Free Clay's Ark by Octavia E. Butler Page B

started to close the door, then instead squatted beside her. "Kerry, did you hear anything about Rane? Do you know
    where she is?"
    "With Ingraham and Lupe. I don't know which house they're in."
    She did not know. And how many people would he wake up if he tried to find out? One would be enough to recapture
    him. He had not even been bright enough to get himself another knife -not that the first one had done him any good.
    What he needed was a gun.
    "Daddy, I heard something," Keira said.
    He froze, listened, heard it himself-someone moving around carelessly in the house nearest to him. It may have been
    just someone going to the bathroom, but it frightened him. He rounded the car in a few long steps, got in, and heedless
    of noise, started the engine. At that moment, someone opened the door of the house from which the noise had come. It
    was a man, a stranger, who actually managed to catch the car as Blake swung it around toward the rocky trail that led
    down from the ranch. The stranger tried to tear Blake's door open as Ingraham had earlier. But with the car moving and
    his body inadequately braced, he failed to break the lock. He was dragged several yards as Blake picked up speed. As a
    final gesture, he managed to release his hold with one hand, raise his fist, and smash it into the window beside Blake's
    head. Like the lock, the glass held. It broke, cracks raying outward in all directions from the impact of the blow, but it
     
     
     
    did not shatter. Its breaking amazed Blake. The glass was special, expected to stop bullets with less damage. Blake
    realized again how powerful these people were. If they caught him, they could literally tear him limb from limb.
    He drove on, praying that he would see Rane, that he would have a chance to pick her up. But he saw only stick people-
    menacing, utterly terrifying in their difference and their intensity. In the moonlight, they seemed other than human. One
    refused to move from the car's path, apparently trying to make Blake swerve and hit a house or a huge rock.
    Blake did not swerve. No experienced city driver would have swerved or slowed. At the last possible instant, the
    "victim" leaped aside and clung to the rock like an insect.
    Something that moved like a cat, but was too big to be a cat, ran alongside the car briefly, and Keira screamed.
    "Don't hit him," she said. "Don't hurt him!"
    The car accelerated, leaving the running thing behind.
    "What the hell was that?" Blake asked.
    "Be careful," she said. "Remember the rocks Eli had to dodge around."
    He remembered. It was impossible to speed past those boulders. On the other hand, it was very possible that Meda's
    people in the mountains above could start rockslides that would close the narrow road entirely if he crept along slowly.
    As though in answer to his thought, he heard a rumbling from above. Praying as he had not since childhood, he drove
    on, managed to swerve around one boulder just in time to see a rockslide beginning ahead.
    He pushed the accelerator to the floor, sped past the slide area as the first rocks came down. Twice the car was hit by
    rocks big enough to shake it, but Blake managed to stay on the road. He did not slow down until he came to a sharp
    curve around which he thought he recalled a rock.
    There was a rock. Many rocks. Another slide had blocked the road with a steep hill of loose rocks and dirt. Blake had
    no time to think. The car would climb the slide or it would not. It was a Jeep, after all, antique or no.
    The car struggled for traction in the loose dirt and rock, then shuddered heavily as something landed on its roof. The
    something made an indentation they could see inside the car.
    Suddenly Keira pushed her door open. Blake grabbed for her, not understanding. His hand just missed her as she leaned
    out. Then he saw what she had seen-a small, bloody face hanging upside down from the cartop.
    "Rane!" he shouted. He leaned across Keira, indifferent for the moment to the way Keira