Christine (44 page)

"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 was like the slow panting of some gigantic animal.

Buddy licked his lips. Something in his left side pulled and jabbed with every breath. Something busted in there, too. Ribs.

Christine's engine gunned and fell off; gunned and fell off. Faintly, like something from a lunatic's nightmare, he could hear Elvis Presley singing "Jailhouse Rock".

Orange-pink points of light on the snow. The rumbling whoosh of fire. It was going to blow. It was—

It
did
blow. The Camaro's gas tank went with a hard thudding noise. Buddy felt a rude hand shove him in the back, and he flew through the air and landed in the snow on his hurt slide. His jacket was flaming. He grunted and rolled in the snow, putting himself out. Then he tried to get to his knees. Behind him, the Camaro was a blazing pyre in the night.

Christine's engine, revving and falling off, revving and falling off, now more quickly, more urgently.

Buddy finally managed to get to his hands and knees. He peered at Cunningham's Plymouth through the sweaty tangles of hair hanging in his eyes. The hood had been crimped up when the Plymouth blasted through the barrier arm, and the radiator was dripping a mixture of water and antifreeze that steamed on the snow like fresh animal spoor.

Buddy licked his lips again. They felt as dry as lizard skin. His back felt warm, as if he had gotten a moderately bad sunburn; he could smell smoking cloth, but in the extremity of his shock he was unaware that both his parka and the two shirts beneath had been burned away.

"Listen," he said, hardly aware he was speaking. "Listen hey—"

Christine's engine screamed and she came at him, rear end flirting back and forth as her tires spun through the sugary snow. The crimped hood was like a mouth in a frozen snarl.

Buddy waited on his hands and knees, resisting the overpowering urge to leap and scramble away at once, resisting as much as he could—the wild panic that was ripping away his self-control. No one in the car. A more imaginative person would already have gone mad, perhaps.

At the last possible second he rolled to the left, screaming as the splintered ends of the broken bone in his leg ground together. He felt something bullet past him inches away, there was warm, foul-smelling exhaust in his face for a moment, and then the snow was red as Christine's tail-lights flashed.

She wheeled, skidding, and came back at him

"No!" Buddy screamed. Pain lanced at his chest. "No! No! N—"

He leaped, blind reflexes taking over, and this time the bullet was closer, clipping leather off one shoe and turning his left foot instantly numb. He turned crazily on his hands and knees, like a small child playing I Witness at a birthday party. Blood from his mouth now mixed with the snot running freely from his nose; one of his broken ribs had nicked a lung. Blood ran down his cheek from the hole in his head where his ear had been. Frosty air jetted from his nose. His breath came in whistling sobs.

Christine paused.

White vapor drifted from her exhaust; her engine throbbed and purred. The windscreen was a black blank.

Behind Buddy, the remains of the Camaro shot greasy flames at the sky. A razor-sharp wind fluttered and fanned them. Bobby Stanton sat in the inferno of the back seat, his head cocked, a grin locked onto his blackening features.

Playing with me,
Buddy thought.
Playing with me, that's what it's doing. Like a cat with a mouse.

"Please," he croaked. The headlights were blinding, turning the blood dripping down his cheek and from the sides of his mouth to an insectile black. "Please… I… I'll tell him I'm sorry… I'll crawl to him on my fucking hands and knees if that's what… you want only please… pl—

The engine screamed. Christine leaped at him like old doom from a dark age. Buddy howled and lunged aside again, and this time the bumper struck his shin and broke his other leg and threw him toward the embankment at the side of the park road. He hit and sprawled like a loose bag of grain.

Christine wheeled back toward him, but Buddy bad seen a chance, one thin chance. He began to scramble wildly up the embankment, digging into the snow with bare hands from which the feeling had already departed, digging with his feet, ignoring the tremendous clouts of pain from his shattered legs. Now his breath came in little screams as the headlights grew brighter and the engine louder; every clod of snow threw its own jagged black shadow and he could feel it, he could feel it behind him like some horrible man-eating tiger—

There was a crunch and jangle of metal, and Buddy cried out as one of his feet was driven into the snow by Christine's bumper. He yanked it out of the snow, leaving his shoe wedged deep.

Lying, gibbering, crying, Buddy gained the top of the bank thrown up by some National Guard Motor Pool plough days ago, tottered on the edge of balance there, pinwheeled his arms, and barely kept from rolling back down.

He turned to face Christine, The Plymouth had reversed across the road and now came forward again, rear tires spinning, digging at the snow. It crashed into the bank a foot below where Buddy was perched, making him sway and sending down a further avalanche of snow. The hit crimped her hood in further, but Buddy was not touched. She reversed again through a mist of churned-up snow, engine now seeming to howl with frustrated anger.

Buddy screamed in triumph and shook his middle finger at her.
"Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"
A spray of mixed blood and spittle flew from his lips. With each gasping breath, the pain seemed to sink deeper into his left side, numbing and paralyzing.

Christine roared forward and slammed into the embankment again.

This time a large section of the bank, loosened in the car's first charge, came sliding down, burying Christine's wrinkled, snarling snout, and Buddy almost came down with it. He saved himself only by skittering backward rapidly, sliding on his butt and pulling himself with hands that were clawed into the snow like bloody grappling hooks. His legs were in agony now, and he flopped over on his side, gasping like a beached fish.

Christine came again.

"Get outta
here!"
Buddy cried. "Get outta
here,
you crazy
WHORE!"

She slammed into the embankment again, and this time enough snow fell to douse her hood to the windscreen. The wipers came on and began to arc back and forth, flicking melting snow away.

She reversed again, and Buddy saw that one more hit would sent him cascading down onto Christine's hood with the snow. He let himself fall over backward and went rolling down the far side of the embankment, screaming each time his broken ribs bumped the ground. He came to rest in loose powder, staring up at black sky, the cold stars. His teeth began to click helplessly together. Shudders raced through his body.

Christine didn't come again, but he could hear the soft mutter of her engine. Not coming, but waiting.

He glanced at the snowbank bulking against the sky. Beyond it, the glow of the burning Camaro had begun to wane a bit. How long had it been since the crash? He didn't know. Would anyone see the fire and come to rescue him? He didn't know that either.