Christine's engine screamed and she came at him, rear end flirting back and forth as her tyres spun through the sugary snow. The crimped hood was like a mouth in a frozen snarl.
Buddy waited on his hands and knees, resisting the overpowering urge to leap and scramble away at once, resisting as much as he could - the wild panic that was ripping away his self-control. No one in the car. A more imaginative person would already have gone mad, perhaps.
At the last possible second he rolled to the left, screaming as the splintered ends of the broken bone in his leg ground together. He felt something bullet past him inches away, there was warm, foul-smelling exhaust in his face for a moment, and then the snow was red as Christine's tail-lights flashed.
She wheeled, skidding, and came back at him
'No!' Buddy screamed. Pain lanced at his chest. 'No! No! N - '
He leaped, blind reflexes taking over, and this time the bullet was closer, clipping leather off one shoe and turning his left foot instantly numb. He turned crazily on his hands and knees, like a small child playing I Witness at a birthday party. Blood from his mouth now mixed with the snot running freely from his nose; one of his broken ribs had nicked a lung. Blood ran down his cheek from the hole in his head where his ear had been. Frosty air jetted from his nose. His breath came in whistling sobs.
Christine paused.
White vapour drifted from her exhaust; her engine throbbed and purred. The windscreen was a black blank.
Behind Buddy, the remains of the Camaro shot greasy flames at the sky. A razor-sharp wind fluttered and fanned them. Bobby Stanton sat in the inferno of the back seat, his head cocked, a grin locked onto his blackening features.
Playing with me, Buddy thought. Playing with me, that's what it's doing. Like a cat with a mouse.
'Please,' he croaked. The headlights were blinding, turning the blood dripping down his cheek and from the sides of his mouth to an insectile black. 'Please . . . I . . . I'll tell him I'm sorry . . . I'll crawl to him on my fucking hands and knees if that's what you want . . . only please . . . pl -
The engine screamed. Christine leaped at him like old doom from a dark age. Buddy howled and lunged aside again, and this time the bumper struck his shin and broke his other leg and threw him toward the embankment at the side of the park road. He hit and sprawled like a loose bag of grain.
Christine wheeled back toward him, but Buddy bad seen a chance, one thin chance. He began to scramble wildly up the embankment, digging into the snow with bare hands from which the feeling had already departed, digging with his feet, ignoring the tremendous clouts of pain from his shattered legs. Now his breath came in little screams as the headlights grew brighter and the engine louder; every clod of snow threw its own jagged black shadow and he could feel it, he could feel it behind him like some horrible man-eating tiger -
There was a crunch and jangle of metal, and Buddy cried out as one of his feet was driven into the snow by Christine's bumper. He yanked it out of the snow, leaving his shoe wedged deep.
Lying, gibbering, crying, Buddy gained the top of the bank thrown up by some National Guard Motor Pool plough days ago, tottered on the edge of balance there, pinwheeled his arms, and barely kept from rolling back down.
He turned to face Christine, The Plymouth had reversed across the road and now came forward again, rear tyres spinning, digging at the snow. It crashed into the bank a foot below where Buddy was perched, making him sway and sending down a further avalanche of snow. The hit crimped her hood in further, but Buddy was not touched. She reversed again through a mist of churned-up snow, engine now seeming to howl with frustrated anger.
Buddy screamed in triumph and shook his middle finger at her. 'Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!' A spray of mixed blood and spittle flew from his lips. With each gasping breath, the pain seemed to sink deeper into his left side, numbing and paralyzing.
Christine roared forward and slammed into the embankment again.
This time a large section of the bank, loosened in the car's first charge, came