C. Box - The Highway

Her eyes flashed with anger.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Just promise me one thing and keep it this time.”

“What?”

“Promise me you won’t take another drink tonight. I know how you are. Once you get started, you don’t stop. You can’t stop. And you’ve got a head start.”

“I stopped for two years,” he said.

“Until tonight. You started drinking again when your son needed you.”

“I didn’t know it at the time,” he said.

“Just promise me.”

“I promise.” Thinking, She didn’t say anything about a minute after midnight.

Then, as he stood and gathered his weapons and gear, he thought, No . Not tonight. He had a job to do. This is what he’d explained to Cassie at Jester’s. This, right here, was why he existed.

“I promise,” he said again.

11:56 P.M., Tuesday, November 20

Gracie awoke. she was in a different place.

The floor she lay on was hard slick cement instead of vibrating steel. But it was dark, like before, except for a slight airy hum somewhere in back of her. She was in a fetal position on her side, her knees tucked up almost beneath her chin. There was faint orange light in the room, emanating from behind her, but there was enough illumination for her to see that her knees were bare and white.

Painfully, she stretched out. Her arms raised up above her head-no bindings-and her legs straightened along the floor. The tape on her mouth had been removed but her lips and cheeks were still gummy with adhesive. She’d been stripped to her underwear and wore only her panties, bra, and socks. The thought of someone taking her clothes off while she slept disgusted and frightened her.

She reached down the length of her body and slipped her hand between her legs. Although she’d never had sex and didn’t know what it felt like afterward, she was sure she hadn’t been raped.

She flopped over to her back and her naked shoulders made contact with the cool concrete floor. The ceiling was dark and without features. The air in the room was musty and there was a sharp unpleasant odor on the fringes, something old and permanent. Some kind of human odor.

She still had no strength and it was hard to connect with her own body. A headache pounded between her ears and it was so all-powerful that she thought a quick movement would again lead to nausea.

Gracie rolled her head to the right. A wall, also concrete, without a door or a window. Faint pale lines about an inch apart like tooth-tracks from a rake, swept across the surface in an arc. The wall she thought at first was pitted wasn’t pitted at all, but flecked with dark stains and paintbrushlike smears of black.

Her heart raced, and with it her head pounded even harder.

It was silent inside the room except for that soft hum, but she had trouble hearing because of the liquid pulsing in her ears as she comprehended the nature of the place she was in.

She rolled her head to the left. Danielle was there, also undressed except for her underwear-a lacy black bra and ridiculous magenta-thong panties-her face hidden by a cascade of black hair. But there was rhythmic breathing, and Gracie heard Danielle issue a soft moan. She was still alive but unconscious.

“You want a blanket?”

The voice made her jump. It was low and raspy and it came from behind her out of view. Gracie rocked back on the crown of her head, chin up, to try and see who had spoken.

“Here,” the voice said, and Gracie’s head and torso were suddenly covered with a scratchy blanket that had been tossed on top of her with a soft whump .

Moving slowly to not trigger the nausea again, Gracie lifted her right arm to move a corner of the blanket off her face. The fabric smelled slightly of sweat, dust, and urine. Once her face was clear she shifted her hips so she could look up and see.

The figure-it took a moment to recognize it as a woman-sat with her back to the far wall, a bare knee propped up. Gracie couldn’t see all of her because she was half in shadow, but what she saw was white and skeletal. A thin scabbed-over ankle, a bulbous knee like knotty pine, the sharp angle of a corpselike shoulder, and oily hanks of long blond hair. One eye looked out from a sunken dark socket and it was lit orange by the electric heater that hummed beside her. The heater was the source of the sound and the only bit of light in the room.

The woman shifted and lowered her knee and her leg stretched out along the floor. There was something wrong with the gesture, something incongruous about her. Gracie realized it was because the woman only had one full leg. Her other thigh, which lay flat on the concrete floor, stopped just above where her other knee should have been.

“Lost it when I was little,” the woman said, and gestured toward the door. “They took my prosthesis and they won’t give it back. Like I was ever gonna fuckin’ run away,” she said, hissing out the words.

When the woman opened her mouth again Gracie saw a dark maw with no teeth.

“Now that they got you little girls they won’t have no use for me,” she said, and a single tear snaked down her cheek.

11:58 P.M., Tuesday, November 20

After dumping the body of the lot lizard in the trunk of a car next to the house, the Lizard King stood silently on the broken front porch of the house he’d grown up in, trying to calm his breath and slow his heartbeat. He’d dropped the two girls off, hidden the body in his sleeper while his truck was unloaded, then driven home. The events of the night had been fantastic but now he wanted to calm down. He welcomed the utter and pure exhaustion that came after the rush, because he knew the next few days would be incredible.

There was a light on inside.

He thought for a moment that he might just turn on his boot heels, get in his truck, and stay in his sleeper for the night. But being back in those familiar surroundings would bring it all rushing back again, the events of the day, and he’d never get to sleep. Plus, the cab reeked of disinfectant from being thoroughly scrubbed down. So he hoped she’d simply left a light on for him or forgotten to turn it off-it happened more and more often-and he reached down for the door handle.

The house itself was close, tiny, tired, and sad. It was obscured from the dirt road out front by sixty years of gnarled and tightly packed Russian olive bushes that rimmed all four sides like medieval walls. There was no garage-not even a carport. The paint peeled on the asbestos siding and most of the shingles on the roof were cracked. There was always a certain smell around the house, sickly sweet and ancient, from the coal that was once burned in the stove to warm it. That smell seemed to live in the walls itself. But compared to the odors inside …

He opened the door and stepped in quietly and eased it shut behind him. The light came from the kitchen and it was muted and lit floating dust motes kicked up by his entry. There was a tunnel of sorts through the living room to his bedroom. His shoulders brushed against a column of boxes and plastic tubs that rose from the floor to the ceiling. He had to turn slightly to make progress. The floor was gritty with dirt.

There was a side passage off his route to the kitchen and he took it so he could turn off the light. There was so much loose paper stacked throughout the kitchen and the rest of the house that leaving a light on was a fire hazard. He was always telling her that, always complaining about the stacks of newspapers and mail, about the columns of boxes, crates, and things she called her “collectibles” or her “memorabilia” that now filled the entire house except for his bedroom, telling her that the house was a fire hazard and a health hazard because of the old groceries rotting in the refrigerator and cupboards.…