“What did you do to him?” the woman asks. “He was screaming so loud.”
“He’s gone. He jumped.”
“Are they gonna stop?” Hours of agony are preparing to split the woman’s sanity in two. “Are they ever going to stop?” she wails.
A clanging sound, like a giant rock has hit the underside of the truck. Then another—the clanging of something very large underneath the cargo area. Metal engaging with metal?
Or disengaging?
They’re trying to uncouple from the cargo area, she thinks. They’re trying to cut us loose.
On a major highway, being in a loose trailer would be dangerous because of other traffic, but there’d be enough roadway to recover if they didn’t get struck. Out here on this narrow, winding road, they’ll go plummeting into a ravine, and the only way to protect the woman she came here to save would be to throw her arms around her. Which could also crush her.
Charlotte throws herself against the wall between the cargo area and the passenger cab and drives one arm through it. If she can manage to grab the back of the cab and hold it for a few minutes, she can release it at a time of her choosing, maybe keep the cargo area steady. At the very least, whoever’s driving will realize he can’t cut the cargo area loose so easily. Maybe then they’ll resort to pumping the damn brakes and trying to bail on foot. That’ll give the woman behind her time to recover and the truck time to slow to a stop.
But when she punches her arm through the metal wall, she doesn’t feel open air on the other side like she expected. Instead she feels something slick and warm. She was wrong about how the truck’s built, wrong about her belief that the cargo area was about to be released. There’s no gap between the cargo area’s back wall and the passenger cab at all. She didn’t see the truck from the front as she approached it, and the violent sounds of rocks impacting the underside of the cargo area tricked her into believing it was a different style of truck from the one Cyrus put her in. Thanks to this misunderstanding, she’s just driven her arm straight through someone sitting inside the passenger cab.
She withdraws her arm. It’s covered in thick black blood turning deep red as oxygen hits it. What at first looks like tufts of fabric are actually splinters of human bone pulverized by the quick passage of her fist.
Agonized howls pour through the bloody hole she just left in the metal wall. A man and a woman’s screams combining in a terrible harmony. Both are so piercing it’s impossible to tell which one of them she just injured. One thing’s for sure. If they’re both screaming this badly, the one who’s driving won’t have control of the wheel for much longer.
“Get down on the floor in a ball,” Charlotte shouts.
“What?” the woman she just freed screams.
“Do it! I’m trying to save your life. We’re about to—”
Before the rest of the sentence can leave her mouth, the cargo area’s floor starts wobbling like a ship at sea. Either one of the tires has blown out or the driver’s losing control.
Wide-eyed, the woman hits the floor and curls into a ball, right in the corner the divider makes with the cargo area’s side wall. Knowing she’ll crush the poor girl if she throws herself on top of her, Charlotte drops to her knees next to her instead. There’s nothing to grab on to so Charlotte punches one fist through the cargo area’s sidewall, then another through the divider, and does her best to hang on to the resulting holes as if they’re grips without pulling on them. But it’s a useless effort. When their world turns upside down, the woman’s thrown into Charlotte’s chest, and Charlotte has no choice but to close her arms around her as they both go flying, praying she doesn’t break the woman in half while trying to save her life.
40
In the darkness, it’s possible to believe it was all a nightmare.
In the dark, she can convince herself she didn’t really see an arm come bursting through Jonah’s chest as he drove. Didn’t hear his keening, throaty screams as he spit blood and tried to stare down at the impossible eruption of gore his own torso had become.
In the dark, she’s her daddy’s girl again, poised on the edge of her bed after dusk, waiting for him to bring her a moon pie, a sign they’re about to go stargazing.
In the dark, Marjorie Payne realizes she’s chewing dirt.
Blindly, desperately, she unbuckles the seat belt that’s twisted up around her like a tentacle. A mistake; she drops sideways against Jonah, whose body’s been half consumed by the twisted remains of the cab’s driver side, which, she now realizes, struck earth first after they went off the road. The only mercy in his awful posture is that his horribly bent limbs conceal the wound in his chest.
But she can’t get out unless she pushes herself away from his corpse, then steps on his soft limbs. That’s the only way she can reach the upturned passenger-side window so she can pull herself free of the cab. Ignoring the shards of glass slicing into her hands, she gets her chest free, flops up and onto the door like a fish leaving water, then manages to swing one leg free, then the other. When she lets herself drop to the wet dirt, it’s as if all her energy has been exhausted and suddenly her age makes itself known in every bone in her body.
She crawls. It’s the only thing she can do that will take her farther from the truck and the terrible noises coming from inside it. There are no screams now, just a deep, persistent scratching that reminds her of the time a rat got stuck in the wall behind her oven. Only bigger.
If she hasn’t knocked out several teeth, she’s jostled a bunch of them loose, and she’s afraid to lift her face from the mud and find out just how many. But she does, and that’s when she sees her blood running through the stubborn rivulets of creek that haven’t gone dry yet.
She can’t go any farther, and so she rolls over onto her back because she’d rather see what’s coming for her than sob facedown on the ground.
She refuses to believe what she sees next: two hands, a woman’s hands, it looks like, pressing against the narrow lip of what remains of the windshield, pushing outward from within a space too small and mangled for a human to fit. A living one, at least. But what else besides life could be animating the arms that just shoved the large spiderwebbed piece of glass from where it’s been clinging perilously to its bent frame?
The hands look spotted, but they’re moving without any hesitation or fatigue that would indicate injury. The spots, she realizes, aren’t exactly round. They’re misshapen. They’re bloody openings in the woman’s skin. Marjorie blinks what must be a hundred times before she can accept what her eyes are telling her—they’re all changing size; they’re each getting smaller. Healing.
The hands reach out, grab the edges of the windshield’s bent frame, and pull.
One eye stares wildly, and Marjorie realizes it looks that way because the skin’s separated above and below it, revealing glimpses of white skull underneath. The woman’s hair looks like it’s been pulled back because her entire scalp has been pulled back, revealing a blood-spotted patch of skull where her forehead should be. But that terrible wound is healing, too. And as she pulls herself out from the truck’s demolished front cab, yanking one leg free of the wreckage at an angle perfectly parallel with the rest of her body, so parallel it should break her hip, Marjorie sees the eye looks normal now.