Mile 81 (5 page)

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
?”

Their bones
, Rachel thought. She was only six years old, and not allowed to go to PG-13 movies or watch them on TV (let alone R; her mother said R stood for
Raunchy
), but she knew that was the sound of their bones breaking.

The car wasn’t a car. It was some kind of monster.

“Where mommy-n-daddy?” Blakie asked, turning his large eyes—now made even larger by his tears—on her. “Where mommy-n-daddy, Rachie?”

He sounds like he’s two again
, Rachel thought, and for maybe the first time in her life, she felt something other than irritation (or, when extremely tried by his behavior, outright hate) for her baby brother. She didn’t think this new feeling was love. She thought it was something even bigger. Her mom hadn’t been able to say anything in the end, but if she’d had time, Rachel knew what it would have been:
take care of Blakie
.

He was thrashing in his car seat. He knew how to undo the straps, but in his panic had forgotten how.

Rachel opened her seat belt, slid out of her booster seat, and tried to do it for him. One of his flailing hands caught her cheek and administered a ringing slap. Under normal circumstances that would have earned him a hard punch on the shoulder (and a time-out in her room, where she would have sat staring at the wall in a boiling fugue of fury), but now she just grabbed his hand and held it down.

“Stop it! Let me help you! I can get you out, but not if you do that!”

He stopped thrashing, but kept on crying. “Where Daddy? Where Mommy? I want Mommy!”

I want her too, asshole
, Rachel thought, and undid the car seat straps. “We’re going to get out now, and we’re going to . . .”

What? They were going to what? Go up to the restaurant? It was closed, that was why there were orange barrels. That was why the gas pumps in front of the gas station part were gone and there was grass poking out of the empty parking lot.

“We’re going to get away from here,” she finished.

She got out of the car and went around to Blakie’s side. She opened his door but he just looked at her, eyes brimming. “I can’t get out, Rachie, I’ll fall.”

Don’t be such a scaredy-baby
, she almost said, then didn’t. This wasn’t the time for that. He was upset enough. She opened her arms and said, “Slide. I’ll catch you.”

He looked at her doubtfully, then slid. Rachel did catch him, but he was heavier than he looked, and they both went sprawling. She got the worst of it because she was on the bottom, but Blakie bumped his head and scraped one hand and began to bawl loudly, this time in pain instead of fear.

“Stop it,” she said, and wriggled out from under him. “Put on your man-pants, Blakie.”

“H-Huh?”

She didn’t answer. She was looking at the two phones lying beside the terrible station wagon. One of them looked broken, but the other—

Rachel edged toward it on her hands and knees, never taking her eyes off the car into which their father and mother had disappeared with terrifying suddenness. As she was reaching toward the good phone, Blakie walked past her toward the station wagon, holding out his scraped hand.

“Mom? Mommy? Come out! I hurted myself. You have to come out n kiss it bet—”

“
Stop right where you are, Blake Lussier
.”

Carla would have been proud; it was her she-who-must-be-obeyed voice at its most forbidding. And it worked. Blake stopped four feet from the side of the station wagon.

“But I want
Mommy
! I want
Mommy
, Rachie!”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him away from the car. “Not now. Help me work this thing.” She knew perfectly well how to work the phone, but she had to distract him.

“Gimme, I can do it! Gimme, Rache!”

She passed it over, and while he examined the buttons, she got up, took him by the back of his Wolverine tee-shirt, and pulled him back three steps. Blake hardly noticed. He found the power button of Julie Vernon’s cell phone and pushed it. The phone beeped. Rachel took it from him, and for once in his dopey little-kid life, Blakie didn’t protest.

She had listened carefully when McGruff the Crime Dog came to talk to them at school (although she knew perfectly well it was only a guy in a McGruff suit), and she did not hesitate now. She punched in 911 and put the phone to her ear. It rang once, then was picked up.

“Hello? My name is Rachel Ann Lussier, and—”

“This call is being recorded,” a man’s voice overrode her. “If you wish to report an emergency, push one. If you wish to report adverse road conditions, push two. If you wish to report a stranded motorist—”

“Rache? Rachie? Where Mommy? Where Da—”

“
Shhh
!” Rachel said sternly, and pushed 1. It was hard to do. Her hand was trembling and her eyes were all blurry. She realized she was crying. When had she started crying? She couldn’t remember.

“Hello, this is nine-one-one,” a woman said.

“Are you real or another recording?” Rachel asked.

“I’m real,” the woman said, sounding a little amused. “Do you have an emergency?”

“Yes. A bad car ate up our mother and our daddy. It’s at the—”

“Quit while you’re ahead,” the 911 woman advised. She sounded more amused than ever. “How old are you, kiddo?”

“I’m six and a half. My name is Rachel Ann Lussier, and a car, a bad car—”

“Listen, Rachel Ann or whoever you are, I can trace this call. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t. Now just hang up and I won’t have to send a policeman to your house to paddle your—”

“
They’re dead, you stupid phone person
!” Rachel shouted into the phone, and at the d-word, Blakie began to cry again.

The 911 woman didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, in a voice no longer amused: “Where are you, Rachel Ann?”

“At the empty restaurant! The one with the orange barrels!”

Blakie sat down and put his arms over his face. That hurt Rachel in a way she had never been hurt before. It hurt her deep in her heart.

“That’s not enough information,” the 911 lady said. “Can you be a little more specific, Rachel Ann?”

Rachel didn’t know what
specific
meant, but she knew what she was seeing: the back tire of the station wagon, the one closest to them, was melting a little. A tentacle of what looked like liquid rubber was moving slowly across the pavement toward Blakie.

“I have to go,” Rachel said. “We have to get away from the bad car.”

She dragged Blake to his feet, staring at the melting tire. The tentacle of rubber started to go back where it had come from (
because it knows we’re out of reach
, she thought), and the tire started to look like a tire again, but that wasn’t good enough for Rachel. She kept dragging Blake down the ramp and toward the turnpike.

“Where we goin, Rachie?”

I don’t know
.

“Away from that car.”

“I want my Transformers!”

“Not now, later.” She kept a tight hold on Blake and kept backing, down toward the turnpike where the occasional traffic was whizzing by at seventy and eighty miles an hour.

Nothing is as piercing as a child’s scream; it’s one of nature’s more efficient survival mechanisms. Pete Simmons’s sleep had already thinned to little more than a doze, and when Rachel screamed at the 911 lady, he heard it and finally woke up all the way.

He sat up, winced, and put a hand to his head. It ached, and he knew what that sort of ache was: the dreaded HANGOVER. His tongue tasted furry, and his stomach was blick. Not I’m-gonna-hurl blick, but blick, just the same.