Nobody knew his real name. They called him Army because he always wore ratty, ripped T-shirts from the army recruiter: BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE, or AN ARMY OF ONE. He probably never was in the army, but he must have been something, once, before he did what ever it was that broke his brain. Nobody as deeply retarded as Army could have lived to adulthood.
His T-shirt to night said NOT JUST STRONG, BUT ARMY STRONG, through the carrot soup he spilled down his front when the news interrupted mealtime confession.
Trista had made sure he understood what really happened to Jake. The idea had come to her like a lightning bolt, divine inspiration from on high. A way to save the halfway house, which had donated more to the Church of Eternal Life in the last year than it had paid in rent and upkeep.
A way to claim the $10,000 reward offered for Jake’s murder, and make the halfway house into the church’s new home…
Still ahead, but coming up fast, the monster truck starting edging Denny’s pickup off the pavement. It was the most beautiful thing she’d seen since Jacob Connaway’s smile.
Then Denny sped up and out of the way, the leviathan sliding into the passing lane behind him.
It was as if a gateway had opened: again, for her and her alone.
The Camry almost floated above the road, the runaway car becoming a missile. They blasted by the monster truck, passing on the right, Trista waving and honking with glee.
“Thank them, on behalf of our Savior!” she bellowed, urging her passengers on.
“THANK OOO, HALF A SAVIOR!” came the resounding response of the chosen.
And only then—as she fully entered the fray—did Trista notice that there were still more headlights, far in the distance, coming up behind her.
Chapter Forty-two
Lisa watched the crazy fuckers whip by on their right; and though the shotgun was now cocked and in her hands, it didn’t occur to her to actually shoot those stupid people.
She was more interested in blowing Steve and his pals off the back of the pickup, before they dumped any more glass in the road.
Especially now that they’d tossed a whole twelve-pack, and were picking up guns of their own.
She loved the fact that Big Keith remained cool as a cucumber throughout. Though his teeth had clenched a little when he drove over the bottles, the Murderator had barely registered the crunching. The odds on a shard of glass punching through the knobby hide of the radial tires were slim to none, but not impossible. So far, so good.
Lisa rolled down the passenger window, unclipped her seat belt, and poked the barrel out into the wind. She wasn’t looking forward to sticking her head out there—spend an hour on your hair, just to destroy it in a second—but Big Keith clearly had his hands full.
And frankly, she was sick to death of feeling helpless.
“What the fuck is going ON with these people?” she hollered over the sudden upsurge in sound.
“I don’t know for certain!” he hollered back. “But if I had to guess—”
“GOD DAMN IT!” Guessing the same thing, too, as the clankity Toyota sedan passed the pickup, uneasily pushing ninety.
In Keith’s high beams, Lisa watched Steve and his drunken shitwits turn away from her entirely, shouting and brandishing arms.
Then the pickup took off in hot pursuit, leaving Lisa and Big Keith to lollygag after, like a tortoise racing hares.
“AUGH!” Lisa screamed, with no one left to shoot at. “How are we supposed to catch ’em now?”
“We may not have to,” he said, loud enough to be heard. “Roll up the window, would’ja, darlin’? You’re gettin’ sand all over my seats.”
Trista tried to ignore the furious honking from the pickup filled with backsliders coming up behind her, but it was impossible. Only a mile to Jake’s ranch, and the bastards were drinking all the way, the road behind them littered with bottle glass and starbursts of demon liquor.
She let loose a teapot scream of wordless fury as the wets closed the distance. How dare they come to his house in such a state? They huddled around his guiding light but remained lost; to them, Jake’s love was just another drug, another cheap high on a Saturday night.
They would not be saved, and they would be blasted out of their boots by the first sight of him, if he had truly risen.
She believed in him, truly and without reservation.
She would give her life, knowing he would return it to her, this night, if he could.
If he could…
Was that gnawing doubt the work of a demon in her head—a coke-bug infestation of the soul—or was it destiny, calling her to do its work?
