The rain was still pouring down on top of them. “I’ve got this,” Ivan said to Kendra.
She grunted. Even though shifting around humans wasn’t anything they were supposed to do, they hadn’t had any choice. She returned to the car and shifted, then climbed in and dressed.
Then she rejoined Ivan, pulled Collier off the ground, and hauled him to the back seat of her car, and seat belted him in.
Both she and Ivan had rain jackets, but they couldn’t put them on while they were removing clothes and shifting, so they were very wet. So was their fugitive.
Collier began to stir.
"What did you do to the officers in the house?" Kendra asked.
Collier wouldn't speak.
She pulled towels out of a bag, handed one to Ivan, and they both dried off.
“What about me?” the fugitive asked from the back seat.
“What about you? You were trying to kill us,” Ivan said. “And would have if we hadn’t gotten lucky when a couple of bears came for you.”
“You’re just lucky we saved you from them.” Kendra called her car insurance for help with the car tires.
“I’m calling this in to George,” Ivan said, “to let him know we got our perp and that he shot out our tires.”
“Roadside assistance is coming,” Kendra said, pulling her rain jacket on and zipping it shut.
"You're not going inside, are you?" Ivan asked.
"I have to check on the men. You need to stay with the fugitive."
"Why don't I go in?"
"I have medical training. Do you?" she asked.
"No. I guess it’s something I need to get some training on."
Kendra pulled the hood of her rain jacket over her head, braced herself, and grabbed her first-aid kit from the passenger side floor. Sheets of water battered the SUV until the metal roof shivered. She hesitated just long enough to take a few steadying breaths, then yanked open the door and sprinted into the tempest.
Water sluiced into her hiking boots on the first step, and the wind snatched the rain jacket, nearly yanking the hood off her head. Lightning split the sky, illuminating the lot in an X-ray flash: the fence, the heaps of debris, the sagging trailer like a beached ship, and next to it, the small house where the officers were trapped. The gate was chained shut, but the debris blocked it anyway.
She checked the broken door and called out to the officers. Neither answered her. The entry was so blocked with furniture that she assumed Collier had moved the furniture there after they entered the house.
She left the cluttered porch, which creaked with her weight, and she was afraid she would fall through one of the boards at any moment.
Rain had softened the ground, and the fence posts leaned like drunken soldiers, forgetting how to stand at attention. She pushed a bush aside, climbed the chain-link fence by jamming her boots into the diamond mesh. Her fingers slipped on the wet metal, but she made it over, landing in an ankle-deep slurry of leaves and plastic water bottles.
She pushed through the junkyard maze, all the while clutching the heavy first-aid kit. The ground rose and fell in unpredictable waves, as if all the garbage was floating in a swamp, as the rain continued to pour down on her.
Rain funneled down from the eaves and pooled at her feet. She slipped, caught herself on the edge of a battered metal cabinet, and cursed.
The back of the house loomed up ahead, collapsed porch and all, and the door was just visible behind a screen of brambles and broken window screens woven together with twine.
She elbowed through the brush and found the patch of earth that had been trampled into mud by desperate feet. Someone had hacked away at the branches, leaving splintered stumps and a path just wide enough for her to duck through. Her rain jacket caught on a nail at the shoulder. She hardly felt it as she tore it loose. She was running on pure adrenaline now.
The back door was partly open; the wood was rotting to the point that after a third kick, the door gave way. She stumbled into the darkness, out of the rain at last, and nearly broke her ankle on an upturned box. She found herself in a storage room lined with shelves of ancient, canned food, half-collapsed under their own weight. The air was thick and foul, smelling of pungent cat feces and urine. Something scuttled in the rafters overhead.
She called Ivan on her phone. "Ivan, I'm in a storage room. Going into the place deeper now."
"Copy," came Ivan's voice, nice and reliable.
