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“What?”
“It’s a marsh,” she said, looking out the driver’s-side window. “Look at the cattails. Last thing I would have expected out here. I used to run a muskrat trapline in a marsh like that…”
There was little transition into the mountains. One moment they were on the plain, then up onto a plateau that looked down into a valley that appeared to be full of vacation houses, and then into a narrow mountain canyon that climbed toward the ski valley. Sheer gray stone walls rose hundreds of feet above them, while a creek ran down the hill to their right, the source of the water in the cattail swamp.
They met only two or three cars coming down from the ski valley, and then two more as they drove past a sign announcing that they’d arrived. The ski village was below them to their right, a jumble of condos, hotels, bars, ski shops, mostly closed for the summer. A ski lift ran up the mountain, and was moving, but they couldn’t see anyone on it.
They were on Twining Road, which widened into a parking area. A shiny blue-gray motor home had been sitting motionless at the end of the open space, as they crossed it, but rolled forward, toward them, as they approached, and Letty moved over for it.
As they passed, Hawkins swiveled in his seat and shouted, “Wait! Wait! That was Rose Turney driving the bus! That was Turney!”
“What!”
“Turney!”
Letty snatched her phone out of the SUV’s center console, punched “favorites” and Lucas’s number, as she was doing a fast unstable U-turn. Lucas came up immediately and she shouted, “Turney is in the bus. Rose Turney in the bus.”
Lucas followed her through the U-turn, and they caught the motor home, which looked like a slicked-up but shorter version of a Greyhound bus, in two hundred yards. Letty pulled behind it and then beside it, the bus accelerating as she closed. She could see the driver in the bus’s rearview mirror, and thought it was Turney, but wasn’t sure.
Twining was probably fifty feet above the main level of the ski valley, and as they came alongside the RV, Turney yanked the bus to the left, nearly driving Letty over the edge to the street below. Letty slammed on the brakes and was almost rear-ended by Lucas, then the bus lurched ahead, and finally slewed sideways, half blocking the road. The bus’s door was on the far side, so they couldn’t see what was happening, but then Turney stepped out from behind the hood with a rifle and Letty screamed, “Holy shit!” and “Get down!” as Turney began firing at them.
Two slugs tore through the SUV, making achacksound as one of the slugs poked through a window, and Letty wrenched the awkward vehicle around and accelerated away, juking back and forth the best she could, glanced at Hawkins, who was looking over his shoulder at the bus. Lucas had turned his SUV sideways in the road and he and Rae were climbing out, crouching behind the SUV, Rae shoving a thirty-round magazine into her M4.
Letty pulled in on the far side of them. Rae was now standing behind the hood of Lucas’s SUV and was firing in the direction of thebus. Lucas, on his hands and knees, scrambled around the SUV and then behind a tire, and waved an urgent hand at Letty, who shouted at Hawkins, “Get out and get behind a wheel.”
Hawkins already had the door open and dropped toward the ground, and Letty crawled over the center console and followed him. Hawkins scrambled behind a wheel and looked back at her and said, “I will definitely be sending a memo about this.”
“That’s your basic black rifle, right there, pecking away at us,” Letty said, at the gunshots. Another slug hit the SUV and she said, “Hertz is gonna be majorly pissed.”
She took the Sig 928 out of her jeans pocket. It was cocked and locked, and she didn’t unlock it. “One AR-15 shooting at us, one M4 shooting back. Maybe two M4s, if Dad’s got one. Doesn’t sound like anyone got hurt yet.”
The shooting stopped, and Lucas and Rae were calling to each other. Then Lucas yelled, “Letty, you all okay?”
“We’re fine here,” she shouted back. “The car got dinged up.”
Rae called out, “I think she’s on foot. I think she’s running.”
“Let’s get the armor on,” Lucas said to Rae.
Staying low, he opened the back door of the SUV, crawled inside, reached over the back seat and pulled Rae’s gear bag over the seat and out onto the ground. Rae kept watch while Lucas pulled on an armored vest, then he stood up with his big Walther .40-caliber handgun as Rae armored up. As she was doing that, Letty spotted Turney scrambling up a slope of tan dirt and broken rock a hundred yards away, still carrying her rifle, and Letty shouted, “Rae, Rae, right of the bus, going up the slope.”
Rae stopped buckling the armor, grabbed her rifle and slung it over the hood just as Turney disappeared into a copse of pines.
Rae said, “Shit.” They’d have to run across seventy-five or eighty yards of open street to get to the line Turney had been following. Lucas, protected by the bus, jogged up to it, peeked around it, then stood on the front bumper and looked into it.
He immediately jumped off the bumper and ran back to the SUVs and shouted, “There are sick people in there. There are people on stretchers…”
Rae: “Ah, fuck me. What do you want to do?”
Lucas looked around, then said, “We gotta stop her. Hose down the trees where you saw her, in case she’s still there. I’m going to run straight across the road, and then I’ll work my way through the trees toward where we last saw her. “
“What about Letty?”
Lucas shouted, “Letty, did you hear me? There are sick people in the bus?”
“I heard that,” Letty called back.
Lucas: “There’ll be people coming because of the shooting. You gotta keep them back. Way back from the bus. And stay away yourself.”
