Mile 81

Their bones, Rachel thought. She was only six years old, and not allowed to go to PG-13 movies or watch them on TV (let alone R; her mother said R stood for Raunchy), but she knew that was the sound of their bones breaking.

The car wasn’t a car. It was some kind of monster.

“Where mommy-n-daddy?” Blakie asked, turning his large eyes — now made even larger by his tears — on her. “Where mommy-n-daddy, Rachie?”

He sounds like he’s two again, Rachel thought, and for maybe the first time in her life, she felt something other than irritation (or, when extremely tried by his behavior, outright hate) for her baby brother. She didn’t think this new feeling was love. She thought it was something even bigger. Her mom hadn’t been able to say anything in the end, but if she’d had time, Rachel knew what it would have been: take care of Blakie.

He was thrashing in his car seat. He knew how to undo the straps, but in his panic had forgotten how.

Rachel opened her seat belt, slid out of her booster seat, and tried to do it for him. One of his flailing hands caught her cheek and administered a ringing slap. Under normal circumstances that would have earned him a hard punch on the shoulder (and a time-out in her room, where she would have sat staring at the wall in a boiling fugue of fury), but now she just grabbed his hand and held it down.

“Stop it! Let me help you! I can get you out, but not if you do that!”

He stopped thrashing, but kept on crying. “Where Daddy? Where Mommy? I want Mommy!”

I want her too, asshole, Rachel thought, and undid the car seat straps. “We’re going to get out now, and we’re going to. ”

What? They were going to what? Go up to the restaurant? It was closed, that was why there were orange barrels. That was why the gas pumps in front of the gas station part were gone and there was grass poking out of the empty parking lot.

“We’re going to get away from here,” she finished.

She got out of the car and went around to Blakie’s side. She opened his door but he just looked at her, eyes brimming. “I can’t get out, Rachie, I’ll fall.”

Don’t be such a scaredy-baby, she almost said, then didn’t. This wasn’t the time for that. He was upset enough. She opened her arms and said, “Slide. I’ll catch you.”

He looked at her doubtfully, then slid. Rachel did catch him, but he was heavier than he looked, and they both went sprawling. She got the worst of it because she was on the bottom, but Blakie bumped his head and scraped one hand and began to bawl loudly, this time in pain instead of fear.

“Stop it,” she said, and wriggled out from under him. “Put on your man-pants, Blakie.”

“H-Huh?”

She didn’t answer. She was looking at the two phones lying beside the terrible station wagon. One of them looked broken, but the other —

Rachel edged toward it on her hands and knees, never taking her eyes off the car into which their father and mother had disappeared with terrifying suddenness. As she was reaching toward the good phone, Blakie walked past her toward the station wagon, holding out his scraped hand.

“Mom? Mommy? Come out! I hurted myself. You have to come out n kiss it bet—”

“Stop right where you are, Blake Lussier.”

Carla would have been proud; it was her she-who-must-be-obeyed voice at its most forbidding. And it worked. Blake stopped four feet from the side of the station wagon.

“But I want Mommy! I want Mommy, Rachie!”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the car. “Not now. Help me work this thing.” She knew perfectly well how to work the phone, but she had to distract him.

“Gimme, I can do it! Gimme, Rache!”

She passed it over, and while he examined the buttons, she got up, took him by the back of his Wolverine tee-shirt, and pulled him back three steps. Blake hardly noticed. He found the power button of Julie Vernon’s cell phone and pushed it. The phone beeped. Rachel took it from him, and for once in his dopey little-kid life, Blakie didn’t protest.

She had listened carefully when McGruff the Crime Dog came to talk to them at school (although she knew perfectly well it was only a guy in a McGruff suit), and she did not hesitate now. She punched in 911 and put the phone to her ear. It rang once, then was picked up.

“Hello? My name is Rachel Ann Lussier, and—”

“This call is being recorded,” a man’s voice overrode her. “If you wish to report an emergency, push one. If you wish to report adverse road conditions, push two. If you wish to report a stranded motorist—”

“Rache? Rachie? Where Mommy? Where Da—”

“Shhh!” Rachel said sternly, and pushed 1. It was hard to do. Her hand was trembling and her eyes were all blurry. She realized she was crying. When had she started crying? She couldn’t remember.

“Hello, this is nine-one-one,” a woman said.

“Are you real or another recording?” Rachel asked.

“I’m real,” the woman said, sounding a little amused. “Do you have an emergency?”

“Yes. A bad car ate up our mother and our daddy. It’s at the—”

“Quit while you’re ahead,” the 911 woman advised. She sounded more amused than ever. “How old are you, kiddo?”

“I’m six and a half. My name is Rachel Ann Lussier, and a car, a bad car—”

“Listen, Rachel Ann or whoever you are, I can trace this call. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t. Now just hang up and I won’t have to send a policeman to your house to paddle your—”

“They’re dead, you stupid phone person!” Rachel shouted into the phone, and at the d-word, Blakie began to cry again.

The 911 woman didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, in a voice no longer amused: “Where are you, Rachel Ann?”

“At the empty restaurant! The one with the orange barrels!”

Blakie sat down and put his arms over his face. That hurt Rachel in a way she had never been hurt before. It hurt her deep in her heart.

“That’s not enough information,” the 911 lady said. “Can you be a little more specific, Rachel Ann?”

Rachel didn’t know what specific meant, but she knew what she was seeing: the back tire of the station wagon, the one closest to them, was melting a little. A tentacle of what looked like liquid rubber was moving slowly across the pavement toward Blakie.

“I have to go,” Rachel said. “We have to get away from the bad car.”

She dragged Blake to his feet, staring at the melting tire. The tentacle of rubber started to go back where it had come from (because it knows we’re out of reach, she thought), and the tire started to look like a tire again, but that wasn’t good enough for Rachel. She kept dragging Blake down the ramp and toward the turnpike.

“Where we goin, Rachie?”

I don’t know.

“Away from that car.”

“I want my Transformers!”

“Not now, later.” She kept a tight hold on Blake and kept backing, down toward the turnpike where the occasional traffic was whizzing by at seventy and eighty miles an hour.

Nothing is as piercing as a child’s scream; it’s one of nature’s more efficient survival mechanisms. Pete Simmons’s sleep had already thinned to little more than a doze, and when Rachel screamed at the 911 lady, he heard it and finally woke up all the way.

He sat up, winced, and put a hand to his head. It ached, and he knew what that sort of ache was: the dreaded HANGOVER. His tongue tasted furry, and his stomach was blick. Not I’m-gonna-hurl blick, but blick, just the same.

Thank God I didn’t drink any more, he thought, and got to his feet. He went to one of the mesh-covered windows to see who was yelling. He didn’t like what he saw. Some of the orange barrels