His Bible was well-thumbed, because he read it every day. He loved all the stories in it, but the one he loved the best--the one he meditated on most often--was the parable of the Good Samaritan. He had preached on that passage from the Gospel of Luke several times, and the Redeemer congregation had always been generous with their praise afterward, God bless them.
Doug supposed it was because the story was so personal to him. A priest had passed by the robbed and beaten traveler lying at the side of the road; so had a Levite. Then who comes along? A nasty, Jew-hating Samaritan. But that's the one who helps, nasty Jew-hater or not. He cleanses the traveler's cuts and scrapes, then binds them up. He loads the traveler on his donkey, and fronts him a room at the nearest inn.
"So which of these three do you think was a neighbor to him who fell among thieves?" Jesus inquires of the hotshot young lawyer who asked him about the requirements for eternal life. And the hotshot, not stupid, replies: "The one who shewed mercy."
If Doug Clayton had a horror of anything, it was of being like the Levite in that story. Of refusing to help when help was needed and passing by on the other side. So when he saw the muddy station wagon parked a little way up the entrance ramp of the deserted rest area--the downed orange barrier-barrels in front of it, the driver's door hanging ajar--he hesitated only a moment before flicking on his turn signal and pulling in.
He parked behind the wagon, put on his four-ways, and started to get out. Then he noticed that there appeared to be no license plate on the back of the station wagon . . . although there was so much damn mud it was hard to tell for sure. Doug took his cell phone out of the Prius's center console and made sure it was on. Being a good Samaritan was one thing; approaching a plateless mongrel of a car without caution was just plain stupid.
He walked toward the wagon with the phone clasped loosely in his left hand. Nope, no plate, he was right about that. He tried to peer through the back window and could see nothing. Too much mud. He walked toward the driver's-side door, then paused, looking at the car as a whole, frowning. Was it a Ford or a Chevy? Darned if he could tell, and that was strange, because he had to've insured thousands of station wagons in his career.
Customized? he asked himself. Well, maybe . . . but who would bother to customize a station wagon into something so anonymous?
"Hi, hello? Everything okay?"
He walked toward the door, squeezing the phone a little tighter without being aware of it. He found himself thinking of some movie that had scared the heck out of him as a kid, some haunted house thing. A bunch of teenagers had approached the old deserted house, and when one of them saw the door standing ajar, he'd whispered "Look, it's open!" to his buddies. You wanted to tell them not to go in there, but of course they did.
That's stupid. If there's someone in that car, he could be hurt.
Of course the guy might have gone up to the restaurant, maybe looking for a pay phone, but if he was really hurt--
"Hello?"
Doug reached for the door handle, then thought better of it and stooped to peer through the opening. What he saw was dismaying. The bench seat was covered with mud; so was the dashboard and the steering wheel. Dark goo dripped from the old-fashioned knobs of the radio, and on the wheel were prints that didn't look exactly as if hands had made them. The palm prints were awfully big, for one thing, but the finger marks were as narrow as pencils.
"Is someone in there?" He shifted his cell phone to his right hand and took hold of the driver's door with his left, meaning to swing it wide so he could look into the backseat. "Is someone hur--"
There was a moment to register an ungodly stink, and then his left hand exploded into pain so great it seemed to leap through his entire body, trailing fire and filling all his hollow spaces with agony. Doug didn't, couldn't, scream. His throat locked shut with the sudden shock of it. He looked down and saw that the door handle appeared to have impaled the pad of his palm.
His fingers were barely there. He could only see the stubs, just below the last knuckles where the back of his hand started. The rest had somehow been swallowed by the door. As Doug watched, the third finger broke. His wedding ring fell off and clinked to the pavement.
He could feel something, oh dear God and dear Jesus, something like teeth. They were chewing. The car was eating his hand.
Doug tried to pull back. Blood flew, some against the muddy door, some splattering his slacks. The drops that hit the door disappeared immediately, with a faint sucking sound: slorp. For a moment he almost got away. He could see glistening finger bones from which the flesh had been sucked, and had a brief, nightmarish image of chewing on one of the Colonel's chicken wings. Get it all before you put that down, his mother used to say, the meat's sweetest closest to the bone.
