Shadowfires

called out more insistently when he
saw that Peake had not moved.
    Reluctantly Peake followed. Some of the tall grass was so dry and
brittle that it prickled through his socks. Burrs and bits of
milkweed fluff adhered to his trousers. When he leaned against the
trunk of a tree, his hand came away sticky with resin. Vines tried to
trip him up. Brambles snagged his suit. His leather-soled shoes
slipped treacherously on the stones, on patches of dry pine needles,
on moss, on everything. Climbing over a fallen tree, he put his foot
down in a teeming nest of ants; although he hurriedly moved out of
their way and wiped them off his shoe, a few scaled his leg, and
finally he had to pause, roll up his trousers, and brush the damn
things off his badly bitten calf.
    “We're not dressed for this,” he told Sharp when he caught up with him.
    “Quiet,” Sharp said, easing under a low-hanging pine branch heavy
with thorn-tipped cones.
    Peake's feet almost skidded out from under him, and he grabbed desperately at a branch. Barely managing to stay on his feet, he said, “We're
going to break our necks.”
    “ Quiet!” Sharp whispered furiously. Over his shoulder, he
looked back angrily at Peake. His face was unnerving: eyes wide and
wild, skin flushed, nostrils flared, teeth bared, jaw muscles taut,
the arteries throbbing in his temples. That savage expression
confirmed Peake's suspicion that since spotting Shadway the deputy director had been out of control, driven by an almost maniacal hatred and by sheer blood lust.
    They pushed through a narrow gap in a wall of dense and bristly
brush decorated with poisonous-looking orange berries. They stumbled
into a shallow dry wash-and saw Shadway. The fugitive was fifteen
yards farther along the channel, following it down through the
forest. He was moving low and fast, carrying a shotgun.
    Peake crouched and sidled against the wall of the channel to make
as difficult a target of himself as possible.
    But Sharp stood in full view, as if he thought he was Superman,
bellowed
Shadway's name, pulled off several shots with the silencer-equipped pistol. With a silencer, you traded range and accuracy for the quiet you gained, so considering the distance between Sharp and Shadway, virtually every shot was wasted. Either Sharp did not know the effective range of his weapon-which seemed unlikely-or he was so completely a captive of his hatred that he was no longer capable of rational action. The first shot tore bark off a tree at the edge of the dry wash, two yards to Shadway's
left, and with a high thin whine, the second slug ricocheted off a
boulder. Then Shadway disappeared where the runoff channel curved to
the right, but Sharp fired three more shots, in spite of being unable
to see his target.
    Even the finest silencer quickly deteriorates with use, and the
soft whump of Sharp's pistol grew noticeably louder with each round he expended. The fifth and final shot sounded like a wooden mallet striking a hard but rubbery surface, not thunderous by any means but loud enough to echo for a moment through the woods.
    When the echo faded, Sharp listened intently for a few seconds,
then bounded back across the dry wash toward the same gap in the
brush through which they had entered the channel. “Come on, Peake. We'll get the bastard now.”
    Following, Peake said, “But we
can't chase him down in these woods. He's better dressed for it than
we are.”
    “We're getting out of the woods, damn it,” Sharp said, and indeed they were headed back the way they had come, up toward the yard behind the cabin. “All I wanted to do was make sure we got him moving, so he wouldn't
just lie in here and wait us out.
He's moving now, by God, and what he'll do is head straight down the
mountain toward the lake road.
He'll try to steal some transportation down there, and with any luck at all we'll
nail the son of a bitch as he's trying to hot-wire some fisherman's
car. Now come on.”
    Sharp still had that savage, frenetic, half-sane look, but Peake
realized that the deputy director was not, after all, as overwhelmed
and as totally controlled by hatred as he had at first appeared. He
was in a rage, yes, and not entirely rational, but he had not lost
all of his cunning. He was still a dangerous man.
Ben was running for his own life, but he was
in a panic about Rachael as well. She was heading to Nevada in the
Mercedes, unaware that Eric was curled up in the trunk. Somehow Ben
had to