Buddy didn’t answer. He hunched over the wheel, alternating glances at the road ahead with glances shot into the rearview mirror, where those lights grew and grew.
“The road curves up ahead,” Bobby said hoarsely. And as the curve approached, guardrail reflectors flickering chrome in the Camaro’s headlights, he screamed it: “Buddy! It curves! It curves!”
Buddy changed down to second gear and the Camaro’s engine bellowed its protest. The tachometer needle hit 6,000 rpm, danced briefly at redline-7,000, and then dropped back to a more normal range. Backfires blatted through the Camaro’s exhaust pipes like machine-gun fire. Buddy pulled the wheel over, and the car floated into the sharp bend. The rear wheels skimmed over hard-packed snow. At the last possible instant he shifted back up, tramped on the accelerator pedal, and let his body sway freely as the Camaro’s left rear end slammed into the snowbanks digging a coffin-sized divot and then bouncing off. The Camaro slewed the other way. He went with it, then goosed the accelerator again. For one moment he thought it would not respond, that the skid would continue and they would simply barrel sideways up the road at seventy-five until they hit a bare patch and flipped over.
But the Camaro straightened out.
“Holy Jesus Buddy slow down!” Richie wailed.
Buddy hung over the wheel, grinning through his beard, bloodshot eyes bulging. The bottle of Driver was clamped between his legs. There! There, you crazy murdering sonofabitch. Let’s see you do that without rolling it over!. A moment later the headlights reappeared, closer than ever, Buddy’s grin faltered and faded. For the first time he felt a sickish, unmanning tingle running up his legs toward his crotch, Fear—real fear—stole into him.
Bobby had been looking behind as the car chased them round the bedd, and now he turned around, his face slack and cheesy. “It dint even skid,” he said. “But that’s impossible! That’s—”
“Buddy, who is it?” Richie asked.
He reached out to touch Buddy’s elbow, and his hand was flung away with such force that his knuckles cracked on the glass of his window.
“You don’t want to touch me,” Buddy whispered. The road rolled straight in front of him, not black tar now but white snow, packed and treacherous. The Camaro was rolling over this greasy surface at better than ninety miles an hour, only its roof and the orange Ping-Pong ball jammed on the top of its radio aerial visible between chest-high embankments. “You don’t want to touch me, Richie. Not going this fast.”
“Is it — ” Richie’s voice cracked and he couldn’t go on.
Buddy spared him a glance, and at the sight of the fear in Buddy’s small red eyes, Richie’s own terror came up in his throat like hot, smooth oil.
“Yeah,” Buddy said. “I think it is.”
No houses up here; they were already on state land. Nothing up here but the high snow embankments and the dark interlacing of trees.
“It’s gonna bump us!” Bobby screeched from the back seat. His voice was as high as an old woman’s. Between his feet the remaining bottles of Texas Driver chattered wildly in their carton. “Buddy! It’s gonna bump us!”
The car behind them had come to within five feet of the Camaro’s back bumper; its high beams flooded the car with light bright enough to read fine print. It slipped forward even closer. A moment later there was a thud.
The Camaro shifted its stance on the road as the car behind them fell back a trifle; to Buddy it was as if they were suddenly floating, and he knew they were a hair’s breadth from going into a wild, looping skid, the front end and the rear briskly swapping places until they hit something and rolled.
A droplet of sweat, as warm and stinging as a tear, ran into his eye.
Gradually, the Camaro straightened out again.
When he felt that he had control, Buddy let his right foot smoothly depress the accelerator all the way. If it was Cunningham in that old rustbucket ’58—ah, and hadn’t that been part of the dreams he could barely remember—the Camaro would shut him down.
The engine was now screaming. The tach needle was again on the edge of the redline at 7,000 rpm. The speedometer had passed the one hundred post, and the snowbanks streamed past them on either side in ghastly silence. The road ahead looked like a point-of-view shot in a film that had been insanely speeded up.
