Intensity

11

Sheriff Edgler Foreman Vess, youngest sheriff in the county’s history, watches the side mirror as Chyna Shepherd hurries along the shoulder of the highway toward his patrol car, and he wonders if this woman is, after all, his blown tire, the destroyer of his bright future. When she abruptly stops, whips around, and races back through the flashing lights toward the motor home, Mr. Vess’s alarm increases.

At the same time, he is enormously taken with her and is not entirely sorry that they met. He says aloud, “What a clever bitch you are.”

Getting out of the black-and-white, he draws his revolver, intending to put a round in one of her legs. He still has some hope of salvaging the situation. If he can disable her and get her into the motor home before another motorist comes along, all will be well. What fun he will have when he wraps her in chains again. Ariel won’t lift a hand to help this woman, and if she tries, he’ll pistol-whip the little bitch into submission; that will spoil the plans he has for her, but he’s been looking at her beautiful face for a year, wanting to smash it, and the smashing will be enormously satisfying even in these circumstances.

Although Vess is quick getting out of the car, Chyna is faster. By the time he raises the revolver, she is behind the wheel of the motor home, drawing the door shut.

He can’t take any chances now, can’t risk merely wounding her to have fun with her later. She has to be wasted. He pumps six rounds through the windshield.

When Chyna saw the gun coming up, she shouted, “Get down!” She pushed Ariel’s head below the windshield, throwing herself sideways, half out of her seat, across the open console. She covered the girl as best she could, squeezing her eyes tightly shut and shouting at the girl to close hers too.

Gunshots cracked, one right after the other, as fast as Vess could squeeze them off, and the windshield imploded. Sheets of gummy safety glass crashed into the front seats, spilling over Chyna and the girl, and things split and shattered farther back in the motor home as the slugs found stopping points.

She tried to count the shots. She thought she heard six. Maybe only five. She wasn’t sure. Damn. Then she realized that it didn’t matter how many rounds he’d fired, because she hadn’t gotten a good look at the weapon. She didn’t know for sure that it was a revolver. A pistol wouldn’t have just six rounds; it could have ten or more, a lot more if it had an expanded magazine.

Risking a bullet in the face, Chyna sat up, shaking off cascades of gummy-prickly glass, and looked out through the empty windshield frame. She saw Edgler Vess by the patrol car, thirty feet away. He was tipping the expended cartridges out of his piece, so it had to be a revolver.

Already she had released the emergency brake. Now she shifted the motor home out of park.

Standing tall, appearing cool and unhurried but nevertheless nimble-fingered, Vess plucked a speedloader from the dump pouch on his gun belt.

Thanks to her mother’s criminal friends, Chyna knew all about speedloaders. Before Vess could reload, she took her foot off the brake pedal and stomped the accelerator.

Move, move, move.

Slipping the speedloader into the revolver and twisting it, Vess looked up almost casually when he heard the roar of the motor-home engine.

Chyna drove onto the pavement as though she intended to sweep past the patrol car and away, but she was going to run the freak into the ground.

Vess dropped the speedloader, snapped the cylinder shut.

Afraid that Ariel might look up, Chyna shouted, “Stay down, stay down!” She ducked her own head just as a slug smacked off the window frame and ricocheted back through the vehicle.

She raised her head at once, because the motor home was on the move, and she needed to see what she was doing. She swung the wheel to the right, heading for Vess at the open door of the patrol car.

He fired again, and she seemed to be looking straight down the bore of the barrel when the quick flame flared. She heard a strange hissing-throbbing-buzzing, not unlike the lightning-quick passage of a fat bumblebee on a summer afternoon, and she smelled something hot, like singed hair.

Vess dived into the car to get out of her way. The motor home smashed into the open door, ripping it away, maybe taking off one or both of the hateful bastard’s legs as well.

