on the concrete, and I just had time to register the fact that there were people inside of Christine: a whole carload of them.
At the same instant that Christine roared toward her, Leigh leaped upward with a big ungainly Jack-in the box spring. My mind, seeming to run at a speed approaching light, wondered for a moment if she was intending to leap right over the Plymouth, as if, instead of Fryes, she wore boots of the seven-league variety.
Instead, she caught and gripped the rusted metal struts which supported an overhead shelf about nine feet above the floor, over three feet above her head. This shelf skirted all four walls. On the night Arnie and I had first brought Christine in, that entire shelf had been crammed with recapped tyres and old baldies waiting to be recapped - in some funny way it had reminded me of a well-stocked library shelf. Now it was mostly empty. Holding those angled struts, Leigh swung her jeaned legs up like a kid who means to throw his legs right over his own shoulders - what we used to call skinning the cat in grammar school. Christine's snout smashed into the wall directly below her. If she had been any slower getting her legs up, they would have been mashed off at the knees. A piece of chrome flew. Two of the remaining tyres tumbled from the shelf and bounced crazily on the cement like giant rubber doughnuts.
Leigh's head smashed back against the wall with battering, dazing force as Christine reversed, all four of her tyres laying rubber and squirting blue smoke.
And what was I doing 'all this time,' you wonder? It wasn't all that time, that is my answer. Even as I used the O-Cedar mop to depress Petunia's clutch and gear into first, the overhead door was just thumping down. All of it had happened in the space of seconds.
Leigh was still holding onto the struts supporting the tyre shelf, but now she only hung there, head down, dazed.
I let the clutch out, and a cold part of my mind took over: Easy, man - if you pop the clutch and stall this fucker, she's dead.
Petunia rolled. I revved the engine up to a bellow and let the clutch out all the way. Christine roared at Leigh again, her hood crimped almost double from her first hit, bright metal showing through the broken paint at the sharpest points of bend. It looked as if her hood and grille had grown shark's teeth,
I hit Christine three-quarters of the way toward the front and she slid around, one of her tyres pulling off the rim. The '58 slammed into a litter of old bumper jacks and junk parts in one corner; there was a booming crash as she struck the wall, and then the hot sound of her engine, revving and falling off, revving and falling off. The entire left front end was bashed in - but she was still running.
I slammed on Petunia's brake with my right foot and barely managed to avoid crushing Leigh myself. Petunia's engine stalled. Now the only sound in the garage was Christine's screaming engine.
'Leigh!' I screamed over it. 'Leigh, run!'
She looked over at me groggily, and now I could see sticky braids of blood in her hair - it was as purple as I had expected. She let go of the struts, landed on her feet, staggered, and went to one knee.
Christine came for her. Leigh got up, took two wobbling steps, and got on her blind side, behind Petunia. Christine swerved and struck the truck's front end. I was thrown roughly to the right. Pain roared through my left leg.
'Get up!' I screamed at Leigh, trying to lean even farther over and open the door. 'Get up!'
Christine backed off, and when she came again she cut hard to the right and went out of my line of vision around the back of Petunia. I caught just a glimpse of her in the rearview mirror bolted outside the driver's side window. Then I could only hear the scream of her tyres.
Barely conscious, Leigh simply wandered off, holding both hands laced to the back of her head. Blood trickled through her fingers. She walked in front of Petunia's grille toward me and then just stopped.
I didn't have to see in order to know-what was going to happen next. Christine would reverse again, back to my side, and then crush her against the wall.