“Oh dear God,” Bobby babbled, “oh dear God please don’t let me get killed oh dear God oh holy shit—”
He wasn’t there the night we trashed Cuntface’s car, Buddy thought. He doesn’t know what’s going on. Poor busted-luck sonofawhore. He did not really feel sorry for Bobby, but if he could have been sorry for anyone, it would have been for the little shit-for-brains freshman. On his right, Richie Trelawney sat bolt-upright and as pallid as a gravestone, his eyes eating up his face. Richie knew the score, all right.
The car whispered toward them, headlights swelling in the rearview mirror.
He can’t be gaining! Buddy’s mind screamed. He can’t be! But the car behind them was indeed gaining, and Buddy sensed it was boring in for the kill. His mind ran like a rat in a cage, looking for a way out, and there was none. The slot in the left snowbank that marked the little side-road he usually used to bypass the gate and get into the state park had already flashed by. He was running out of time, room, and options.
There was another soft bump, and again the Camaro slewed—this, time at something over a hundred and ten miles an hour. No hope, man, Buddy thought fatalistically. He took his hands off the wheel altogether and grabbed his seatbelt. For the first time in his life, he snapped it shut across his waist.
At the same time, Bobby Stanton in the back seat screamed in a shrill ecstasy of fear: “The gate, man! Oh Jesus Buddy it’s the gaaaaayyyyy—”
The Camaro had breasted a final steep hill. The far side sloped down to a place where the road branched in two, becoming the entrance and exit from the state park. Between the two ways stood a small gatehouse on a concrete island—in the summertime, a lady sat in there on a camp chair and took a buck from each car that entered the park.
Now the gatehouse was flooded with ghastly light as the two cars raced down toward it, the Camaro heeling steadily to port as the skid worsened.
“Fuck you, Cuntface!” Buddy screamed. “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!” He yanked the wheel all the way around, twirling it with the death-knob that held one bobbing red die in alcohol.
Bobby screamed again. Richie Trelawney clapped his hands over his face, his last thought on earth a constant repetition of Watch out for broken glass watch out for broken glass watch out for broken glass—
The Camaro swapped ends, and now the headlights of the car following blared directly into them, and Buddy began to scream because it was Cuntface’s car, all right, that grille was impossible to mistake, it seemed at least a mile wide, only there was no one behind the wheel. The car was totally empty.
In the last two seconds before impact, Christine’s headlights shifted away to what was now Buddy’s left. The Fury shot into the entrance roadway as neatly and exactly as a bullet shoots down a rifle barrel. It snapped off the wooden barrier and sent it flying end over end into the black night, round yellow reflectors flashing.
Buddy Repperton’s Camaro rammed ass-backwards into the concrete island where the gatehouse stood. The eight-inch concrete lip peeled off everything bolted to the lower deck, leaving the twisted wreckage of the exhaust pipes and the silencer sitting on the snow like some weird sculpture. The Camaro’s rear end was first accordioned and then demolished. Bobby Stanton was demolished along with it. Buddy was dimly aware of something hitting his back like a bucket of warm water. It was Bobby Stanton’s blood.
The Camaro flipped into the air end for end, a mangled projectile in a squall of flying splinters and shattered boards, one headlight still glaring maniacally. It did a complete three-sixty and came down with a glass- jangling thud and rolled over. The firewall ruptured and the engine slid backward, at an angle crushing Richie Trelawney from the waist down. There was a coughing explosion of fire from the ruptured gas tank as the Camaro came to rest.
Buddy Repperton was alive. He had been cut in several places by flying glass—one ear had been clipped off with surgical neatness, leaving a red hole on the left side of his head—and his leg had been broken, but he was alive. His seatbelt had saved him. He thumbed the catch and it let go. The crackle of fire was like someone crumpling paper. He could feel the baking heat.
He tried to open the door, but the door was crimped shut.
Panting hoarsely, he threw himself through the empty space where the windscreen had been—
— and there was Christine.
She stood forty yards away, facing him at the end of a long, slewing skidmark. The rumble of her engine
