White Rabbit(91)
“It’s not—I mean, I just zapped him the once, and he was only out for a couple of minutes!” She’s flustered and unnerved, watching her control of the situation swiftly evaporate. “When he was coming around, I made him drink a glass of water with some white rabbits dissolved in it—to relax him. Usually they just relax him! Like, make him happy and goofy and … and easy to handle? And I thought, I mean, with all the stuff in the news about them, if they turned up in his system afterward, it would make it more believable that he’d killed a bunch of people!”
My mouth snaps shut, and I glance back at Race. Sebastian, looking seasick, has rolled him onto his side while spasms rock the boy’s torso and pungent, foamy liquid oozes from his mouth. “You gave him some of Fox’s stash, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, so?”
“‘So?’ It was poisoned, Peyton!” She stares at me, alarmed, and I realize that she had actually missed that entire revelation. She’d been out in the hot tub when Arlo confronted Fox about the doctored pills and probably knew nothing of their unintended side effects. “Fox cut the white rabbits with something, and—you know what? It doesn’t even matter. Race might die from this, okay? You’ll never convince anybody that he shot us and himself—not when they do an autopsy and find out he was having a grand mal fucking seizure at the same time!”
“N-no.” She shakes her head vehemently, her face white. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not.” In her eyes, I can see she believes me—or thinks maybe she should—and her gaze darts to the boy jerking and twitching on the ground. I cut a glance to Sebastian, and he stares back at me with a look as loud as a thunderclap. His lips are clamped shut, but I hear him screaming in my mind, asking the same question I’m asking myself: Is this it? Should we wait longer? Can we afford to? I pour more poison into Peyton’s ear. “You fucked up, and it’s game over, so you might as well just help us get him to the hospital! Maybe if you save his life, the cops’ll take it into account.”
She keeps shaking her head, but the rifle dips another few inches as she stares uncertainly at Race, chewing her lip while he convulses and she tries to think of some new workaround—some way to alter her plan and still forge ahead. It’s as distracted as she’s ever going to get, I realize, and so I blank my mind and lunge.
As I leap forward, I reach for the weapon, envisioning the barrel in my hands—anticipating the force it’s going to take to wrench it out of her grasp, and how the action might throw me off-balance; I have to be prepared for that. I am prepared. My heart is throbbing, heat scratching at my chest, my throat, my face, and I channel all of it into the strength of my will.
There’s too much ground to cover, though. Peyton sees me coming before I’m halfway there, and the barrel jigs up again, the sight swinging toward me just as I put my hands out to grab it. Sebastian shouts, my fingers close around cold metal, and the rifle goes off; the bullet probably misses my face by an inch, but heat and pain radiate through my palms as all the sound in the world vanishes in an instant, replaced by a piercing, insistent ring.
Peyton loses her footing, and the rifle is ripped from my numbed hands as she stumbles backward and falls, dropping hard onto the slick grass and twisting away. I don’t try again. I’ve got a split-second choice to make—dive after her, or turn and run—and she’s already scrambling to right herself, finger still on the trigger. My close call scared me a hell of a lot more than I think I’d care to admit, and my bladder doesn’t have the integrity for a second attempt.
“RUN!” I scream, spinning around, every muscle in my body suddenly alive, my nervous system blazing like a fire in a coal seam. I spring over Race’s body just as Sebastian—already on his feet—falls into step beside me, and we bolt together into the fog. I’ve never run so fast and felt so slow, the gun at my back making every stride nightmarishly inadequate.
The rifle cracks twice, hideously—the noise expected, and yet simultaneously so startling that Sebastian steps wrong and falls, skidding several feet on his shirtfront. I help drag him up again and we keep going, veering left, afraid to look back. Peyton shouts, and we pour on more speed.
A butterfly garden appears ludicrously before us, the entrance a whimsical arch of willow branches woven through with tendrils of ivy, and we plow down a slender path, twisting between beds of echinacea, zinnias, and milkweed; we cut right as we emerge on the other side, careening down a shallow slope, skirting a massive tree stump and blundering headlong into a forest of waist-high cattails. The earth squelches under my feet, and I realize that we’ve reached the water’s edge, a doleful tree with drooping branches bending over as if admiring its reflection in the lake.
We hunker down, cold mud seeping through our clothes, insects and worms crawling over our exposed flesh, and we wait. Lake Champlain is eerily calm at our backs, flat as a mirror, the mist hanging above it like smoke. Minutes pass and we don’t move—we don’t dare—listening for the sound of Peyton’s footsteps, refusing to believe we’ve lost her. Have we? Even without a visual, she could still have easily heard us; panting and gasping, our feet slapping the ground as we fled the business end of the rifle, stealth had not been our main objective.
But as three minutes of silence becomes four and then five, it seems obvious she isn’t out there. If she’d been anywhere close behind us, she’d have already shown herself; she doesn’t have the luxury of time to lie in wait for us to emerge—not with the clock ticking on Race’s life, and her clean getaway dependent on finishing this business before Mr. Atwood can discover his son’s alleged suicide note and send the authorities out here to find him.