that was just for starters. Buddy had demonstrated a kind of furious invention when it came to destroying Cuntface’s car; it had left Moochie feeling both delighted and uneasy. All in all, that car should not have moved under its own power for six months, if ever. So this could not be Christine. It was some other ’58 Fury.
Except it was Christine. He knew it.
Moochie stood there on the deserted early-morning sidewalk, his numb ears poking out from beneath his long hair, his breath pluming frostily on the air.
The car sat at the curb facing him, engine growling softly. It was impossible to tell who, if anyone, was behind the wheel; it was parked directly beneath one of the streetlights, and the orange globe burned across the glass of the unmarred windshield like a waterproof jack-o'-lantern seen deep down in dark water.
Moochie began to be afraid
He slicked his tongue over dry lips and looked around. To his left was JFK Drive, six lanes wide and looking like a dry riverbed at this empty hour of the morning. To his right was a photography shop, orange letters outlined in red spelling KODAK across its window.
He looked back at the car. It just sat there, idling.
He opened his mouth to speak and produced no sound. He tried again and got a croak. “Hey. Cunningham.”
The car sat, seeming to brood. Exhaust curled up. The engine rumbled, idling fast on high-octane gas.
“That you, Cunningham?”
He took one more step. A cleat scraped on cement. His heart was thudding in his neck. He looked around at the street again; surely another car would come, JFK Drive couldn’t be totally deserted even at one-twenty-five in the morning, could it? But there were no cars, only the flat orange glare of the streetlights.
Moochie cleared his throat.
“You ain’t mad, are you?”
Christine’s duals suddenly came on, pinning him in harsh white light. The Fury ripped toward him, peeling out, the tyres screaming black slashes of rubber onto the pavement. It came with such sudden power that the rear end seemed to squat, like the haunches of a dog preparing to spring—a dog or a she-wolf. The onside wheels jumped up on the pavement and it ran at Moochie that way, offside wheels down, onside wheels up over the curb, canted at an angle. The undercarriage scraped and shrieked and shot off a swirling flicker of sparks.
Moochie screamed and tried to sidestep. The edge of Christine’s bumper barely flicked his left calf and took a chunk of meat. Warm wetness coursed down his leg and puddled in his shoe. The warmth of his own blood made him realize in a confused way just how cold the night was.
He thudded hip-first into the doorway of the photo shop, barely missing the plate-glass window. A foot to the left and he would have crashed right through, landing-in a litter of Nikons and Polaroid One-Steps.
He could hear the car’s engine, suddenly revving up. That horrible, unearthly shrieking of the undercarriage on the cement again. Moochie turned around, panting harshly. Christine was reversing back up the gutter, and as it passed him, he saw. He saw.
There was no one behind the wheel.
Panic began to pound in his head. Moochie took to his heels. He ran out into JFK Drive, sprinting for the far side. There was an alley over there between a market and a dry-cleaning place. Too narrow for the car. If he could get in there—
Change jingled madly in his pants pockets and in the five or six pockets of his Army-surplus duffel coat. Quarters, nickels, dimes. A jingling silver carillon. He pumped his knees almost to his chin. His cleated engineer boots drummed the pavement. His shadow chased him.
The car somewhere behind him revved again, fell off, revved again, fell off, and then the motor began to shriek. The tyres wailed, and Christine shot at Moochie Welch’s back, crossing the lanes of JFK Drive at right angles. Moochie screamed and could not hear himself scream because the car was still peeling rubber, the car was still shrieking like an insanely angry, murderous woman, and that shriek filled the world.
His shadow was no longer chasing him. It was leading him and getting longer. In the window of the dry- cleaning shop he saw great yellow eyes blossom.
It wasn’t even close.
At the very last moment Moochie tried to jig left, but Christine jigged with him as if she had read his final desperate thought. The Plymouth hit him squarely, still accelerating, breaking Moochie Welch’s back and knocking him spang out of his engineer’s boots. He was thrown forty feet into the brick siding of the little market, again narrowly missing a plunge through a plate-glass window.
The force of his strike was hard enough to cause him to rebound into the street again, leaving a splash of blood on the brick like an inkblot. A picture of it would appear the next day on the front page of the Libertyville Journal-Standard.
Christine reversed, screeched to a skidding, sliding stop, and roared forward again. Moochie lay near the curbing, trying to get up. He couldn’t get up. Nothing seemed to work. All the signals were scrambled.
Bright white light washed over him.
“No,” he whispered through a mouthful of broken teeth. “N—”
The car roared forward and over him. Change flew everywhere. Mooche was pulled and rolled first one way and then the other as Christine reversed into the street again. She stood there, engine revving and falling off to a rich idle, then revving again. She stood there as if thinking.
Then she came at him again. She hit him, jumped the curb, skidded around, and then reversed again, thumping back down.
She screamed forward.
And back.
And forward.
Her headlights glared. Her exhaust pipes jetted hot blue smoke.
The thing in the street no longer looked like a human being; it looked like a scattered bundle of rags.
The car reversed a final time, skidded around in a half-circle, and accelerated, roaring over the bleeding bundle in the street again and going down the Drive, the blast of its engine, still winding up to full rev, rocketing off the walls of the sleeping buildings—but not entirely sleeping now; lights were beginning to flick on, people who lived over their stores were going to their windows to see what all the racket had been about, and if there had been an accident.
One of Christine’s headlights had been shattered. Another flickered unsteadily off and on, bleared with a thin wash of Moochie’s blood. The grille had been bent inward, and the dents in it approximated the shape and size of Moochie’s torso with all the gruesome perfection of a deathmask. Blood was splashed across the hood in fans that spread out as windspeed increased. The exhaust had taken on a heavy, blatting sound; one of Christine’s two silencers had been destroyed.
Inside, on the instrument panel, the milometer continued to run backward, as if Christine were somehow slipping back into time, leaving not only the scene of the hit-and-run behind but the actual fact of the hit-and- run.
The silencer was the first thing.
Suddenly that heavy, blatting sound diminished and smoothed out.
The fans of blood on the hood began to run toward the front of the car again in spite of the wind—as if a movie film had been reversed.
The flickering headlight suddenly shone steadily, and a tenth of a mile later the deadlight became a headlight again. With an unimportant tinkling sound—no more than the sound of a small boy’s boot breaking the thin scum of ice on a mudpuddle—the glass reassembled itself from nowhere.
There was a hollow punk! punk! punk! sound from the front end, the sound of denting metal, the sound you sometimes get when you squeeze a beer-can. But instead of denting, Christine’s grille was popping back out—a bodyshop veteran with fifty years” experience in putting fender-benders right could not have done it more neatly.
Christine turned onto Hampton Street even before the first of those awakened by the screaming of her tyres had reached Moochie’s remains. The blood was gone. It had reached the front of the hood and disappeared. The scratches were gone. As she rolled quietly toward the garage door with its HONK FOR ENTRY sign, there was one final punk! as the last dimple—this one in the left front bumper, the spot where Christine had struck Moochie’s
