The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine

by Robert R. McCammon

  The BMW crashed into the back of the van, the hood crumpling and pieces of glass and metal flying up. Van Diver was lifted off his seat, his body thrown forward to strain the limits of his seat belt and his chin slamming against the steering wheel. His entire body tensed for the rest of the wreck, but Mary’s foot was planted on the accelerator again and the van was pulling away with a backfire of burning oil, the BMW still traveling seventy miles an hour. Van Diver trembled, his muscles shocked from the impact and his trousers wet between his legs. He backed off from the van, swung into the right lane, and was looking at the back of a school bus about thirty yards away. A twist of the wheel and an inner scream, and he missed the school bus by a foot and a half. Then he powered the BMW forward again, red lights pulsing on the dashboard and a whip of smoke starting to flail back from the crumpled hood.

  Mary saw him coming. Drummer was on the passenger-side floorboard on his stomach, his hands clasping and opening. Mary stomped the brake again and braced for the jolt. Once more the BMW collided into the back of the van, further smashing the hood and throwing its driver forward in the second before Mary hit the accelerator. The gap between them widened, Mary’s backbone aching from the force of the collision, and her teeth clenched together. Her gnawed thigh was wet with blood, her right forearm ripped open, and red muscle tissue spasmed in the fissure. The wounds were numb and cold, but black motes spun before her eyes. Oily sweat had risen on her cheeks and forehead, and she could feel the clammy fingers of shock trying to drag her under. If she gave in to it, she was finished.

  The BMW was coming up fast again. Mary started to hit the brake, but the car suddenly swerved around her into the right lane, on Drummer’s side. The van shuddered and moaned as the BMW smashed into it, the impact rolling Drummer across the floorboard like a limp rag and almost knocking the wheel from Mary’s white-knuckled grip. She fought back, slamming the van into the BMW. Like two enraged beasts, the car and the van crashed back and forth along the interstate at almost eighty miles an hour. Streamers of smoke were whirling from the BMW’s wrecked hood, a shriek of scraping metal coming from the engine. Van Diver saw the temperature gauge’s needle shoot up past the warning line, the car beginning to shimmy out of control. Blue light winked in the rearview mirror, and both Van Diver and Mary saw the trooper car roaring after them. Mary took the Compact Magnum from her bag, the pain waking up with a ferocious bite in her forearm.

  Still Van Diver rammed the BMW against the van’s side, Mary’s left tires going onto the grassy median. She felt true fear clutch her throat; ahead of her in her lane was what looked like a tanker truck of some kind. Van Diver hit her again, keeping her from moving over. The trooper car was speeding up onto Van Diver’s rear, lights flashing and siren awail. Ahead of Mary, the tanker truck—painted with brown and white blotches like a cow’s hide and with the pink-painted udders of hose nozzles underneath—was trying to get over into the right lane. She saw the red sign stenciled on its side: SUNNYDALE FARMS DAIRY.

  Mary let go of the wheel, the van beginning to slide over onto the median, and she strained toward the passenger door with her foot pressed on the accelerator. She put the gun against the glass, aimed downward at the BMW, and pulled the trigger, her face contorted with the strain.

  The driver’s window exploded in on Van Diver, glass blasting his face. He was blinded with blood, and as he opened his mouth to give a soundless scream he heard the ghost voices and static of a highway patrol radio sparking from the metal in his jaw. Something—another bullet, hot as a shock—tore into his right knee and seized up the muscles. He wrenched the wheel to the right, trying to get away from the van, and as he felt the car violently fishtail into a skid and the tanker loom in his windshield he heard a single, awful voice from the phantom radio say, “Oh Jesus.”

  At the same instant as Earl Van Diver skidded into the dairy tanker at seventy-eight miles per hour, Mary Terror was throwing her weight against the wheel, forcing the van onto the median. The back end of the tanker was right there in front of her. Going to hit! she screamed inwardly, bracing for the impact. Going to hit!

