But there wasn’t a smile on any of them, him included. He turned back to me.
“You’ve told us who you are out of your own mouth,” he said with soft ferocity. “If you weren’t Lee Nugent how would you know the street and the very house-number you lived at as a kid? How could you know there was such a fire, in which your mother and sister lost their lives, but in which you were saved — for me, here, today?”
He got up and came over to me. He gave me the back of his hand across my mouth, back and forth, three, four, five times. It sounds light, the back of a hand; it wasn’t. He had a heavy ring on it. It opened my lip the second time, it widened the split on the back-swing. It chipped the enamel from my front teeth the time after. By the time he quit there were thin strings of red running down crisscross all over my chin.
“Take him outside,” he said, “and put on your best hats, we’re all going to a funeral.”
They put me in the back again, one on each side of me. He sat in front, next to the driver. He rode turned halfway around in the seat, facing me over the back of it, so that he could gloat all the way.
People have been taken for rides before. I kept telling myself that; it was all I had. They died at the end of it, and then it was over. It only took a few minutes. All right, they were going to show me my own grave at the cemetery, readied years beforehand, he’d told me just now as we got in. Then they’d make me climb down into it, most likely, and then they’d shoot me. People had died in worse ways than that. Sewn up in gunny-sacks, so that they strangled themselves. Dropped into the river with their feet stuck into buckets of cement.
And meanwhile, he kept riding sidewards on the seat, looking back at me, arm slung over the seat-top. He couldn’t wait until we got there, that might have spared me ten or fifteen minutes premonitory agony of mind. No, he had to tell me now, ahead of time, so I’d have that much added horror to look forward to.
“You think you’re going to be stretched out in it dead, don’t you?” he smiled. “My father was buried alive. That’s what that jail amounted to. We’ll do as much for you. We’ve got a length of copper tubing, with a little nozzle. D’you get what I mean? You’ll last for hours, maybe days. He lasted years!” A mouth wasn’t meant to smile like that; to call such a thing a smile was sacrilege. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” he said softly.
I raised my face toward the ceiling of the car and drew in a slow, cold, shuddering breath. I shivered as it went down me. He was getting what he wanted; anticipation was sheer unadulterated agony. One of the oldest instincts of man is fear of being put into the ground alive.
He all but licked his lips. If he didn’t that was the expression in his eyes as he watched me. Then something the driver did took his attention off me for a moment. He turned his head around forward. “No, you should have taken the other one, Chris. This won’t get you anywhere.” He was indulgent about it, though. I was his only hate in the world. He could forgive anyone else anything, tonight. “Back up to the intersection we just crossed and turn right into Hallowell Avenue, that’s the shortest way.”
“Sorry, chief,” the driver mumbled, crestfallen. “I thought this one was just as good.” He went into reverse. “Wasn’t watching.”
“Naw, this is Pokanoke Street, this won’t take us anywhere. It just runs on for a while and then quits cold. You’d only have to shuttle back over again when you got to the end of it—”
The name sank in, the funny name, like a pebble thrown into a dark pool, and went plunging downward through layers of memory. Pokanoke Street, Pokanoke Street. That name, there was something I had to remember — No there wasn’t, it didn’t matter, what was the difference? I was going to be dead in a little while, what good would a street-name do me?
There was a moment or two of awkward maneuvering, while he guided the car backward, erasing the slight error of direction he’d made. I suppose he thought it was simpler than making a complete loop around and facing the other way, only to have to reverse a second time a few moments later for the new start. There wasn’t anything behind us in a straight line, his mirror showed him that, but as our rear backed out into the open past the corner line, a lightweight truck came at us from the transverse direction without any warning.
The two things happened at once. The plunging pebble struck bottom in the pool of my memory, and the truck sideswiped the back of the car, shunted it out of the way, and sent it lashing around in a long shuddering skid against the pull of its own brakes, that momentarily threatened to overturn it.
Limpy. A helping hand, waiting down there along that street. Refuge if I could only get to it. Sanctuary. It’s true he was only a lame peddler, but he had a door that would let me in, and close them out. The only friendly door in the whole length and breadth of the town —
There were four of them around me in the car. And only one — the driver — without a gun either already in his hands or within such short reach of his hands that it amounted to the same thing.
But the odds had suddenly evened out in my favor. For, while the car rocked from side to side and threatened to topple from one instant to the next, they were all afraid of dying, death was all they had time to think of. I’d been afraid of dying all along, long before they were, so I was ready for it, and now life was all I could think of.
I freed the gun from the hand of the man next to me on my right. His grip had become so nerveless that I didn’t even have to wrench it from him. I just plucked it from his loose fingers. That meant I had it by the bore and that was the way I wanted it, it saved me the trouble of reversing it. I hitched it against the ceiling and chopped down backhard into the middle of his forehead with it, square between the two eyebrow-bulges. Then I freed the door on that side and made a circular hop out past his relaxing knees. The car hadn’t even finished its burning skid yet. They were all still suspended between two worlds.
Ed Donnelly turned just in time to see me go, then reversed to try to get me on that side. “Hold onto him!” I gave him the gun-butt the flat way, across his teeth. He got his hands on it blindly, as though he were a glutton cramming something into his own mouth. I let it go. His whole head was well-shocked, he couldn’t use it.
By the time the first shot came, I was already sprinting up Pokanoke Street. It was a soft, spongy sound I didn’t recognize for a shot. It was like a soggy paper bag crunching open. Silencer. I swerved in closer to the building-line and kept hurtling along.
410. 410, he’d said. 410 alone was life, and every other doorway spelled death. Their badges, their phony tin badges would open them, pull me out.
The crunching sound came again, but it was further behind me now.
The doorways kept ticking off, like uprights of a black picket-fence, I was going so fast. Most were dark. I flashed past one with a dim light behind its grubby fanlight. 395. I was on the wrong side, but it was right over there, just a few doors ahead.
I had to get over. I didn’t slacken, but I launched myself out on a diagonal, away from the sheltering building-line, and that was when they got me. They got me halfway over; I guess I showed better against the empty middle of the street. It made me miss a step, but then I went right on as though nothing had happened.
It was like the prickling of a needle first. That was all, nothing more. Then a sharper pain bored its way in more slowly, as though an awl was being rotated in its wake. Then came heat, as though the awl were generating friction. Then fire, then agony, then approaching collapse.
400. 402. They were coming now. Something had held them up, they hadn’t been able to start right out after me. Most likely the truck that had participated in the collision had halted a short distance off around the corner and its occupants got out to parley for a minute. They’d been held there against their wills a minute or two, until they could get rid of them, even though one had ventured the muffled potshots in the meantime that had gained their object. Now the running splatter of their feet suddenly surged out after me in the silence up there; it echoed forebodingly.