There was a crunch and jangle of metal, and Buddy cried out as one of his feet was driven into the snow by Christine’s bumper. He yanked it out of the snow, leaving his shoe wedged deep.
Lying, gibbering, crying, Buddy gained the top of the bank thrown up by some National Guard Motor Pool plough days ago, tottered on the edge of balance there, pinwheeled his arms, and barely kept from rolling back down.
He turned to face Christine, The Plymouth had reversed across the road and now came forward again, rear tyres spinning, digging at the snow. It crashed into the bank a foot below where Buddy was perched, making him sway and sending down a further avalanche of snow. The hit crimped her hood in further, but Buddy was not touched. She reversed again through a mist of churned-up snow, engine now seeming to howl with frustrated anger.
Buddy screamed in triumph and shook his middle finger at her. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” A spray of mixed blood and spittle flew from his lips. With each gasping breath, the pain seemed to sink deeper into his left side, numbing and paralyzing.
Christine roared forward and slammed into the embankment again.
This time a large section of the bank, loosened in the car’s first charge, came sliding down, burying Christine’s wrinkled, snarling snout, and Buddy almost came down with it. He saved himself only by skittering backward rapidly, sliding on his butt and pulling himself with hands that were clawed into the snow like bloody grappling hooks. His legs were in agony now, and he flopped over on his side, gasping like a beached fish.
Christine came again.
“Get outta here!” Buddy cried. “Get outta here, you crazy WHORE!”
She slammed into the embankment again, and this time enough snow fell to douse her hood to the windscreen. The wipers came on and began to arc back and forth, flicking melting snow away.
She reversed again, and Buddy saw that one more hit would sent him cascading down onto Christine’s hood with the snow. He let himself fall over backward and went rolling down the far side of the embankment, screaming each time his broken ribs bumped the ground. He came to rest in loose powder, staring up at black sky, the cold stars. His teeth began to click helplessly together. Shudders raced through his body.
Christine didn’t come again, but he could hear the soft mutter of her engine. Not coming, but waiting.
He glanced at the snowbank bulking against the sky. Beyond it, the glow of the burning Camaro had begun to wane a bit. How long had it been since the crash? He didn’t know. Would anyone see the fire and come to rescue him? He didn’t know that either.
Buddy became aware of two things simultaneously: that blood was flowing from his mouth—flowing at a frightening rate—and that he was very cold. He would freeze to death if someone didn’t come.
Frightened all over again, he struggled and thrashed his way into a sitting position. He was trying to decide if he could worm his way back up and watch the car—it was worse, not being able to see it—when he glanced up at the embankment again. His breath snagged and stopped.
A man was standing there.
Only it wasn’t a man at all; it was a corpse. A rotting corpse in green pants. It was shirtless, but a back brace splotched with grey mould was cinched around its blackening torso. White bone gleamed through the skin stretched across its face.
“That’s it for you, you shitter,” this starlit apparition whispered.
The last of Buddy’s control broke and he began to scream hysterically, his eyes bulging, his long hair seeming to puff into a grotesque helmet around his bloody, soot-smudged face as the root of each strand stiffened and stood on end. Blood poured from his mouth in freshets and drenched the collar of his parka; he tried to skid backward, hooking into the snow with his hands again and sliding his buttocks as the thing came toward him. It had no eyes. Its eyes were gone, eaten out of its face by God knew what squirming things. And he could smell it, oh God he could smell it and the smell was like rotting tomatoes, the smell was death.
The corpse of Roland D. LeBay held out its decayed hands to Buddy Repperton and grinned.
Buddy screamed. Buddy howled. And suddenly he stiffened, his lips forming an O of perfect finality, puckered as if he wished to kiss the horror shambling toward him. His hands scratched and scrabbled at the left side of his shredded parka above his heart, which had finally been punctured by the jagged stub of a splintered rib. He fell backward feet kicking groove in the snow, his final breath slipping out in a long white jet from his slack mouth… like auto exhaust.
On the embankment, the thing he had seen flickered and was gone. There were no tracks.
From the far side, Christine’s engine cranked up into an exhaust-crackling bellow of triumph that struck the frowning, snow-covered uplands of Squantic Hills and then echoed back.
On the far verge of Squantic Lake, some ten miles away as the crow flies, a young man who had gone out for a cross-country ski by starlight heard the sound and suddenly stopped, his hands on his poles and his head cocked.
Abruptly the skin on his back prickled into bumps, as if a goose had just walked over his grave, and although he knew it was only a car somewhere on the other side—sound carried a long way up here on still winter nights—his first thought was that something prehistoric had awakened and had tracked its prey to earth: a great wolf, or perhaps a sabre-toothed tiger.
The sound was not repeated and he went on his way.
37
DARNELL COGITATES
Baby, lemme ride in your automobile,
Hey, babe, lemme ride in your automobile!
Tell me, sweet baby,
Tell me: Just how do you feel?
Will Darnell was at the garage until after midnight on the night Buddy Repperton and his friends met Christine in Squantic Hills. His emphysema had been particularly bad that day. When it got bad, he was afraid to lie down, although he was ordinarily a perfect bear for sleep.
The doctor told him it was not at all likely he would choke to death in his sleep, but as he got older and the emphysema slowly tightened its grip on his lungs, he feared it more and more. The fact that his fear was irrational didn’t change it in the least. Although he hadn’t been inside a church of any faith since he had been twelve years old—forty-nine years ago now! — he had been morbidly interested in the circumstances surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I ten weeks before. John Paul had died in bed and had been found there in the morning. Already stiffening probably. That was the part that haunted Wilclass="underline" Already stiffening, probably.
He pulled into the garage at half-past nine, driving his 1966 Chrysler Imperial—the last car he intended ever to own. At about the same time Buddy Repperton was noticing the twin sparks of distant headlights in his rearview mirror.
Will was worth better than two million dollars, but money didn’t give him much pleasure anymore, if indeed it ever had. The money didn’t even seem completely real anymore. Nothing did, except the emphysema. That was hideously real, and Will welcomed anything that took his mind off it.
The problem of Arnie Cunningham, now—that had taken his mind off his emphysema. He supposed that was why he had let Cunningham hang around the place when all of his strongest- instincts told him to get the kid out of the garage, he was in some way dangerous. Something was going on with Cunningham and his rebuilt ’58. Something very peculiar.
The kid wasn’t in tonight; he and the entire LHS chess club were in Philadelphia for three days at the Northern States Fall Tourney. Cunningham had laughed about that; he was much changed from the pimply, big-eyed kid that Buddy Repperton had jumped on, the kid Will had immediately (and erroneously) dismissed as a crybaby jellyfish and maybe a goddam queer in the bargain.