The Meridians(84)

Then, suddenly, her son went rigid.

He turned.

She turned as well, following his gaze back to where they had been a moment before.

Back to where a man was coming around the corner.

Mr. Gray.

And he was going to see them at any moment.





***





39.

***

Scott immediately hugged Kevin to him, then threw himself and the boy to the ground, pulling Lynette with them to the ground at the same time.

"Lay flat," he said in a whisper. "Keep your face down."

He was reminded of stories of World War II, where upturned faces would reflect moonlight...and provide a perfect target for enemy fire. He had nothing to blackout his face with, so had to settle for hiding it in the dust. With one hand he held Kevin to him, and with the other he held the boy's head to his chest. He could only hope that Lynette was doing the same thing as he was, hiding her face as well, and then further hope that Mr. Gray was not looking their way. Or that if he was looking, he was not seeing them as more than irregularities in the field. At the distance that they were from one another, it was impossible to guess what he might see them as.

Scott had never been so terrified in his entire life as he was in that instant. Not even in the alley - either of the alleys - when Mr. Gray had gotten the drop on him, not in the Garment District where he had been critically shot. For in all of those instances, he had at least had the ability to look death in the eye as it came for him, though in those instances it had passed him by without taking him.

Now, however, cowering in the dust of the baseball diamond, holding onto Kevin and hoping that the boy did not cry out or throw a tantrum, he couldn't see anything. Mr. Gray could be coming right up to them right this instant.

But no. He didn't think that was the case. In a sudden understanding of what Kevin had just done, he looked up, chancing a glance in the direction of the office that they had just left. He looked up in time to see Mr. Gray disappearing into the office, into the very office that they had just abandoned on account of Kevin.

Scott wondered whether Mr. Gray was just going into that office as part of a random sweep, or if he was somehow tracking them, tracking Kevin. He flashed to the note that he had found in Kevin's empty bedroom upon moving him and his mother into their home in Meridian: "I found you once, Kevin, and I'll find you again." Was it possible that the gray man had some kind of sense about where Kevin was? That he was tracking a sort of psychic residue that the autistic child left behind, invisible to Scott and Lynette but bright as a yellow brick road to the man tracking them?

Somehow Scott guessed that this must be the case. Mr. Gray had found them at every turn - though sometimes it had taken him years to do so - and had especially focused his ill will on Kevin. So there must be some kind of internal compass that the gray man was using to find them, one that oriented on Kevin as its true north. And if that was the case, then the killer would soon be leaving the office of the crotchety old Mr. Randall, and would be following them out to the baseball diamond, where if he came much closer he would be sure to find them with ease.

Scott rose quickly to his feet. Once deciding that they were being tracked, he felt an almost panicked need to flee, his flight instinct nearly overwhelming all his other senses. "Come on," he said, pulling Kevin to his feet and then helping Lynette up as well.

Moving quickly with Kevin proved to be an impossibility when the boy did not want to run. He moved at a gait that was faster than walking, but considerably slower than the running speed that Scott wanted to take. Finally, he picked the boy up and ran with him.

Kevin buried his head in Scott's chest, as though by doing so he could erase the terrors that sought him out even now. Scott wished that could be true; that if only by not looking they could avoid the demon in their wake. But he knew - knew somehow - that the only chance they had to survive lay in movement, in constant motion without rest.

A sudden shout behind them seemed to confirm Scott's premonition. It was Mr. Gray, and it was the shout of someone deeply disappointed, the shout of a man who had gone searching for something, expecting fully to find it, and had then discovered only that it was absent. Mr. Gray was on their trail, he knew.

Move, move, move, he thought.

Behind him, he heard Lynette huffing and puffing, trying to keep up with him as he ran over the grass and dirt, through the baseball field and then through the football field. A part of him wanted to stop when he reached the football bleachers, to go under them and hide in the hopes that Mr. Gray would lose their trail and would overshoot them, leaving them safely behind. But the part of him that had been gripped by the sure knowledge that Mr. Gray would be able to track them no matter where they went vetoed that idea. The only survival lay in continuing to run, at least for now.

So he continued with Kevin and Lynette past the bleachers, then into the main part of the school grounds. There were, of course, no cars in the parking lot at this time of night, but he hoped that they could find some on the nearby street.

Luck was with them, for once. They immediately found four cars parked one after another on the side of the road. Probably friends who had stayed overnight at one of the nearby farmhouses and had decided to park their cars on the road for whatever reason. Scott didn't much care, he just cared about the number of cars there were. He knew that in smaller cities and towns one in three people left their cars open and their keys in the car, so the odds were good that one of these cars was such a vehicle, driven by a trusting soul whose trust was about to be rewarded by the theft of his or her car.