the walk of an animal that scents danger. I try to scream to her through Petunia’s windscreen. Come back, Leigh, come back quick, you were right, you heard something, she’s out there now, out there in the snow with her headlights off, crouched down, Leigh, come back!
She stopped suddenly, her hands tensing into fists, and that was when sudden savage circles of light sprang to life in the snowy dark outside. They were like white eyes opening.
Leigh froze, hideously exposed on the open floor. She was thirty feet inside the door and slightly to the right of centre. She turned toward the headlights, and I could see the dazed, uncertain expression on her face.
I was just as stunned, and that first vital moment passed unused. Then the headlights sprang forward and I could see the dark, low-slung shape of Christine behind them; I could hear the mounting, furious howl of her engine as she leaped toward us from across the street where she had been waiting all along—maybe even since before dark. Snow tunnelled back from her roof and skirted across her windscreen in filmy nets that were, almost instantly melted by the defroster. She hit the tarmac leading up to the entrance, still gaining speed. Her engine was a V-8 scream of rage.
“Leigh!” I screamed, and clawed for Petunia’s ignition switch.
Leigh broke to the right and ran for the wall-button. Christine roared inside as she reached it and pushed it. I heard the rattle-rumble of the overhead door descending on its track.
Christine came in angling to the right, going for Leigh. She dug a great clout of dry wood and splinters from the wall. There was a metallic screech as part of her right bumper pulled loose—a sound like a drunk’s scream of laughter. Sparks cascaded across the floor as she went into a long, slewing turn. She missed Leigh, but she wouldn’t when she went back; Leigh was stuck in that right-hand corner with nowhere to hide. She might be able to make it outside, but I was terribly afraid that the door wasn’t coming down fast enough to cut off Christine. The descending door might peel off her roof, but that wouldn’t stop her and I knew it.
Petunia’s engine bellowed and I dragged out the headlight button. Her brights came on, splashing over the closing door, and over Leigh. She was backed up against the wall, her eyes wide. Her parka took on a weird, almost electric blue colour in the headlights, and my mind informed me with sickening and clinical accuracy that her blood would look purple.
I saw her glance upward for a moment and then back down at Christine.
The Fury’s tyres screamed violently as she leaped at Leigh. Smoke rose from the new black marks on the concrete, and I just had time to register the fact that there were people inside of Christine: a whole carload of them.
At the same instant that Christine roared toward her, Leigh leaped upward with a big ungainly Jack-in the box spring. My mind, seeming to run at a speed approaching light, wondered for a moment if she was intending to leap right over the Plymouth, as if, instead of Fryes, she wore boots of the seven-league variety.
Instead, she caught and gripped the rusted metal struts which supported an overhead shelf about nine feet above the floor, over three feet above her head. This shelf skirted all four walls. On the night Arnie and I had first brought Christine in, that entire shelf had been crammed with recapped tyres and old baldies waiting to be recapped—in some funny way it had reminded me of a well-stocked library shelf. Now it was mostly empty. Holding those angled struts, Leigh swung her jeaned legs up like a kid who means to throw his legs right over his own shoulders—what we used to call skinning the cat in grammar school. Christine’s snout smashed into the wall directly below her. If she had been any slower getting her legs up, they would have been mashed off at the knees. A piece of chrome flew. Two of the remaining tyres tumbled from the shelf and bounced crazily on the cement like giant rubber doughnuts.
Leigh’s head smashed back against the wall with battering, dazing force as Christine reversed, all four of her tyres laying rubber and squirting blue smoke.
And what was I doing “all this time,” you wonder? It wasn’t all that time, that is my answer. Even as I used the O-Cedar mop to depress Petunia’s clutch and gear into first, the overhead door was just thumping down. All of it had happened in the space of seconds.
Leigh was still holding onto the struts supporting the tyre shelf, but now she only hung there, head down, dazed.
