to scream with tremendous force. When he expelled the last of the air from his lungs, he began to hyperventilate. His eyes, glossy and as wide as silver dollars, stared at the black sky overhead.
“Jeff?” Steve said. He’d set Jenny down on the ground and was bending over his friend. “Jeff? Can you hear me?”
“It hurts!” Jeff bleated through clenched teeth. “It hurts it hurts it hurts!”
“Where does it hurt?” Steve asked him. The calmness in his voice didn’t match the panic chilling his blood.
“Back…my back…” Jeff’s face had flushed liver pink. It was sheathed in perspiration. The tendons in his neck were bunched into ropey cords.
Steve took Jeff’s hand, as if they were shaking, and instructed him to squeeze it.
Jeff let loose another choked scream and crushed Steve’s hand in his. He squeezed tighter and screamed louder before falling abruptly silent. His eyes slid closed. His grip slackened.
Steve snatched his hand back and clenched and unclenched it against his chest.
“What the hell was that?” Austin said, running his hands through his Mohawk. The wildness in his eyes made him appear ten years older.
“He said his back,” Mandy mumbled. Tears streaked her cheeks, while her hands were clamped over her ears, as if in anticipation of more screams. “Did he break it?”
Steve shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“But he squeezed your hand,” Austin said. “So he’s not paralyzed, right? At least he’s not paralyzed?”
“He could be from the waist down,” Steve said.
“Don’t say that,” Mandy whispered.
“It’s not going to change the fact if he is.”
She sobbed and turned away.
“Maybe we did it,” Austin blurted. “We moved him. You’re not supposed to move someone with a broken back. Maybe we made it worse.”
“If we left him in the car,” Steve said, “he would be dead right now.”
They all glanced at the burning BMW. Stout yellow and orange flames now engulfed the entire vehicle, feeding off the foam and leather seats and other combustible items. Grayish smoke streamed upward into the black night.
Noah broke the silence. “How are we going to move him now?” he said quietly.
“We’re not,” Steve said. “Austin, Mandy, Cherry—you guys stay here with Jeff. Noah and I will take Jenny to the hospital and bring help back.”
“What do we do if Jeff comes to again?” Mandy asked. She’d finally removed her hands from her ears.
“Just talk to him. Tell him an ambulance is coming. But don’t move him.”
“That’s all?” she said.
“That’s all,” he said. “We’ll be back soon.”
CHAPTER 4
“Goddamn foreign TV. I told ya we should’ve got a Zenith.”
Gremlins (1984)
Cleavon sat in his recliner with one eye squeezed shut, the other open, because this seemed to help keep the headache thumping against the inside of his skull at bay. The Sony color television glowed softly in the dark room, though it didn’t produce any sound because the volume knob was busted. On the fourteen-inch screen, a customized ’86 Toyota Xtra Cab sporting a lifted suspension and oversized tires idled at the track’s starting line some five hundred miles away in Mississippi. Then the flag dropped. The truck leapt forward. A dozen cameras flashed.
The truck shot toward the bog, windshield wipers waving back and forth. When it hit the water it sprayed curtains of mud down both flanks, turning the bright red and blue paint job—BAD TO THE BONE airbrushed across the hood—a shitty brown. A few seconds later it got caught up and stopped, shimmying back and forth, dipping and rising, smoke billowing from the raised wheel wells. It made Cleavon think of an antelope or zebra losing their battle to cross a muddy river on one of those nature shows.
“It’s them big fat tires,” Earl said from his own recliner a few feet away. “They just slow you down, am I right?” He reached for a fresh beer from the six-pack in the cooler resting between the two of them. The recliner squealed in protest at the sudden shift in his six-foot-seven, four-hundred-pound body. It was no wonder the fucking thing hadn’t collapsed under his weight yet. It wasn’t made for someone so big. Clothes weren’t either. Earl always had trouble finding clothes that fit him, not that he bought clothes much, a pair of jeans, a few wife beaters every few years, if that. The white, stained tank top he had on now stopped halfway over his gut, above his bellybutton. The jeans stopped a few inches shy of his ankles. He looked like a fucking retard, Cleavon always told him, but Earl didn’t care. Cleavon