The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,7

strike her across the face. She lost her balance and fell backward, and then he was on top of her, his legs astride her waist like a jockey riding a horse, slapping and hitting, trying to pin her arms. Once he did this it would all be over. He probably wouldn’t care if she was conscious or not, she thought, when he did it; none of them would. She reached into her purse where it lay on the grass. Her life was so strange to her it didn’t seem like it was even her own anymore, if it had ever been hers to begin with. But everything made sense to a gun. A gun knew what it was, and she felt the cool metal of the revolver slide into her palm, like it wanted to be there. Her mind said, Don’t think, Jeanette, and she pushed the barrel against the side of the boy’s head, feeling the skin and bone where it pressed against him, figuring that was close enough she couldn’t miss, and then she pulled the trigger.

It took her the rest of the night to get home. After the boy had fallen off her, she’d run as fast as she could to the biggest road she could see, a wide boulevard glowing under streetlights, just in time to grab a bus. She didn’t know if there was blood on her clothes or what, but the driver hardly looked at her as he explained how to get back to the airport, and she sat in the back where no one could see. In any case, the bus was almost empty. She had no idea where she was; the bus inched along through neighborhoods of houses and stores, all dark, past a big church and then signs for the zoo, and finally entered downtown, where she stood in a Plexiglas shelter, shivering in the damp, and waited for a second bus. She’d lost her watch somehow and didn’t know the time. Maybe it had come off somehow when they were fighting and the police could use it as a clue. But it was just a Timex she’d bought at Walgreens, and she thought it couldn’t tell them much. The gun was what would do it; she’d tossed it on the lawn, or so she remembered. Her hand was still a little numb from the force of it going off in her fist, the bones chiming like a tuning fork that wouldn’t stop.

By the time she reached the motel the sun was rising; she felt the city waking up. Under the ashy light, she let herself into the room. Amy was asleep with the television still on, an infomercial for some kind of exercise machine. A muscled man with a ponytail and huge, doglike mouth was barking silently out of the screen. Jeanette figured she didn’t have much more than a couple of hours before somebody came. That was dumb of her, leaving the gun behind, but there wasn’t any point worrying over that now. She splashed some water on her face and brushed her teeth, not looking at herself in the mirror, then changed into jeans and a T-shirt and took her old clothes, the little skirt and stretchy top and fringed jacket she’d worn to the highway, streaked with blood and bits of things she didn’t want to know about, behind the motel to the reeking dumpster, where she shoved them in.

It seemed as if time had compressed somehow, like an accordion; all the years she had lived and everything that had happened to her were suddenly squeezed below the weight of this one moment. She remembered the early mornings when Amy was just a baby, how she’d held and rocked her by the window, often falling asleep herself. Those had been good mornings, something she’d always remember. She packed a few things into Amy’s Powerpuff Girls knapsack and some clothing and money into a grocery sack for herself. Then she turned off the television and gently shook Amy awake.

“Come on, honey. Wake up now. We got to go.”

The little girl was half asleep but allowed Jeanette to dress her. She was always like this in the morning, dazed and sort of out of it, and Jeanette was glad it wasn’t some other time of day, when she’d have to do more coaxing and explaining. She gave the girl a cereal bar and a can of warm grape pop to drink, and then the two of them went out