Mile 81

“Yes!” Carla said warmly. “When you’re twenty-six!”

This made Rachel put on her mad-face (puckered brow, puffed cheeks, lips down to a stitch), but when the horse-lady laughed, Rache gave up and laughed, too.

The big woman bent down to Blakie, her hands on knees covered by her riding skirt. “Can I have my ice cream cone back, young fella?”

Blake held it out. When she took it, he began to lick his fingers, which were covered with melting pistachio.

“Thank you,” Carla told the horse-lady. “That was very kind of you.” Then, to Blake, “Let’s get you inside and cleaned up. After that you can have ice cream.”

“I want what she’s having,” Blake said, and that made the horse-lady laugh some more.

Johnny insisted that they eat their cones in a booth, because he didn’t want them decorating the Expedition with pistachio ice cream. When they finished and went out, the horse-lady was gone.

Just one of those people you meet — occasionally nasty, more often nice, sometimes even terrific — along the road and never see again.

Only here she was, or at least here her truck was, parked in the breakdown lane with traffic cones neatly placed behind her trailer. And Carla was right, the horse-lady had been nice to the kids. So thinking, Johnny Lussier made the worst — and last — decision of his life.

He flipped his blinker and pulled onto the ramp as Carla had suggested, parking ahead of Doug Clayton’s Prius, which was still flashing its four-ways, and beside the muddy station wagon. He put the transmission in park but left the engine running.

“I want to pet the horsie,” Blake said.

“I also want to pet the horsie,” Rachel said in the haughty lady-of-the-manor tone of voice she had picked up God knew where. It drove Carla crazy, but she refused to say anything. If she did, Rache would use it all the more.

“Not without the lady’s permission,” Johnny said. “You kids sit right where you are for now. You too, Carla.”

“Yes, master,” Carla said in the zombie voice that always made the kids laugh.

“Very funny, Easter bunny.”

“The cab of her truck’s empty,” Carla said. “They all look empty. Do you think there was an accident?”

“Don’t know, but nothing looks dinged up. Hang on a minute.”

Johnny Lussier got out, went around the back of the Expedition he would never finish paying for, and walked to the cab of the Dodge Ram. Carla hadn’t seen the horse-lady, but he wanted to make sure she wasn’t lying on the seat, maybe trying to live through a heart attack. (A lifelong jogger, Johnny secretly believed a heart attack was waiting by age forty-five at the latest for anyone who weighed even five pounds over the target weight prescribed by Medicine.Net.)

She wasn’t sprawled on the seat (of course not, a woman that big Carla would have seen even lying down), and she wasn’t in the trailer, either. Only the horse, who poked her head out and sniffed Johnny’s face.

“Hello there. ” For a moment the name didn’t come, then it did. “. DeeDee. How’s the old feedbag hanging?”

He patted her nose, then headed back up the ramp to investigate the other two vehicles. He saw there had been an accident of sorts, albeit a very tiny one. The station wagon had knocked over a few of the orange barrels blocking the ramp.

Carla rolled down her window, a thing neither of the kids in back could do because of the lockout feature. “Any sign of her?”

“Nope.”

“Any sign of anyone?”

“Carl, give me a ch—” He saw the cell phones and the wedding ring lying beside the partially open door of the station wagon.

“What?” Carla craned to see.

“Just a sec.” The thought of telling her to lock the doors crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. They were on I-95 in broad daylight, for God’s sake. Cars passing every twenty or thirty seconds, sometimes two or three in a line.

He bent down and picked up the phones, one in each hand. He turned to Carla, and thus did not see the car door opening wider, like a mouth.

“Carla, I think there’s blood on this one.” He held up Doug Clayton’s cracked phone.

“Mom?” Rachel asked. “Who’s in that dirty car? The door’s opening.”

“Come back,” Carla said. Her mouth was suddenly dust-dry. She wanted to yell it, but there seemed to be a stone on her chest. It was invisible but very large. “Someone’s in that car!”

Instead of coming back, Johnny turned and bent to look inside. When he did, the door swung shut on his head. There was a terrible thudding noise. The stone on Carla’s chest was suddenly gone. She drew in breath and screamed out her husband’s name.

“What’s wrong with Daddy?” Rachel cried. Her voice was high and as thin as a reed. “What’s wrong with Daddy?”

“Daddy!” Blake yelled. He had been inventorying his newest Transformers and now looked around wildly to see where the daddy in question might be.

Carla didn’t think. Her husband’s body was there, but his head was in the dirty station wagon. He was still alive, though; his arms and legs were flailing. She was out of the Expedition with no memory of opening the door. Her own body seemed to be acting on its own, her stunned brain just along for the ride.

“Mommy, no!” Rachel screamed.

“Mommy, NO!” Blake had no idea of what was going on, but he knew it was bad. He began to cry and struggle in his car seat’s webwork of straps.

Carla grabbed Johnny around the waist and pulled with the crazy superstrength of adrenaline. The door of the station wagon came partway open and blood ran over the footing in a little waterfall. For one awful moment she saw her husband’s head, lying on the station wagon’s muddy seat and cocked crazily to one side. Even though he was still trembling in her arms, she understood (in one of those lightning-flashes of clarity that can come even during a perfect storm of panic) that it was how hanging victims looked when they were cut down. Because their necks were broken. In that brief, searing moment — that shutterflash glimpse — she thought he looked stupid and surprised and ugly, all the essential Johnny out of him, and knew he was already dead, trembling or not. It was how a kid looked after hitting the rocks instead of the water when he dived. How a woman who had been impaled by her steering wheel looked after her car slammed into a bridge abutment. It was how you looked when disfiguring death came at you out of nowhere.

The car door slammed viciously shut. Carla still had her arms wrapped around her husband’s waist, and when she was yanked forward, she had another lightning-flash of clarity.

It’s the car, you have to stay away from the car!

She let go of Johnny’s midsection just a moment too late. A sheaf of her hair fell against the door and was sucked in. The top of her head smacked against the car before she could tear free. Suddenly the top of her head was burning as the thing ate into her scalp.

Run! she tried to scream at her often troublesome but undeniably bright daughter. Run and take Blakie with you!

But before she could even begin to articulate the thought, her mouth was gone.

Only Rachel saw the station wagon slam shut on her daddy’s head like a Venus flytrap on a bug, but both of them saw their mother somehow pulled through the muddy door as if it were a curtain. They saw one of her mocs come off, they got a flash of her pink toenails, and then she was gone. A moment later, the white car lost its shape and clenched itself like a fist. Through their mother’s open window, they heard a crunching sound.

“Wha’ that?” Blakie screamed. His eyes were streaming tears and his lower lip was lathered with snot. “Wha’ that, Rachie, wha’ that, wha’ that?”