The dog shuddered with the shots, but it did not let go. And now it was trying to drag her, blood streaming from its side and foaming from its mouth. Its claws dug into the sawdust. Laura’s wrist was about to snap. She fired again, into the side of the pit bull’s blocky head, and the dog’s lower jaw exploded in a spray of bone chips and blood.
Mary was fighting her own battle ten feet away. She slammed her knee into the brown pit bull’s skull with everything she had behind it. Then a second and third time, as the dog’s teeth kept tearing her thigh open. She got a finger hooked into one of the eyes and yanked it out like a white grape, and at last the pit bull grunted and released her thigh. It danced with pain, shaking its one-eyed head back and forth and snapping at the air. Mary crawled for the Colt, tried to latch her fingers around it, but they were spasming out of control, the nerves and muscles of her injured arm rioting. She looked up as the pit bull charged at her again, and she cried out and shielded her face with her arms.
It hit her shoulder with a bone-bruising blow, knocked Mary aside, and fell with a pain-maddened snarl upon Laura.
The dying dog was still hanging on to Laura’s left hand. The one-eyed beast fastened its teeth on the overcoat sleeve of her right arm and began to tear at it. She couldn’t get her gun angled to shoot it. She kicked and screamed, the one-eyed dog working on her right arm and the other animal still trying to crunch her hand with its ruined jaws.
Mary scrambled to the wailing baby, scooped him up with her left arm, and struggled to her feet. Blood streamed from her gnawed thigh, her jeans leg drenched. The two dogs had Laura between them, the woman trying to wrench loose. Mary saw the Colt on the ground. Her right hand was still convulsing, drops of blood falling from her fingertips. Panic flared within her. She was hurt badly, near passing out. If she fell and the dogs turned on her and Drummer…
She left the gun and hobbled toward the van, ignoring the man she’d shot. As Mary transferred Drummer to her right arm and used her left hand to open the driver’s door, Didi came at her with a two-by-four she’d plucked off a lumber pile. Mary saw the blow coming and dodged it, the wood whacking against the van’s side. And then Mary stepped in and drove a knee up into Didi’s stomach, and Didi cried out and doubled over. Mary brought her left arm down across Didi’s back, the blow whooshing the air from Didi’s lungs and dropping her to her knees.
Didi groaned, her battle-flag-red hair hanging over her face in defeat. Mary could see how gray it was. Didi looked up at her, eyes watery with pain. It was the face of an old woman, tortured by the things that were.
“Go on,” Didi said. “Kill me.”
Laura kicked the dying pit bull away from her broken hand, and the animal staggered in dazed circles. The other dog still had hold of her ragged coat sleeve, its fangs starting to reach the flesh. She couldn’t get a shot at it, unless…
She dropped the gun and wrenched her arm out of the overcoat, the dog’s teeth snapping shut in its wake. Then she picked up the automatic, jammed the barrel right up under the pit bull’s throat, and squeezed the trigger.
Mary Terror flinched at the sound of the shot. Blood was running down her leg in hot rivulets. Before her, Didi kneeled with sawdust in her hair, and Didi saw the raw fear in Mary’s eyes. Mary’s right hand was still spasming, torn muscles twitching in the forearm wound. Drummer was screaming in her ear, the world starting to turn gray. Mary got into the van with Drummer and slammed the door. She backed away from the building’s side, intending to crush Didi beneath the wheels, but Didi had shaken the cobwebs loose and crawled to the safety of the lumber stacks. Mary got the van turned around and sped toward the gates, the tires throwing dust.
Five seconds later, Didi heard another car door open and close. She emerged from her hiding place as the BMW’s engine started. Earl Van Diver was behind the wheel, his face a grinning, terrible rictus. As Van Diver twisted the wheel with his shattered shoulder, Didi saw his mouth open in a soundless scream. The BMW tore away, in pursuit of Mary Terror. Its right front tire went over the speaker and crushed it to bits.
Didi stood up. She saw the mottled pit bull lying on the ground. Laura was on her knees, her right arm free of the tattered coat sleeve, and the brown pit bull faced her six feet away. Didi picked up the two-by-four, her ear stinging, and walked toward the animal.
