Clay and the others would see the approaching lights and get off the pavement in a hurry, right off the shoulder and into the weeds if they had spotted wrecks or stalls up ahead. Jordan took to calling these "sprinter-reefs." The sprinter would blow past, the people inside frequently whooping (and almost certainly liquored up). If there was only one stall--a small sprinter-reef--the driver would most likely elect to weave around it. If the road was completely blocked, he might still try to go around, but he and his passengers were more apt to simply abandon their vehicle and resume their eastward course on foot until they found something else that looked worth sprinting in--which was to say, something fast and temporarily amusing. Clay imagined their course as a series of jerks... but then, most of the sprinters were jerks, just one more pain in the ass in what had become a pain-in-the-ass world. That seemed true of Gunner, as well.
He was the fourth sprinter of their first night on Highway 19, spotting them standing at the side of the road in the flare of his headlights. Spotting Alice. He leaned out, dark hair streaming back from his face, and yelled "Suck my rod, you teenybop bitch!" as he slammed by in a black Cadillac Escalade. His passengers cheered and waved. Someone shouted "Tell huh!" To Clay it sounded like absolute ecstasy expressed in a South Boston accent.
"Charming" was Alice's only comment.
"Some people have no--" Tom began, but before he could tell them what some people didn't have, there was a scream of tires from the dark not far ahead, followed by a loud, hollow bang and the tinkle of glass.
"Jesus-fuck," Clay said, and began to run. Before he had gotten twenty yards, Alice blew past him. "Slow down, they might be dangerous!" he shouted.
Alice held up one of the automatic pistols so Clay could see it and ran on, soon outdistancing him completely.
Tom caught up with Clay, already working for breath. Jordan, running beside him, could have been in a rocking chair.
"What... are we going... to do... if they're badly hurt?" Tom asked. "Call... an ambulance?"
"I don't know," Clay said, but he was thinking of how Alice had held up one of the automatic pistols. He knew.
11
They caught up with her around the next curve of the highway. She was standing behind the Escalade. It was lying on its side with the airbags deployed. The tale of the accident wasn't hard to read. The Escalade had come steaming around the blind curve at maybe sixty miles an hour and had encountered an abandoned milk tanker dead ahead. The driver, jerk or not, had done well to avoid being totaled. He was walking around the battered SUV in a dazed circle, pushing his hair away from his face. Blood gushed from his nose and a cut in his forehead. Clay walked to the Escalade, sneakers gritting on pebbles of Saf-T-Glas, and looked inside. It was empty. He shone his light around and saw blood on the steering wheel, nowhere else. The passengers had been lively enough to exit the wreck, and all but one had fled the scene, probably out of simple reflex. The one who had stuck with the driver was a shrimpy little postadolescent with bad acne scars, buck teeth, and long, dirty red hair. His steady line of jabber reminded Clay of the little dog who idolized Spike in the Warner Bros, cartoons.
"Ah you all right, Gunnah?" he asked. Clay presumed this was how you pronounced Gunner in Southie. "Holy shit, you're bleedin like a mutha. Fuckin-A, I thought we was dead." Then, to Clay: "Whuttajw lookin at?"
"Shut up," Clay said--and, under the circumstances, not unkindly. The redhead pointed at Clay, then turned to his bleeding friend. "This is one of em, Gunnah! This is a bunch of em!"
"Shut up, Harold," Gunner said. Not kindly at all. Then he looked at Clay, Tom, Alice, and Jordan.
"Let me do something about your forehead," Alice said. She had reholstered her gun and taken off her pack. Now she was rummaging through it. "I've got Band-Aids and gauze pads. Also hydrogen peroxide, which will sting, but better a little sting than an infection, am I right?"
"Considering what this young man called you on his way by, you're a better Christian than I was in my prime," Tom said. He had unslung Sir Speedy and was holding it by the strap as he looked at Gunner and Harold.
Gunner might have been twenty-five. His long black rock-vocalist hair was now matted with blood. He looked at the milk tanker, then at the Escalade, then at Alice, who had a gauze pad in one hand and the bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the other.