“Go go go go,” bawled Army. He lurched and stabbed the dashboard with his knife. In the back, old Mrs. Tibbs wet her nightgown, and the others tried to rearrange themselves to get out of the puddle.
Trista could not make the car go any faster, yet still the speedometer needle climbed inexorably higher into the triple digits, the whole car bouncing on its shocks in time with Army’s spastic rocking.
“Get the blaspheming cocksuckers!” Rudy shouted in her ear, wind whistling through his deviated septum. “Run the shit-poking drunks off his road, praise his name!”
Old Mrs. Tibbs cried out, “Timothy wants to go home!”
“One of their number,” screeched Charlene, “killed our savior!”
Army rolled around in his seat in a motion so violent it almost threw the car off the road. “NO!” he roared in their faces. Trista yanked on his jug ear and hissed at him to shut up, but he would not behave.
“I DOOD IT!” Army stabbed the roof of the car with the knife, slashing the headliner and cracking the dome light. “I kill Jake! I KILLEDED JAKE!”
The pickup whizzed past them, fishtailed across the centerline to block their passing. Someone in the bed of the truck stepped up and threw something shiny that whickered in the wind, straight toward her.
A tire iron.
The chrome swastika caromed off the Camry’s hood and starred the windshield, momentarily blinding Trista and forcing a shriek from the peanut gallery.
Letting her cramped foot off the accelerator, she tipped the wheel ever so slightly left, then braked and juked right, and stomped the gas.
The pickup lurched hard to block her, but she still might have passed them, had she not recognized one of the assholes in the back.
“Pablo?” Trista squinted at the wind-warped faces of the redneck posse in the back of the pickup truck. She recognized Doyle, Chuck, and Steve, and their faces lit up as they recognized her, leering down from their perch as the Camry limped alongside them.
But she only had eyes for Pablo—the cocksucker who gave her herpes—and the cut-down twelve-gauge shotgun in his arms.
He blew her a scabby kiss and fired almost straight down into the open window of the Camry. The spray of buckshot peppered the roof and door panel. Trista reflexively cringed away, throwing up her left elbow to catch the lead pellets that missed her face.
But her hands still gripped the wheel.
The Camry swung hard into the side of the pickup truck, crushing the passenger-side door. The window shattered. The slut behind it turned red.
Trista couldn’t see Chuck tumble headfirst off the back and into the road behind them, skull wetly dissembling on impact like an all-beef water balloon.
Then someone else in the truck threw a lit road flare, which narrowly missed Trista’s head on its way to Tammy’s lap, inducing squeals and clouds of noxious black smoke.
Trista did not notice the chaos in the backseat, any more than she took note of the pickup truck grinding into the Camry and trying to shove it off the road. Even the searing agony of the buckshot in her arm, cheek, and scalp only lifted her up, out of her terror and panic, and into a comfortable passenger seat in her own head.
She looked up into the sky above Pastor Jake’s ranch, less than half a mile away now; and just as she stared, the roiling black storm seemed to part before her cloud-busting gaze, and a star like a compass
rose sparkled down a beam of heavenly blessing on the roof of his house, just over the next rise of sand dunes framing the road.
And much closer—less than a football field’s length—stood a lone billboard: the John the Baptist of billboards, shorted-out floodlights frenetically strobing across its message.
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
Trista gave a cry of pure joy, a rapture that made her forget all her doubts, and abandon all her schemes. Jake was a prophet, and his prophecy had come to pass.
“He is risen,” she breathed into the wind.
Somehow, all of them heard, and replied, “Hallelujah!”
The pickup truck disengaged from the Camry and swerved onto the wrong side of the road. Then, even as Pablo and Steve opened up on the sedan with shotguns, the truck heeled back across the centerline to slam into them one final time.
Trista Gluck confessed her sins and felt the lifting out of her seat that meant she was heard and forgiven.
