Page 51 of Helsing: Demon Slayer
She was also terrified that he’d leave her. She swallowed and gazed out the side window.
“Hey,” he said, shooting her a hard glance, “look at me.” When she did, he said, “I will never leave you, Dianne. Never. We’re in this together. I’m gonna get you to Fushë-Arrëz. Your sister and Mihàil have their own little secure compound with its own renewable power supply and food stores. We can survive a years’ long siege or geomagnetic disruption without much hardship.”
Dianne, her throat too thick to let words out, nodded.
Had she really been sailing the Adriatic only twenty-four hours ago, drinking cocktails while worried about friendship drama and pining for love?
It was so surreal.
Even more surreal? Finding the man she wanted more than anything at the heart of this mind-blowing situation. Somehow, everything was larger-than-life, including her growing feelings for this remarkable warrior. Feelings that might be a product of proximity. Wasn’t it a common trope? A shallow romance that couldn’t go the distance growing in the heat of a crisis? She didn’t think she could settle for that. It would be worse than any one-night stand, which never promised her heart so much. In fact, they’d never promised her anything.
She glanced at Ryan from the corner of her eye, afraid to look too long and reveal how she felt.
How did he feel? If that kiss was anything to go by, he was feeling the same adrenaline-laden desire she was. But did it mean anything to him? What about the model-pretty woman in the worn photo he carried?
They drove in silence for another hour. Apparently, the highway into Montenegro was little traveled, despite the long queue at the border crossing. Long stretches of empty asphalt opened up before them as the highway snaked through the mountains. Even when they came across cars, by now abandoned, Ryan easily bypassed them. Sometimes they passed individuals and small groups of people walking along the highway. Many waved and shouted, but Ryan drove a wide berth around them, his jaw clenched. Dianne reached over and squeezed his forearm but said nothing. She knew that they couldn’t stop to help anyone. Even so, seeing a mother holding a toddler with a slightly older boy clutching at her bag shook Dianne’s resolve.
Nothing impeded their progress, not even when the deserted vehicles blocked both lanes. No one seemed inclined to violence, and thedaemonshad receded into the stuff of urban legend and half-remembered nightmare.
Until the highway intersected a larger road at an angle.
Up ahead, several cars blocked the intersection, which didn’t have lights or signs, just multiple lanes for merging. Two cars, in the left and right lanes turning onto this new route, had stopped a few dozen feet from the intersection. The car in the right lane had its hood up, obscuring the view of the highway in front of it. In the other lane coming north toward them sat a box truck.
It would be difficult, but not impossible, for Ryan to navigate between these three vehicles given the spacing of the merging lanes, but he would have to slow down. Dianne, even without any battlefield experience, could see that they could be attacked from all sides.
Ryan braked a few feet behind the vehicles on the right. His hand strayed to the Glock where it rested in his lap.
“The roadblock is a trap,” said Dianne.
Ryan squinted as he studied the silent scene. “Someone’s watched a few too many military thrillers,” he said, “either that, or we’ve stumbled across a former soldier. I’m betting that there are at least a handful of people in that box truck waiting to jump anyone lucky enough to drive through here. And there are probably people in front of the other two vehicles where we can’t see them from here. They may all be armed in one way or another.”
“What do we do?”
“Your door still locked?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ryan reached down and locked his.
“We run the gauntlet, Beauty Queen.”
Dianne pressed her lips together and said nothing to the nickname as Ryan backed the Opel to the edge of the thick stand of trees on their right, a few hundred feet if she had to guess.
“Ready?”
She nodded.
He stomped on the gas. The little sedan fishtailed before pushing off and accelerating toward the open space between the truck and the lefthand car.
They’d reached the trunk of the car when two men stepped out of the box truck in front of them, one wielding a crowbar, the other a wrench. Ryan raised his Glock with his left hand and began shooting without slowing. The man with the wrench dove for the side, hitting the car next to them and rolling over its hood. At the same time, the man with the crowbar swung it at the Opel’s windshield, stepping sideways to avoid being run over. The windshield cracked but held.
Two more men materialized in front of their car, each with other tools that they swung with desperate power at the little German sedan. Ryan retained his cool, shooting and steering straight at the men. From nowhere, another man smashed the passenger window. Dianne screamed. He clung to the car using the tire iron as a makeshift climbing hook and began battering the window with his other fist.
Ryan swerved at the intersection, scattering attackers in the wake of their passage, except for the shockingly stubborn man on the right.
“Move,” he commanded Dianne as he slowed to shift the Glock to his right hand and the steering wheel to his left.
She ducked an instant before he shot the man clinging to their car. Dianne heard the awful grunt and saw a spray of blood as the bullet pierced their attacker. He fell to the pavement like a sack of potatoes, leaving the tire iron behind. She pulled the impromptu weapon into the car. It could come in handy later …