"Tommy and Frito and that guy who was always pickin his nose, they took off," the redheaded shrimp was saying. He expanded what chest he had. "But I stuck around, Gunnah! Holy fuck, buddy, you're bleedin like a pig."
Alice put hydrogen peroxide on the gauze pad, then took a step toward Gunner. He immediately took a step back. "Get away from me. You're poison."
"It's them!" the redhead cried. "From the dreams! What'd I tellya?"
"Keep away from me," Gunner said. "Fuckin bitch. Alla ya."
Clay felt a sudden urge to shoot him and wasn't surprised. Gunner looked and acted like a dangerous dog backed into a corner, teeth bared and ready to bite, and wasn't that what you did to dangerous dogs when there was no other recourse? Didn't you shoot them? But of course they did have recourse, and if Alice could play Good Samaritan to the scumbag who had called her a teenybop bitch, he guessed he could refrain from executing him. But there was something he wanted to find out before he let these two charming fellows go their way.
"These dreams," he said. "Do you have a... I don't know... a kind of spirit guide in them? A guy in a red hoodie, let's say?"
Gunner shrugged. Tore a piece off his shirt and used it to mop the blood on his face. He was coming back a little now, seemed a little more aware of what had happened. "Harvard, yeah. Right, Harold?"
The little redhead nodded. "Yeah. Harvard. The black guy. But they ain't dreams. If you don't know, it ain't no fuckin good telling ya. They're fuckin broadcasts. Broadcasts in our sleep. If you don't get em, it's because you're poison. Ain't they, Gunnah?"
"You guys fucked up bigtime," Gunner said in a brooding voice, and mopped his forehead. "Don't you touch me."
"We're gonna have our own place," Harold said. "Ain't we, Gunnah? Up Maine, fuckin right. Everyone who didn't get Pulsed is goin there, and we're gonna be left alone. Hunt, fish, live off the fuckin land. Harvard says so."
"And you believe him?" Alice said. She sounded fascinated.
Gunner raised a finger that shook slightly. "Shut your mouth, bitch."
"I think you better shut yours," Jordan said. "We've got the guns."
"You better not even think about shootin us!" Harold said shrilly. "Whatcha think Harvard would do to you if you shot us, you fuckin punkass shorty?"
"Nothing," Clay said.
"You don't--" Gunner began, but before he could get any further, Clay took a step forward and pistol-whipped him across the jaw with Beth Nickerson's .45. The sight at the end of the barrel opened a fresh cut along Gunner's jaw, but Clay hoped that in the end this might prove better medicine than the hydrogen peroxide the man had refused. In this he proved wrong.
Gunner fell back against the side of the abandoned milk tanker, looking at Clay with shocked eyes. Harold took an impulsive step forward. Tom trained Sir Speedy on him and gave his head a single forbidding shake. Harold shrank back and began to gnaw the ends of his dirty fingers. Above them his eyes were huge and wet.
"We're going now," Clay said. "I'd advise you stay here at least an hour, because you really don't want to see us again. We're leaving you your lives as a gift. If we see you again, we'll take them away." He backed toward Tom and the others, still staring into that glowering, unbelieving bloody face. He felt a little like the old-time lion-tamer Frank Buck, trying to do it all by pure force of will. "One more thing. I don't know why the phone-people want all the 'normies' in Kashwak, but I know what a roundup usually means for the cattle. You might think about that the next time you're getting one of your nightly podcasts."
"Fuck you," Gunner said, but broke his eyelock with Clay and gazed down at his shoes.
"Come on, Clay," Tom said. "L
et's go."
"Don't let us see you again, Gunner," Clay said, but they did.
12
Gunner and Harold must have gotten ahead of them somehow, maybe by taking a chance and traveling five or ten daylight miles while Clay, Tom, Alice, and Jordan were sleeping in the State Line Motel, which was about two hundred yards into Maine. The pair might have laid up in the Salmon Falls rest area, Gunner hiding his new ride among the half a dozen or so cars that had been abandoned there. It didn't really matter. What mattered was they got ahead of them, waited for them to go by, and then pounced.