Beside her, Army still brayed that he killed Jake. The lost-little-boy look on his beefy linebacker’s face was touching and creepy; he would have made a lousy Judas. But even he would be saved, and maybe even fixed. Restored to his senses.
All of them would be given back the lost lives they never knew, if they only acted with pure faith, in casting away the broken ones they now suffered.
Sure this was God’s will—and more importantly, Jake’s will—Trista brought the wheel down in a hard left to slew the Camry’s nose sideways on the road.
And meet the charging pickup truck head-on.
The pickup truck and the sedan collided at an oblique angle on the double yellow centerline, brutally jolting the passengers in the Camry into the roof, but Trista’s car was already spinning out of control on its bald tires. The kiss of her bumper off the rusty grill of Denny’s pickup was just enough to send the overloaded truck into a sideways power skid.
Denny pumped the brakes and yanked on the wheel, but to no avail. The truck slid down the centerline until the Camry came back, whirling like a top, and slammed broadside into the only thing Denny had ever truly loved.
The foursome packed in the Camry’s backseat were crushed against the opposing door until it gave way and dumped them into the road at ninety liquefying miles per hour.
The pickup soaked up all of the runaway sedan’s fatal momentum with its formidable V-8 engine block, which bulldozed through the firewall of the cab to rest in Denny’s lap, squeezing firehose freshets of body shrapnel out of his mouth, nose, and ruptured sides.
While the jolly lynch mob in the bed got tossed like beads at Mardi Gras.
Doyle popped straight up with a bottle to his lips, but landed in the path of the oncoming Camry, and was smeared across fifty yards of tarmac before the last sip of beer and teeth could cascade down his throat.
Pablo somersaulted clear of the accident and sailed through the air for a hopeful moment, only to get wrapped backward around a telephone pole.
Steve hit the soft, sandy shoulder of the road with an alcoholic’s miraculous, rubbery grace: his arm bent backward under his weight as he landed, snapping at the elbow, then continuing to snap as he rolled over and over, getting punctured and torn by rocks and scrub brush, and screaming all the while.
But then the tumbling stopped, and Steve just lay there, numb and panting hard, staring sideways and upside down at the billboard’s flickering inquiry.
Wondering if he could stand.
Spitting up a surprising amount of blood, but thinking, Praise Jesus, it’s a miracle!
And watching the high beams of the monster truck, bouncing as they swerved off the road and climbed the sandy shoulder toward him like a huge, ugly angel charged with erasing God’s mistakes.
The road ahead was getting worse by the second. The pickup truck and the Camry went cartwheeling down the road like Hot Wheels toys in a vacuum cleaner, spitting out sparks that Lisa’s eyes told her, too late to blink, were flying human bodies.
Lisa lurched forward in her seat as Big Keith goosed the brakes. The top-heavy monster truck rocked on its gargantuan wheels, but Big Keith leaned over the wheel with a deep, furrowed frown that suddenly undid any illusion she might have clung to that they were okay.
Behind them, another car came, flashing its brights and playing at passing the monster truck on both sides at once. Big Keith looked over his shoulder at the oncoming lights, then back at the auto parts swap meet scattered across both lanes.
Finally, he seemed to notice Lisa sitting beside him, buckled into her seat, but with the shoulder leash pushed aside, to hold the stupid shotgun.
“I’m so sorry, darlin’.”
Big Keith didn’t yank the steering wheel at all, but the Murderator seemed to bounce up on its front left tire, staggering drunkenly across the left shoulder and onto the soft sand.
The monster truck almost revolted at the sudden change in course, but driving over cars at anything faster than a slow crawl would overturn the truck. The alternative to being rear-ended by the kamikaze on their rear was to turn into the open desert.
Big Keith’s face remained screwed up in concentration, but he almost began to crack a smile that said, Shit, I guess we’re gonna live, after all, and pointed at the shotgun. “Maybe you should just let go of that—”
At less than sixty, the truck might have negotiated the ruts alongside the road, but a tumbleweed-choked irrigation ditch yawned and swallowed the wheels.
