“No. It was just sort of banal, really. It has a memory of my Aunt Jessica — ”
“It’s coming.”
“Oh shit!”
Tammy glanced in her rear view window: nothing. Looked over her shoulder: nothing.
“I don’t see it!”
“It’s after us.”
“I don’t see it!”
She caught a glimpse of Todd’s face in the mirror, his eyes turned directly upwards; and she knew where it was. The next moment there was a light on the road all around the car, as though a police helicopter had appeared over the ridge with a spotlight, and caught them in it.
There was a turn up ahead. She took it at sixty-five miles an hour, wheels shrieking, and for a moment the cloud overshot the road, and she was driving in near darkness. Losing the light so suddenly left her utterly disorientated and she took the next curve, which came fifteen yards after the previous one, so tightly that the lefthand side of the car was clawed by twigs and branches. Todd whooped.
“Hell, woman! You’re quite a driver! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You never asked!” Tammy said, steering the car back into the middle of the road.
“We could have gone drag-racing together. I always wanted to find a woman I could go drag-racing with.”
“Now you tell me.”
Another curve came up, as tight as the one before. But this time she took it without any problem. They were halfway down the hill by now, and Tammy was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, they were going to reach Sunset Boulevard without their pursuer catching up with them.
“If we do get to Sunset,” she said, “what happens then? Do you think the damn thing will give up?”
She’d no sooner spoken than the light reappeared on the street ahead of them. It was no longer hovering in the air above the street but had descended to block the road from one side to the other.
Tammy slammed on the brakes, but as she did so a sliver of the angel’s light came through the windshield to meet her mind, its freight familiar from their previous encounter. The road ahead of her was instantly erased, replaced with the facade of the house on Monarch Street. She heard Maxine, somewhere to her right, let out a yell of panic, and then felt her reaching over to wrest control of the car from her. There was a brief, chaotic moment when Tammy’s panic overwhelmed the angel’s gift of memory, and she saw, to her horror, that the car had swerved off the road and was speeding into the dense thicket that grew between the trees. The image lasted for a moment only. Then it was gone, the approaching trees, Maxine’s fumbling hands, her curses: all of it erased.
In its place, Tammy was standing at the door of her Aunt Jessica’s house, in the dappled sunlight, and Aunt Jessica was telling her that her papa had gone down to the fire station —
The car struck a tree, and the windshield smashed, but Aunt Jessica smiled on. They hit another tree, and another, though Tammy saw none of it. She didn’t hear the splinter of wood, or the shrieks from Maxine. Nor did she hear the din of tearing metal as a door was torn off. Her foot was still jammed on the brakes but they didn’t seem to be slowing the vehicle’s momentum. What eventually brought the car to a halt was a boulder, which lifted it up and threw it over on its left side.
At the instant of impact the angel’s vision faltered again, and Tammy saw the world as it really was-a blur of tumbling trees and raining glass. She saw her arms in front of her, her white-knuckled hands still seizing the wheel. She saw blood on her fingers, and then a little storm of shredded leaves coming in through the broken window, their sweetness reminding her, even in the midst of this chaos, of quieter times. Mown lawns on a Sunday afternoon; grass in her hair when she’d been play-wrestling with Sandra Moses from next door. Pieces of green memory, which flickered into her mind’s eye between the tumbling view through the windshield and the last, brief appearance of Aunt Jessica’s doorstep.