Clay barely registered the approaching sound of the engine or Jordan's comment--"Here comes a sprinter." This was his home turf, and as they passed each familiar landmark--the Freneau Lobster Pound two miles east of the State Line Motel, Shaky's Tastee Freeze across from it, the statue of General Joshua Chamberlain in the tiny Turnbull town square--he felt more and more like a man having a vivid dream. He didn't realize how little he'd expected to ever reach home again until he saw the big plastic sof-serv cone towering over Shaky's--it looked both prosaic and as exotic as something from a lunatic's nightmare, hulking its curled tip against the stars.
"Road's pretty littered for a sprinter," Alice commented.
They walked to the side of the road as headlights brightened on the hill behind them. An overturned pickup truck was lying on the white line. Clay thought there was a good chance the oncoming vehicle would ram it, but the headlights swerved to the left only an instant after they cleared the hilltop; the sprinter avoided the pickup easily, running on the shoulder for a few seconds before regaining the road. Clay surmised later that Gunner and Harold must have gone over this stretch, mapping the sprinter-reefs carefully.
They stood watching, Clay closest to the approaching lights, Alice standing next to him on his left. On her left were Tom and Jordan. Tom had his arm slung casually around Jordan's shoulders.
"Boy, he's really comin," Jordan said. There was no alarm in his voice; it was just a remark. Clay felt no alarm, either. He had no premonition of what was going to happen. He had forgotten all about Gunner and Harold.
There was a sports car of some sort, maybe an MG, parked half on and half off the road fifty feet or so west of where they were standing. Harold, who was driving the sprinter vehicle, swerved to avoid it. Just a minor swerve, but perhaps it threw Gunner's aim off. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Clay had never been his target. Perhaps it was Alice he'd meant to hit all along.
Tonight they were in a nondescript Chevrolet sedan. Gunner was kneeling on the backseat, out the window to his waist, holding a ragged chunk of cinderblock in his hands. He gave an inarticulate cry that could have come directly from a balloon in one of the comic books Clay had drawn as a freelance--"Yahhhhbh!"--and threw the block. It flew a short and lethal course through the dark and struck Alice in the side of the head. Clay never forgot the sound it made. The flashlight she had been holding--which would have made her a perfect target, although they had all been holding them--tumbled from her relaxing hand and sprayed a cone of light across the macadam, picking out pebbles and a piece of tail-light glass that glinted like a fake ruby.
Clay fell on his knees beside her, calling her name, but he couldn't hear himself in the sudden roar of Sir Speedy, which was finally getting a trial. Muzzle-flashes strobed the dark, and by their glare he could see blood pouring down the left side of her face--oh God, what face--in a torrent.
Then the gunfire stopped. Tom was screaming "The barrel pulled up, I couldn't hold it down, I think I shot the whole fucking clip into the sky" and Jordan was screaming "Is she hurt, did he get her" and Clay thought of how she had offered to put hydrogen peroxide on Gunner's forehead and then bandage it. Better a little sting than an infection, am I right? she had said, and he had to stop the bleeding. He had to stop it right now. He stripped off the jacket he was wearing, then the sweater beneath. He would use the sweater, wrap it around her head like a fucking turban.
Tom's roving flashlight happened on the cinderblock and stopped. It was matted with gore and hair. Jordan saw it and began to shriek. Clay, panting and sweating madly in spite of the chilly evening air, began to wrap the sweater around Alice's head. It soaked through immediately. His hands felt like they were wearing warm wet gloves. Now Tom's light found Alice, her head wrapped in a sweater down to the nose so that she looked like a prisoner of Islamic extremists in an Internet photo, her cheek (the remains of her cheek) and her neck drowned in blood, and he also began to scream.
Help me, Clay wanted to say. Stop that, both of you, and help me with her. But his voice wouldn't come out and all he could do was press the sopping sweater against the spongy side of her head, remembering that she had been bleeding when they had first met her, thinking she had been okay that time, she had been okay then.
Her hands were twitching aimlessly, the fingers kicking up little sprays of roadside dirt. Somebody give her that sneaker of hers, Clay thought, but the sneaker was in her pack and she was lying on her pack. Lying there with the side of her head crushed in by someone who'd had a little score to settle. Her feet were twitching, too, he saw, and he could still feel the blood pouring out of her, through the sweater and over his hands.
