Behind them, the distant twin sparks had grown to circles—dual headlights about a mile back.
“Hand me another Molotov cocktail, you fucking racist pig.”
Bobby handed up a fresh bottle of Driver, remaining prudently silent.
Buddy drank deeply, belched, and then handed the bottle across to Richie.
“No thanks, man.”
“You drink it, or you may find yourself getting an enema with it.”
“Sure, okay,” Richie said, wishing mightily that he had stayed home tonight. He drank.
The Camaro sped along, its headlights cutting the night. Buddy glanced into the rearview and saw the other car. It was now coming up fast. He glanced at his speedometer and saw he was doing sixty-five. The car behind them had to be doing close to seventy. Buddy felt something—a curious kind of doubling back to the dreams he could not quite remember. A cold finger seemed to press lightly against his heart.
Ahead, the road branched in two, Route 46 continuing east toward New Stanton, the other road bearing north toward Squantic Hills State Park. A large orange sign advised: CLOSED WINTER MONTHS.
Barely slowing, Buddy dragged left and shot up the hill. The approach road to the park was not so well-ploughed, and overarching trees had kept the warm afternoon sun from melting off the snowpack. The Camaro slid a little before grabbing the road again. In the back seat, Bobby Stanton made a low, uneasy sound.
Buddy looked up in the rearview, expecting to see the other car shoot by along 46—after all, there was nothing up this road but a dead end as far as most drivers were concerned—but instead it took the turn eyen faster than Buddy had and pounded along after them, now less than a quarter of a mile behind. Its headlights were four glowing white circles that washed the Camaro’s interior.
Bobby and Richie turned around to look.
“What the fuck?” Richie muttered.
But Buddy knew. Suddenly he knew. It was the car that had run down Moochie. Oh yes it was. The psycho who had greased Moochie was behind the wheel of that car, and now he was after Buddy.
He stepped down on the go, and the Camaro started to fly. The speedometer needle crept up to seventy and then gradually heeled over toward eighty. Trees blurred past, dark sketches in the night. The lights behind them did not fall back; the truth was that they were still gaining. The duals had merged into two great white eyes.
“Man, you want to slow down,” Richie said. He grabbed for his seatbelt, actively scared now. “If we roll at this speed—”
Buddy didn’t answer. He hunched over the wheel, alternating glances at the road ahead with glances shot into the rearview mirror, where those lights grew and grew.
“The road curves up ahead,” Bobby said hoarsely. And as the curve approached, guardrail reflectors flickering chrome in the Camaro’s headlights, he screamed it: “Buddy! It curves! It curves!”
Buddy changed down to second gear and the Camaro’s engine bellowed its protest. The tachometer needle hit 6,000 rpm, danced briefly at redline—7,000, and then dropped back to a more normal range. Backfires blatted through the Camaro’s exhaust pipes like machine-gun fire. Buddy pulled the wheel over, and the car floated into the sharp bend. The rear wheels skimmed over hard-packed snow. At the last possible instant he shifted back up, tramped on the accelerator pedal, and let his body sway freely as the Camaro’s left rear end slammed into the snowbanks digging a coffin-sized divot and then bouncing off. The Camaro slewed the other way. He went with it, then goosed the accelerator again. For one moment he thought it would not respond, that the skid would continue and they would simply barrel sideways up the road at seventy-five until they hit a bare patch and flipped over.
But the Camaro straightened out.
“Holy Jesus Buddy slow down!” Richie wailed.
Buddy hung over the wheel, grinning through his beard, bloodshot eyes bulging. The bottle of Driver was clamped between his legs. There! There, you crazy murdering sonofabitch. Let’s see you do that without rolling it over! A moment later the headlights reappeared, closer than ever, Buddy’s grin faltered and faded. For the first time he felt a sickish, unmanning tingle running up his legs toward his crotch, Fear—real fear—stole into him.
Bobby had been looking behind as the car chased them round the bedd, and now he turned around, his face slack and cheesy. “It dint even skid,” he said. “But that’s impossible! That’s—”
“Buddy, who is it?” Richie asked.
He reached out to touch Buddy’s elbow, and his hand was flung away with such force that his knuckles cracked on the glass of his window.
“You don’t want to touch me,” Buddy whispered. The road rolled straight in front of him, not black tar now but white snow, packed and treacherous. The Camaro was rolling over this greasy surface at better than ninety miles an hour, only its roof and the orange Ping-Pong ball jammed on the top of its radio aerial visible between chest-high embankments. “You don’t want to touch me, Richie. Not going this fast.”
“Is it—” Richie’s voice cracked and he couldn’t go on.
Buddy spared him a glance, and at the sight of the fear in Buddy’s small red eyes, Richie’s own terror came up in his throat like hot, smooth oil.
“Yeah,” Buddy said. “I think it is.”
No houses up here; they were already on state land. Nothing up here but the high snow embankments and the dark interlacing of trees.
“It’s gonna bump us!” Bobby screeched from the back seat. His voice was as high as an old woman’s. Between his feet the remaining bottles of Texas Driver chattered wildly in their carton. “Buddy! It’s gonna bump us!”
The car behind them had come to within five feet of the Camaro’s back bumper; its high beams flooded the car with light bright enough to read fine print. It slipped forward even closer. A moment later there was a thud.
The Camaro shifted its stance on the road as the car behind them fell back a trifle; to Buddy it was as if they were suddenly floating, and he knew they were a hair’s breadth from going into a wild, looping skid, the front end and the rear briskly swapping places until they hit something and rolled.
A droplet of sweat, as warm and stinging as a tear, ran into his eye.
Gradually, the Camaro straightened out again.
When he felt that he had control, Buddy let his right foot smoothly depress the accelerator all the way. If it was Cunningham in that old rustbucket ’58—ah, and hadn’t that been part of the dreams he could barely remember—the Camaro would shut him down.
The engine was now screaming. The tach needle was again on the edge of the redline at 7,000 rpm. The speedometer had passed the one hundred post, and the snowbanks streamed past them on either side in ghastly silence. The road ahead looked like a point-of-view shot in a film that had been insanely speeded up.
“Oh dear God,” Bobby babbled, “oh dear God please don’t let me get killed oh dear God oh holy shit—”
He wasn’t there the night we trashed Cuntface’s car, Buddy thought. He doesn’t know what’s going on. Poor busted-luck sonofawhore. He did not really feel sorry for Bobby, but if he could have been sorry for anyone, it would have been for the little shit-for-brains freshman. On his right, Richie Trelawney sat bolt-upright and as pallid as a gravestone, his eyes eating up his face. Richie knew the score, all right.
The car whispered toward them, headlights swelling in the rearview mirror.
He can’t be gaining! Buddy’s mind screamed. He can’t be! But the car behind them was indeed gaining, and Buddy sensed it was boring in for the kill. His mind ran like a rat in a cage, looking for a way out, and there was none. The slot in the left snowbank that marked the little side-road he usually used to bypass the gate and get into the state park had already flashed by. He was running out of time, room, and options.