Her windscreen shattered. Michael Cunningham’s body flew through the jagged opening, legs trailing, his head a grotesque flattened football. He was catapulted through Will’s window; he struck Will’s desk with a heavy grainsack thud and skidded over onto the floor. His shoes stuck up.
Leigh began to scream.
Her fall had probably saved her from being badly lacerated or killed by the flying glass, but when she rose from behind the desk her face was contorted with horror, and utter hysteria had its hold on her. Michael had skidded from the desk and his arms had looped themselves over her shoulders and as Leigh struggled to her feet she appeared to be waltzing with the corpse. Her screams were like fireballs. Her blood, still flowing, sparkled deadly bright. She dumped Michael and ran for the door.
“Leigh, no!” I screamed, and slammed down the clutch with the mop again. The handle snapped cleanly in two, leaving me with a stump five inches long. “Ohhhh—SHIT!” Christine reversed away from the broken window, leaving water, antifreeze, and oil puddled on the floor.
I stamped down on the clutch with my left foot, barely feeling the pain now, bracing my left knee with my left hand as I worked the gearstick.
Leigh tore the office door open and ran out.
Christine turned toward her, its smashed, snarling snout sighting down on her.
I revved Petunia’s engine and roared at her, and as that damned car from hell grew in the windscreen, I saw the purple, swollen face of a child pressed to the rear window, watching me, seeming to beg me to stop.
I struck her hard. The boot lid popped up and gaped like a mouth. The rear end heeled around and Christine went skidding sideways past Leigh, who fled with her eyes seeming to swallow her face. I remember the spray of blood along the fur fringe of her parka’s hood, tiny droplets like an evil fall of dew.
I was in it now. I was in the peak seat. Even if they had to take my leg off at the groin when this was done, I was going to drive.
Christine hit the wall and bounced back. I stamped the clutch, rammed the gearstick into reverse, backed up ten feet, stamped the clutch again, rammed it back into first. Engine revving, Christine tried to pull away along the wall. I cut to the left and hit her again, crushing her almost wasp-waisted in the middle. The doors popped out of their frames at the top and the bottom. LeBay was behind the wheel, now a skull, now a decayed and stinking cameo of humanity, now a hale and hearty man in his fifties with a crew-cut turning white. He stared out at me with his devil’s grin, one hand on the wheel, one balled into a fist that he shook at me.
And still her engine would not die.
I got into reverse again, and now my leg was white iron and the pain was all the way up to my left armpit. The hell it was. The pain was everywhere. I could feel it
(Michael, Jesus why didn’t you stay in the house) in my neck, in my jaw in my
(Arnie? Man, I am so sorry I wish I wish) temples. The Plymouth—what remained of her—lunged drunkenly down the side of the garage, spraying tools and junk metal, pulling out struts and dumping the overhead shelves. The shelves hit the concrete with flat, clapping sounds that echoed like demon applause.
I stamped the clutch again and floored the gas. Petunia’s engine bellowed, and I hung onto the wheel like a man trying to stay aboard a bucking mustang. I hit her on the right side and smashed the body clear off the rear axle, driving it into the door, which shivered and rattled. I went up over the wheel, which slammed into my belly and drove the breath out of me and dumped me back into my seat, gasping.
Now I saw Leigh, cowering in the far corner, her hands clapped to her face, dragging it down into a witch’s mask.
Christine’s engine was still running.
She dragged herself slowly down toward Leigh, like an animal whose rear legs have been broken in a trap. And even as she went I could see her regenerating, coming back: a tyre that suddenly popped up full and plump, the radio aerial that unjointed itself with a silvery twinggg! sound, the accretion of metal around the ruined rear end.
“Stay dead!” I screamed at it. I was crying, my chest heaving. My leg wouldn’t work anymore. I braced it with both hands and jammed it onto the clutch. My vision went hazy and grey with the white-metal agony. I could almost feel the bones grating.
I raced the engine, got first gear again, and charged it; and as I did I heard LeBay’s voice for the first and only time, high and cheated and full of a terrible, unquenchable fury:
“You SHITTER! Fuck off, you miserable SHITTER! LEAVEMEALONE!”
“You should have left my friend alone,” I tried to yell—but all that would come out was a tearing, wounded gasp.
I hit it squarely in the rear end, and the gas tank ruptured as the back of the car accordioned inward and upward in a kind of metal mushroom. There was a yellow lick of fire. I shielded my face with my hands—but then it was gone. Christine sat there, a refugee from a demolition derby. Her engine ran choppily, missed, fired again, and then died.
The place was silent except for the bass rumble of Petunia’s engine.
Then Leigh was running across the floor, screaming my name over and over, crying. I was suddenly, stupidly aware that I was wearing her pink nylon scarf around the arm of my jacket.
I looked down at it, and then the world greyed out again.
I could feel her hands on me, and then there was nothing but darkness as I fainted.
I came to about fifteen minutes later, my face wet and blessedly cool. Leigh was standing on Petunia’s driver’s side running board, mopping my face with a wet rag. I caught it in one hand, tried to suck it, and then spat. The rag tasted strongly of oil.
“Dennis, don’t worry,” she said. “I ran out into the street… stopped a snowplough… scared the poor man out of ten years of his life, I think… all this blood… he said… an ambulance… he said he’d, you know… Dennis, are you all right?”
“Do I look all right?” I whispered.
“No,” she said, and burst into tears.
“Then don’t”—I swallowed past a pain dry lump in my throat—“don’t ask stupid questions. I love you.”
She hugged me clumsily.
“He said he’d call the police, too,” she said.
I barely heard her. My eyes had found the twisted, silent hulk that was Christine’s remains. And hulk was the right word; she hardly looked like a car at all anymore. But why hadn’t she burned? A hubcap lay off to one side like a dented silver tiddlywink.
“How long since you stopped the plough?” I asked hoarsely.
“Maybe five minutes. Then I got the rag and dipped it in that bucket over there. Dennis… thank God it’s over.”
Punk! Punk! Punk!
I was still looking at the hubcap.
The dents were popping out of it.
Abruptly it flicked up on its rim and rolled towards the car like a huge coin.
Leigh saw it too. Her face froze. Her eyes widened and began to bulge. Her lips mouthed the word No but no sound came out.
“Get in here with me,” I said in a low voice, as if it could hear us. How do I know? — perhaps it could. “Get in on the passenger side. You’re going to run the gas while I run the clutch with my right foot.”
“No…” This time it was a hissing whisper. Her breath came in whining little gasps. “No… no…”
The wreckage was quivering all over. It was the most eerie, most terrible thing I have ever seen in my life. It was quivering all over, quivering like an animal that is not… quite… dead. Metal tapped nervously against metal. Tie rods clicked jittery jazz rhythms against their connectors. As I watched, a bent cotter-pin lying on the floor straightened itself and did half a dozen cartwheels to land in the wreckage.