Shattered

here,” the boy said, excited about it. “You have Abilene and Fort Riley, Fort Scott, Pawnee Rock, Wichita, Dodge City, and the old Boot Hill.”
        “I didn't know you were a cowboy-movie fan,” Doyle said.
        “I'm not, that much. But it's still exciting.”
        Alex looked at the great plains and tried to picture them as they had once been: shifting sands, dust, cactus, a stark and foreboding landscape that had barely been touched by man. Yes, once it must have been a romantic place.
        “There were Indian wars here,” Colin said. “And John Brown caused a small civil war in Kansas back in 1856, when he and his boys killed five slave owners at Pottawatomie Creek.”
        “Bet you can't say that five times, fast.”
        “A dollar?” Colin asked.
        “You're on.”
        “Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie, Pottawatomie!” he said, breathless at the end of it. “You owe me a buck.”
        “Put it on my tab,” Doyle said. He felt loose and easy and good again, now that the trip was turning out to be what they had planned.
        “You know who else came from Kansas?”
        “Who?”
        “Carry Nation,” Colin said, giggling. “The woman who went around breaking up saloons with an ax.”
        They passed another grain elevator sitting at the end of a long, straight blacktop road.
        “Where did you learn all this?” Doyle asked.
        “Just picked it up,” Colin said. “Bits and pieces from here and there.”
        Now and then they passed fields which were standing idle, rich brown patches of land like neatly opened tablecloths. In one of these, a fifty-foot-high whirlwind gathered dust in a compact column of whining spring air.
        “This is also where Dorothy lived,” Colin said, watching the whirlwind.
        “Dorothy who?”
        “The girl in The Wizard of Oz . Remember how she got carried to oz by a tremendous tornado?”
        Alex was about to answer when he was startled by the brash roar of an automobile horn immediately behind them. He looked in the mirror-and sucked air between his teeth when he saw the Chevrolet van. It was no more than six feet from their rear bumper. The unseen driver was pounding the palm of his hand into the horn ring: beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beeeeeep!
        Doyle looked at the speedometer, saw that they were doing better than seventy. If he had been so surprised by the horn that he had stomped the brake pedal, the Chevrolet would have run right over them. And they would all be dead.
        “Stupid sonofabitch,” he said.
         Beep, beeeeeeep, beeeeeep…
         “ Is it him?” Colin asked.
        “Yes.”
        The van moved up, so close now that Doyle could not even see its bumper or the bottom third of its grill.
        “Why's he blowing his horn?” Colin asked.
        “I don't know… I guess-to make sure we know he's back.”
        

    Eight
        
        The van's horn played a monotonous dirge.
        “Do you think he wants you to stop? Colin asked, gripping his knees in his delicate hands and leaning forward as if bent by the tension.
        “I don't know.”
        “Are you going to stop?”
        “No.”
        Colin nodded. “Good. I don't think we should stop. I think we should keep going no matter what.”
        Doyle expected that any second now the stranger would stop blowing his horn and let the van fall back to its customary quarter of a mile. Instead, it just hung in there, only three feet away from their back end now, cruising at seventy miles an hour, horn blaring.
        Whether or not the man in the Chevy was as dangerous as a Charles Manson or Richard Speck, he was most certainly unbalanced. He was getting some sort of kick out of terrorizing complete strangers, and that was far from normal. More than ever before, Doyle knew he did not want to confront this man face-to-face and test the limits of his madness.
         Beep, beep, beeeeeep…
        “What can we do?” the boy asked.
        Doyle glanced at him. “Seatbelt on?”
        “Of course.”
        “We'll outrun him again.”
        “And go to Denver on the back roads?”
        “Yeah.”
        “He'll pick us up again tomorrow morning when we leave Denver on the way to Salt Lake City.”
        “No, he won't,” Doyle said.
        “How can you be sure?”
        “He's not clairvoyant,” Doyle said. “He's just been lucky, that's