Before she got there, the pit bull groaned deep in its blasted-open throat and collapsed, its eyes fixed on the woman who’d delivered the bullet.
Tears of pain glistened on Laura’s cheeks, but her face was shocked clean of all emotion. She looked at the bluish-red lump of her left hand. There were only three fingers and a thumb on it. The little finger was gone, torn off” at the knuckle. Her hand made her think of a fresh steak, tenderized by a butcher’s mallet.
“Oh my God,” Didi said. Blood was dripping from her right ear like a chain of rubies. “Your… hand…”
Laura had gone deathly pale. She blinked, staring at Didi, and then she keeled over onto her side.
Laura’s purse was in the car, Didi realized. Her money, credit cards…everything was gone. It was over, and Mary had won.
“Help me! Somebody!” The voice was coming from over near the dogpen. “I’m dyin’ over here!”
Didi left Laura and went back to where the big-bellied man lay against the dogpen. He was a mess, but Didi saw that the blood wasn’t spewing out so no arteries had been hit. He looked at her blearily, trying to focus. “Who’re you?”
“Nobody,” she said.
“You gonna kill me?”
She shook her head.
“Listen…listen…call an ambulance. Okay? Phone’s in the office. Locked up.” He offered her the bloody key ring. “Call an ambulance. Goddamn Kenny took off early. Oh, I’m hurtin’. Do it, okay?”
Didi accepted the key ring. One of the keys, she saw, was for a General Motors car. “The Olds is yours?”
“Yeah. Yeah. The Cutlass. Call an ambulance, I’m bleedin’ to death.”
She didn’t think so. She knew a dying man when she saw one. This guy had a broken collarbone and maybe a punctured lung, but he was breathing all right. Still, she’d have to call the ambulance. “You just be quiet and don’t move.”
“What am I gonna do? A fuckin’ polka?”
Didi hurried back to Laura, who was sitting up again. “Can you walk?”
“I think…I’m going to pass out.”
“I’ve found us a car,” Didi said.
Laura looked up at her friend, her eyes swollen and her broken hand throbbing almost beyond endurance. She wanted to lie on the ground, curl up, and cry in the cold. But she could not, because Mary Terror still had her baby, and Mary Terror was on her way to California. Laura had something left; she pulled it from a deep, unknown place, the same place where people gritted their teeth and fought uphill against the iron-spiked wheels of life. She had to keep going. There was no quitting, no surrender.
Laura lifted her right hand, and Didi helped her stand. Then Didi picked up the automatic, and she and Laura walked together past the dead dogs.
In the trailer, Didi called 911 and told the operator there’d been a shooting, that an ambulance was needed at the Wentzel Brothers Lumberyard near Geneseo. The operator said an ambulance would be there in eight to ten minutes, and for her to stay on the line. Didi hung up. A small metal box atop the office’s desk caught her attention, and she spent forty seconds finding the right key to unlock it. Inside were a few checks clipped to copies of receipts, and a bank deposit envelope that held seventy-one dollars and thirty-five cents. She took the money.
Didi got behind the wheel of the Cutlass, with Laura lying semiconscious amid burger wrappers and crumpled beer cans in the backseat. A pair of large red plastic dice hung from the rearview mirror, and there was a Playboy bunny decal stuck prominently on the rear windshield. The Olds chugged, refusing to start as she turned the key. Didi thought she could hear a siren, getting closer. The Olds chugged again as Didi pumped the accelerator. An
d then the car shuddered, and with a cannon’s boom black smoke blew from the tailpipe. Didi checked the gas gauge, seeing that its needle stood at a quarter of a tank.
The Cutlass creaked and groaned like a frigate in a tempest as Didi backed up, wrestled the grimy wheel, and drove toward the gates. She could feel the tires wanting to slew off to the right, and she decided it was best she hadn’t looked to see how much tread they still wore. Then they were through the gates and heading back to the interstate, the Cutlass slowly but steadily gaining speed and making a racket like bricks in a cement mixer. An ambulance appeared ahead of them, approaching across the flat fields. It passed them, its siren yowling, on the way to save a Wentzel. The two women went on, and only when they were five or six miles farther west along I-80 did Didi give one gasping, terrible sob and wipe her eyes with her dirty sleeve.