The rocky bank of the ditch smashed the bumper, and then the world was kicking them down the street in a can: end over end, sand and sky, sand and moon and stars…
…and then Steve, crushed like the desert’s unloveliest bug on their front fender, and smeared across the spiderwebbed windshield…
Chapter Forty-three
Lisa’s head had slammed against the dashboard and her headrest so many times that she must have blacked out, because she remembered only waking up in the truck and thinking it was so much nicer than when she went to sleep, even if the truck was upside down—
The tangle of cars on the road was now a bonfire.
The third speeding car must have slammed into the pileup and exploded, because the flickering firelight blossomed and cast the dunes and the smoldering cacti outside into a relief as bright as late afternoon.
Two bright spears of light jutted off the edge of the road, where a fourth car must have stopped. Maybe someone sane, here to help…
She tried to speak and reach out for Big Keith, but her mouth was full of blood and tooth fragments. Her arm was broken in three places and splinted against the shotgun, which was hot against her breasts. It must have gone off at least once in her arms when the truck rolled.
She tried to make her other hand find the seat belt release, but it wouldn’t unlock, and if it did, she would tumble onto her head and probably break her neck. Keith would help her. Keith—
Her good hand strained out for Big Keith until she found his wet headrest. Big Keith was still there, but his face was gone.
His flannel-clad barrel of a torso still hung in its seat like a tapped keg, but the mess below (above) it looked like roadkill with sad, denim-colored eyes. They might have blinked once, when the breeze blew sand into them, but he was dead as anything Lisa had ever seen.
Lisa tried to hold down her panic, but found it already tame. She must be in shock, because none of it seemed to matter much. Jasper and Christian were close by, at a truly shitty party.
But no one would come to save them.
And they would all end up in the same place, soon…
Fuck that. She prodded and jerked on the seat belt release again, but it wouldn’t budge. Bright white light pinned her eyes shut. She squinted and tried to say, “Somebody help me, I’m stuck,” but she could barely make words at all.
A flashlight beam roved around inside the overturned truck cab, noting each glimmer of change or glass or shotgun shells sprinkled over spreading pools of blood. Through the glare, she could just make out a pair of ski
nny little legs tucked into white snakeskin cowboy boots, parked just beyond the thrusting hood of the upside-down truck.
Her eyes were watering from fumes. Was that gasoline? In movies, cars were flying bombs that lit up with the slightest fender bender, but it was pretty hard to rupture a gas tank in real life, wasn’t it?
“Help me?” Lisa asked.
“Help is coming, sister,” someone said. “Even for you sinners, he is coming.”
Another light came into the cab with her then, in a torch of flaming tumbleweed tossed into the pool forming in the roof of the cab. It wasn’t all blood. The gas from the spare fuel tanks bolted to the back of the cab. But they hadn’t broken open during the crash.
Someone opened them.
That same someone stood beside the cab and sang a tuneless hymn until the fire inside stopped struggling.
And, like Lazarus, rose up in glory.
The first thing to catch was her hair, dangling down like Rapunzel’s. The flames climbed so fast that by the time she opened her mouth to scream, her face was already on fire: flesh blackening, tongues of yellow-red blistering heat thrusting insistently up the back of her throat.
There were no words for this agony, no thoughts in her head.
All was burned clear in the cleansing, killing light.
It wasn’t until her body shut down that she heard the voice, reverberating through the deeper chambers of her sentience.
And maybe it was just the last gasp of memory, the final flaming brain cell jumping like a rat off a sinking ship.
Or maybe it was truly a message from beyond, urging her like a beacon to the shore. She was too busy dying to tell.
The words were simple, and came only once.
“Maybe,” it said, “you should just let go.”
But she didn’t know how. She honestly didn’t.
Jake's Wake Page 17