howls pour through the bloody hole she just left in the metal wall. A man and a woman’s screams combining in a terrible harmony. Both are so piercing it’s impossible to tell which one of them she just injured. One thing’s for sure. If they’re both screaming this badly, the one who’s driving won’t have control of the wheel for much longer.
“Get down on the floor in a ball,” Charlotte shouts.
“What?” the woman she just freed screams.
“Do it! I’m trying to save your life. We’re about to—”
Before the rest of the sentence can leave her mouth, the cargo area’s floor starts wobbling like a ship at sea. Either one of the tires has blown out or the driver’s losing control.
Wide-eyed, the woman hits the floor and curls into a ball, right in the corner the divider makes with the cargo area’s side wall. Knowing she’ll crush the poor girl if she throws herself on top of her, Charlotte drops to her knees next to her instead. There’s nothing to grab on to so Charlotte punches one fist through the cargo area’s sidewall, then another through the divider, and does her best to hang on to the resulting holes as if they’re grips without pulling on them. But it’s a useless effort. When their world turns upside down, the woman’s thrown into Charlotte’s chest, and Charlotte has no choice but to close her arms around her as they both go flying, praying she doesn’t break the woman in half while trying to save her life.
40
In the darkness, it’s possible to believe it was all a nightmare.
In the dark, she can convince herself she didn’t really see an arm come bursting through Jonah’s chest as he drove. Didn’t hear his keening, throaty screams as he spit blood and tried to stare down at the impossible eruption of gore his own torso had become.
In the dark, she’s her daddy’s girl again, poised on the edge of her bed after dusk, waiting for him to bring her a moon pie, a sign they’re about to go stargazing.
In the dark, Marjorie Payne realizes she’s chewing dirt.
Blindly, desperately, she unbuckles the seat belt that’s twisted up around her like a tentacle. A mistake; she drops sideways against Jonah, whose body’s been half consumed by the twisted remains of the cab’s driver side, which, she now realizes, struck earth first after they went off the road. The only mercy in his awful posture is that his horribly bent limbs conceal the wound in his chest.
But she can’t get out unless she pushes herself away from his corpse, then steps on his soft limbs. That’s the only way she can reach the upturned passenger-side window so she can pull herself free of the cab. Ignoring the shards of glass slicing into her hands, she gets her chest free, flops up and onto the door like a fish leaving water, then manages to swing one leg free, then the other. When she lets herself drop to the wet dirt, it’s as if all her energy has been exhausted and suddenly her age makes itself known in every bone in her body.
She crawls. It’s the only thing she can do that will take her farther from the truck and the terrible noises coming from inside it. There are no screams now, just a deep, persistent scratching that reminds her of the time a rat got stuck in the wall behind her oven. Only bigger.
If she hasn’t knocked out several teeth, she’s jostled a bunch of them loose, and she’s afraid to lift her face from the mud and find out just how many. But she does, and that’s when she sees her blood running through the stubborn rivulets of creek that haven’t gone dry yet.
She can’t go any farther, and so she rolls over onto her back because she’d rather see what’s coming for her than sob facedown on the ground.
She refuses to believe what she sees next: two hands, a woman’s hands, it looks like, pressing against the narrow lip of what remains of the windshield, pushing outward from within a space too small and mangled for a human to fit. A living one, at least. But what else besides life could be animating the arms that just shoved the large spiderwebbed piece of glass from where it’s been clinging perilously to its bent frame?
The hands look spotted, but they’re moving without any hesitation or fatigue that would indicate injury. The spots, she realizes, aren’t exactly round. They’re misshapen.