The fragrance of gunfire always reminds Sheriff Vess of the stink of sex, maybe because it smells hot or maybe because there’s a trace of the same ammonia odor in gunpowder that is stronger in semen, but no matter what the reason, gunfire excites him and gives him an instant erection, and when he leaps into the car, he lets out an exuberant whoop. The roar of the motor home is all around him, bearing down on him, the headlights blazing, as much tumult as if he were in the middle of a close encounter of the third kind. As he dives for safety, he yanks his legs in after himself, knowing that this is going to be close, damn close, which is what makes it fun. Something raps hard against his right foot, cold wind rushes in around him, the driver’s door tears off and clatters end over end along the blacktop as the motor home shrieks past.

The sheriff’s right foot is numb, and although he feels no pain yet, he believes that it might have been crushed or even torn off. When he sits up in the driver’s seat, holsters his revolver, and reaches down with one hand to feel for the expected stump and the warm gush of blood, he discovers that he is intact. The heel was torn off his boot. Just that. No worse. The rubber heel.

His foot is numb, and his calf tingles all the way to the knee, but the sheriff laughs. “You’ll pay for the shoe repair, you bitch.”

The motor home is two hundred feet from him, heading south.

Because he never switched off the engine when he pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, he needs only to release the hand brake and shift into drive. The tires kick up a storm of gravel that thunders against the undercarriage. The black-and-white lurches forward. Hot rubber shrieks like babies in pain, bites into the blacktop, and Vess rockets after the motor home.

Too late, distracted by his numb foot and recklessly eager to get his hands on the woman, he realizes that the big vehicle is no longer heading south. It’s reversing toward him at maybe thirty miles an hour, even faster.

He slams his foot down on the brake pedal, but before he can pull the wheel to the left to get out of the way, the motor home crashes into him with a horrendous sound, and it’s like hitting a rock wall. His head snaps back, and then he pitches forward against the steering wheel so hard that all the breath is knocked out of him, while a dizzying darkness swirls at the edges of his vision.

The hood buckles and pops open, and he can’t see a damn thing through the windshield. But he hears his tires spinning and smells burning rubber. The patrol car is being pushed backward, and though the collision dramatically slowed the motor home for a moment, it’s picking up speed again.

He tries to shift the black-and-white into reverse, figuring that he can back away from the motor home even as it’s pushing at him, but the stick first stutters stubbornly in his hand, clunks into neutral, and then freezes. The transmission is shot.

As bad: He suspects that the smashed front end of the car is hung up on the back of the motor home.

She’s going to push him off the highway. In some places the drop-off from the shoulder is eight or ten feet and steep enough virtually to ensure that the patrol car will tumble ass-over-teakettle if it goes over the edge. Worse, if they are hung up on each other, and if the woman doesn’t have full control of the motor home, she’ll most likely roll it off the road on top of the black-and-white, crushing him.

Hell, maybe that’s what she’s trying to do.

She’s a damn singularity, all right, in her own way just like him. He admires her for it.

He smells gasoline. This is not a good place to be.

To the right of the center console and the police radio (which he switched off when he first saw the motor home and realized that it was his own), a pump-action 20-gauge shotgun is mounted barrel-up in spring clips attached to the dashboard. It has a five-shell magazine, which Sheriff Vess always keeps loaded.

He grabs the shotgun, wrenches it out of the clips, holds it in both hands, and slides left from behind the steering wheel. He bails out through the missing door.

They’re reversing at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, rapidly gaining speed because the car is in neutral and no longer resisting the backward rush. The pavement comes up to meet him as though he’s a parachutist with huge holes in his silks. He hits and rolls, keeping his arms tucked in against his body in the hope that he won’t break any bones, fiercely clutching the shotgun, tumbling diagonally across the blacktop to the shoulder beyond the northbound lane. He tries to keep his head up, but he takes a bad knock, and another. He welcomes the pain, shouting with delight, reveling in the incredible intensity of this adventure.

Chyna was watching the side mirror when Edgler Vess sprang out of the patrol car, slammed into the blacktop, and rolled across the highway.

“Shit.”

By the time that Chyna braked to a full stop, crying out at the flash of pain in her bitten foot, Vess was sprawled facedown on the far shoulder of the roadway, three hundred feet to the south. He lay perfectly still. Though she didn’t believe that the tumble had killed him, she was sure that he must be unconscious or at least dazed.