Then he was yanked forward again. The driver's door opened to welcome him: Hello, Doug, been waiting for you, come on in. His head connected with the top of the door, and he felt a line of cold across his brow that turned hot as the station wagon's roofline sliced through his skin.
He made one more effort to get away, dropping his cell phone and pushing at the rear window. The window yielded instead of supporting, then enveloped his hand. He rolled his eyes and saw what had looked like glass now rippling like a pond in a breeze. And why was it rippling? Because it was chewing. Because it was chowing down.
This is what I get for being a good Sam--
Then the top of the driver's door sawed through his skull and slipped smoothly into the brain behind it. Doug Clayton heard a large bright SNAP, like a pine knot exploding in a hot fire. Then darkness descended.
A southbound delivery driver glanced over and saw a little green car with its flashers on parked behind a mud-coated station wagon. A man--presumably he belonged to the little green car--appeared to be leaning in the station wagon's door, talking to the driver. Breakdown, the delivery driver thought, and returned his attention to the road. No good Samaritan he.
Doug Clayton was jerked inside as if hands--ones with big palms and pencil-thin fingers--had seized his shirt and pulled him. The station wagon lost its shape and puckered inward, like a mouth tasting something exceptionally sour . . . or exceptionally sweet. From within came a series of overlapping crunches--the sound of a man stamping through dead branches in heavy boots. The wagon stayed puckered for ten seconds or so, looking more like a lumpy clenched fist than a car. Then, with a pouck sound like a tennis ball being smartly struck by a racquet, it popped back into its station wagon shape.
The sun peeked briefly through the clouds, reflecting off the dropped cell phone and making a brief hot circle of light on Doug's wedding ring. Then it dived back into the cloud cover.
Behind the wagon, the Prius blinked its four-ways. They made a low clocklike sound: Tick . . . tick . . . tick.
A few cars went past, but not many. The two workweeks surrounding Easter are the slowest time of year on the nation's turnpikes, and afternoon is the second-slowest time of the day; only the hours between midnight and five a.m. are slower.
Tick . . . tick . . . tick.
In the abandoned restaurant, Pete Simmons slept on.
3. JULIANNE VERNON ('05 Dodge Ram)
Julie Vernon didn't need King James to teach her how to be a good Samaritan. She had grown up in the small town of Readfield, Maine (population 2,400), where neighboring was a way of life, and strangers were also neighbors. Nobody had told her this in so many words; she had learned from her mother, father, and big brothers. They had little to say about such issues, but teaching by example is always the most powerful teaching of all. If you saw a guy lying by the side of the road, it didn't matter if he was a Samaritan or a Martian. You stopped to help.
Nor had she ever worried much about being robbed, raped, or murdered by someone who was only pretending to need help. When asked for her weight by the school nurse when she was in the fifth grade, Julie had replied proudly, "My dad says I'd dress out around one seventy. Little less if skinned." Now, at thirty-five, she would have dressed o
ut closer to two eighty, and had no interest in making any man a good wife. She was as gay as old Dad's hatband, and proud of it. On the back of her Ram truck were two bumper stickers. One read SUPPORT GENDER EQUALITY. The other, a bright pink, opined that GAY IS A HAPPY WORD!
The stickers didn't show now because she was hauling what she referred to as the "hoss-trailer." She had bought a two-year-old Spanish Jennet mare in the town of Clinton, and was now on her way back to Readfield, where she lived on a farm with her partner just two miles down the road from the house where she'd grown up.
She was thinking, as she often did, of her five years of touring with The Twinkles, a female mud-wrestling team. Those years had been both bad and good. Bad because The Twinkles were generally regarded as freakshow entertainment (which she supposed they sort of were), good because she had seen so much of the world. Mostly the American world, it was true, but The Twinkles had once spent three months in England, France, and Germany, where they had been treated with a kindness and respect that was almost eerie. Like young ladies, in fact.
