Cold Fire by Dean Koontz

had not eaten breakfast and had nothing to toss up. No matter what the nutritionists said, sometimes it paid to skip a meal.
    Full of deep shade, the concrete culvert was comparatively cool. He was tempted to stop and hide there—and hope they would give up, go away.
    He couldn’t do that, of course. He wasn’t a coward. But even if his conscience had allowed him to buy into a little cowardice this time, the mysterious force driving him would not permit him to cut and run. To some extent, he was a marionette on strings invisible, at the mercy of a puppeteer unseen, in a puppet-theater play with a plot he could not understand and a theme that eluded him.
    A few tumbleweeds had found their way into the culvert, and their brittle spines raked him as he shoved through the barrier they had formed. He came out on the other side of the highway, into another arm of the arroyo, and scrambled up the wall of that parched channel.
    Lying belly-flat on the desert floor, he slithered to the edge of the elevated roadbed and eased up to look across the pavement, east toward the motor home. Beyond the Roadking, he could see the Camaro like a dead roach on its back. The two men were standing near it, together now. Evidently, they had just checked the car and knew he was not in it.
    They were talking animatedly, but they were too far away for Jim to hear what they were saying. A couple of words carried to him, but they were faded by distance and distorted by the furnace-dry air.
    Sweat kept trickling into his eyes, blurring his vision. He blotted his face with his sleeve and squinted at the men again.
    They were moving slowly away from the Camaro now, deeper into the desert. One of them was wary, swiveling his head from side to side, and the other studied the ground as they moved, no doubt searching for signs of Jim’s passage. Just his luck, one of them would turn out to have been raised by Indian scouts, and they’d be all over him faster than an iguana on a sand beetle.
    From the west came the sound of an engine, low at first but growing rapidly louder even as Jim turned his head to look in that direction. Out of a waterfall mirage came a Peterbilt. From Jim’s low vantage point, the truck looked so huge that it didn’t even seem like a truck but like some futuristic war machine that had traveled backward in time from the twenty-second century.
    The driver of the Peterbilt would see the overturned Camaro. In the traditional Samaritan spirit that most truckers showed on the road, he would stop to offer assistance. His arrival would rattle the two killers, and while they were distracted, Jim would get the drop on them.
    He had it all figured out—except it didn’t work that way. The Peterbilt didn’t slow as it approached, and Jim realized he was going to have to flag it down. But before he could even rise up, the big truck swept past with a dragon roar and a blast of hot wind, breaking the speed limit by a Guinness margin, as if it were a judgment wagon driven by a demon and loaded with souls that the devil wanted in hell right now.
    Jim fought the urge to leap up and yell after it: Where’s your traditional Samaritan spirit, you shithead?
    Silence returned to the hot day.
    On the far side of the road, the two killers looked after the Peterbilt for a moment, then continued their search for Jim.
    Furious and scared, he eased back from the shoulder of the highway, flattened out again, and belly-crawled eastward toward the motor home, dragging the shotgun with him. The elevated roadbed was between him and them; they could not possibly see him, yet he more than half expected them to sprint across the blacktop and pump half a dozen rounds into him.
    When he dared look up again, he was directly opposite the parked Roadking, which blocked the two men from his view. If he couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see him. He scrambled to his feet and crossed the pavement to the passenger side of the motor home.
    The door on that flank was a