She wasn’t capable of running over him while he lay insensate. But she wasn’t going to wait around to give him a sporting chance either.

She buckled into the combination shoulder and lap belt. She suspected that she was going to need it.

As she shifted into drive and started forward, she became aware of a sharp stinging along the right side of her head, and when she put a hand to her scalp, she discovered that she was bleeding. The passing bumblebee buzz had been a grazing bullet, which had burned a shallow furrow about three inches long and a sixteenth of an inch deep. Any closer, it would have taken off the side of her skull. This also explained the faint smell of burning that she’d briefly detected: hot lead, a few singed hairs.

Ariel was sitting up in a sparkling mantilla and shawl of gummy glass. She gazed out through the missing windshield toward Vess, but she was blank-eyed.

The girl’s hands were bleeding. Chyna’s heart leaped at the sight of the wet blood, but she realized that the wounds were only tiny cuts, nothing serious. The safety glass couldn’t cause mortal injury, but it was prickly enough to nick the skin.

When Chyna looked at Vess again, he was on his hands and knees, two hundred feet away. Beside him lay a shotgun.

She tramped on the accelerator.

A hard clunk at the back of the motor home. The vehicle shook. Another clunk. Then a scraping noise arose, and a hellacious clatter-jangle, but they gained speed.

Glancing at the side mirror, she saw showers of sparks as ragged steel scraped across blacktop.

The damaged patrol car was behind her, rumbling along in her wake. She was dragging it.

Sheriff Vess’s right ear is badly abraded, torn, and the smell of his blood is like January wind rushing across snowfields high on a mountain slope. A brassy ringing in both ears reminds him of the bitter metallic taste of the spider in the Templeton house, and he savors it.

As he gets to his feet, all bones intact, choking down the interestingly sour insistence of vomit, he picks up the shotgun. He’s happy to see that it seems to have come through in fine shape.

The motor home is angling toward him across the two-lane, about a hundred fifty feet away but closing fast, a juggernaut.

Instead of running off the road into the woods and away from the oncoming vehicle, he sprints toward it in a rightward-leading loop that will bring him alongside as it races past. He’s limping — not because he has injured his leg but simply because he is missing the heel on his right boot.

Even with one boot heel too few, Vess is more agile than the lumbering vehicle, and the woman sees that she’s not going to be able to run him down. She also sees the shotgun, no doubt, and she pulls the steering wheel to her right, away from him, ready to settle for escape instead of vengeance.

He has no intention of trying to blast her head off through the already shattered windshield or through the side window, partly because he’s beginning to be spooked by her resilience and doesn’t think he’ll be able to do enough damage to stop her as she sails past like a skeet disk. Also, it’s far easier to halt and shoot from the hip than to raise the gun and aim, and shooting from the hip means shooting low.

The recoil from the first three rounds, fired as quickly as he can work the pump action, nearly pounds the sheriff off his feet, but he takes out the front tire on the driver’s side.

Hardly six feet from him, the motor home starts to slide. Snakes of rubber uncoil into the air from the ruined tire. As the behemoth streaks past, Vess uses his last two rounds to blow out the rear tire on the driver’s side.

Now Ms. Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive, has big trouble.

The steering wheel spun back and forth in Chyna’s hands, burning her palms as she tried determinedly to hold on to it.

She tapped the brakes, and that seemed to be the absolute wrong thing to do because the vehicle yawed dangerously to the left, but when she let up on the brakes, that also seemed to be wrong because it yawed even more wildly to the right. The trailing black-and-white stuttered against the back bumper, and the motor home shuddered even as it swayed more violently side to side, and Chyna knew that they were going to tip over.

Half drunk on the deliciously complex smell of his own blood and the pure-sex stink of the shotgun fire, Sheriff Vess tosses the 20-gauge aside when the magazine is empty. With shining-eyed glee, he watches as the aged motor home rises inevitably off its starboard tires, tilting along the night highway on its port-side wheel rims. Virtually all of the rubber has shredded away; strips and chunks of it litter both lanes. The steel rims carve into the blacktop with a grinding sound that reminds him of the texture of crinoline crisp with dried blood, which brings to mind the taste of a certain young lady’s mouth in the very moment that she died. Then the vehicle crashes onto its side hard enough for Vess to feel vibrations in the pavement beneath his feet. The flat boom echoes back and forth between the road-flanking trees, like the devil’s own shotgun fire.