She still had her passport, and had renewed it last year, although she guessed she might never go abroad again. Mostly that was all right. Mostly she was happy on the farm with Amelia and their motley menagerie of dogs, cats, and livestock, but she sometimes missed those days of touring--the one-night stands, the matches under the lights, the rough camaraderie of the other girls. Sometimes she even missed the push-and-bump with the audience.
"Grab her by the cunt, she's a dyke, she likes that!" some shitbrained yokel had yelled one night--in Tulsa that had been, if she remembered right.
She and Melissa, the girl she'd been grappling with in the Mudbowl, had looked at each other, nodded, and stood up facing the section of the audience from which the yell had come. They stood there wearing nothing but their sopping bikini briefs, mud dripping from their hair and breasts, and had flipped the bird at the heckler in unison. The audience had broken into spontaneous applause . . . which became a standing O when first Julianne, then Melissa, turned, bent, dropped trou, and shot the asshole a double moon.
She had grown up knowing you cared for the one who had fallen and couldn't get up. She had also grown up knowing you ate no shit--not about your hosses, your size, your line of work, or your sexual preferences. Once you started eating shit, it had a way of becoming your regular diet.
The CD she was listening to came to an end, and she was just about to poke the Eject button when she saw a car ahead, parked a little way up the ramp leading to the abandoned Mile 81 service stop. Its four-way flashers were on. There was another car in front of it, a muddy old beat-to-shit station wagon. Probably a Ford or a Chevrolet, it was hard to tell which.
Julie didn't make a decision, because there was no decision to be made. She flipped her blinker, saw there would be no room for her on the ramp, not with the trailer in tow, and got as far over in the breakdown lane as she could without hooking her wheels in the soft ground beyond. The last thing she wanted to do was overturn the hoss for which she had just paid eighteen hundred dollars.
This was probably nothing, but it didn't hurt to check. You could never tell when some woman had all at once decided to have herself a baby on the interstate, or when some guy who stopped to help got excited and fainted. Julie put on her own four-ways, but they wouldn't show much, not with the hoss-trailer in the way.
She got out, looked toward the two cars, and saw not a soul. Maybe someone had picked the drivers up, but more likely they'd gone up to the restaurant. Julie doubted if they'd find much there; it had been closed down since the previous September. Julie herself had often stopped at Mile 81 for a TCBY cone, but these days made her snack stop twenty miles north, at Damon's in Augusta.
She went around to the trailer, and her new hoss--DeeDee by name--poked her nose out. Julie stroked it. "Soo, baby, soo. This'll just take a minute."
She opened the doors so she could get at the locker built into the trailer's left side. DeeDee decided this would be a fine time to exit the vehicle, but Julie restrained her with one beefy shoulder, once again murmuring, "Soo, baby, soo."
She unlatched the locker. Inside, sitting on top of the tools, were a few road flares and two fluorescent-pink mini traffic cones. Julie hooked her fingers into the hollow tops of the cones (no need for flares on an afternoon that was slowly beginning to brighten). She closed the locker and latched it, not wanting DeeDee to step a hoof in and maybe hurt herself. Then she closed the back doors. DeeDee once more poked her head out. Julie didn't really believe a horse could look anxious, but DeeDee sort of did.
"Not long," she said, then placed the traffic cones behind the trailer and headed for the two cars.
The Prius was empty but unlocked. Julie didn't particularly care for that, given the fact that there was a suitcase and a fairly expensive-looking briefcase in the backseat. The driver's door of the old station wagon was hanging open. Julie started toward it, then stopped, frowning. Lying on the pavement beside the open door was a cell phone and what just about had to be a wedding ring. There was a big crack zigzagging up the phone's casing, as if it had been dropped. And on the little glass window where the numbers appeared--was that a drop of blood?
Probably not, probably just mud--the wagon was covered with it--but Julie liked this less and less. She had taken DeeDee for a good canter before loading her, and hadn't changed out of her no-nonsense split riding skirt for the trip home. Now she took her own cell phone out of the righthand pocket and debated punching in 911.
