Worth Dying For

No choice at all.

Out in the open was suicide. At close quarters the truck was relatively clumsy, but he couldn’t run and jink and dodge for ever. No one could. Exhaustion would tell in the end. So he got to his feet and waded into the brambles. The thorns tore at his pants. The truck came after him, driving backwards, narrowing its radius. The driver was staring over his shoulder. A big guy. Big neck. Big shoulders. Short hair. Reacher headed straight for the centre of the thicket. Long thorny tendrils latched together and tugged at his ankles. He ripped his way onward. The driver turned the wheel as far as it would go. The truck’s radius tightened, but not enough. Reacher ducked inside its turn and barged on.

He made it to the rock.

It was a hell of a rock. Much bigger than the first one he had seen. Maybe the parent of the first one he had seen. The first one had been wedge-shaped, as if it had been busted out of a larger boulder. This second rock looked like that larger boulder. It was shaped like a pie with a broad piece broken out of it, but not flat like a pie. It was humped and round. Like an orange, with three or four segments missing, half buried in the earth. Maybe fifty thousand years ago an Ice Age glacier had rolled it all the way down from Canada, and the weight of a billion tons of frozen snow had cracked it apart, and the smaller fragment had been pushed onward two more miles before grinding to a stop and weathering gently over the next countless centuries. The larger fragment had stayed right in place, and it was still there, waist-deep in the rich dirt, itself gently weathered, a huge granite ball with a worn and shallow triangular notch in it, like a bite, like an open mouth, facing south towards its smaller relation. The bite was maybe ten feet wide at the opening, and it narrowed down to a point maybe five feet later.

Reacher came to rest with his back against the boulder, on the east side, the bite a quarter-circle away, behind his right shoulder. The truck turned and drove out of the thicket and for a crazy moment Reacher thought the guy was giving up and going home, but then the truck turned again, a wide lazy circle out on the dirt, and it came back, slow and menacing, head-on, straight at him. The driver was smiling behind the windshield glass, a wide feral grin of triumph. The first of the brambles collapsed under the chrome bumper. The driver was holding the wheel carefully, two-handed, aiming precisely.

Aiming to pin Reacher by the legs against the rock.

Reacher scrambled up on to the granite slope, backward, palms and soles, like a crab. He worked and scuffled and stood upright on the top of the dome, balanced uneasily maybe five feet in the air. The truck came to rest with its front bumper an inch from the rock, its hood a little below the level of Reacher’s feet, its roof a little above. The motor calmed to an idle and Reacher heard four ragged thumps as the doors locked from the inside. The driver was worried. Didn’t want to be dragged out of his seat for a fistfight. Smart guy. Now Reacher’s options were reduced. He could step down on the hood and try to kick the windshield in, but automotive glass was tougher than it looked, and all the guy had to do was take off suddenly and Reacher would be thrown clear, unless he grabbed the roof bars, but his arms were hurting too much to survive a wild-ass ride all the way across Nebraska, clinging to the top of a bouncing truck at thirty or more miles an hour.

Impasse.

Or maybe not. The guy had laid out his tactics for all to see. He hadn’t used his phone. He wanted to capture Reacher all by himself, for the glory of it. He intended to do it by using his truck like a hammer and the rock like an anvil. But he wouldn’t wait for ever. He would dial his buddies just as soon as frustration got the better of him.

Time to go.

Reacher scrambled down the far side of the rock and waded into the thorny growth. He heard the truck back up and swing around after him. It appeared on his right, crunching through the brambles, holding a tight curve as if it was rounding a traffic circle, driving slow, staying deliberate. Reacher faked a break for the open land and the driver bought it and steered maybe ten degrees out of the circle, and then Reacher ducked back towards the rock and slid around the granite circumference and tucked himself into the shallow triangular bite, right at the point of the V, shoulders tight against the converging walls. The truck paused a second and then leapt ahead and steered a tight loop out on the dirt and came right back at him, head-on again, the same low gear, the same low menacing speed, closer and closer, ten feet, five feet, three feet, then two feet.

Then simultaneously the left end and the right end of the truck’s front bumper jammed hard against the narrowing walls of rock, and the truck came to a stop, immobile, right where Reacher wanted it, the big chrome bumper making a new boundary, closing off the shallow triangle a foot from Reacher’s thighs. He could feel the heat from the radiator, and the idling beat of the motor resonated in his chest. He could smell oil and gas and rubber and exhaust fumes. He put his hands on the bulbous chrome and started easing down towards a sitting position, intending to slide feet-first underneath the vehicle and wriggle away on his back.

Didn’t work.

The driver wanted Reacher more than he wanted an undamaged front bumper.

Reacher got halfway to the ground and then he heard a snick and a crunch as the transfer box changed down to low-range gearing. Ideal for pulling stumps. Or for crushing chrome. The engine roared and all four tyres bit down hard and the truck pushed forward against nothing except the resistance of its own sheet metal. Both ends of the bumper shrieked and deformed and then crumpled and flattened and the truck kept on coming, one inch, then two, then three. The tyres turned slowly but relentlessly, one knob of tread at a time. The bumper crushed from the outside in, grinding and scraping, as the massive V-8 torque turned the bulbous cosmetic panel into a piece of flattened junk.

Now the centre of the bumper was six inches from Reacher’s chest.

And it kept on coming. The bumper flattened all the way to where the steel brackets bolted it to the frame. Sterner stuff. The engine roared louder and the truck dug in hard and squatted and strained on its suspension. One front tyre lost traction for a second and spun wildly and spattered dirt and stones and shredded pieces of bramble into the wheel well. The whole truck rocked and bucked and danced in place and then the tyre bit again and the tailpipes bellowed and the steel brackets collapsed and gave an inch and the truck lurched forward.

Four inches from Reacher’s chest.

Then three.

Then the brackets gave a little more and the hot metal touched Reacher’s coat.

Time to go.

He turned his head sideways and pushed up on the chrome with his hands and forced himself downward, like immersing himself in water. He got halfway there, and then the sheet metal itself behind the bumper started giving way, shrieking and bending and crushing, the curves inverting, the contours flattening. The engine roared and the pipes bellowed louder and the truck lurched forward another inch and the centre of the bumper tapped Reacher on the side of his face. He scraped on down, one ear on the hot chrome and the other on the cold granite. He kicked and scrabbled with his heels and got his feet out from under him and he forced his butt through the brambles and got down on his back. Right above his face the last tiny triangle of clear air disappeared as the fenders gave way and what was left of the bumper folded violently into a forward-facing point and hit the granite.

The driver didn’t let up.

The guy kept his foot down hard. Clearly he didn’t know exactly where Reacher was. Because he couldn’t see. Clearly he hoped he had him pinned by the chest. The truck bucked and squatted and pushed. Reacher was flat on his back underneath it, straining tyres to his left, straining tyres to his right, throbbing exhaust pipes above him, all kinds of ribbed and dirty metal components inches from his face. Things were racing and whirring and turning. There were nuts and bolts and tubes and belts. Reacher didn’t know much about cars. Didn’t know how to fix them, didn’t know how to break them. And he had no tools, anyway.