From a Buick 8 by Stephen King

The Bel Aire was back, as I’d known it would be. He’d parked it where Arky’s truck had been earlier. And it was empty. I could see that in the first splash of my headlights. The song titles dropped out of my head. What replaced them was a cold readiness, the kind that comes by itself, empty-handed and without plans, ready to improvise.

The Buick had taken hold of Curt’s boy. Even while we’d been sitting with him, conducting our own peculiar kind of wake for his dad and trying to be his friend, it had reached out and taken hold of him. If there was still a chance to take him back, I’d do well not to bitch it up by thinking too much.

Steff, probably worried at the sight of a single Kojak instead of a rack of roof-lights, poked her head out the back door. ‘Who’s that? Who’s there?’

‘It’s me, Steff.’ I got out of the car, leaving it parked where it was with the red bubble flashing on the roof over the driver’s seat. If anyone came hauling in behind me, it would at least keep them from rear-ending my car. ‘Go back inside.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘That’s what he said.’ She pointed at the Bel Aire, then stalked back inside.

I ran for the roll-up door of Shed B in the stutter-pulse of the light — so many stressful moments of my life have been lit by flashers. A John Q. stopped or overtaken by flashers is always frightened. They have no idea what those same lights sometimes do to us. And what we have seen by their glow.

We always left a light on in the shed, but it was brighter than a single night-light in there now, and the side door was standing open. I thought about diverting to it, then kept on as I was. I wanted a look at the playing-field before anything else.

What I’d been most afraid of seeing was nothing but the Buick. Looking in, I discovered something scarier. The boy was sitting behind the Roadmaster’s oversized steering wheel with his chest smashed in. There was nothing where his shirt had been except a bright bloody ruin. My legs started to unbuckle at the knees, and then I realized it wasn’t blood I was looking at, after all. Maybe not blood. The shape was too regular. There was a straight red line running just below the round neck of his blue T-shirt . . . and corners . . . neat right-angled corners . . .

No, not blood.

The gas can Arky kept for the mower.

Ned shifted behind the wheel and one of his hands came into view. It moved slowly, dreamily. There was a Beretta in it. Had he been driving around with his father’s sidearm in the trunk of the Bel Aire? Perhaps even in the glove compartment?

I decided it didn’t matter. He was sitting in that deathtrap with gas and a gun. Kill or cure, I’d thought. It had never crossed my mind to think he might try doing both at the same time.

He didn’t see me. He should’ve — my white, scared face filling one of those dark windows

should have been perfectly visible to him from where he sat — and he should’ve seen the red pulse from the light I’d stuck on the roof of my car. He saw neither. He was as hypnotized as Huddie Royer had been when Huddie decided to crawl into the Roadmaster’s trunk and pull the lid shut behind him. I could feel it even from outside. That tidal pulse. That liveliness.

There were even words in it. I suppose I might have made them up to suit myself, but it almost doesn’t matter because it was the pulse that called them forth, the throb all of us had felt around the Buick from the very start. It was a throb some of us — this boy’s father, for one — had felt more strongly than others.

Come in or stay out, the voice in my head told me, and it spoke with perfect chilling indifference. I’ll take one or two, then sleep. That much more mischief before I’m done jar good. One or two, I don’t care which.

I looked up at the round thermometer mounted on the beam. The red needle had stood at sixty-one before I went down to The Country Way, but now it had dropped back to fifty-seven. I could almost see it slumping to even colder levels as I watched, and all at once I was struck by a memory so vivid it was frightening.

On the smokers’ bench, this had been. I had been smoking and Curt had just been sitting.

The smokers’ bench had assumed odd importance in the six years since the barracks itself was declared a smoke-free zone. It’s where we went to compare notes on the cases we were rolling, to work out scheduling conflicts, to mull over retirement plans and insurance plans and the GDR. It was on the smokers’ bench that Carl Brundage told me his wife was leaving him and taking the kids. His voice hadn’t wavered but tears had gone rolling down his cheeks as he talked. Tony had been sitting on the bench with me on one side and Curt on the other (‘Christ and the two thieves,’ he’d said with a sardonic smile) when he told us he was putting me up for the SC post his own retirement would leave vacant. If I wanted it, that was. The little gleam in his eyes saying he knew goddam well I wanted it. Curtis and I had both nodded, not saying much. And it was on the smokers’ bench that Curt and I had our final discussion about the Buick 8. How soon before his death had that been? I realized with a nasty chill that it might well have been on the very day. Certainly that would explain why the vividness of the memory seemed so terrible to me.

Does it think? Curt had asked. I could remember strong morning sun on his face and — I think — a paper cup of coffee in his hand. Does it watch and think, wait for its chances, pick its moments?

I’m almost sure not, I had replied, but I’d been troubled. Because almost covers a lot of territory, doesn’t it? Maybe the only word in the language that covers more is if.

But it saved its biggest horror show for a time when this place was almost entirely deserted, Ned’s father had said. Thoughtful. Setting his coffee aside so he could turn his Stetson over and over in his hands, an old habit of his. If I was right about the day, that hat was less than five hours from being knocked from his head and cast bloody into the weeds,

where it would later be found among the McDonald’s wrappers and castaway Coke cans. As if it knew. As if it can think. Watch. Wait.

I had laughed. It was one of those gruff little ha-ha laughs that don’t really have much amusement in them. I told him he was cuckoo on the subject. I said, Next thing you’ll be telling me it sent out a ray or something to make that Norco tanker crash into the schoolbus that day.

He made no verbal reply, but his eyes had looked a question at me. How do you know it didn’t?

And then I had asked the boy’s question. I had asked—

A warning bell went off inside my head, very dim and deep. I stepped back from the window and raised my hands to my face, as if I thought I could block off that tidal ache simply by blocking off sight of the Buick. And sight of Ned, looking so white and lost behind the oversized steering wheel. It had taken hold of him and just now, briefly, it had taken hold of me. Had tried to sidetrack me with a lot of old useless memories. Whether or not it had consciously waited for its chance to get at Ned didn’t matter. What mattered was that the temperature in there was going down fast, almost diving, and if I intended doing something, now was the time.

Maybe you ought to get some backup in on this, the voice in my head whispered. It sounded like my own voice, but it wasn’t. Might be someone in the barracks. I’d check, if I were you. Not that it matters to me. Doing one more piece of mischief before I sleep, that’s what matters to me. Pretty much all that matters to me. And why? Because I can, hoss — just because I can.

Backup seemed like a good idea. God knows I was terrified at the idea of going into Shed B on my own and approaching the Buick in its current state. What got me going was the knowledge that I had caused this. I was the one who had opened Pandora’s Box.

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