“Get your hands off that thing!” Willis commanded.

“Shut up! I can drive while I watch.”

“I’m gonna gas both of ’em.”

“What are you, crazy? Don’t do that. Hey!”

The ambulance veered wildly. There was a loud splattering of mud and the overloaded vehicle yawed and half spun. Oscar was flung from Greta’s side, and thrown bruisingly against the bulkhead. The vehicle ground to a halt.

“Now you’ve done it,” Willis said.

“Don’t get in a twist,” the man grumbled. “We’ll make it on time. ”

“Not if you just broke the axle, you horny moron.”

“Stop bitching, lemme think. I’ll check.” A door squealed open. “I broke my arm!” Oscar yelled. “I’m bleeding to death back here!”

“Would you stop being so goddamn clever?” Willis shouted. “Jesus Christ, you’re a pain! Why can’t you make this easy? It doesn’t have to be this hard! Just shut up and go to sleep.” There was an evil hiss of gas.

Oscar woke in darkness to a violent racket of tearing metal. He was lying on his back and there was something very heavy on his chest. He was hot and dizzy and his mouth tasted like powdered aluminum.

There was a vicious screech and a sullen pop. A diamond-sharp wedge of sunlight poured in upon him. He found that he was lying at the bottom of a monster coffin, with Greta sprawling on his chest. He squirmed, and shoved her legs aside with an effort that brought lanc-ing pain behind his eyeballs.

After a few clear breaths, Oscar grasped his situation. The two of them were still lying inside the ambulance. But the vehicle had tum-bled onto its side. He was now lying flat on one narrow wall. Greta was dangling above him, still handcuffed to the stretcher stanchions, which were now part of the roof.

There was more banging and scraping. Suddenly one of the back doors broke open, and fell flat against the earth.

A crew-cut young man in overalls looked in, a crowbar in one hand. “Hey,” he said. “You’re alive!”

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“Hey, nobody! I mean, uhm … Dewey.”

Oscar sat up. “What’s going on, Dewey?”

“I dunno, but you’re some lucky guy to be alive in there. What’s with this lady? Is she okay?”

Greta was dangling limply by her wrists with her head flung back and her eyes showing rims of white. “Help us,” Oscar said, and coughed. “Help us, Dewey. I can really make it worth your while.”

“Sure,” Dewey said. “I mean, whatever you say. C’mon out of there!”

Oscar crawled out of the back of the ambulance. Dewey caught his arm and helped him to his feet. Oscar felt a spasm of nauseated dizziness, but then his pumping heart jumped on a gout of adrenaline. The world became painfully clear.

The shattered ambulance was lying on a dirt road next to a swampy, sluggish river. It was early morning, chill and foggy.

The air stank of burned upholstery. The ambulance had taken a direct hit from some kind of explosive-maybe a mortar round. The concussion had blasted it entirely from the road, and it had tumbled onto its side in red Texas mud. The engine was a blackened mess of shredded metal and molten plastic. The cab had been sheared in half, revealing the thick, dented armor of the interior prison vault.

“What happened?” Oscar blurted.

Dewey shrugged, bright-eyed and cheery. “Hey, mister — you tell me! Somebody sure shot the hell out of somebody’s ass last night. I reckon that’s all I can say.” Dewey was very young, maybe seven-teen. He had a single-shot hunting rifle strapped across his back. An ancient, rusty pickup truck sat nearby, with Texas plates. It had a smashed motorcycle in the back.

“Is that your truck?” Oscar said.

“Yup!”

“Do you have a tool chest in there? Anything that can cut through handcuffs?”

“I got me a power saw. I got bolt cutters. I got a towing chain. Hey, back at the farm, my dad’s got welding equipment!”

“You’re a good man to know, Dewey. I wonder if I might bor-row your tools for a moment, and saw my friend loose.”

Dewey looked at him with puzzled concern. “You sure you’re okay, mister? Your ear’s bleeding pretty bad.”

Oscar coughed. “A little water. Water would be good.” Oscar touched his cheek, felt a viscous mass of clotted blood, and gazed down at the riverbank. It would feel lovely to wash his head in cold water. This was a brilliant idea. It was totally necessary, it was his new top priority.

He stumbled through thick brown reeds, sinking ankle-deep in cold mud. He found a clear patch in the algae-scummed water and bathed his head with his cupped hands. Blood cascaded from his hair. He had a large, gashed bruise above his right ear, which announced itself with a searing pang and a series of sickening throbs. He risked a few mouthfuls of the river water, crouching there doubled over, until the shock passed. Then he stood up.

Twenty meters away, he spotted another wreck, bobbing slowly in the river. Oscar took it for a half-submerged tanker truck at first, and then realized, to his profound astonishment, that it was a midget submarine. The black craft had been peppered from stern to bow with thumb-sized machine-gun holes. It was beached in the mud in a spreading rainbow scum of oil.

Oscar clambered back up the riverbank, spattered with mud to his kneecaps. On his way to the ambulance he noted that the cab’s windshield had exploded, and that many of the fragments were liber-ally splashed with dried blood. There was no sign of anyone at all. The rain-damp dirt road was furiously torn with motorcycle tracks.

The muffled sound of Dewey’s power saw echoed from inside the smashed ambulance. Oscar trudged to the back and looked inside. Dewey had given up on his attempt to saw through the handcuffs, and was sawing through the slotted metal stanchion of the stretcher frame. He bent the metal frame and slipped the cuffs through.

Oscar helped him carry Greta into daylight. Her hands were blue with constriction and her wrists were badly skinned, but her breathing was still strong.

She had been gassed unconscious — twice — and had lived through a car wreck and a firefight. Then she’d been abandoned in a locked and armored vault. Greta needed a hospital. Some nice safe hospital. A hospital would be an excellent idea for both of them.

“Dewey, how far is it to Buna from here?”

“Buna? About thirty miles as the crow flies,” Dewey allowed.

“I’ll give you three hundred dollars if you’ll take us to Buna right now.”

Dewey thought about the offer. It didn’t take him long. “Y’all hop on in,” he said.

Oscar’s phone couldn’t find a proper relay station this far from Buna. They stopped at a grocery in the tiny hamlet of Calvary, Texas, where he bought some first-aid supplies and tried a local pay phone. He couldn’t get through to the lab. He couldn’t even reach the hotel in Buna. He was able to restore Greta to consciousness with a cautious application of temple rubbing and canned soda, but she was headachy and nauseous. She had to lie still and groan, and the only place avail-able for lying down was the back of Dewey’s truck, next to the sal-vaged wreck of a motorcycle.

Oscar waited in anguished silence as the miles rolled by. He had never much liked the lurking somnolence of the East Texas landscape. Pines, marsh, creeks, more pines, more marsh, another creek; nothing had ever happened here, nothing would ever be allowed to happen here. But something important had finally happened. Now its piney hick tedium crackled with silent menace.

Four miles from Buna they encountered a lunatic in a rusted rental car. He raced past them at high speed. The car then screeched to a halt, did a U-turn, and rapidly pulled up behind them, honking furiously.