As the speedometer indicated 92, his fear of crashing into another vehicle influenced him less than did the pure animal need to move. When it eased past 93, he grew concerned about the waves of vibrations that rattled the chassis, but not concerned enough to be able to cut their speed.
This urgent necessity, this sense that he must drive hard or die, exceeded mere compulsion, possessed him so fully as to be no less than an obsession, until with every rushing breath he heard within his mind the dire admonition You’re running out of time, and heard with every racing heartbeat the exhortation Faster!
Encountering chuckholes, cracks, and patches in the pavement, the tires stuttered as hard as rapping hammers, and Dylan worried about the consequences of a blowout at this lightning pace, but he pressed the Expedition to 96, taxing the shock absorbers, torturing the springs, onward to 97, with engine screaming and wind of their own manufacture shrieking at the windows, to 98, between bracketing big rigs, around a sleek Jaguar with a cruise-missile whoosh that elicited a disapproving blast of the sports car’s horn, to 99.
He remained aware of Jilly beside him, still braced for disaster with her sneakered feet against the dashboard, frantically struggling to shrug into her safety harness and to buckle herself to the seat. Peripheral vision suggested and a glance confirmed that she’d fallen into a state of unadulterated terror. He supposed she was saying something to him, shouting objections to his heedless, headlong westward rush. In fact he could hear her voice, which had grown hollow and low and distorted, as though hers was a taped recitation being replayed at the wrong speed; he couldn’t understand a word.
Before the speedometer registered 100, to an even greater degree when it read 101, each irregularity in the pavement translated with magnified effect to the steering wheel, which tried to spin out of his grip. Fortunately, the sudden sweat that earlier slathered his face and moistened his palms had already dried in the steady blast of air conditioning. He maintained control at 102, at 103, but though he held the wheel, he couldn’t lift his foot from the accelerator.
Greater velocity didn’t at all diminish his overwhelming need for speed, and indeed, the faster the Expedition went, the greater Dylan’s sense of urgency grew, and the more compelled he became to push the vehicle still harder, more relentlessly. He felt drawn by black-hole gravity, across the event horizon, beyond which neither matter nor radiation could escape the power of a crushing vortex. Move, move, MOVE became his mantra, movement with no deducible purpose, movement for movement’s sake, westward, westward, on the trail of the long-lost sun and the still visible but receding moon.
Perhaps this frenzied plunge toward an unknown yet desperately needed object was how Frankenstein’s unluckiest injected subjects felt in the frantic moments before their plummeting IQs dropped them through a trapdoor to the land of imbecility, idiocy.
If it doesn’t obliterate your personality or totally disrupt your capacity for linear thinking, or reduce your IQ by sixty points…
Ahead loomed the town that they had departed with such haste a short while ago, when they’d feared nothing more than the appearance of a train of black Suburbans in the rearview mirror, gleaming like Death’s gondolas given wheels.
Dylan expected to experience an irresistible pull toward the freeway exit near the motel where Jilly’s Coupe DeVille had served as their tormentor’s flaming casket. A glance at the instrument panel – 104 miles per hour – caused his briskly trotting heart to break into a gallop. He couldn’t navigate that curving ramp at half their current velocity. He prayed that if compelled to leave the interstate, he would overcome this rage for speed in time to avoid crashing through the guardrail and tumbling to the bottom of an embankment in a test-to-destruction of Ford Motor Company’s safety engineering.
As they approached the dreaded exit, he tensed, but he felt no strange attraction for it. They shot past the off-ramp as though they were a stunt team gearing up toward a jump over sixteen parked buses.
South of the interstate, among the bright clutter of road-service enterprises, the motel sign glowed with an ominous quality. The red neon inspired thoughts of blood, fire; it brought to mind myriad scenes of Hell as conceived with morbid passion by everyone from pre-Renaissance artists to contemporary comic-book illustrators.