At this hour on a Thursday night, there were no tourists. There were only long-haul timber trucks, the occasional local pickup, and empty asphalt.
I gripped the wheel at nine and three. The knuckles of my right hand were throbbing, swollen and hot where I had driven them into Colt’s sternum. The pain was clean; it kept the edges of my focus razor-sharp.
In the Corps, we called this the transition phase. You move from the point of contact to the point of exploitation. You do not stop to evaluate your feelings about the ground you just took; you immediately isolate the enemy’s reserve forces before they can dig into prepared defensive positions.
New Bern Creek Behavioral Health was an old colonial-style estate turned private asylum, situated on a remote peninsula off the Neuse River. It had high brick walls, electronic iron gates, and private security guards hired from Jacksonville private military firms. Once they got Lainey behind those gates, under a valid involuntary commitment hold, North Carolina General Statute 122C gave them seventy-two hours of absolute medical custody.
In seventy-two hours, a corrupt attending physician could load her bloodstream with enough neuroleptics to make her swear she fell off a skyscraper, let alone a set of stairs.
Three miles past the Newport turnoff, the red taillights of distant traffic appeared through the humid mist rising off the marsh canals.
A flatbed lumber truck in the right lane. A dark sedan passing it on the left. And half a mile ahead of them, a tall, boxy silhouette throwing dull halogen beams onto the wet macadam.
A white Ford Econoline with no side windows.
I eased the F-250 into the left lane, letting the speed build to eighty-five. The wind screamed through the weather stripping around the driver's side door. The heavy iron bumper of my truck, welded out of four-inch structural steel back when I used it to haul cedar logs out of the Dismal Swamp, sat thirty inches off the ground.
The van was cruising at sixty, hugging the right lane with the mechanical steadiness of a driver who believed his paperwork made him untouchable.
I didn't turn on my high beams. I didn't honk.
I pulled up into their blind spot, matching their speed for three long seconds. Through the tinted passenger window of the van, I could see two men in the front buckets. The driver was a thick-necked kid with a buzz cut and a dark windbreaker; the passenger was older, hunched over a glowing tablet computer, a laminated county access badge swinging from his rearview mirror.
In the back, behind the steel security partition, a faint amber interior light illuminated the silhouette of a stretcher locked into the floor tracks.
Lainey.
I pulled the F-250 forward until my front right quarter-panel was aligned with the van’s rear wheel well.
Then I laid on the horn—one long, deafening blast that shattered the stillness of the Croatan woods.
The driver glanced to his left. His eyes widened behind the glass as he recognized the battered brown hood and the gray-haired woman staring back at him across three feet of empty space. He reached down with his right hand, reaching for something on the floorboard or grabbing a radio handset.
He didn't hit the brakes. He swerved left, deliberately trying to crowd me into the concrete median barrier that divided the highway.
"Wrong answer," I muttered.
I tapped the brakes, dropping back just enough to let his front bumper sweep through the air where my door had been half a second earlier. The moment his momentum carried him across the center line, I hit the throttle and turned hard into his right rear quarter-panel.
It wasn't a blind crash; it was a precision pit maneuver executed at fifty miles an hour.
The steel bumper of the F-250 caught the light sheet metal of the Econoline's rear corner with a shriek of tearing steel and exploding taillight plastic. The van’s rear tires lost their grip on the damp asphalt. The vehicle began to fishtail, its tall center of gravity working against the driver as he overcorrected to the right.
The van spun a full ninety degrees, rubber smoking against the macadam, before sliding sideways off the shoulder and into the shallow, pine-choked ditch that bordered the swamp.
It didn't roll. The ditch was wide, choked with heavy reeds and soft black muck that absorbed the vehicle's momentum with a massive, sucking thump. The Econoline came to a dead stop, tilted at a twenty-degree angle against a stand of young sweetgum trees, steam hissing violently from a punctured radiator hose.
