Hughes shot at Annie Starling the moment he saw her. Just pointed his Mossberg pump-action shotgun at her and fired.
Frank drove and had to weave all over the place to get around wrecked and abandoned cars on the road. Hughes didn’t look ahead. He watched the tree line, guarding against a flank attack. The Chevy could be assaulted from the side with just a few seconds’ warning. The trees were less than thirty feet from the road. Hughes could not screw around, and he had to shoot fast.
So when he saw the woman charging out of the trees fifty yards ahead, he just reacted. She was shrieking and flailing her arms, and the whole front of her shirt was soaked in blood. Her face was smeared with it. Hughes didn’t blame himself, not even in hindsight. She looked like a threat, so he fired.
But he didn’t see the mangled Toyota in the Chevy’s path. Frank swerved around it at the precise moment Hughes saw her, and by the time he squeezed the trigger, Frank had already turned the Chevy a good thirty degrees. Hughes’ shot went wide. Real wide.
The woman screamed.
Frank slammed on the brakes as she dove behind an abandoned Mercedes.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” she said.
“Shit,” Frank said.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Hughes said and stepped out of the vehicle. He heard no sound but the Chevy’s idling engine and his boots crunching on road grit.
Frank killed the engine—a wise decision, as they’d made far too much noise already—and absolute silence fell over the road. Hughes heard no people, no cars, no distant trains, no airplanes, no hum of electricity in the power lines. Nothing. The air was still. No wind, no radio waves pulsing through the atmosphere, no vibration from living things in any direction.
They were safe then, at least for the moment, but he took the shotgun with him. He wasn’t going to shoot at the woman again, but he sure as hell wasn’t about to go out there unarmed. She had come running out of the trees, and for all he knew she had been chased out of the trees. He wouldn’t
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