She had almost plucked the answer from her mental junkheap when her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an engine. As she turned toward it, sure that the Zombie Bakers had come back after all, the sound of the motor was joined by the scream of ancient brakes. It wasn’t the white van but an old Ford F-150 pickup with a bad blue paintjob and Bondo around the headlights. A man in bib overalls and a gimme cap sat behind the wheel. He was looking at the litter of wood scraps in the ditch.
“Hello?” Tess called. “Pardon me, sir?”
He turned his head, saw her standing in the overgrown parking lot, flicked a hand in salute, pulled in beside her Expedition, and turned off his engine. Given the sound of it, Tess thought that an act tantamount to mercy killing.
“Hey, there,” he said. “Did you pick that happy crappy up off the road?”
“Yes, all but the piece that got my left front tire. And—” And my phone doesn’t work out here, she almost added, then didn’t. She was a woman in her late thirties who went one-twenty soaking wet, and this was a strange man. A big one. “—and here I am,” she finished, a bit lamely.
“I’ll change it forya if you got a spare,” he said, working his way out of his truck. “Do you?”
For a moment she couldn’t reply. The guy wasn’t big, she’d been wrong about that. The guy was a giant. He had to go six-six, but head-to-foot was only part of it. He was deep in the belly, thick in the thighs, and as wide as a doorway. She knew it was impolite to stare (another of the world’s facts learned at her mother’s knee), but it was hard not to. Ramona Norville had been a healthy chunk of woman, but standing next to this guy, she would have looked like a ballerina.
“I know, I know,” he said, sounding amused. “You didn’t think you were going to meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?” Only he wasn’t green; he was tanned a deep brown. His eyes were also brown. Even his cap was brown, although faded almost white in several places, as if it had been splattered with bleach at some point in its long life.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I was thinking you don’t ride in that truck of yours, you wear it.”
He put his hands on his hips and guffawed at the sky. “Never heard it put like that before, but you’re sort of right. When I win the lottery, I’m going to buy myself a Hummer.”
“Well, I can’t buy you one of those, but if you change my tire, I’d be happy to pay you fifty dollars.”
“You kiddin? I’ll do it for free. You saved me a mess of my own when you picked up that scrapwood.”
“Someone went past in a funny truck with a skeleton on the side, but he missed it.”
The big guy had been heading for Tess’s flat front tire, but now he turned back to her, frowning. “Someone went by and didn’t offer to help you out?”
“I don’t think he saw me.”
“Didn’t stop to pick up that mess for the next fellow, either, did he?”
“No. He didn’t.”
“Just went on his way?”
“Yes.” There was something about these questions she didn’t quite like. Then the big guy smiled and Tess told herself she was being silly.
“Spare under the cargo compartment floor, I suppose?”
“Yes. That is, I think so. All you have to do is—”
“Pull up on the handle, yep, yep. Been there, done that.”
As he ambled around to the back of her Expedition with his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his overalls, Tess saw that the door of his truck hadn’t shut all the way and the dome light was on. Thinking that the F-150’s battery might be as battered as the truck it was powering, she opened the door (the hinge screamed almost as loudly as the brakes) and then slammed it closed. As she did, she looked through the cab’s back window and into the pickup’s bed. There were several pieces of wood scattered across the ribbed and rusty metal. They were painted white and had nails sticking out of them.
For a moment, Tess felt as if she were having an out-of-body experience. The ticking sign, YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU, now sounded not like an old-fashioned alarm clock but a ticking bomb.
She tried to tell herself the scraps of wood meant nothing, stuff like that only meant something in the kind of books she didn’t write and the kind of movies she rarely watched: the nasty, bloody kind. It didn’t work. Which left her with two choices. She could either go on trying to pretend because to do otherwise was terrifying, or she could take off running for the woods on the other side of the road.
Before she could decide, she smelled the whopping aroma of man-sweat. She turned and he was there, towering over her with his hands in the side pockets of his overalls. “Instead of changing your tire,” he said pleasantly, “how about I fuck you? How would that be?”
Then Tess ran, but only in her mind. What she did in the real world was to stand pressed against his truck, looking up at him, a man so tall he blocked out the sun and put her in his shadow. She was thinking that not two hours ago four hundred people—mostly ladies in hats—had been applauding her in a small but entirely adequate auditorium. And somewhere south of here, Fritzy was waiting for her. It dawned on her—laboriously, like lifting something heavy—that she might never see her cat again.
“Please don’t kill me,” some woman said in a very small and very humble voice.
“You bitch,” he said. He spoke in the tone of a man reflecting on the weather. The sign went on ticking against the eave of the porch. “You whiny whore bitch. Gosh sakes.”
His right hand came out of his pocket. It was a very big hand. On the pinky finger was a ring with a red stone in it. It looked like a ruby, but it was too big to be a ruby. Tess thought it was probably just glass. The sign ticked. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU. Then the hand turned into a fist and came speeding toward her, growing until everything else was blotted out.
There was a muffled metallic bang from somewhere. She thought it was her head colliding with the side of the pickup truck’s cab. Tess thought: Zombie Bakers. Then for a little while it was dark.
– 6 –
She came to in a large shadowy room that smelled of damp wood, ancient coffee, and prehistoric pickles. An old paddle fan hung crookedly from the ceiling just above her. It looked like the broken merry-go-round in that Hitchcock movie, Strangers on a Train. She was on the floor, naked from the waist down, and he was raping her. The rape seemed secondary to the weight: he was also crushing her. She could barely draw a breath. It had to be a dream. But her nose was swollen, a lump that felt the size of a small mountain had grown at the base of her skull, and splinters were digging into her buttocks. You didn’t notice those sorts of details in dreams. And you didn’t feel actual pain in dreams; you always woke up before the real pain started. This was happening. He was raping her. He had taken her inside the old store and he was raping her while golden dust motes twirled lazily in the slanting afternoon sun. Somewhere people were listening to music and buying products online and taking naps and talking on phones, but in here a woman was being raped and she was that woman. He had taken her underpants; she could see them frothing from the pocket in the bib of his overalls. That made her think of Deliverance, which she had watched at a college film retrospective, back in the days when she had been slightly more adventurous in her moviegoing. Get them panties down, one of the hillbillies had said before commencing to rape the fat townie. It was funny what crossed your mind when you were lying under three hundred pounds of country meat with a rapist’s cock creaking back and forth inside you like an unoiled hinge.
“Please,” she said. “Oh please, no more.”
“Lots more,” he said, and here came that fist again, filling her field of vision. The side of her face went hot, there was a click in the middle of her head, and she blacked out.
– 7 –
The next time she came to, he was dancing around her in his overalls, tossing his hands from side to side and singing “Brown Sugar” in a squalling, atonal voice. The sun was going down, and the abandoned store’s two west-facing windows—the glass dusty but miraculously unbroken by vandals—were filled with fire. His shadow danced behind him, capering down the board floor and up the wall, which was marked with light squares where advertising signs had once hung. The sound of his cludding workboots was apocalyptic.