Nothing to Lose

Three-quarters of a mile out the shape grew width, and depth, and height. The sun blazed behind it and winked around its edges. It looked like a low wide pile of something dark. Like a gigantic truck had strewn earth or asphalt right across the road, shoulder to shoulder, and beyond.

The pile looked to be fifty feet wide, maybe twenty deep, maybe six high.

From a half-mile out, it looked to be moving.

From a quarter-mile out, it was identifiable.

It was a crowd of people.

Vaughan slowed, instinctively. The crowd was two or three hundred strong. Men, women, and children. They were formed up in a rough triangle, facing east. Maybe six people at the front. Behind the six, twenty more. Behind the twenty, sixty more. Behind the sixty, a vast milling pool of people. The whole width of the road was blocked. The shoulders were blocked. The rearguard spilled thirty feet out into the scrub on both sides.

Vaughan stopped, fifty yards out.

The crowd compressed. People pushed inward from the sides. They made a human wedge. A solid mass. Two or three hundred people. They held together, but they didn’t link arms.

They didn’t link arms because they had weapons in their hands.

Baseball bats, pool cues, ax handles, broom handles, split firewood, carpenters’ hammers. Two or three hundred people, pressed tight together, and moving. Moving as one. They were rocking in place from foot to foot and jabbing their weapons up and down in the air. Nothing wild. Their movements were small and rhythmic and controlled.

They were chanting.

At first Reacher heard only a primitive guttural shout, repeated over and over. Then he dropped his window an inch and heard the wordsOut! Out! Out! He hit the switch again and the glass thumped back up.

Vaughan was pale.

“Unbelievable,” she said.

“Is this some weird Colorado tradition?” Reacher asked.

“I never saw it before.”

“So Judge Gardner went and did it. He deputized the whole population.”

“They don’t look drafted. They look like true believers. What are we going to do?”

Out! Out! Out!

Reacher watched for a moment and said, “Drive on and see what happens.”

“Are you serious?”

“Try it.”

Vaughan took her foot off the brake and the car crept forward.

The crowd surged forward to meet it, short steps, crouched, weapons moving.

Vaughan stopped again, forty yards out.

Out! Out! Out!

Reacher said, “Use your siren. Scare them.”

“Scarethem? They’re doing a pretty good job scaring me.”

The crowd had quit rocking from side to side. Now people were rocking back and forth instead, one foot to the other, jabbing their clubs and sticks forward, whipping them back, jabbing them forward again. They were dressed in work shirts and faded sundresses and jean jackets, but collectively in terms of their actions they looked entirely primitive. Like a weird Stone Age tribe, threatened and defensive.

“Siren,” Reacher said.

Vaughan lit it up. It was a modern synthesized unit, shatteringly loud in the emptiness, sequencing randomly from a basicwhoop-whoop-whoop to a manicpock-pock-pock to a hysterical digital cackling.

It had no effect.

No effect at all.

The crowd didn’t flinch, didn’t move, didn’t miss a beat.

Reacher said, “Can you get around them?”

Vaughan shook her head. “This car is no good on the scrub. We’d bog down and they’d be all over us.”

“So fake them out. Drift left, then sneak past on the right real fast.”

“You think?”

“Try it.”

She took her foot off the brake again and crept forward. She turned the wheel and headed for the wrong side of the road and the crowd in front of her tracked the move, slow and infinitely fluid. Two or three hundred people, moving as one, like a pool of gray mercury, changing shape like an ameba. Like a disciplined herd. Vaughan reached the left shoulder.

“Can’t do it,” she said. “There’s too many of them.”

She stopped again, ten feet from the front rank.

She killed the siren.

The chanting grew louder.

Out! Out! Out!

Then the note dropped lower and the rhythm changed down. As one, the people started banging their clubs and sticks on the ground and shouting only every other beat.

Out!

Crash!

Out!

Crash!