Chapter 42 #2
“Do you think there’s a phone nearby?”
“Who would we call? 1-800-We’re-Fucked?” He laughs again and looks in the rearview mirror at the projection booth. “I gotta piss. I’ll check out the projection booth. I wonder if we can barricade ourselves in there.”
He climbs out of the car but then pauses to lean back in through the window. His useless, dried-out garlic necklace rustles
at his throat. He grins at her, and for a moment it is possible to remember why she fell for him. He has a grin like a ten-year-old
boy on the first day of summer vacation.
“It was a damn short movie, wasn’t it, babe?” he says, and laughs his smoker’s laugh and claps a hand against the inside of
the door. He sets out for the low concrete building, a gangly, scrawny man with the rolling gait of a pirate. Soon he has
disappeared into the gloom.
Jayne watches the last of the light drain from the sky. She draws her knees to her chest and hugs herself. She tries to catalog
what she is feeling. Resentment and terror, yes. But also a kind of giddy hilarity. Of all the ways she thought she might
die, being run to earth and butchered by a dragon had not been on her list. She takes a long deep breath and smells garlic
and thinks suddenly that she is wearing a garnish, she is garnished and ready to be served.
Mars burns red above one corner of the movie screen and she wonders what’s taking Ronnie so long. She’s just started to sit
up straighter in her seat when the movie screen goes bright. A projector switches itself on, throwing a vast rectangle of
white brilliance onto the blank screen.
A shadow uncoils across it. King Sorrow’s head appears first, crowned with that spreading, regal fan. It rises from a neck
that goes on and on, long as a telephone pole and sinewy as a cobra. Wings unfold. At their full extent they blot out the
light entirely.
Jayne begins to laugh. It is a shrill, hysterical sound, very close to a scream.
Suddenly the shadow soars straight upward and disappears, giving her a last, long look at a tail that seems to trail on for
most of a minute. Then the darkness has moved on and the screen is bright again, as white and empty as oblivion.
A gust of wind strikes the Ranchero and rocks it up and down on its springs.
A moment later, Ronnie Volpe hits the hood, falling from a height of at least a hundred feet.
He strikes with enough force to collapse the front end of the car, landing with a concussive iron BANG!
that jumps the rear tires off the ground.
Jayne’s laughter turns to a wail. She’s staring at the reddened, clawed stump of his neck.
Ronnie’s head comes through the windshield a moment later. It hits the driver’s seat and rolls, comes to a stop against her
hip, staring up at her. His mouth is open and stuffed with bulbs of garlic. Splinters of broken glass glint in his curly hair.
Jayne scrabbles for the latch but before she can get the door open, something—perhaps one of King Sorrow’s hind feet—descends
slowly on the Ranchero’s roof and crushes it in and down. The side windows splinter and crack, erupt outward. The entire frame
of the car deforms under the massive weight and Jayne finds she can’t force her door open, not even when she throws all her
weight against it.
“Stop!” she screams. “Stop! Stop! Please! PLEASE!”
The chassis groans. The roof continues to sink toward her. The gap where the windshield belongs is narrowing, closing out
the view of the movie screen.
With an infinite slowness, King Sorrow lowers his head from above, to put both of his black, scaly nostrils into the open
space. His breath stinks of a campfire.
“Manners,” King Sorrow says. “Manners at last. You see, Jayne, it’s never too late to learn something new.”
He inhales deeply, so deeply that road rubbish—empty wax cups, hamburger wrappers—whirls about the inside of the car in a
fantastic eddy. Then he exhales, great flowers of flame, and Jayne tries to scream but her lungs have already ignited in her
chest, burning up in an instant like paper bags touched with a torch. Before her eyes explode in her head, she has time to
see the flesh and sinew blasted off the hands she has raised to protect her face. With her last breath, she can smell the
seared pork-and-garlic odor of her own frying skin. She missed lunch and dinner, and the smell, in that last dreadful instant
of her life, makes her stomach tighten with hunger.
Arthur jerked his head back from the flash of heat on his face, eyes blurring with tears from the smoke. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision. When he could see again, he reached out to shove the heavy drapes aside. The brick patio and the yard beyond were lit by icy moonlight.
“It’s over,” he told Gwen, squeezing her hand. At some point in the last few moments, he had found it again. With his other
hand, he fumbled for the latch and pushed the door open. The air that billowed in was unexpectedly summery and sweet. “He’s
gone.”
She squeezed his hand in acknowledgment and he looked down and it wasn’t Gwen’s hand at all, it was a reptile’s claw, a fine
black webbing between hard bony fingers. Arthur shouted and let go and the hand shrank back into the darkness.
“This meeting of the Get Even Club,” King Sorrow told them, “ has been adjourned.”