pull away along the wall. I cut to the left and hit her again, crushing her almost wasp-waisted in the middle. The doors popped out of their frames at the top and the bottom. LeBay was behind the wheel, now a skull, now a decayed and stinking cameo of humanity, now a hale and hearty man in his fifties with a crew-cut turning white. He stared out at me with his devil's grin, one hand on the wheel, one balled into a fist that he shook at me.
And still her engine would not die.
I got into reverse again, and now my leg was white iron and the pain was all the way up to my left armpit. The hell it was. The pain was everywhere. I could feel it
(Michael, Jesus why didn't you stay in the house)
in my neck, in my jaw in my
(Arnie? Man, I am so sorry I wish I wish)
temples. The Plymouth - what remained of her - lunged drunkenly down the side of the garage, spraying tools and junk metal, pulling out struts and dumping the overhead shelves. The shelves hit the concrete with flat, clapping sounds that echoed like demon applause.
I stamped the clutch again and floored the gas. Petunia's engine bellowed, and I hung onto the wheel like a man trying to stay aboard a bucking mustang. I hit her on the right side and smashed the body clear off the rear axle, driving it into the door, which shivered and rattled. I went up over the wheel, which slammed into my belly and drove the breath out of me and dumped me back into my seat, gasping.
Now I saw Leigh, cowering in the far corner, her hands clapped to her face, dragging it down into a witch's mask.
Christine's engine was still running.
She dragged herself slowly down toward Leigh, like an animal whose rear legs have been broken in a trap. And even as she went I could see her regenerating, coming back: a tyre that suddenly popped up full and plump, the radio aerial that unjointed itself with a silvery twinggg! sound, the accretion of metal around the ruined rear end.
'Stay dead!' I screamed at it. I was crying, my chest heaving. My leg wouldn't work anymore. I braced it with both hands and jammed it onto the clutch. My vision went hazy and grey with the white-metal agony. I could almost feel the bones grating.
I raced the engine, got first gear again, and charged it; and as I did I heard LeBay's voice for the first and only time, high and cheated and full of a terrible, unquenchable fury:
'You SHITTER! Fuck off, you miserable SHITTER! LEAVEMEALONE!'
'You should have left my friend alone,' I tried to yell - but all that would come out was a tearing, wounded gasp.
I hit it squarely in the rear end, and the gas tank ruptured as the back of the car accordioned inward and upward in a kind of metal mushroom. There was a yellow lick of fire. I shielded my face with my hands - but then it was gone. Christine sat there, a refugee from a demolition derby. Her engine ran choppily, missed, fired again, and then died.
The place was silent except for the bass rumble of Petunia's engine.
Then Leigh was running across the floor, screaming my name over and over, crying. I was suddenly, stupidly aware that I was wearing her pink nylon scarf around the arm of my jacket.
I looked down at it, and then the world greyed out again.
I could feel her hands on me, and then there was nothing but darkness as I fainted.
I came to about fifteen minutes later, my face wet and blessedly cool. Leigh was standing on Petunia's driver's side running board, mopping my face with a wet rag. I caught it in one hand, tried to suck it, and then spat. The rag tasted strongly of oil.
'Dennis, don't worry,' she said. 'I ran out into the street . . . stopped a snowplough . . . scared the poor man out of ten years of his life, I think . . . all this blood . . . he said . . . an ambulance . . . he said he'd, you know . . . Dennis, are you all right?'
'Do I look all right? I whispered.
'No,' she said, and burst into tears.
'Then don't' - I swallowed past a pain dry lump in my throat - 'don't ask stupid questions. I love you.'