  The van cleared a collision by less than half a foot, grass and clumps of dirt flying up behind the rear wheels. As the BMW hit the tanker broadside, it folded up like an accordion being squeezed. In the rending of metal and smashing of glass, red flames shot high, followed by an explosion of white, frothy milk as the tanker’s storage compartment ripped open at the seams. The milk flooded forth, a white tide surging through the air, and it deluged the highway patrol car as the trooper tried to make the right shoulder. The tires lost their purchase, the patrol car turned sideways and flipped over as it left the interstate, crashing through the guardrail and turning over twice more before it came to rest, upside down and smoking, in the brown dirt of a bean field.

  Mary Terror was already swerving into the left lane on the other side of the wreck, which had taken about four seconds from the BMW’s impact to the overturning of the trooper’s car. She glanced in the sideview mirror, the air behind her hazed with smoke and burning milk, the tanker on its side and the truck’s driver struggling out from behind the wheel. Of the BMW, nothing could be seen but a scorched tire rolling westward for ten yards before it went off onto the median.

  Both the lanes behind her were blocked by fire and tangled metal. Mary picked Drummer up by the back of his jump suit. He was crying, the tears streaming down his face. His nose and his left cheek had been scraped raw, little drops of blood trickling from his nostrils. Mary licked the blood away and held him against her as he cried. “Shhhhh,” she said. “Shhhhhh. Mama’s got her baby now. Everything’s cool.”

  But it wasn’t. A second highway patrol car, lights flashing, passed her going east toward the wreck. It was time to get off I-80 for a while, and find a place to rest. She was near exhaustion, her eyes heavy-lidded, the smell of her own blood making her sick. It was time to find a hole to hide in.

  She took the next exit. A sign stood at a crossroads on the flat land, pointing one way to Plain View and another to Maysville. Farmhouses stood about, smoke rising from chimneys, acres of fields going on toward the far horizon. Mary kept driving, drowsy with loss of blood. On the other side of Plain View’s two streets and meager gathering of buildings, she pulled off onto a dirt road that twisted into an orchard of denuded apple trees. She cut the engine, and there she sat with Drummer cradled against her.

  Her vision was fading, the world closing in on her. She was afraid of falling asleep because she might not awaken. She felt a pressure on her index finger; Drummer had grasped it, was holding it tightly. Darkness pulled at her, a seductive current. She folded her arms around the baby in a coil of protection. Sleep for just a little while, she thought. Maybe an hour or two, and then get back onto the interstate west. Just an hour or two, and she’d be all right.

  Mary’s eyes closed. The baby’s fingers played with her Smiley Face button. Mary dreamed of Lord Jack sitting in a sunlit room talking to God about why he drowned in a bathtub in Paris.

  On the interstate twelve miles west, Didi joined the backup of cars and trucks stopped by the wreckage. Laura was unconscious in the backseat, but every so often she gave a muffled, gasping moan that tore at Didi’s heart. The troopers and firemen were out in force, guiding the traffic onto the tire-scarred median around the wreck. A news-team van was there, minicams at work, and a helicopter buzzed overhead. “What happened?” Didi asked a fireman as she approached the wreckage at a crawl, and the man said, “Milk truck and car hit. Smokey went off the road, too.”

  “You’re sure it was a car? It wasn’t a van?”

  “Car,” he said. “Truck driver says some damn yuppie plowed right into him, must’ve been goin’ eighty.”

  “A yuppie?”

  “Yeah. One of them yuppie cars. Come on, I think you can get past now.” He waved her on through.

  Didi negotiated the median. A wrecker was in the midst of the scorched metal, trying to pull part of a car free. The fireme
n were hosing down the pavement, and the air smelled of hot iron and clabbered milk.

  She passed a tire lying in the brown grass. On its dented wheel cover was a circle cut into blue and white triangles, and the scarred letters BMW.

  Didi looked away from it as if the sight had stung her. Then the Cutlass picked up speed and left the dead behind.

  5

  Doctor Didi

  THE DARKNESS CAME.

  The wind blew cold across the plains, and flurries of snow spat from the clouds. At the Liberty Motor Lodge six miles east of Iowa City, Laura lay in bed in Room 10 and alternately shivered and sweated beneath the sheet and coarse blanket. The TV was on, tuned to a family sitcom. Laura couldn’t focus on it, but she liked the sound of the voices. On the bedside table was the debris of her dinner: two plastic McDonald’s burger containers, an empty french fries pack, and a half-finished Coke. A plastic bag full of crushed ice lay at her side, useful when the pain in her hand got to be excruciating and she needed to numb it. Laura stared fixedly at the TV set, waiting for Didi to come back. Didi had been gone thirty minutes, hunting for a drugstore. They had agreed on what needed to be done, and she knew what was ahead for her.