Here we are at the end of the world, he thought. He looked up in the sky and saw the evening star.
13
She never really passed out and never fully regained consciousness. Tom got himself under control and helped carry her up the slope on their side of the road. Here were trees--what Clay remembered as an apple orchard. He thought he and Sharon had come here once to pick, back when Johnny had been small. When it had been good between them and there had been no arguments about money and ambitions and the future.
"You're not supposed to move people when they've got bad head-wounds," Jordan fretted, trailing along behind them and carrying her pack.
"That's nothing we have to worry about," Clay said. "She can't live, Jordan. Not like she is. I don't think even a hospital could do much for her." He saw Jordan's face begin to crumple. There was enough light for that. "I'm sorry."
They laid her on the grass. Tom tried to give her water from a Poland Spring bottle with a nipple end, and she actually took some. Jordan gave her the sneaker, the Baby Nike, and she took that, too, squeezing it, leaving smears of blood on it. Then they waited for her to die. They waited all that night.
14
She said, "Daddy told me I could have the rest, so don't blame me." That was around eleven o'clock. She lay with her head on Tom's pack, which he had stuffed with a motel blanket he'd taken from the Sweet Valley Inn. That had been on the outskirts of Methuen, in what now seemed like another life. A better life, actually. The pack was already soaked with blood. Her one remaining eye stared up at the stars. Her left hand lay open on the grass beside her. It hadn't moved in over an hour. Her right hand squeezed the little sneaker relentlessly. Squeeze... and relax. Squeeze... and relax.
"Alice," Clay said. "Are you thirsty? Do you want some more water?"
She did not answer.
15
Later--quarter of one by Clay's watch--she asked someone if she could go swimming. Ten minutes later she said, "I don't want those tampons, those tampons are dirty," and laughed. The sound of her laughter was natural, shocking, and it roused Jordan, who had been dozing. He saw how she was and started to cry. He went off by himself to do it. When Tom tried to sit beside him and comfort him, Jordan screamed for him to go away.
At quarter past two, a large party of normies passed by on the road below them, many flashlights bobbing in the dark. Clay went to the edge of the slope and called down to them. "You don't have a doctor, do you?" he asked, without much hope.
The flashlights stopped. There was a murmur of consultation from the dark shapes below, and then a woman's voice called up to him, a rather beautiful voice. "Leave us alone. You're off-limits."
Tom joined Clay at the edge of the bank. " 'And the Levite also passed by on the other side,' " Tom called down. "T
hat's King James for fuck you, lady."
Behind them, Alice suddenly spoke in a strong voice. "The men in the car will be taken care of. Not as a favor to you but as a warning to others. You understand."
Tom grabbed Clay's wrist with a cold hand. "Jesus Christ, she sounds like she's awake."
Clay took Tom's hand in both of his own and held it. "That's not her. That's the guy in the red hoodie, using her as a... as a loudspeaker."
In the dark Tom's eyes were huge. "How do you know that?"
"I know," Clay said.
Below them, the flashlights were moving away. Soon they were gone and Clay was glad. This was their business, it was private.
16
At half past three, in the ditch of the night, Alice said: "Oh, Mummy, too bad! Fading roses, this garden's over." Then her tone brightened. "Will there be snow? We'll make a fort, we'll make a leaf, we'll make a bird, we'll make a bird, we'll make a hand, we'll make a blue one, we'll..." She trailed off, looking up at stars that turned on the night like a clock. The night was cold. They had bundled her up. Every breath she exhaled came out in white vapor. The bleeding had finally stopped. Jordan sat next to her, petting her left hand, the one that was already dead and waiting for the rest of her to catch up.
"Play the slinky one I like," she said. "The one by Hall and Oates."
17
At twenty to five, she said, "It's the loveliest dress ever." They were all gathered around her. Clay had said he thought she was going.
"What color, Alice?" Clay asked, not expecting an answer--but she did answer.
"Green."
"Where will you wear it?"
"The ladies come to the table," she said. Her hand still squeezed the sneaker, but more slowly now. The blood on the side of her face had dried to an enamel glaze. "The ladies come to the table, the ladies come to the table. Mr. Ricardi stays at his post and the ladies come to the table."