4
White Tide
ACROSS THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER, where I-80 shot straight and true toward Iowa City, Earl Van Diver was gaining on the woman who had savaged his life.
The van was going almost eighty, the BMW pushing past eighty-five. Van Diver gripped the wheel with his one good hand, the other hand cold and dead at the end of his torn-open shoulder. Blood was streaked over the seats, spattered across the instrument panel, soaked into the carpet beneath him. He was filling up with winter, his vision turning gray. It was getting more difficult to hold the wheel steady, the wind and his own weakness conspiring against him. Cars veered out of the paths of the two vehicles, a wake of horns echoing behind Van Diver. He glanced at the speedometer, saw the needle vibrating at eighty-seven. Mary had kept the van’s speed up over eighty since they’d left the Geneseo exit, swinging back and forth from lane to lane to keep cars between them. Now, though, it was clear from the blue coughs of burning oil coming from the tailpipe that the van’s engine was worn out, and she couldn’t maintain that speed. Good, he thought as he felt the cold creeping through his cheeks. Good. He wasn’t going to let her get away. Oh, no; not this time.
He felt no remorse for leaving Laura and Bedelia. The opportunity to take the car was there. Mary could not be allowed to roam free. She was an animal, and must be put to death like a rabid dog drooling foam. Put to death and death and death.
About the baby he had no emotion. The baby was there. Babies had died before; there were always babies. What was the death of a single baby if an animal like Mary Terror could be ground under? He knew he could never have made Laura Clayborne understand his life’s purpose. How could she understand that every time he looked into a mirror he saw the face of Mary Terror? How could she understand the nightmare rages that had driven his wife and daughter away from him? How could she understand that the name Mary drove him crazy with hatred, and that his daughter’s name had made him look at her with hatred, too. Laura Clayborne had lost a baby; he had lost himself, down into a dark hole of torment so horrible that it began to—dear God—make him dream of fucking Mary with the barrel of his gun, ah yes ah yes sweet sweet Mary you bitch you soul-sucking bitch, and in the mornings he would wake up wet and sated for a time.
But not for very long.
You’re mine, Van Diver thought, his black eyes glazed and shiny.
Two more feet, and the BMW’s front fender smashed into the van’s rear with a jolt that cracked the stubs of his teeth together. He pushed the van toward the right, trying to force it off the highway, and tires shrieked in a burn of rubber as Mary fought the van back to the left again. A station wagon was in front of her, a Garfield stuck with suction cups to the rear windshield. Mary grazed the station wagon as it careened aside, scraping off a sheet of sparks. Then she was past it, veering around a tractor-trailer truck and back into the left lane. She looked up into the rearview mirror at the BMW’s battered snout, and she saw the man’s grinning, terrible face above the wheel. Little pig wants to play, she thought, and she stomped on the brake.
The BMW crashed into the back of the van, the hood crumpling and pieces of glass and metal flying up. Van Diver was lifted off his seat, his body thrown forward to strain the limits of his seat belt and his chin slamming against the steering wheel. His entire body tensed for the rest of the wreck, but Mary’s foot was planted on the accelerator again and the van was pulling away with a backfire of burning oil, the BMW still traveling seventy miles an hour. Van Diver trembled, his muscles shocked from the impact and his trousers wet between his legs. He backed off from the van, swung into the right lane, and was looking at the back of a school bus about thirty yards away. A twist of the wheel and an inner scream, and he missed the school bus by a foot and a half. Then he powered the BMW forward again, red lights pulsing on the dashboard and a whip of smoke starting to flail back from the crumpled hood.
Mary saw him coming. Drummer was on the passenger-side floorboard on his stomach, his hands clasping and opening. Mary stomped the brake again and braced for the jolt. Once more the BMW collided into the back of the van, further smashing the hood and throwing its driver forward in the second before Mary hit the accelerator. The gap between them widened, Mary’s backbone aching from the force of the collision, and her teeth clenched together. Her gnawed thigh was wet with blood, her right forearm ripped open, and red muscle tissue spasmed in the fissure. The wounds were numb and cold, but black motes spun before her eyes. Oily sweat had risen on her cheeks and forehead, and she could feel the clammy fingers of shock trying to drag her under. If she gave in to it, she was finished.
