Stephen King - Mile 81

“Is someone in there?” He shifted his cell phone to his right hand and took hold of the driver’s door with his left, meaning to swing it wide so he could look into the backseat. “Is someone hur—”

There was a moment to register an ungodly stink, and then his left hand exploded into pain so great it seemed to leap through his entire body, trailing fire and filling all his hollow spaces with agony. Doug didn’t, couldn’t, scream. His throat locked shut with the sudden shock of it. He looked down and saw that the door handle appeared to have impaled the pad of his palm.

His fingers were barely there. He could see only the stubs of them, just below the last knuckles where the back of his hand started. The rest had somehow been swallowed by the door. As Doug watched, the third finger broke. His wedding ring fell off and clinked to the pavement.

He could feel something, oh dear God and dear Jesus, something like teeth. They were chewing. The car was eating his hand.

Doug tried to pull back. Blood flew, some against the muddy door, some splattering his slacks. The drops that hit the door disappeared immediately, with a faint sucking sound: slorp . For a moment he almost got away. He could see glistening fingerbones from which the flesh had been sucked, and he had a brief, nightmarish image of chewing on one of the Colonel’s chicken wings. Get it all before you put that down , his mother used to say, the meat’s sweetest closest to the bone .

Then he was yanked forward again. The driver’s door opened to welcome him: hello, Doug, come on in . His head connected with the top of the door, and he felt a line of coldness across his brow that turned hot as the station wagon’s roofline sliced through his skin.

He made one more effort to get away, dropping his cell phone and pushing at the rear window. The window yielded instead of supporting, then enveloped his hand. He rolled his eyes and saw what had looked like glass now rippling like a pond in a breeze. And why was it rippling? Because it was chewing. Because it was chowing down.

This is what I get for being a good Sam —

Then the top of the driver’s door sawed through his skull and slipped smoothly into the brain behind it. Doug Clayton heard a large bright SNAP , like a pine knot exploding in a hot fire. Then darkness descended.

A southbound delivery driver glanced over and saw a little green car with its flashers on parked behind a mud-coated station wagon. A man — presumably he belonged to the little green car — appeared to be leaning in the station wagon’s door, talking to the driver. Breakdown , the delivery driver thought, and returned his attention to the road. No good Samaritan he.

Doug Clayton was jerked inside as if hands — ones with big palms and pencil-thin fingers — had seized his shirt and pulled him. The station wagon lost its shape and puckered inward, like a mouth tasting something exceptionally sour. or exceptionally sweet. From within came a series of overlapping crunches — the sound of a man stamping through dead branches in heavy boots. The wagon stayed puckered for ten seconds or so, looked more like a lumpy clenched fist than a car. Then, with a pouck sound like a tennis ball being smartly struck by a racquet, it popped back into its station wagon shape.

The sun peeked briefly through the clouds, reflecting off the dropped cell phone and making a brief hot circle of light on Doug’s wedding ring. Then it dived back into the cloud cover.

Behind the wagon, the Prius blinked its four-ways. They made a low clocklike sound: Tick. tick. tick .

A few cars went past, but not many. The two workweeks surrounding Easter are the slowest time of year on the nation’s turnpikes, and afternoon is the second-slowest time of the day; only the hours between midnight and 5 AM are slower.

Tick. tick. tick .

In the abandoned restaurant, Pete Simmons slept on.

Julie Vernon didn’t need King James to teach her how to be a good Samaritan. She had grown up in the small town of Readfield, Maine (population 2,400), where neighboring was a way of life, and strangers were also neighbors. Nobody had told her this in so many words; she had learned from her mother, father, and big brothers. They had little to say about such issues, but teaching by example is always the most powerful teaching of all. If you saw a guy lying by the side of the road, it didn’t matter if he was a Samaritan or a Martian. You stopped to help.

Nor had she ever worried much about being robbed, raped, or murdered by someone who was only pretending to need help. Julie was the sort of woman who would supposedly make a good wife because — in the parlance of the old Maine Yankees, of whom there are still a few—“She’ll give ya warmth in the winter and shade in the summer.” When asked for her weight by the school nurse when she was in the fifth grade, Julie had replied proudly, “My dad says I’d dress out around one-seventy. Little less if skinned.”

Now, at thirty-five, she would have dressed out closer to two-eighty, and had no interest in making any man a good wife. She was as gay as old Dad’s hatband, and proud of it. On the back of her Ram truck were two bumper stickers. One read SUPPORT GENDER EQUALITY. The other, a bright pink, opined that GAY IS A HAPPYWORD!

The stickers didn’t show now because she was hauling what she referred to as the “hoss-trailah.” She had bought a two-year-old Spanish jennet mare in the town of Clinton, and was now on her way back to Readfield, where she lived on a farm with her partner just two miles down the road from the house where she’d grown up.

She was thinking, as she often did, of her five years of touring with The Twinkles, a female mud-wrestling team. Those years had been both bad and good. Bad because The Twinkles were generally regarded as freakshow entertainment (which she supposed they sort of were), good because she had seen so much of the world. Mostly the American world, it was true, but The Twinkles had once spent three months in England, France, and Germany, where they had been treated with a kindness and respect that was almost eerie. Like young ladies, in other words.

She still had her passport, and had renewed it last year, although she guessed she might never go abroad again. Mostly that was all right. Mostly she was happy on the farm with Amelia and their motley menagerie of livestock, but she sometimes missed those days of touring — the one-night stands, the matches under the lights, the rough camaraderie of the other girls. Sometimes she even missed the push-and-bump with the audience.

“ Grab her by the cunt, she’s a dyke, she likes that! ” some shitbrained yokel had yelled one night — in Tulsa that had been, if she remembered right.

She and Melissa, the girl she’d been grappling with in the Mudbowl, had looked at each other, nodded to each other, and stood up facing the section of the audience from which the yell had came. They stood there wearing nothing but their sopping bikini briefs, mud dripping from their hair and breasts, and had flipped the bird at the heckler in unison. The audience had broken into spontaneous applause. which became a standing O when first Julianne, then Melissa, turned, bent, dropped trou, and shot the asshole a double moon.

She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn’t get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit — not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet.

The CD she was listening to came to an end, and she was just about to poke the eject button when she saw a car ahead, parked a little way up the ramp leading to the abandoned Mile 81 service stop. Its four-way flashers were on. There was another car in front of it, a muddy old beat-to-shit station wagon. Probably a Ford or a Chevrolet, it was hard to tell which.