Sam followed. Inside, the house suddenly flared with bright light; Pierce had slapped a wall switch on the far side of the living room. Sam squinted, his eyes stinging, but he saw Pierce pull open a door and go through. An instant later the dark space beyond that doorway was also bathed in light, revealing a garage. The lone vehicle inside was a dark green, open-top Jeep.

Ahead of Sam, Dani stepped into the garage, all but running. Pierce was already pulling open the driver’s door of the Jeep. He reached in and tilted down the visor, and a set of keys dropped into his hand.

“You’re going up there,” Dani said.

“Yes.”

“We’re coming with you. If there’s any way she survived—”

“Then I’ll help her,” Pierce said. “Stay here.”

Dani took another two fast steps, grabbed the Jeep’s roll bar and clambered into the back seat. Sam did the same, dropping into place beside her.

Pierce stood there outside the open driver’s door, staring at them.

“We heard you,” Sam said.

Pierce looked at them a moment longer, then gave up. He went around the Jeep’s back end, twisted the manual release for the garage door, and hauled the thing up on its rollers. He got back in the Jeep, started it, gunned the engine and reversed out of the garage.

The moment they cleared the north end of downtown Ashland, they saw the crash site. The chopper had gone down in the cornfield, south and west of the subdivision.

Sam stood up from his seat, holding the Jeep’s roll bar. Beside him, Dani did the same.

The burning wreck of the aircraft lay maybe two hundred yards from the southwest corner of the suburb—the corner of the sideways rainbow, as it would have appeared on a map. The wind was blowing northeast, hard and gusty, sending the smoke right into the subdivision in a layer that hugged the surface like ground fog.

Sam watched it drift among the houses for only a second or two, and then his attention went back to the crashed chopper and the cornfield around it, brightly lit by the flames.

It was obvious the chopper had not simply hit the ground and exploded. The cornfield had been torn up and shredded in a long furrow that stretched more than a hundred feet. It looked as if the helicopter had come in at a shallow angle, dragging its skids through the corn and the dirt—maybe the edges of its spinning rotors, too. There were also deeper ruts sticking off of the main path of destruction here and there; Sam picture the chopper’s tail whipping around and slamming into the ground at those places, carving into the soil.