  Every so often she chewed her lower lip. It had gotten raw, but she kept chewing it. She could hear the whine of the wind outside, and once in a while she imagined she heard the sound of a baby crying in it. She had gotten up once to look outside, but the effort had so drained her that she couldn’t force herself to get up again. So she listened to the wind and the crying baby and she knew she was very, very close to the edge and it would not take much for her to open that door and go wandering in the hungry dark.

  They had lost Mary Terror and David. That much was certain. Exactly how Van Diver had crashed into the milk tanker, Laura didn’t know, but Mary and David were gone. But Mary had been badly hurt, too, losing a lot of blood. She’d been weary—maybe even more weary than Laura— and she couldn’t have gotten very far. Where would she have stopped? Surely not a motel; not with blood all over her and her leg chewed up. Would she have just found a place to pull the van over and spend the night? No, because she’d have to run the engine all night or she and David would freeze to death. So that left one other possibility: that Mary had invited herself into somebody’s house. It wouldn’t be hard for her to do, not with the farmhouses spread hundreds of acres apart. How far west had Mary gotten before she’d decided to leave the interstate? Was she ahead of them, or behind them? It was impossible to know, but Laura did know one vital thing: Mary Terror’s destination. Wherever Mary was, however long she rested and let her wounds heal, she would sooner or later be back on the highway with David, heading for Freestone, California, and the memory of a lost hero.

  And that, too, was Laura’s destination, even if she had to get there on her hands and knees. Minus one finger, with scar tissue toughening her heart. She was going to get David back, or die trying.

  When Laura heard the key slide into the door’s lock, she thought she might be sick. But her food stayed down, and Didi came in with snowflakes in her red hair and a sack in her arms.

  “Got the stuff,” Didi said as she closed the door against the cold and double-latched it. She had found not a drugstore but a K-Mart, and she’d bought them both gloves, woolen socks, fresh underwear, toothpaste, and toothbrushes as well as the other necessities. As Didi put the sack down, Laura realized Didi had gained about twenty pounds since she’d left the motel. Didi pulled off her sweater and revealed the weight gain: there were two more thick sweaters underneath the first one.

  “My God,” Laura rasped. “You shoplifted.”

  “I had to do it,” Didi said as she peeled another layer off. “We’ve only got about thirty-five dollars left.” She smiled, the lines deepening around her eyes. “Shoplifting isn’t what it used to be. They watch you like a hawk.”

  “So how’d you do it without getting caught?”

  “You give a kid in a Quiet Riot jacket a buck to knock over a display of skiwear, and then you come out of the dressing room, put your head down, and walk. It helps to be buying other items, too. That way you don’t go out past the guard, and those cashiers don’t give a crap.” She threw one of the sweaters on the bed beside Laura, who picked it up with her right hand.

  “Inferior quality,” Laura decided. It was dark gray, banded with green stripes the color of puke. Didi’s new sweater was yellow with cardinals on the front. “Did prisoners sew these?”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers. Neither can shoplifters.” But the fact was that she had been careful to choose the bulkiest knits she could find. The cold of Nebraska and Wyoming would make Iowa’s weather seem balmy. Didi continued to take items out of the sack. At last she came to the wooden tongue depressors, the gauze bandages, a small pair of scissors, a box of wide Band-Aids, and a bottle of iodine and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Didi swallowed hard, getting herself ready for what had to be done. This was going to be like trying to build a house with thumbtacks, but it was the best they could do. She looked at Laura and offered another smile, the woman’s face bleached with pain. “Doctor Didi’s come to call,” Didi said, and then she looked away before her smile cracked and betrayed her.

  “Do your ear first.”

  “What? That scratch? Just got skin, that’s all.” Her wounded ear, hidden beneath her hair, had crusted over. It hurt like hell, but Laura needed the attention. “Oh, I got this, too.” She took a bottle of Extra-Strength Excedrin from her pocket and set it aside. “Courtesy of my fast hands.” She wished it were industrial strength, because before this night was over they were both going to need some heavy drugs. “Sorry I couldn’t get you any liquor.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll survive.”

