coastal elk should have been somewhat closer to the sea, in the open meadows beyond the redwoods, where the grass was lush and green from the winter rains, where the grazing was good. Although they were not strangers to the forest, their presence here, in the rainy predawn darkness, was remarkable.
        Then she saw others in addition to the herd of six-one here, one there, and there a third, and still more-between trees, at a greater distance than the initial group. Some were barely visible in the bosky grove, at the extreme reach of the backwash from the motor-home headlights, but she thought that there were as many as a dozen altogether, all standing at attention, as though transfixed by woodland music beyond human hearing.
        Lightning spread branches across the sky, put down jagged roots toward the earth, and briefly brightened the grove sufficiently for Chyna to see all the elk more clearly than before. More of them than she had thought. In mist and ferns, among flowering red rhododendron, revealed by fluttering leaves of light. Heads lifted, their breath steaming from black nostrils. Their eyes fixed on her.
        She looked out at the highway.
        The killer had given up trying to start the engine. He put the Honda in gear, and it began to roll backward on the slightly sloped pavement.
        After one last glance at the elk, Chyna stepped out from between the two redwoods.
        The killer pulled the steering wheel hard to the right, letting the momentum of the car carry it backward in an arc until it was facing downhill.
        Through sparse ferns and scattered clumps of bunch grass, Chyna approached the highway. The weakness in her legs was gone, and her spasm of irresolution had passed.
        Under the killer's guidance, the Honda coasted downhill and onto the right shoulder.
        She could go after him, shoot him in the car or as he got out of the car. But he was fifty yards away now, sixty, and he would surely see her coming. She would have no hope of keeping the advantage of surprise, so she would have to shoot to kill, which would do Ariel no good at all, because with this bastard dead they would still have to search for the girl wherever she was hidden. And they