Hung up on the back of the motor home, the black-and-white is hauled onto its side by the larger vehicle. Then it finally tears loose, flips onto its roof, spins three hundred and sixty degrees, and comes to rest in the northbound lane.

The motor home is far past the car, three hundred feet away from the sheriff and still sliding, but it is slowing and will soon stop.

Everything is screwed up big time: the mess scattered all over the highway, which he will be hard-pressed to explain; the ruination of his plan to deal with Ariel in the methodical manner that has kept him so excited for the past year; and the incriminating bodies in the bedroom of his motor home.

Yet Sheriff Vess has never felt half as buoyant as he does now. He is so alive, all of his senses enhanced by the ferocity of the moment. He feels giddy, silly. He wants to caper under the moon and twirl with his arms out like a child making himself dizzy with the sight of spinning stars.

But there are two deaths to be dealt, a lovely young face to be disfigured, and that is fun too.

He reaches to his holster for his revolver. Evidently it fell out when he leaped from the car and tumbled across the highway. He looks around for it.

When the motor home slid to a stop, Chyna wasted no time being astonished to be alive. Instantly she disengaged her safety harness and then the girl’s.

The starboard flank of the tipped-over motor home had become its ceiling in this new orientation. Ariel clung to the door handle up there to avoid dropping down on top of Chyna. The port flank, where Chyna lay, was now essentially the floor. The window in the driver’s door at her side provided a close-up view only of blacktop.

She struggled out of her seat, turned around, and perched on the dashboard with her back to the windshield and her feet on the console box. She leaned her right side against the steering wheel.

The air was thick with gasoline fumes. Breathing was difficult.

She reached to Ariel and said, “Come on, baby, out through the windshield, quickly now.”

When the girl failed to look at her but clung to the door and stared out the side window at the night sky, Chyna took her by the shoulder and pulled.

“Come on, honey, come on, come on, come on,” she urged. “It’s damn stupid if we die now, after getting this far. If you die now, won’t the dolls laugh? Won’t they laugh and laugh?”

Here, now, comes Sheriff Edgler Vess, battered and bleeding but sprightly in his step, past the roof of the motor home, which is now essentially the vehicle’s port flank as it lies half capsized on this sea of blacktop and spilled gasoline. He glances curiously at the broken-out skylight but proceeds without hesitation to the front of the vehicle — where he discovers Chyna and Ariel, naughty girls, who have just come out through the windshield.

Their backs are to him, and they are moving away, heading toward the west side of the highway, where a sheltering grove of pines stands not far beyond the pavement, surely hoping to scuttle out of sight before he finds them. The woman is hobbling, urging the girl along with a hand in the small of her back.

Though the sheriff was unable to find his revolver, he has the 20-gauge, which he holds in both hands by the barrel. He comes in fast behind them. The woman hears the odd squish that he makes limping on one bad boot heel across the reeking wet pavement, but she doesn’t have a chance to turn fully and confront him. Vess swings the shotgun like a club, putting everything he has into it, smashing the flat of the stock across her shoulder blades.

The woman is knocked off her feet, the breath hammered from her, unable to cry out. She pitches forward and sprawls facedown on the pavement, perhaps unconscious but certainly stunned immobile.

Ariel totters forward in the direction that she was headed, as though she knows nothing of what happened to Chyna, and perhaps she doesn’t. Maybe she is desperate for freedom, but more likely she is stumbling across the blacktop with no more awareness than a windup doll.

The woman rolls onto her back, looking up at him, not dazed but white and wild-eyed with rage.

“God fears me,” he says, which are words that can be formed from the letters of his name.

But the woman seems unimpressed. Wheezing, because of either the fumes or the blow to the back, she says, “Fuck you.”

