From a Buick 8 by Stephen King

-wrapped itself around D’s throat and D began to yip arid howl with pain. I saw smoke starting to rise up from where the thing had him, and a moment later I could smell burning fur as well as rotting vegetables and seawater. The intruder was sprawled on top of our dog, squealing and thrashing, its legs (if they were legs) thumping against the roll-up door and leaving smudges that looked like nicotine stains. And Mister Dillon let out howl after long, agonized howl.

Huddle leveled his gun. I grabbed his wrist and forced it down. ‘No! You’ll hit D!’ And then Eddie shoved past me, almost knocking me down. He’d found a pair of rubber gloves on some bags by the door and snapped them on.

THEN:

Eddie

You have to understand that I don’t remember any of this the way people ordinarily remember things. For me this is more like remembering the bitter end of a bad drunk. It wasn’t Eddie Jacubois who took that pair of rubber gloves from the pile of them on top of the lawn-food bags by the door. It was someone dreaming that he was Eddie Jacubois. That’s how it seems now, anyway. I think it seemed that way them.

Was Mister Dillon on my mind? Kid, I’d like to think so. And that’s the best I can say.

Because I can’t really remember. I think it’s more likely that I just wanted to shut that shrieking yellow thing up, get it out of the middle of my head. I hated it in there. Loathed it.

Having it in there was like being raped.

But I must have been thinking, you know it? On some level I really must have been, because I put the rubber gloves on before I took the pickaxe down from the wall. I remember the gloves were blue. There were at least a dozen pairs stacked on those bags, all the colors of the rainbow, but the ones I took were blue. I put them on fast — as fast as the doctors on that ER show. Then I took the pickaxe off its pegs. I pushed past Shirley so hard I almost knocked her down. I would have knocked her down, I think, only Huddie grabbed her before she could fall.

George shouted something. I think it was ‘Be careful of the acid’. I don’t remember feeling scared and I certainly don’t remember feeling brave. I remember feeling outrage and revulsion. It was the way you’d feel if you woke up with a leech in your mouth, sucking the blood out of your tongue. I said that once to Curtis and he used a phrase I never forgot: the horror of trespass. That’s what it was, the horror of trespass.

Mister D, howling and thrashing and snarling, trying to get away; the thing lying on him, the pink threads growing out of its top thrashing around like kelp in a wave; the smell of burning fur; the stench of salt and cabbage; the black stuff pouring out of the thing’s dog-bit, furrowed back, running down the wrinkles in its yellow skin like sludge and then pattering on the floor; my need to kill it, erase it, make it gone from the world: all these things were whirling in my mind — whirling, I tell you, as if the shock of what we’d found in Shed 13

had whipped my brains, pureed them and then stirred them into a cyclone that had nothing to

do with sanity or lunacy or police work or vigilante work or Eddie Jacubois. Like I say, I remember it, but not the way you remember ordinary things. More like a dream. And I’m glad. To remember it at all is bad enough. And you can’t not remember. Even drinking doesn’t stop that, only pushes it away a little bit, and when you stop, it all comes rushing back. Like waking up with a bloodsucker in your mouth.

I got to it and I swung the pickaxe and the pointed end of it went into the middle of it.

Black gunk came out, and I remember thinking of the theme-song from The Beverly Hillbillies, that line that goes ‘Up from the ground came a-bubblin crude’.

The thing screamed and threw itself backward against the roll-up door. Mister Dillon got loose and backed away, creeping with his belly low to the floor. He was barking with anger and howling with pain, the sounds mixed together. There was a charred trench in his fur behind his collar. Half his muzzle had been singed black, as if he’d stuck it in a campfire.

Little tendrils of smoke were rising from it.

The thing lying against the roll-up door lifted that gray hose in its chest and those were eyes embedded in it, all right.

They were looking at me and I couldn’t bear it. I turned the pickaxe in my hands and brought the axe side of it down. There was a thick chumping sound, and part of the hose rolled away on the concrete. I’d also caved in the chest area. Clouds of stuff like pink shaving cream came out of the hole, billowing, like it was under pressure. Along the length of the gray trunk — the severed piece is what I’m talking about — those eyes rolled spastically, seeming to look in all different directions at once. Clear drops of liquid, its venom, I guess, dribbed out and scorched the concrete.

Then George was beside me. He had a shovel. He drove the blade of it down into the middle of the tendrils on the creature’s head. Buried it in the thing’s yellow flesh all the way up to the ashwood shaft. The thing screamed. I heard it so loud in my mind that it seemed to push my eyes out in their sockets, the way a frog’s eyes will bulge when you wrap your hand around its flabby body and squeeze.

THEN:

Huddie

I put on a pair of gloves myself and grabbed one of the other tools — I think it was a hard rake, but I’m not entirely sure. Whatever it was, I grabbed it, then joined Eddie and George. A few seconds later (or maybe it was a minute, I don’t know, time stopped meaning anything) I looked around and Shirley was there, too. She’d put on her own pair of gloves, then grabbed Arky’s posthole digger. Her hair had come loose and was hanging down all around her face.

She looked to me like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

We all remembered to put on gloves, but we were all crazy. Completely nuts. The look of it, the gibbering keening screeching sound of it, even the way Mister D was howling and whining — all of that made us crazy. I’d forgotten about the overturned tanker, and George Stankowski trying to get the kids into the schoolbus and drive them to safety, and the angry young man Eddie and George Morgan had brought in. I think I forgot there was any world at all outside that stinking little shed. I was screaming as I swung the rake, plunging the tines into the thing on the floor again and again and again. The others were screaming, too. We stood around it in a circle, beating and bludgeoning and cutting it to pieces; we were screaming at it to die and it wouldn’t die, it seemed as if it would never die.

If I could forget anything, any part of it, I’d forget this: at the very end, just before it did die, it raised the stump of the thing in its chest. The stump was trembling like an old man’s hand. There were eyes in the stump, some of them hanging from shiny threads of gristle by then. Maybe those threads were optic nerves. I don’t know. Anyway, the stump rose up and for just a moment, in the center of my head, I saw myself. I saw all of us standing around in a circle and looking down, looking like murderers at the grave of their victim, and I saw how strange and alien we were. How horrible we were. In that moment I felt its awful confusion.

Not its fear, because it wasn’t afraid. Not its innocence, because it wasn’t innocent. Or guilty, for that matter. What it was was confused. Did it know where it was? I don’t think so. Did it know why Mister Dillon had attacked it and we were killing it? Yes, it knew that much. We were doing it because we were so different, so different and so horrible that its many eyes could hardly see us, could hardly hold on to our images as we surrounded it screaming and chopping and cutting and hitting. And then it finally stopped moving. The stub of the trunk-

thing in its chest dropped back down again. The eyes stopped twitching and just stared.

We stood there, Eddie and George side by side, panting. Shirley and I were across from them — on the other side of that thing — and Mister D was behind us, panting and whining.

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