Free Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz

spear-point verticals were solidly welded to the horizontal rails; instead of clattering from my impact, the fence briefly thrummed.
    I sagged against the ironwork.
    A bitter taste plagued me. My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t spit.
    My right temple stung. I raised a hand to my face. Three thorns prickled my skin. I plucked them out.
    During my flight downhill, I must have been lashed by a trailing rose brier, although I didn’t recall encountering it.
    Maybe because I was breathing harder and faster, the sweet fragrance of roses became too sweet, sharpened into a half-rotten stench. I could smell my sunscreen again, too, almost as strongly as when it had been freshly applied—but with a sour taint now—because my perspiration had revitalized the scent of the lotion.
    I was overcome by the absurd yet unshakable conviction that the six searchers could sniff me out, as though they were hounds. I was safe for the moment only because I was downwind of them.
    Clutching the fence, out of which the thrumming had passed into my hands and bones, I glanced uphill. The search party was moving from the highest terrace to the second.
    Six scythes of light slashed through the roses. Portions of the lattice structures, when briefly backlit and distorted by those bright sweeping swords, loomed like the bones of slain dragons.
    The gardens presented the searchers with more possible hiding places to probe than did the open lawn above. Yet they were moving faster than before.
    I scaled the fence and swung over the top, wary of snaring my jacket or a leg of my jeans on the spear-point pickets. Beyond lay open land: shadowed vales, steadily rising ranks of moonlit hills, widely scattered and barely discernible black oaks.
    The wild grass, lush from the recent winter rains, was knee-high when I dropped into it from the fence. I could smell the green juice bursting from the blades crushed beneath my shoes.
    Certain that Sandy and his associates would survey the entire perimeter of the property, I bounded downhill, away from the funeral home. I was eager to get beyond the reach of their flashlights before they arrived at the fence.
    I was heading farther from town, which wasn’t good. I wouldn’t find help in the wilderness. Every step eastward was a step into isolation, and in isolation I was as vulnerable as anyone, more vulnerable than most.
    Some luck was with me because of the season. If the searing heat of summer had already been upon us, the high grass would have been as golden as wheat and as dry as paper. My progress would have been marked by a swath of trampled stalks.
    I was hopeful that the still-verdant meadow would be resilient enough to spring shut behind me, for the most part concealing the fact that I had passed this way. Nevertheless, an observant searcher would most likely be able to track me.
    Approximately two hundred feet beyond the fence, at the bottom of the slope, the meadow gave way to denser brush. A barrier of tough, five-foot-high prairie cordgrass was mixed with what might have been goatsbeard and massive clumps of aureola.
    I hurriedly pushed through this growth into a ten-foot-wide natural drainage swale. Little grew here because an epoch of storm runoff had exposed a spine of bedrock under the hills. With no rain in over two weeks, this rocky course was dry.
    I paused to catch my breath. Leaning back into the brush, I parted the tall cordgrass to see how far down into the rose gardens the searchers had descended.
    Four of them were already climbing the fence. Their flashlight beams slashed at the sky, stuttered across the pickets, and stabbed randomly at the ground as they clambered up and over the iron.
    They were unnervingly quick and agile.
    Were all of them, like Sandy Kirk, carrying weapons?
    Considering their animal-keen instinct, speed, and persistence, perhaps they wouldn’t need weapons. If they caught me, maybe they would tear me apart with their hands.
    I wondered if they would take my eyes.
    The