When he kills her, he will have to eat a piece of her, as he ate the spider, because in the difficult days ahead, he may need a measure of her extraordinary strength.

Ariel is fifty or sixty feet away, and the sheriff considers going after her. He decides to finish the woman first, because the girl can’t get far in her condition.

When Vess looks down again, the woman is withdrawing a small object from a pocket of her jeans.

Chyna held the butane lighter that she’d been carrying since the service station where Vess had murdered the clerks. She released the childproof lock on the gas lever and slid her thumb onto the striker wheel. She was terrified to ignite it. She lay in gasoline, and her clothes, her hair, were soaked with it. She could barely draw breath through the suffocating fumes. Her trembling hand was damp with gasoline too, and she figured that the flame would leap immediately to her thumb, travel down her hand, her arm, enshrouding her entire body in only seconds.

But she had to trust that there was justice in the universe and meaning in the redwood mists, for without that trust, she would be no better than Edgler Vess, no better than a mindlessly seeking palmetto beetle.

She was lying at Vess’s feet. Even if the worst happened, she would take him with her.

“Forever,” she said, because that was another word that could be formed from the letters of his name, and she thumbed the striker wheel.

A pure flame spurted from the Bic but didn’t instantly leap to her thumb, so she thrust the lighter against Vess’s boot, dropped it, and the flame went out at once but not before igniting the gasoline-soaked leather.

Even as Chyna let go of the lighter, she rolled away from Vess, arms tucked against her breast, spinning across the blacktop, shocked by how quickly fire exploded high into the night behind her with a whoosh and a sudden wave of heat. Ethereally beautiful blue flames must be streaking toward her across the saturated pavement, and she steeled herself for the killing rapture of fire — but then she was out of the gasoline, rolling across dry highway.

Gasping for air, she shoved onto her feet, backing farther from the burning pavement and from the beast in the conflagration.

Edgler Vess was wearing boots of fire, screaming and stamping his feet as great sheets of flame were flung up from the blacktop around him.

Chyna saw his hair ignite, and she looked away.

Ariel was well beyond the gasoline-wet pavement and out of danger, though she seemed oblivious of the blaze. She was stopped with her back to the fire, gazing up at the stars.

Chyna hurried to the girl and led her another twenty feet south on the highway, just to be safe.

Vess’s screaming was shrill and terrible and louder now, louder because, as Chyna discovered when she turned to look back, the freak was coming after them, a pillar of fire, totally engulfed. Yet he was on his feet, slogging through the boiling tar that bubbled out of the softening blacktop. His bright arms stretched in front of him, blue-white tongues of fire seething off his fingertips. A tornado of blood-red fire whirled in his open mouth, dragon fire spouted from his nostrils, his face vanished behind an orange mask of flames, yet he came onward, stubborn as a sunset, screaming.

Chyna pushed the girl behind her, but then Vess abruptly veered away from them, and it became clear to her that he hadn’t seen them. He was seared blind, chasing neither her nor Ariel but an undeserved mercy.

In the middle of the highway, he fell across the yellow lines and lay there, jerking and twitching, writhing and kicking, gradually turning on his side, pulling his knees up to his chest, folding his blackened hands under his chin. His head curled down to his hands as though his neck were melting and unable to support it. Soon he was silent in his burning.

On one level, Vess knew the fading scream was his own, but his suffering was so intense that bizarre thoughts flared through his mind in a blaze of delirium. On another level, he believed that this eerie cry was not his own, after all, but issued from the unborn twin of the service-station clerk, which had left its image as a raw pink birthmark on the forehead of its brother. At the end, Vess was very afraid in the strangeness of the consuming fire, and then he was not a man any more but only an enduring darkness.

Pulling Ariel with her, Chyna backed farther from the fire, but at last she was unable to stand one moment longer. She sat on the highway, shaking uncontrollably, pain-racked, sick with relief. She began to cry, sobbing like a child, like an eight-year-old girl, loosing all of the tears never spent under beds or in mice-infested barn lofts or on lightning-scorched beaches.

In time, headlights appeared in the distance. Chyna watched as they approached, while beside her the girl mutely studied the moon.