I threw the F-250 into park on the shoulder, pulled the emergency brake, and left the engine running, the high beams pinning the crashed van like a specimen under glass.
I reached behind the bench seat of my cab and pulled out my twenty-four-inch framing pry-bar—a solid piece of forged steel with an angled chisel edge.
My boots hit the gravel with a heavy, crunching rhythm. The smell of hot coolant and scorched rubber hung thick in the cool air, mixed with the sulfurous rot of the swamp muck.
The driver’s side door of the van had been crushed shut against the mud bank. From inside the cab, I heard men shouting, followed by the dull, hollow thud of someone kicking against the passenger side door.
The passenger door flew open.
The older man tumbled out into the wet sawgrass, coughing, holding a sprained wrist against his ribs. He looked up, squinting into the blinding glare of my headlights, and saw me coming down the incline with the pry-bar held low in my right hand.
"Stay back!" he screamed, his voice cracking with terror as he scrambled backward through the mud on his hands and knees. "We are state-licensed medical transport! You just committed a federal felony, you crazy bitch!"
I ignored him entirely.
I stepped onto the rear bumper of the tilted van, wedged the flat chisel end of the pry-bar into the seam between the two rear cargo doors, and put my entire body weight into the lever.
The metal groaned. The cheap commercial lock cylinder sheared with a sharp, metallic snap, and both doors swung wide into the night.
The amber dome light was still burning inside.
Lainey was strapped to the gurney, her head secured in a foam head-block, her arms bound to her sides with thick canvas medical restraints. Her eyes were half-open, glazed and unfocused, her pupils dilated to the rim under the dim bulb. A clear plastic oxygen cannula was looped around her ears, and an IV line ran from a bag of saline hanging from the ceiling directly into the back of her left hand.
She didn't know where she was. She heard the noise, heard the metal tearing, and let out a weak, animal whimper that cut through my chest deeper than any knife Colt Lusk could have carried.
"Lainey," I said, dropping the pry-bar onto the floor of the van with a heavy clatter. "Lainey-bug, look at me."
I reached into my pocket, pulled out my folding pocketknife, and sliced through the canvas wrist straps with two quick strokes. Her hands fell limp against the mattress. I reached up and ripped the IV needle from the vein in her hand, pressing my thumb against the small bead of blood until it stopped.
"Mom?" she whispered, her tongue thick, her lips barely moving against the swelling on her jaw. "Mom... it's dark."
"I have you," I told her, unbuckling the main harness across her chest and legs. "We’re going home."
"She’s not going anywhere," a voice snarled from behind me.
I turned my head.
The driver had crawled out through the passenger door. He was standing at the base of the rear bumper, covered in black ditch muck, his right hand gripping a heavy, black polycarbonate stun gun that crackled with a vicious blue arc of high-voltage electricity.
"Step away from the patient, lady," the driver said, his jaw set in a tight, ugly line. "You touch her again and I’ll drop you into this ditch with fifty thousand volts."
I looked down at the stun gun. Then I looked at his eyes.
He had the stance of a mall cop who had taken an eight-hour certification course at a strip mall and thought the battery pack in his hand made him a deity.
"Son," I said, stepping slowly down from the van's bumper until my boots were sunk two inches into the soft mud. "You have about three seconds to turn that toy off and walk into those woods before I break your arm in three places."
"Screw you, old—"
He lunged, thrusting the twin metal prongs toward my neck.
I didn't block the weapon; you don't block an electric discharge. I stepped inside the thrust, letting the prongs pass over my left shoulder, the blue arc snapping loud enough to singe the collar of my jacket. My left hand caught the inside of his wrist, pulling his arm forward to extend the joint, while my right palm hammered down on his tricep tendon.
His arm locked straight. I twisted his wrist outward, breaking his grip on the handle. The stun gun splashed harmlessly into six inches of swamp water, its blue light dying with a dull sizzle.