  “Yeah, I believe you will.” Didi went to the bathroom, wet a washrag, and brought it out for Laura. When the pain got really bad, Laura was going to need something to chew on. “You ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Didi got the tongue depressors out. A little wider than Popsicle sticks, they were. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s take a look.” She peeled the covers back from Laura’s hand.

  Laura watched Didi’s face. She thought that Didi did a very good job of not flinching at the sight. Laura knew it was hideous. The mangled hand—hamburger hand, she thought—was burning hot, and every so often it throbbed with a pain so intense it sucked away Laura’s breath. The stub of the little finger was still drooling some watery blood, which had soaked into a towel underneath her hand and onto the sheet. The three other fingers and thumb were curved into claws.

  “What’ll my manicurist say?” Laura asked.

  “You should’ve soaked in Palmolive.”

  Laura laughed, but it had a nervous edge. Didi sighed, wishing to God there was someone else who could do this. It could’ve been worse, though. The dogs could’ve gotten to Laura’s throat, or torn up her legs, or chewed into her other arm. Or killed the baby. Didi looked at the wedding band and engagement ring on the swollen finger. There was no way short of cutting them to get them off.

  “The diamond,” Laura said. “Can you work it out of the setting?”

  “I don’t know.” She touched the upraised diamond and found it was already loose, two of its six prongs broken.

  “Try. I’ll hang on.”

  “Why do you want the diamond out?”

  “We’ve got only thirty-five dollars left,” Laura reminded her. “Have we got anything else to pawn but my diamond?”

  They did not. Didi grasped Laura’s bruised wrist as gently as she could and went to work with the scissors, trying to pry the diamond out. Laura was braced for agony, but none came. “That finger’s dead,” she said. In a few minutes Didi had managed to loosen a third prong. The diamond jiggled around, but it still didn’t have quite enough room to be popped out. The fourth prong was tougher. “Hurry, okay?” Laura asked in a faint voice. After two or three more minutes, Didi got the fourth prong bent enough to slide a tip of the scissors blade und
er the diamond and lever it out. It popped free, and Didi held it in her palm. “Nice rock. What’d your husband pay for it?”

  “Three thousand dollars.” Sweat sparkled on Laura’s face. “That was eight years ago.”

  “Maybe we can get five hundred for it. An honest pawnbroker’s not going to touch an unmounted diamond without ownership papers.” She wrapped the diamond up in a Band-Aid and put it into her pocket. “Okay. Ready for the big job?”

  “Yes. Let’s get it over with.”

  Didi began by washing the hand with hydrogen peroxide. Bloody foam hissed up from the bite wounds, and Laura moaned and chewed on the washrag. Didi had to repeat the task twice more, until all the grit was washed away. Laura’s eyes were squeezed shut, tears trickling from the corners. Didi reached for the iodine. “Well,” she said, “this ought to sting just a little.” Laura pushed the rag between her teeth again, and Didi began the awful work.

  There was a pain that Laura would always remember. She had been nine years old. She’d been riding her bike, flying hell-for-leather on a country road, when the tires had slipped out from under her on loose gravel. There had been bloody holes in her knees, her arms were raw, her elbows bleeding, her chin gashed. And the worst of it was that she’d been two miles from home. There was no one to hear her cry. No one to help her. So she got up, remounted that traitorous bike, and started pedaling again, because it was the only way. “Laura!” she remembered her mother screaming. “You’ve crippled yourself!”

  No, the injury hadn’t been crippling. She had grown scabs and scars, but on that day she had begun to grow up.

  This pain also taught a hard lesson. It was like sticking her hand into hot charcoals, dousing it with salty water, and then back into the coals again. She shivered, the sweat rising in beads from her pores. It was a mercy that ten seconds after Didi began the task, Laura lost consciousness. When she awakened, Didi had finished the application of disinfectant and was completing the splint on Laura’s ring finger, pulling it out straight and bandaging one of the sticks along Laura’s palm and finger. Then it was the middle finger’s turn.