There had to be a pull-off along the way … there had to be, or he wasn’t going to be hauling much freight in the future. His mouth was dry, now that the cigarette was gone, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it; he couldn’t spare the effort or thought to light a fresh one; nor was there anything he could do about the four carloads of clowns behind him. The rear-view mirror sparkled and he tossed a glance into it. They were still back there, and coming in faster, it seemed. Harry’s foot refused to go any farther to the floor; more speed would be like taking an enema with a thermite bomb. Like spreading himself out across half a mile of scenic North Carolina like peanut butter; like an uncomplicated suicide. And Harry was convinced he still had a couple of good hours left in him.
“Reach into my shirt pocket,” he said to the girl. “Light me a cigarette.”
His tone frightened her, on an entirely different level than the gut-wrenching fear of the men behind them, the road over which they hurtled, the death all around them. He was an ominous, cruel figure, beside her in the cab, his craggy features limned by the dash lights. She reached across his barrel chest and fingered the crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket. “Matches on the seat somewhere,” he said, in a matter-of-fact way, screaming around a curve, missing the rock wall by inches.
She found them, lit the cigarette, coughed twice at their acrid brittle taste, and put it between his lips. “The pack,” he said. “Put it back where you got it, please.” She was amazed at his surface calm, but reached across once more, put the crumpled pack into his shirt pocket.
He drew deeply, threw smoke against the windshield, and made his decision. “When I stop, I want you out that door and down the road as fast as you can go. Do you understand?”
She looked at him with renewed fear. “I don’t have any shoes.”
His tone became softer, coping with the crazily appropriate remark as if it made sense, rather than as an indication of her nervousness. “That’s all right, the road is smooth, and it won’t be too far. Just try to get around a bend or under cover if you can. There might be an explosion.” Her eyes grew wide.
“But —”
“Do you understand?” he asked again, tightly. His patience was running thin. “Yes or no?” She nodded yes, but he was watching the road; he asked her again, and she answered with the one syllable, softly, timorously.
“Okay then,” he said, “open your door now. Don’t let it fly open, just slip the latch. Hold it ready to jump when I tell you.” He caught sight of the four cars pulling in like hunting falcons, above him in the rear view, behind him in the all-too-real world.
He took an S-curve right, then left, then right again, and for several beats was out of sight of the pursuers. The wheel seemed to flow like licorice in his hands as he slewed the rig sidewise, and amid the banshee-shriek of air brakes and peeling rubber, he jackknifed the cab left, right, left again, and wedged it between the rock-wall and the end-on bulk of the truck that lay across the road, its right rear wheels on the lip of the precipice. He had effectively blocked the road by turning the rig into an L-shaped barricade. “ Now jump! ” he howled at her, shoving her against the open door as hard as he could.
The girl tumbled out of the cab, hit the ground, rolled like a jellybean, and came up with slim legs pistoning, flashing white as her torn dress flapped about her thighs. She was running running and down the road … the sound of heavy boots running behind her, and she tossed a quick glance around; it was Harry Fischer, broken-field sprinting as though time was running out. They gained the safety of a bend, and Harry caught up with her.
“Here, take my hand!” He started climbing the raggedy face of the rock-wall. They were more than fifty feet up, moving like mountain goats, quickly, effortlessly on the ledged rock-wall, when they saw the lights of the first car slithering around the bend. They could not see what happened, but there was a squeal of brakes, a sound of something tearing, and then the car smashed full into the rig. There was an electric moment of waiting, and then the second car hit, the third, the fourth, and then came the explosion. It caught the night and tore it up the middle viciously. The sound was incredible, like a thousand rifles going off inside the semicircular canal of the ear. A whanging, metallic report that ratcheted back and forth through the mountains, building, building, phasing itself up like a dynamo gaining momentum. Harry threw himself across the girl as they hung there on the rock wall and the girl clapped her hands against her ears, a scream tearing from her mouth. The explosion seemed to go on forever, and then bits of metal and rock and dirt and foliage and — other things, cascaded down on them.
Harry started to move, flattening himself protectively against the girl, when something huge and black and heavy came down out of the night sky and clipped him solidly across the top of his skull. He sagged without a sound, and started to slip away. The girl grabbed for him, they lost their footing and tumbled in a welter of rock and dirt down the rock wall. He hit first and lay crumpled, and an instant later she crashed down on top of him. She tried to rise, the debris continued to pelt them, and she was caught by a bit of tree stump that took her high above the right eye; and with a tiny murmur of pain she sagged across Harry Fischer’s body.
They lay there, unmoving, while the faraway hills echoed the dying gasps of the explosion, farther and farther away, till only the stars shied back and hid from the sound.
When he swam up through the ebony pain. Harry knew he was where he was, but superimposed over the watery image of the returning scene around him was another scene, not too far back in the past. He had been coming through the mountains, had stopped in the little town for a cup of joe, a couple of sinkers and a goofball to keep him awake the rest of the run to the excavations. There had been a carnival in the town. One of those balk-line jobs with a freak tent and half a dozen rube games rigged to pay once in ten thousand tries, a couple of animals, maybe a geek, a cotton candy bowl, and a nautch tent with half a dozen worn-over hags.
Harry had wandered down the midway and bought a suety hot dog, and a twist-cup of pink lemonade that tasted as though a boar had urinated in it. As he had come to the darker end of the midway he had heard the scream, and the girl pleading not to be hit again. Then the crack of a whip — that sound unlike any other sound in the world, when thong leather strikes flesh and draws blood — and another scream.
He had dropped the wienie and the pee-juice, and plunged into the darkness at the end of the midway. Behind the road trucks used to haul canvas and booths, there had been a dozen men in white sheet hoods, and one of them was beating the crap out of a blonde, her dress ripped in half a dozen places, and the whip lash-marks already thick and dark across her back and breasts. The man with the whip yelled “Whore!” and pulled his arm back to let her have it again.
Harry had barely realized what he was doing. A sharp remembered image of his mother being struck across the face by his father when he had been a child — it came and went — and he was on his way already. He hadn’t even thought of the ridiculous odds. A dozen big men who could tear his arms from their sockets and shillelagh him to death with the bloody ends.
He had caught the leader low in the back, like a pile-driver, and the man shot forward into the crowd like a cannonball. The whip had flown from his hand, and Harry quickly retrieved it. “Back, you buncha bastards!” he screamed shrilly, and cracked the whip around his head like a cowboy. They had fallen back, the circle of pain he created with the whip keeping them at bay. He grabbed the girl under one arm and started dragging her away.