only time, high and cheated and full of a terrible, unquenchable fury:
“You SHITTER! Fuck off, you miserable SHITTER! LEAVEMEALONE!”
“You should have left my friend alone,” I tried to yell—but all that would come out was a tearing, wounded gasp.
I hit it squarely in the rear end, and the gas tank ruptured as the back of the car accordioned inward and upward in a kind of metal mushroom. There was a yellow lick of fire. I shielded my face with my hands—but then it was gone. Christine sat there, a refugee from a demolition derby. Her engine ran choppily, missed, fired again, and then died.
The place was silent except for the bass rumble of Petunia’s engine.
Then Leigh was running across the floor, screaming my name over and over, crying. I was suddenly, stupidly aware that I was wearing her pink nylon scarf around the arm of my jacket.
I looked down at it, and then the world greyed out again.
I could feel her hands on me, and then there was nothing but darkness as I fainted.
I came to about fifteen minutes later, my face wet and blessedly cool. Leigh was standing on Petunia’s driver’s side running board, mopping my face with a wet rag. I caught it in one hand, tried to suck it, and then spat. The rag tasted strongly of oil.
“Dennis, don’t worry,” she said. “I ran out into the street… stopped a snowplough… scared the poor man out of ten years of his life, I think… all this blood… he said… an ambulance… he said he’d, you know… Dennis, are you all right?”
“Do I look all right? I whispered.
“No,” she said, and burst into tears.
“Then don’t'—I swallowed past a pain dry lump in my throat—’don’t ask stupid questions. I love you.”
She hugged me clumsily.
“He said he’d call the police, too,” she said.
I barely heard her. My eyes had found the twisted, silent hulk that was Christine’s remains. And hulk was the right word; she hardly looked like a car at all anymore. But why hadn’t she burned? A hubcap lay off to one side like a dented silver tiddlywink.
“How long since you stopped the plough?” I asked hoarsely.
“Maybe five minutes. Then I got the rag and dipped it in that bucket over there. Dennis… thank God it’s over.”
Punk! Punk! Punk!
I was still looking at the hubcap.
The dents were popping out of it.
Abruptly it flicked up on its rim and rolled towards the car like a huge coin.
Leigh saw it too. Her face froze. Her eyes widened and began to bulge. Her lips mouthed the word No but no sound came out.
“Get in here with me,” I said in a low voice, as if it could hear us. How do I know? — perhaps it could. “Get in on the passenger side. You’re going to run the gas while I run the clutch with my right foot.”
“No…” This time it was a hissing whisper. Her breath came in whining little gasps. “No… no…”
The wreckage was quivering all over. It was the most eerie, most terrible thing I have ever seen in my life. It was quivering all over, quivering like an animal that is not… quite… dead. Metal tapped nervously against metal. Tie rods clicked jittery jazz rhythms against their connectors. As I watched, a bent cotter-pin lying on the floor straightened itself and did half a dozen cartwheels to land in the wreckage.
“Get in,” I said.
“Dennis, I can’t.” Her lips quivered helplessly. “I can’t… no more… that body… that was Arnie’s father. I can’t, no more, please—”
“You have to,” I said.
She looked at me, glanced affrightedty back at the obscenely quivering remains of that old whore LeBay and Arnie had shared, and then came around Petunia’s front end. A piece of chrome tumbled and scratched her leg deeply. She screamed and ran. She clambered up into the cab and pushed over beside me. “Wh-what do I do?”
I hung halfway out of the cab, holding onto the roof, and pushed the clutch down with my right foot. Petunia’s engine was still running. “Just gun the gas and keep it gunned,” I said. “No matter what.”
Steering with my right hand, holding on with my left, I let the clutch out and we rolled forward and smashed into the wreckage, smashing it, scattering it. And in my head I seemed to hear another scream of fury.
Leigh clapped her hands to her head. “I can’t, Dennis! I can’t do it! It—it’s screaming!”
“You’ve got to do it,” I said. Her foot had come off the gas and now I could hear the sirens in the night, rising and falling. I grabbed her shoulder and a sickening blast of pain ripped up my leg. “Leigh, nothing has changed. You’ve got to.”
“It screamed at me!”
“We’re running out of time and it still isn’t done. Just a little more.”
“I’ll try,” she whispered, and stepped on the gas again.
I changed into reverse. Petunia rolled back twenty feet. I clutched again, got first… and Leigh suddenly cried out. “Dennis, no! Don’t! Look!”
The mother and the little girl, Veronica and Rita, were standing in front of the smashed and dented hulk of Christine, hand in hand, their faces solemn and sorrowing.
“They’re not there,” I said. “And if they are, it’s time they went back”—more pain in my leg and the world went grey—“back to where they belong. Keep your foot on it.”
I let out the clutch and Petunia rolled forward again, gaining speed. The two figures did not disappear as TV and movie ghosts do; they seemed to stream out in every direction, bright colours fading to wash pinks and blues… and then they were totally gone.
We slammed into Christine again, spinning what was left of her around. Metal shrieked and tore.
“Not there,” Leigh whispered. Not really there Okay. Okay, Dennis.”
Her voice was coming from far down a dark hallway. I fetched up reverse and back we went. Then forward. We hit it; we hit it again. How many times? I don’t know. We just kept slamming into it, and every time we did, another jolt of pain would go up from my leg and things would get a little bit darker.
At last I looked up blearily, and saw that the air outside the door seemed full of blood. But it wasn’t blood; it was a pulsing red light reflecting off the falling snow. People were rattling at the door out there.
“Is it good enough?” Leigh asked me.
I looked at Christine—only it wasn’t Christine anymore. It was a spread-out pile of twisted, gored metal, puffs of upholstery, and glittering broken glass.
“Have to be,” I said. “Let them in, Leigh.”
And while she went, I fainted again.
Then there were a series of confused images; things that came into focus for a while and then faded or disappeared completely. I can remember a stretcher being rolled out of the back of an ambulance; I can remember its sides being folded up, and how the overhead fluorescents put cold highlights on its chrome; I can remember someone saying, “Cut it, you have to cut it off so we can at least look at it'; I can remember someone else—Leigh, I think—saying “Don’t hurt him, please, don’t hurt him if you can help it'; I can remember the roof of an ambulance… it had to be an ambulance because at the periphery of my vision were two suspended IV bottles; I can remember a cool swab of antiseptic and then the sting of a needle.
After that, things became exceedingly weird. I knew, somewhere deep inside, that I was not dreaming—the pain proved that, if it proved nothing else—but all of it seemed like a dream. I was pretty well doped, and that was part of it… but shock was part of it too. No fake, Jake. My mother was there, crying, in a room that looked sickeningly like the hospital room in which I had spent the entire autumn. Then my father was there, and Leigh’s dad was with him, and their faces were both so tight and grim they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee as