The BMW was coming up fast again. Mary started to hit the brake, but the car suddenly swerved around her into the right lane, on Drummer’s side. The van shuddered and moaned as the BMW smashed into it, the impact rolling Drummer across the floorboard like a limp rag and almost knocking the wheel from Mary’s white-knuckled grip. She fought back, slamming the van into the BMW. Like two enraged beasts, the car and the van crashed back and forth along the interstate at almost eighty miles an hour. Streamers of smoke were whirling from the BMW’s wrecked hood, a shriek of scraping metal coming from the engine. Van Diver saw the temperature gauge’s needle shoot up past the warning line, the car beginning to shimmy out of control. Blue light winked in the rearview mirror, and both Van Diver and Mary saw the trooper car roaring after them. Mary took the Compact Magnum from her bag, the pain waking up with a ferocious bite in her forearm.
Still Van Diver rammed the BMW against the van’s side, Mary’s left tires going onto the grassy median. She felt true fear clutch her throat; ahead of her in her lane was what looked like a tanker truck of some kind. Van Diver hit her again, keeping her from moving over. The trooper car was speeding up onto Van Diver’s rear, lights flashing and siren awail. Ahead of Mary, the tanker truck—painted with brown and white blotches like a cow’s hide and with the pink-painted udders of hose nozzles underneath—was trying to get over into the right lane. She saw the red sign stenciled on its side: SUNNYDALE FARMS DAIRY.
Mary let go of the wheel, the van beginning to slide over onto the median, and she strained toward the passenger door with her foot pressed on the accelerator. She put the gun against the glass, aimed downward at the BMW, and pulled the trigger, her face contorted with the strain.
The driver’s window exploded in on Van Diver, glass blasting his face. He was blinded with blood, and as he opened his mouth to give a soundless scream he heard the ghost voices and static of a highway patrol radio sparking from the metal in his jaw. Something—another bullet, hot as a shock—tore into his right knee and seized up the muscles. He wrenched the wheel to the right, trying to get away from the van, and as he felt the car violently fishtail into a skid and the tanker loom in his windshield he heard a single, awful voice from the phantom radio say, “Oh Jesus.”
At the same instant as Earl Van Diver skidded into the dairy tanker at seventy-eight miles per hour, Mary Terror was throwing her weight against the wheel, forcing the van onto the median. The back end of the tanker was right there in front of her. Going to hit! she screamed inwardly, bracing for the impact. Going to hit!
/>
The van cleared a collision by less than half a foot, grass and clumps of dirt flying up behind the rear wheels. As the BMW hit the tanker broadside, it folded up like an accordion being squeezed. In the rending of metal and smashing of glass, red flames shot high, followed by an explosion of white, frothy milk as the tanker’s storage compartment ripped open at the seams. The milk flooded forth, a white tide surging through the air, and it deluged the highway patrol car as the trooper tried to make the right shoulder. The tires lost their purchase, the patrol car turned sideways and flipped over as it left the interstate, crashing through the guardrail and turning over twice more before it came to rest, upside down and smoking, in the brown dirt of a bean field.
Mary Terror was already swerving into the left lane on the other side of the wreck, which had taken about four seconds from the BMW’s impact to the overturning of the trooper’s car. She glanced in the sideview mirror, the air behind her hazed with smoke and burning milk, the tanker on its side and the truck’s driver struggling out from behind the wheel. Of the BMW, nothing could be seen but a scorched tire rolling westward for ten yards before it went off onto the median.
Both the lanes behind her were blocked by fire and tangled metal. Mary picked Drummer up by the back of his jump suit. He was crying, the tears streaming down his face. His nose and his left cheek had been scraped raw, little drops of blood trickling from his nostrils. Mary licked the blood away and held him against her as he cried. “Shhhhh,” she said. “Shhhhhh. Mama’s got her baby now. Everything’s cool.”
But it wasn’t. A second highway patrol car, lights flashing, passed her going east toward the wreck. It was time to get off I-80 for a while, and find a place to rest. She was near exhaustion, her eyes heavy-lidded, the smell of her own blood making her sick. It was time to find a hole to hide in.