Chapter 8 - The Cornered Wolf
Sarah didn't expect it.
People facing a loaded weapon are supposed to cower, plead, or freeze. But I was not a woman anymore; I was a mother whose child was standing on the threshold of an execution. Every drop of fear in my veins had turned to pure, concentrated adrenaline.
*BANG.*
The gunshot was deafening. The muzzle flash seared my retinas.
A searing, white-hot pain tore through the fleshy meat of my left shoulder, spinning me half-around. The bullet passed clean through, but the momentum didn't stop me.
I crashed into Sarah at full speed, tackling her into the gravel.
The umbrella went flying into the darkness. Her pistol skittered across the wet stones, disappearing under the front bumper of her sedan.
We rolled in the mud. Sarah was smaller than Daniel, but she was fit, uninjured, and fighting with the savage desperation of a trapped criminal. Her manicured nails raked across my face, opening deep gouges across my cheeks. She drove her knee violently into my ribs, right where the zip-lock bag of poisoned food was still tucked into my waistband.
The plastic held, but the impact sent a spasm of agony through my battered body.
"Get off me, you filthy cow!" Sarah shrieked, wrapping both hands around my throat, using her body weight to pin me into the gravel.
Rain lashed down upon us in blinding sheets. My strength was evaporating. The gunshot wound was pumping warm blood down my arm, mixing with the cold rainwater, sapping the last reserves of my physical power. My vision began to dim again, the edges tunneling into grey static.
"Die!" Sarah hissed, her face contorted in psychotic fury. "Just die like you were supposed to!"
Suddenly, a blinding glare washed over both of us.
High beams.
Not the halogen lights of Sarah's sedan. These were heavy, roof-mounted searchlights, accompanied by the low, rumbling growl of an oversized V8 engine tearing up the gravel road at eighty miles an hour.
A heavy steel bull-bar smashed into the back of Sarah's idling sedan, shoving it ten feet into the ditch with a catastrophic crunch of tearing sheet metal.
A deafening, mechanical siren split the night.
*WHEEEEE-OOOOOO-WHEEEEE-OOOOOO.*
A voice boomed through an exterior PA system, loud enough to rattle the trees:
"STATE POLICE! DROP THE WEAPON AND GET ON THE GROUND! HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM!"
Sarah froze, her hands slipping from my neck. She looked up into the blinding white light of the police interceptor, her mouth open in absolute, paralyzed horror.
Noah emerged from the edge of the woods, waving his arms hysterically at the cruiser. "HERE! SHE HAS A GUN! SHE'S TRYING TO KILL MY MOM!"
The landline call.
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The dispatcher hadn't lost our location. When the line went dead, the automated 911 enhanced geolocation protocol had flagged the severed connection as an active violent domestic dispatch. The troopers hadn't taken the highway—they had come up the logging trail from the western ridge.
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