Impact (Book 5): Black

line, but it had to be better than nothing. The boat was going too fast to make dramatic changes in direction. He didn’t want to bleed off too much speed, either.
Ezra almost jumped out of his seat when the depth finder exploded.
“Damn!” He flinched.
He flicked the wheel reflexively, adding an evasive turn a bit to the left. The depth finder had already been hit once by a bullet the other day. Now it was gone; the rifle round had shattered it completely. There was only a fragment of the black casing stuck to his dash.
Butch fired several more times, but as he gained distance from the bridge, he recognized it was increasingly unlikely anyone was going to hit their targets. However, Ezra didn’t slow down, even when they turned a corner in the river, hiding the bridge from them.
“Are we safe?” Haley asked, sticking her head up.
“I don’t think so,” he replied, not sure if he should talk to her the same way he did with Butch. If Butch had asked, he would have told him there was another bridge a few miles ahead. Butch would recognize they couldn’t slow down, not for a second, since it was imperative they beat the trucks to the next crossing.
Ezra glanced down to the girl, hugging her two furry friends. He held out a hand to help her off the all-weather carpet. “Come on up. You can sit back in your seat.”
He watched as Butch and Haley returned to their original spots. It gave him the few seconds necessary to decide which way to go with her.
“Haley, I’m glad you came aboard with us, but this trip is going to take all of us working together to make it out the other side. It looks like the goons from St. Charles aren’t going to let it go. I bet one of those men was the same guy who’s been chasing us since Bass Pro.”
“We got away, didn’t we?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not.” He decided to tell her the truth. “We have four more bridges to go under before we make it to Kansas City. They might be waiting for us at each of them, but I think we can beat them to the next one. We’re going to try, anyway.”
“And the ones past it?” she pressed.
He thought about it for a few seconds, legitimately unsure what to say. If they didn’t slow down, they’d burn through their fuel long before they made it to the second and third bridges. If they did slow down, the TKM trucks would easily beat them to the next bridge and they’d be shot at the instant they came over the horizon.
“Let’s take it one bridge at a time.”

CHAPTER 4
Sidney, NE
By the time Grace and Asher got their weapons prepared, Robert had driven a truck out from the train shed. He honked and stopped to pick them up. “Come on, we’re going to put out the fire.”
The pickup truck carried a tank of liquid with an industrial hose attached to it. It made sense a professional repair shop would have an equally professional fire suppression system. She hopped in after Asher, though they had to share the passenger seat.
Robert drove them on the gravel entry road, passing her truck, which now had a few new holes, and beyond the long line of coal cars. She finally saw some of the waiting diesel engines on the outside track; engineers sat inside or crouched behind their drive wheels. After having a front-row seat for the helicopter raining hellfire onto the train shed, she didn’t blame them for laying low.
By the time they arrived at the burning truck, the giant fire had died down to a smaller but white-hot inferno consuming the entire vehicle.
“You guys check for survivors while I unspool the hose and get started.”
“Got it,” she and Asher replied together.
He parked about fifty feet from the blaze. Probably a smart way to keep from having his own vehicle catch fire. However, it meant she and Asher needed to jog in a wide semicircle around the fiery wreck to see if the man with the gun was hiding nearby, or dead inside the blast zone. Bullets had created fist-sized divots in the gravel and in the dirt next to the road, making her wonder if fire or machine gun was the quicker way to go.
The roadway sat a few feet above the fields, requiring them to look down both embankments to see if anyone was hiding. It didn’t take long to determine no one was there.
“What the hell?” she said, after meeting Asher back on the road. “Where’d he go?”
Glancing around, they were a quarter mile from the rail yard. She saw for miles in every other direction, over the prairie grasses and farm fields. There were no bushes, trees, or clumps of weeds where a person could hide. Even if there was, they would have seen a man running from the explosion. So would the helicopter.
“Do you think…” She almost hated to voice the horrible thought. “Do you think that machine gun turned the man into a fine mist?”
Asher turned up his lip. “God, I hope not.”
“Well, he isn’t in the truck. There’s nothing left there. He isn’t a pile of goo. And he didn’t run away.” She waved to the windswept fields around them. “So where’d he go?”
They looked at each other, then she turned to go back down the slope next to the road. Asher did the same on his side.
She went a few yards closer to the truck, but ran into the divots of the machine gun. It didn’t seem likely the man would have made it through them. If he was avoiding them, he would have gone the other way, so she walked for several yards alongside the road, going away from