Mind Prey

have to drive past Davenport’s building. He didn’t want to do that.
    He hesitated. The cop was probably on the way to the shooting. He could wait until he passed.
    Mail shifted into reverse and started to back up—but then the cop car, still six or eight blocks away, unexpectedly slewed sideways across the street. And then he saw more lights far down to his right, and then another car joining the squad blocking the street to his left.
    “Motherfuckers.”
    He felt as though a hand had grabbed his heart and squeezed it. He’d underestimated Davenport. The building wasn’t the trap. The whole goddamn area was the trap.
    Headlights still off, he did a quick U-turn and rolled down the street toward a grain elevator at the end. He hadn’t been down there, didn’t know what to expect, but once out of the immediate neighborhood, he could work his way through back streets until he was completely clear.
    A cold sweat broke on his face, and his hands held the steering wheel so tightly that they hurt. He had to break out of this.
    But he couldn’t see much without the lights. Strange, odd shapes, wheelless tractor trailers, loomed off to the left. Here and there, a machine with claws, like mutated, earth-moving equipment. He drove between two elevator buildings, slowed. The van dropped into a pothole seven inches deep and half as long as the van itself, then climbed out the other side. Two trailers were parked against a loading dock. Another van was tucked in between them, facing out.
    Mail leaned toward the windshield, trying to see better, then rolled down the side window, trying to hear. The area smelled of milled grain, corn, maybe. He bumped along through the dark, then into a lighter patch, the light thrown from a naked bulb over an office door.
    No lights on in the office, though…
    The road ended at a gate, a gate closed and locked, with dark buildings behind it. A dead end? There’d been no dead-end sign. He backed up, found a gravel track that went east along the side of the grain elevator. Ahead, he could see the lights of a busy street, a little higher than he was, maybe up a hill? If he could work his way over there…But what was that?
    A cop car, lights flashing, stopped on the hill, and Mail realized it was not a hill at all but an overpass. No way up, no way to the street. The track he was on went from gravel to dirt. To the left, there was nothing but darkness, like an unlit farm field. To the right, there was a line of the boxes that looked like the wheelless tractor trailers he’d seen back in the lot.
    He slowed, thought about going back, looked over his shoulders, and saw the cop lights at the elevator. Had they seen him? He had to go forward.
    Suddenly, a huge dark shape slid past to his left, almost soundlessly, and he jerked the van to the right.
    “What?” he shouted. Frightened now, gripping the wheel, peering out into the dark. The shape made no noise, but he could feel the rumble of it: the thing had materialized from the dark, like some creature from a Japanese horror flick, like Rodan…and he realized it was a string of freight cars, ghosting by in the night. There was no engine attached to them. They simply glided by.
    And he realized that off to his left, in the darkness that looked like a farm field, were multiple lines of railroad tracks. He could see some of them now, in the dim, ambient light, thin, steely reflections against the field of black. He couldn’t see how many there were, but there were several.
    The cop car on the overpass suddenly lit up, and a searchlight swung across the tracks, left to right. If it had come the other way, right to left, it might have caught him, though he was still a half-mile away. As it was, he had time to drive into a hole in a wall of the boxes that lined the track.
    In between the boxes, he couldn’t see at all—he had to risk the parking lights. The cop searchlight swept the field behind him, and he edged forward again, and found another row of boxes parallel to the boxes he was crossing through. Another dirt track ran between the rows of boxes, and he turned onto it. His parking lights caught a sign that said “Burlington Northern Container Yard—Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.”
    Containers. Huh. The track ended when the containers did: nothing ahead but dirt and grass and the certainty of being seen. A second cop car had joined the first on the overpass, and a second searchlight popped out and probed the tracks. He could see