On closer consideration, Curtis finds them to be no less magical but less Tinkerbellish than they appeared from inside the vehicle. As he stares up at the globes, which are currently filled with darkness instead of with churning fuel, reflections of the red and amber Christmas lights shimmer on the surface of the glass but appear to swarm within it, and suddenly this display has an air of malevolence. Something needful and malign seems to be pent up in the spheres.
Near the bow of the motor home, a tall bald man is talking to the twins. His back is toward Curtis, and he’s forty feet away, but something seems wrong with him.
The dog’s hackles rise, and the boy suspects that the uneasiness he feels is actually her distrust transmitted to him through their special bond.
Although Old Yeller growls low in her throat and clearly has no use for the station attendant, her primary interest lies elsewhere. She scampers away from the motor home, almost running, toward the west side of the building, and Curtis hurries after her.
He’s pretty sure this isn’t about toileting anymore.
The store sets eater-corner on the lot, facing the crossroads rather than fronting one highway, and all the lights are at its most public face. Night finds a firmer purchase along the flank of the building. And behind the place, where the clapboard wall offers one door but no windows, the darkness is deeper still, relieved only by a parsimonious moon carefully spending its silver coins.
A Ford Explorer stands in this gloom, its contours barely traced by the lunar light. Curtis supposes that the SUV belongs to the man who’s out front talking to the twins.
The silver Corvette, which passed them on the highway earlier in the night, waits here, as well. Intently studying this vehicle, Old Yeller whimpers.
The moon favors the sports car over the SUV, plating its chrome and paint to a sterling standard.
Even as Curtis takes a step toward the Corvette, however, the dog dashes to the back of the Explorer. She stands on her hind legs, forepaws on the rear bumper, gazing up at the tailgate window, which is too high to provide her with a view inside.
She looks at Curtis, dark eyes moon-brightened.
When the boy doesn’t go to her at once, she paws insistently at the tailgate.
In this murk, he can’t see the dog shuddering, but through the psychic umbilical linking them, he senses the depth of her anxiety.
Fear like a slinking cat has found a way into Curtis’s heart, and from his heart into the whole of him, and now it whets its claws upon his bones.
Joining Old Yeller behind the Explorer, he squints through the rear window. He isn’t able to discern whether the SUV carries a cargo or is loaded only with shadows.
The dog continues to paw at the vehicle.
Curtis tries the door handle, lifts the tailgate.
Disengagement of the latch activates a soft light in the SUV, revealing two corpses in the cargo space. They have been tumbled together in such a way as to suggest that they were heaved in here as if they were bags of garbage.
His heart, a sudden stutterer, spasms on the l in lub, and on the d in dub.
He would run if he were not his mother’s son, but he’d rather die than, by his actions, cast shame upon her memory.
Pity and revulsion would turn him away had he not been taught to react to every horror like this as though it were a survival text, to read it quickly but closely for clues that might save his life and the lives of others.
Others, in this case, means Cass and Polly.
Tall, bald, and male, the first of these cadavers appears to be a physical match for the station attendant who’d been talking to the twins a moment ago, Curtis didn’t sec that guy’s face; nevertheless, he’s convinced that it will prove to he identical to this one, though not wrenched by terror.
Billowy, glossy, chestnut hair surrounds and softens the dead woman’s features. Her wide-open hazel eyes stare with startlement at the first glimpse of eternity that she received in the instant when her soul fled this world.
Neither victim bears a visible wound, but each appears to have a broken neck. Heads loll at such unnatural angles that the cervical vertebrae must have been shattered. For these hunters, who thrill to the administration of terror and who revel in murder, such kills are unusually clean and merciful.
Necessity rather than mercy explains the simple wounds. Each corpse has been stripped of its shoes and outer layer of clothing. To masquerade as their victims, the killers needed costumes without rips or stains.
If the combination service station and convenience store is a mom-and-pop operation, then here lie mom and pop. Their business and their identities have been subjected to a hostile takeover.
The dog’s attention is directed once more at the Corvette. Her interest, though intense, isn’t strong enough to draw her toward the sports car, which she regards with obvious dread. She appears to be as puzzled as she is apprehensive, cocking her head left, and then right, blinking, turning half away from the vehicle but then snapping her head toward it as if she’d seen it start to move.
Perhaps in the Corvette waits something worse than what he found in the Explorer, in which case he’ll keep his distance, too. Instead, seeking to learn what he can by sharing the dog’s perceptions, Curtis opens himself more completely to their bond, and looks at the ‘Vette through her eyes.
At first his sister-become seems to see nothing more than Curtis sees — but then for just a second, no longer, the moonlit car shimmers like a mirage. Dream car in more ways than one, internal-combustion illusion, it is merely the suggestion of a 197 °Corvette, masking a fearsome reality. The dog blinks, blinks, but the sports car remains apparently solid, so she turns her head away from it, and out of the corner of her eye, for two seconds or three, she glimpses what Curtis can’t perceive from the corner of his: a transport not of this earth, sleeker even than the sharklike Corvette, like a beast born to stalk sharks with a vengeance. So mighty-looking is this vehicle that you can’t think of it in the language of designers or engineers, but must resort to the vocabulary of military architecture, because in spite of its sleekness, it seems to be a fortress on wheels: all compact buttresses, ramparts, terrepleins, scarps, counterscarps, bastions made aerodynamic, condensed and adapted to rolling stock.
With this evidence before him, no doubt can linger any longer. The worse scalawags have arrived.
His nerves feel as taut as high-tuned violin strings, and his dark imagination plucks them with dire possibilities.
Death is here now, as always it is here, but it is not always as engaged and attentive as it is at this moment, waiting for a third course in its supper of bones.
The hunters must suspect that Curtis is in the motor home. Kind fate and his clever sister-become brought him out of the Fleetwood and around the building to this moonlit killing ground without being detected. He won’t remain undiscovered for long: perhaps two minutes, maybe three if his luck holds.
The instant that he shows himself, he will be known.
In his place, therefore, he sends the dog to Polly.
Fearful but obedient, she trots away, retracing the route along which she led him.
Curtis has no illusions that he’ll survive this encounter. The enemy is too near, too powerful, too remorseless to be defeated by one as small and defenseless as this motherless boy.
He harbors some hope, however, that he might be able to warn off Cass and Polly, that they might escape with the dog rather than be slaughtered with him.
Old Yeller disappears around the corner of the building. Beloved familiar, companion spirit, she walks always with an awareness of her Maker — and she will need Him now as never before.
Chapter 46
The penitentiary walls crumbled away from her, but she restacked the stones around herself, and when the bars fell out of the windows, she repaired them with a welder’s torch and fresh mortar.