Bandages flew in streamers, gouts of oiled hair tumbled up in spirals. Ghost-white chunks of skull, each with yellowish curds glued poorly to the inside surfaces of their triangles, sprayed high like deadly shrapnel, rebounding off brick and bouncing down onto the plastic carry-alls strapped over the H4’s roof.
There was a burst of some animalistic scent, moist and raw. Something smelled like fragrant cheese.
The slug’s hot remnant ricocheted out over someone else’s head. The oldest of the other men shouted out, his face an almost comical twist of shock and revelation, O! And the nailed-through piece of lumber this man had been holding dropped between his feet, bounced, then angled outward in the air.
The nearest other man, it may have been Morty, tripped over the rebounding board and into the screaming blood-girl. They both fell over in a tangle of limbs, one clawing, the other shielding.
Another man was erratically aiming a vintage green Springfield carbine — a moment earlier, perhaps he had been trying to decide if he could very carefully shoot the blood-girl in the face — while two filth-caked naked women, one very old, were lunging toward him with broken fingers, their fingernails turned into searching claws.
That was the last vision etched into Sophie’s memory. The next she knew, she had pushed her submachine gun further over to the passenger seat and was in, one leg trailing, clutching the H4’s wheel. Without thinking she shunted out of park, hoisted her left leg in. In her panic she fisted the stick over to four-wheel instead of drive. Her right foot stomped down on the accelerator.
The engine roared, hacked and roared louder. The H4 lurched forward out of the bay with men and women running after it. Someone shrieked and fell, perhaps slipping in Rob’s blood and gore or stumbling over his body. Perhaps Sophie had run part of him over, with her back wheel. She didn’t know.
Even over the engine the babbling voices were rising, shouts, cries of panic and rage: “Stop her! Don’t shoot! Please! Christ, Zeke — Stop! Don’t let them get away! Fuck! Get out of the way!”
But there was a louder voice, a trill of lust, a goddess song. Patrice was chanting in Sophie’s head, Yes! Finally! You see? A bicycle wheel with razor spikes. That, my love, is what happens to all the bad girls in a world destroyed by men. Face in a cage. Raped and dead alive and dead and dead and dead! All dead, all dead… cackling. But more solemn than this rose Sophie’s own conviction, in silence and commandment:
Save the girl.
She had to try to save the girl.
Immediately after firing his LCP, Silas had somehow managed to jolt and sit up, turning himself over. His fingers were bleeding where he had torn some of his nails off, scrabbling upright. The pistol went flying from his fingers when Sophie hit the gas.
Silas almost fell out of the Hummer as Sophie veered left and away, trying to circle so far out from the fuel bay that no man could find the time to open fire as she sped onward.
Swerving out of the bay, she had no time to calculate risk or repercussion. There were only life and death. There was a candy-striped concrete bollard sheathed in dented gray aluminum to her left, it read in stencil-painted letters, TRUCKS BEGIN TURN NOW / CLEARANCE ONL —
And that was all she saw. Her open door and then Silas’ both collided with the bollard, each slamming shut in turn with a thunderous bang! Bang! Sparks showered and the aluminum alloy of the H4’s door panels shrieked as the bollard’s plated side turned into a spangled wreck, an upright jag that looked like a silver flower.
Silas cried out, his left arm twisted at an abrupt and misshapen angle as the H4’s slamming passenger door hammered him in and down.
God, Sophie, you could have severed all his fingers. You almost killed —
Reeling, tilting.
The H4 was turning, a precarious and dismayingly gradual arc as the wheels scrabbled over warped concrete, rubble and ruptured sandbags. Behind and to Sophie’s left, dozens of sprinting and hobbling skeleton-shapes were chasing after the Hummer, half-envisaged through a cloud of fuel vapor, smoke and incinerated rubber from the tires. If the H4’s speed had not been limited by the first gear of four-wheel, a complete accident and error, it probably would have flipped and both Silas and Sophie would have been trapped to meet their Fate.
Instead, Sophie had a moment to recalculate, to let her foot off the gas. She got the H4 into drive and running perpendicular to the onrushing crowd, she was looking over her left shoulder as they all swept toward her in two blurred striations: one swarm of naked and bleeding women, the other of armed men. Between the two, the girl with the barbed cage around her head had somehow gotten away from the man who had fallen into her. Her belly was streaked with fresh running slicks of blood.
Sophie fumbled away from the steering wheel with her right hand, padding the passenger seat for the submachine gun. It hadn’t yet fallen onto the floor with her wild acceleration, because its utility cord was tangled in the unused seatbelt which had flipped over the console.
Save the girl.
Sophie tried to both seize and ready the shifting submachine gun without looking down, while staring out at the frenzied surge and crush of people running toward her, gauging the distance between the H4 and the two swarms, and the nearing girl. She tried even more to steer, to correct the veering course which had now aimed the H4 at a chained-down Greyhound charter bus, and even to keep Silas from tumbling over.
She tried.
“Save me!” The blood-girl was running straight for her, limping and clutching her belly with one hand, waving her other twisted arm like a mutilated puppet’s limb free from strings. Twenty, fifteen feet away. “God, don’t leave me!”
And then, without meaning, without a fracture of comprehension or the faintest visual sheen of ceremony, there was a crack and the top of the blood-girl’s caged head erupted and became a crimson, gelid blossom, flowering open upon the fluorescent-streamered wind.
Once, afar, in a mundane modern used-to-be world of elder years and long ago, Sophie had been grocery shopping down in Cherry Creek and she had seen a jar of bleached and fatty beef tripe perched up high in Whole Foods Market shelving, pallid bovine stomach matter floating inside a crystalline jar of cranberry jelly.
She had stood casually there in her khakis and her azure and silken V-blouse, biting her lower lip. Stood there musing in an unnerved, deteriorating mimicry of silence. What in the Hell is that? Disgusting. Regarding the jar with detached fascination, she had not felt thirsty any longer. She had shakily put her covered latte down into its holder in the shopping cart. Revulsion had shivered up her throat, the inside of her cheeks, as she realized this jar of exotic “food” poised upon the highest shelf on aisle nine was the most revolting edible thing that she had ever seen.
A pair of young inebriated men, dressed gamely in CU Boulder t-shirts and day-glo flip-flops, had been egging each other on, betting on just which one of their worthy twosome was brave enough to purchase the jar, or at least to take it down from the shelf, to open it and look inside.
Ten dollars for a whiff, perhaps? Twenty for a taste?
A little joking scuffle had broken out, and Sophie (she remembered, guiltily, that she had edged her squeaky cart even closer to the spectacle — not to admonish these overgrown boys who were almost soiling themselves under muffled grunts and laughter, but simply to behold whatever would happen next) had been nearby, with a brown paper bag of almonds held in her latte-freed hand, when the tripe jar slid out from between twenty fumbling boy-fingers and shattered, tumbling down in inexorable slow motion to its end, where it exploded out in a wreath of fatty flesh, the glass shatter-void of the jar designing a sudden, shrapnel-decorated gore-blot across the entire aisle floor.