You're Next

once and vanished slowly into the metal crush.

Pressing a hand to the wound in his side, Mike slumped forward over the controls, his vision spotting. It occurred to him how very nice it would be to go to sleep. His blinks grew longer.

A faint movement registered through the black-and-white speckling before his eyes, and he blinked several times, squinting through the cab window.

William.

His left leg trailed lifelessly behind him, the screwdriver still jammed through the side of his wilted knee, but he was tugging himself forward with his forearms, making herky-jerky progress, like some awful stop-action film. His face scraped along the ground, his mouth and nose powdered with dirt.

Mike stared for maybe a full minute in disbelief. William belly-crawled, arm over arm, past the rows of smashed cars and into the clearing. He paused now and again to catch his breath, his head wriggling on the yoke of his shoulders.

Mike’s hands twitched forward onto the console, moving across the steering levers, the joystick, the pushbuttons. Having worked a lot of big construction machines, he found the controls familiar. The magnetic hoist hung high in his field of vision, maybe forty feet above the ground. Mike clicked the joystick, and the boom whirred over toward the car crusher, the hoist rocking at the end of the giant cable.

He tried three buttons before he found the servomotor. The entire crane vibrated from the massive charge, the generator shooting a jolt of current to the magnetic hoist at the cable’s end. Mike rode the joystick left a few beats more and dropped the boom, undershooting the release to compensate for the skewed perspective from the cab, a trick he’d learned from years on wheel loaders and hydraulic shovels. The giant magnet clanged onto the roof of the crushed VW Bug. Mike lifted the neat bale of metal and flesh from the vise of the crusher and began to swing it across the clearing.

William paused to take note, his raw face tilted to the early-morning sun.

The rectangular shadow fell across him, and he began tearing at the dirt, trying to make quicker progress, but it seemed his arms had nothing left.

Mike pulled back on the control and raised the compacted car to the clouds. Seventy feet, eighty – he kept on until all he saw was the underside of the vehicle, the wheels smashed up into the box of the frame.

William lay still, panting, glaring across at Mike through a tangle of fallen hair.

A moment of perfect tranquillity stretched out and out.

Then Mike tapped the button, cutting the power to the magnet above. The car detached from the hoist without a whisper of noise and plummeted in absolute silence. William let out a bark of a cry and had just enough time to cover his head.

An explosion of dust, pluming like the aftermath of a bomb. The cloud rose halfway to the hoist and then began to dissipate. The warmth of the sun slanted through the glass, and again Mike was tempted to set his head down on the console and doze off.

Mustering strength, he shoved open the door of the cab and tumbled to the dirt. He lay there panting, holding his side, the flesh tacky and warm. Parked before him was the station wagon that William and Dodge had planned to crush him in, but his slanted view also took in the swirling brown mist in the air, thinning by degrees. Emerging from the dust, stacked against the chain-link across the lot, was a distinct stack of smashed cars, clearly set apart from the other rows. Some were newer, some so rusted that no color was discernible. The dust thinned further, and he saw, wired to the front of every neatly baled car, a license plate – FRVRYNG, MSTHNG, LALADY. Metal coffins, a body interred in each one. Just John. Danielle Trainor. Ted Rogers.

Mike’s breath kicked up little puffs of dust, Indian red and oddly beautiful. His hand, lying a few inches in front of his face, was caked with layers of blood, slick and bright over dry and black.

A snowy patch blotted out all sight, and then somehow he was standing, leaning heavily against one of the crane’s high, hot tires. He staggered forward, falling onto the back of the station wagon and then shoving himself along its side, leaving mime handprints in blood along the dusty windows. The driver’s door groaned open, and his legs went to water. He fell into the soft cloth seat, the springs sighing beneath him. He would not be able to pull himself from the car, so he prayed the broke-down piece of shit ran. His arms felt heavy, filled with gravy. He swatted a hand forward once, twice, his fingers somehow hooking onto a key, but he didn’t believe it was real until he twisted and the engine sputtered irritably to life.

He’d been driven into this mess in a station wagon; now he’d go out in one.

Yanking the stick into drive was a herculean task. Tailpipe dragging, the car shuddered around the dropped bale of VW, out of the yard, down the harsh slope of the desolate dirt road. The turns were punishing, the switchbacks agonizing.

He realized halfway down the hill that he was probably going to die.

Chapter 57

Time became a wash of movement, a confusion of images. Impressions swam through his head. A house on a shady lane at the end of a road, jungle-gym bars, a faded salmon-pink shirt, the yellow cushion reeking of cat piss, him with his elbows propped on the sill, waiting. Mike Doe at the bay window blended into Katherine Smith at the bay window. My dad’s coming back.

You swore it, now. You swore it.

A film reel turned in his head, the run-on sentence that was his daughter’s life.

– her fist, hours old, around his pinkie, Where’s Kath-a-rine?, rocking her to sleep to the na na nas from ‘Hey Jude’, her baby tongue fluttering, scorched with thrush, the soporific pulse of the breast pump at midnight, goodnight chair and the red balloon, holding on to his leg, reaching for him to pick her up, him looking at-

– the sunlight through the windshield, so strong that he had to fight to keep his eyes open so he could see-

– a plaster of paris handprint, the pchhhhht sound of pouring imaginary tea, that No Tears scent, her going boneless in a grocery-store aisle, him struggling with the jointless arms, like trying to pick up water, crying the first time she watches Annabel get her hair cut, the movie-theater seat popping up beneath her tiny legs until he reaches over and holds it down, covering her eyes when the teapot shrieks, walking in his sneakers, in Annabel’s high heels, in his boots, and-

– the station wagon was off the road now, stopped, and he was slumped forward, his lips smashed against the top of the steering wheel. He looked down through the rip in his T-shirt and saw the glittering stick of his rib in the wash of blood at his side. The surrounding skin was fish white. He closed his eyes again and dreamed about how lovely it would be just to keep them that way.

You will come back for me.

I will come back for you.

He set his hands on the wheel and pushed himself upright. He was shuddering; his flesh was shuddering. He willed his arm to move, to throw the car into reverse. The station wagon thumped its way up out of the roadside ditch and onto the road, and he gritted his teeth, blinked the sweat from his eyes, took a creaking breath, and-

– then she is five, jumping rope, smiling at him, missing eyeteeth, the lavender dress with the flaking Disney princess iron-on she sleeps in until it grows brittle, the first time she can read her own fortune at a Chinese restaurant, round red-framed spectacles, the spring break she wants to eat only licorice, orange slices at halftime, the Abominable Snowman on the Matterhorn, High School Fucking Musical. You swore it, now. You swore it-

– a horn blared, bringing him back to life, but by the time he lifted a sluggish arm, the driver had skidded angrily around him and kept on, leaving him behind, coasting down the wrong side of the road. A flash of awareness told him he was driving about five miles per hour, and he did his best to send a signal to his foot to tamp down on the gas pedal. Sometime in the past few minutes, the pain had shifted to numbness. His flesh felt as hard and cold as ice. Vaguely aware of the loose photocopies fluttering around the backseat, he cranked the wheel, righting the station wagon’s course. The road looked wider, a real road now. The sun had notched a few clicks higher in the sky.