No, she decided, not yet. But if the mud-splattered wagon was as empty as the little green car, or if that dime-size spot on the dropped phone really was blood, she'd do it. And wait right here for the state police cruiser to come instead of walking up to that deserted building. She was brave, and she was kind-hearted, but she was not stupid.
She bent to examine the ring and the dropped phone. The slight flare of her riding skirt brushed against the muddy flank of the station wagon, and appeared to melt into it. Julie was jerked to the right, and hard. One hefty buttock slammed against the side of the wagon. The surface yielded, then enveloped two layers of cloth and the meat beneath. The pain was immediate and enormous. She screamed, dropped her phone, and tried to shove herself away, almost as if the car were one of her old mud-wrestling opponents. Her right hand and forearm disappeared through the yielding membrane that looked like a window. What appeared on the other side, vaguely visible through the scrim of mud, wasn't the hefty arm of a large and healthy horsewoman but a starving bone with flesh hanging from it in tatters.
The station wagon began to pucker.
A car passed southbound, then another. Thanks to the trailer, they didn't see the woman who was now half in and half out of the deformed station wagon, like Brer Rabbit stuck in the tar baby. Nor did they hear her screams. One driver was listening to Toby Keith, the other to Led Zeppelin. Both had his particular brand of pop music turned up loud. In the restaurant, Pete Simmons heard her, but only from a great distance, like a fading echo. His eyelids fluttered. Then the screams stopped.
Pete rolled over on the filthy mattress and went back to sleep.
The thing that looked like a car ate Julianne Vernon, clothes, boots, and all. The only thing it missed was her phone, which now lay beside Doug Clayton's. Then it popped back into its station wagon shape with that same racquet-hitting-ball sound.
In the hoss-trailer, DeeDee nickered and stamped an impatient foot. She was hungry.
4. THE LUSSIER FAMILY ('11 Expedition)
Six-year-old Rachel Lussier shouted, "Look, Mommy! Look, Daddy! It's the horse lady! See her trailer? See it?"
Carla wasn't surprised Rache was the first one to spot the trailer, even though she was sitting in the backseat. Rache had the sharpest eyes in the family; no one else even came close. X-ray vision, her father sometimes said. It was one of those jokes that isn't quite a joke.
Johnny, Carla, and four-year-old Blake all wore glasses; everyone on both sides of their family
wore glasses; even Bingo, the family dog, probably needed them. Bingo was apt to run into the screen door when he wanted to go out. Only Rache had escaped the curse of myopia. The last time she'd been to the optometrist, she'd read the whole damn eye chart, bottom line and all. Dr. Stratton had been amazed. "She could qualify for jet fighter training," he told Johnny and Carla.
Johnny said, "Maybe someday she will. She's certainly got a killer instinct when it comes to her little brother."
Carla had thrown him an elbow for that, but it was true. She had heard there was less sibling rivalry when the sibs were of different sexes. If so, Rachel and Blake were the exception that proved the rule. Carla sometimes thought the most common two words she heard these days were started it. Only the gender of the pronoun opening the sentence varied.
The two of them had been pretty good for the first hundred miles of this trip, partially because visiting with Johnny's parents always put them in a good mood and mostly because Carla had been careful to fill up the no-man's-land between Rachel's booster seat and Blake's car seat with toys and coloring books. But after their snack-and-pee stop in Augusta, the squabbling had begun again. Probably because of the ice cream cones. Giving kids sugar on a long car trip was like squirting gasoline on a campfire, Carla knew this, but you couldn't refuse them everything.
In desperation, Carla had started a game of Plastic Fantastic, serving as judge and awarding points for lawn gnomes, wishing wells, statues of the Blessed Virgin, etc. The problem was that on the turnpike there were lots of trees but very few vulgar roadside displays. Her sharp-eyed six-year-old daughter and her sharp-tongued four-year-old boy were beginning to renew old grudges when Rachel saw the horse-trailer pulled over just a little shy of the old Mile 81 rest stop.
"Want to pet the horsie again!" Blake shouted. He began thrashing in his car seat, the world's smallest break-dancer. His legs were now just long enough to kick the back of the driver's seat, which Johnny found tres annoying.