There was debris strewn everywhere along the length of the furrow: pieces of the aircraft, torn off in the dragging impact. Sam could make out a seat, intact but empty, lying on its side among the corn shoots. There were metal panels of the fuselage, and spearlike fragments of the rotor blades, and heavy-looking steel chunks of what must have been the engine.

And human bodies.

Sam could see three of them already, just in the cleared-out path where the field had been scraped flat. All three lay well away from the burning wreckage.

One of the bodies was much smaller than the other two.

With long hair.

Sam elbowed Dani and pointed, but she was already nodding, her eyes fixed on Lauren Coleman, lying there where she’d been thrown from the crashing chopper.

And then Lauren moved.

There was no mistaking it, even from several hundred feet away. She rolled onto her back and put a hand to her head, pressing it there like someone with a headache.

Dani leaned down and screamed at Pierce in the driver’s seat: “She’s alive!”

Pierce nodded, his attention going back and forth between the crash site and the road ahead; they were now midway up the slope between downtown and the subdivision.

Pierce was just turning in place, as if to reply to Dani, when something near the crash site caught his eye—he jerked his head toward it, and slammed on the brakes.

Sam’s chest hit the roll bar hard enough to compress the air out of his lungs; the same happened to Dani beside him. Beneath them, the Jeep’s tires bit into the pavement with a long shriek. The vehicle slewed forty-five degrees to the left as it finally came to rest.

Sam sucked in a breath and found his voice. “What the hell was that for?”

Pierce didn’t answer. He didn’t even seem to have heard. He was staring through the windshield at the wreckage, still a couple hundred feet away. His hands gripped the steering wheel, the knuckles bone-white.

“Hey,” Sam said.

“Thirty feet short of the chopper,” Pierce said. “Just to the right of the gouge. Look close.”

Sam looked. For a moment he could see nothing there; the glare coming off the flames was too bright. Then he heard Dani take a sharp breath, and in the same moment he saw what Pierce was talking about.

Lying in the corn shoots, just off the edge of the scraped-clear ground, was one of the huge black canisters. Its valve assembly must have been damaged in the crash: there was a thick white mist rushing out of it, into the air.

That mist was being pushed sideways on the wind, in the same direction as the smoke.

North and east, hugging the ground in a broad, spreading layer, as it must have been doing for a few minutes by now.

The subdivision was already filled with it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT