Along the shoulder of the highway, tongues of light licked up here and there from the dark gravel, and for an instant Jilly feared a return of votive candles and of displaced church pews, feared the reappearance of bloodless birds and sprays of ectoplasmic blood, but she quickly realized that these quick cold flames were nothing but reflections of their headlights flaring off the curved shards of broken bottles.
The silence fell not to her or to Dylan, but to the gentle ax of Shepherd’s voice monotonously chopping through the same three-word mantra familiar from television commercials: ‘Fries not flies, fries not flies, fries not flies….’
Jilly was baffled as to why Shep would choose to chant the advertising slogan of the very restaurant at which she had bought dinner less than two hours ago, but then she realized that he must have seen the promotional button that the counter clerk had pinned to her blouse.
‘Fries not flies, fries not flies…’
Dylan said, ‘I was clubbed down as I was returning to the room with the bags of takeout. We never had dinner. I guess he’s hungry.’
‘Fries not flies, fries not flies,’ said Shep, rocking from side to side in his seat.
As Dylan took one hand off the steering wheel and reached to the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, Jilly realized he wore a toad pin that matched hers. Against the tropical-flower pattern of the colorful fabric, the grinning cartoon amphibian had not been easy to see.
‘Fries not flies, fries not flies…’
When Dylan removed the promotional gimcrack from his shirt, a strange thing happened, and the night took another unexpected turn. Holding the button between thumb and forefinger, reaching toward the console that separated the front seats, as though he was intending to deposit the unwanted pin in the trash receptacle, he appeared to vibrate, not violently, yet with too much force for the episode to be deemed a mere shudder, vibrated as though an electrical current were quivering through his body. His tongue fluttered rapidly against the roof of his mouth, producing a peculiar noise not unlike that of a stalled car straining to start: ‘Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!’
He managed to hold on to the steering wheel with his left hand, but his foot either eased up on the accelerator or slipped off the pedal altogether. The Expedition’s reckless speed began to plummet from a perilous 95 miles per hour to a merely dangerous 85, to a still hazardous 75.
‘Hunnn-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na,’ he stuttered, and with the final syllable, he snapped the toad button out of his fingers as though he were shooting a game of marbles. He stopped vibrating as abruptly as he had begun.
The little metal disc pinged off the window in the passenger’s door, inches from Jilly’s face, ricocheted off the dashboard, dropped out of sight among Fred’s maze of branches and succulent leaves.
Although they were decelerating, Jilly sensed that because she had slipped out of her safety harness, she was at grave risk, sensed also that she didn’t have enough time to shrug into the straps and engage the buckle. Instead she pivoted to face front, clutched the seat with her left hand almost desperately enough to puncture the leather upholstery, and with her right hand grabbed the padded assist bar immediately above the passenger’s door. Just as Dylan confirmed the value of her intuition by all but standing on the brakes, she braced her feet against the dashboard. Knees bent to absorb whatever shock might come, she launched into a mental recitation of the Hail Mary prayer, not with a petition to be spared from the curse of a fat ass but with a plea to save her ass regardless of what grotesque dimensions it might acquire in years to come.
Maybe the Expedition’s speed fell as far as 60, maybe even as low as 50, in two seconds flat, but it was still traveling so fast that no sane person would have tried to execute a hard turn at this velocity. Evidently, Dylan O’Conner fully embraced madness: He let up on the brakes, pulled the steering wheel hand-over-hand to the left, pumped the brakes again, swung the truck off the pavement, and cranked it through a rubber-burning spin.