I let the clutch out, and a cold part of my mind took over: Easy, man—if you pop the clutch and stall this fucker, she’s dead.
Petunia rolled. I revved the engine up to a bellow and let the clutch out all the way. Christine roared at Leigh again, her hood crimped almost double from her first hit, bright metal showing through the broken paint at the sharpest points of bend. It looked as if her hood and grille had grown shark’s teeth,
I hit Christine three-quarters of the way toward the front and she slid around, one of her tyres pulling off the rim. The ’58 slammed into a litter of old bumper jacks and junk parts in one corner; there was a booming crash as she struck the wall, and then the hot sound of her engine, revving and falling off, revving and falling off. The entire left front end was bashed in—but she was still running.
I slammed on Petunia’s brake with my right foot and barely managed to avoid crushing Leigh myself. Petunia’s engine stalled. Now the only sound in the garage was Christine’s screaming engine.
“Leigh!” I screamed over it. “Leigh, run!”
She looked over at me groggily, and now I could see sticky braids of blood in her hair—it was as purple as I had expected. She let go of the struts, landed on her feet, staggered, and went to one knee.
Christine came for her. Leigh got up, took two wobbling steps, and got on her blind side, behind Petunia. Christine swerved and struck the truck’s front end. I was thrown roughly to the right. Pain roared through my left leg.
“Get up!” I screamed at Leigh, trying to lean even farther over and open the door. “Get up!”
Christine backed off, and when she came again she cut hard to the right and went out of my line of vision around the back of Petunia. I caught just a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror bolted outside the driver’s side window. Then I could only hear the scream of her tyres.
Barely conscious, Leigh simply wandered off, holding both hands laced to the back of her head. Blood trickled through her fingers. She walked in front of Petunia’s grille toward me and then just stopped.
I didn’t have to see in order to know-what was going to happen next. Christine would reverse again, back to my side, and then crush her against the wall.
Desperately, I shoved the clutch in with the mop and keyed the engine again. It turned over, coughed, stalled. I could smell gasoline in the air, heavy and rich. I had flooded the engine.
Christine reappeared in the rearview mirror. She came at Leigh, who managed to stumble backward just out of reach. Christine slammed nose-on into the wall with crunching force. The passenger door popped open and the horror was complete; the hand not clutching the mop-handle went to my mouth and I screamed through it.
Sitting on the passenger side like a grotesque life-sized doll was Michael Cunningham. His head, lolling limply on the stalk of his neck, snapped over to one side as Christine reversed to make another try at Leigh, and I saw his face had the high, rosy colour of carbon monoxide poisoning. He hadn’t taken my advice. Christine had gone to the Cunninghams” house first, as I had vaguely suspected she might. Michael came home from school and there she was, standing in the driveway, his son’s restored 1958 Plymouth. He had gone to it, and somehow Christine had… had gotten him. Had he maybe gotten in just to sit behind the wheel for a moment, as I had that day in LeBay’s garage? He might have. Just to see what vibrations he could pick up. If so, he must have picked up some terrible vibes indeed during his last few minutes on earth. Had Christine started herself up? Driven herself into the garage? Maybe. Maybe. And had Michael discovered that he could neither turn off the madly revving engine or get out of the car? Had he maybe turned his head and perhaps seen the true guiding spirit of Arnie’s ’58 Fury, lounging in the shotgun seat, and fainted in terror?
It didn’t matter now. Leigh was all that mattered.
She had seen, too. Her screams, high, despairing, and shrill, floated in the exhaust-stinking air like hysterically bright balloons. But it had, at least, cut through her daze.
She turned and ran for Will Darnell’s office, blood splattering behind her in dime-sized drops as she went. Blood was soaking into the collar of her parka—too much blood.
Christine backed up, laying rubber and leaving a scatter of glass behind. As she pulled around in a tight circle to go after Leigh, centrifugal force pulled the passenger door shut again—but not before I saw Michael’s
