The car door slammed viciously shut. Carla still had her arms wrapped around her husband’s waist, and when she was yanked forward, she had another lightning-flash of clarity.
It’s the car, you have to stay away from the car!
She let go of Johnny’s midsection just a moment too late. A sheaf of her hair fell against the door and was sucked in. The top of her head smacked against the car before she could tear free. Suddenly the top of her head was burning as the thing ate into her scalp.
Run! she tried to scream at her often troublesome but undeniably bright daughter. Run and take Blakie with you!
But before she could even begin to articulate the thought, her mouth was gone.
Only Rachel saw the station wagon slam shut on her daddy’s head like a Venus flytrap on a bug, but both of them saw their mother somehow pulled through the muddy door as if it were a curtain. They saw one of her mocs come off, they got a flash of her pink toenails, and then she was gone. A moment later, the white car lost its shape and clenched itself like a fist. Through their mother’s open window, they heard a crunching sound.
“Wha’ that?” Blakie screamed. His eyes were streaming tears and his lower lip was lathered with snot. “Wha’ that, Rachie, wha’ that, wha’ that?”
Their bones, Rachel thought. She was only six years old, and not allowed to go to PG-13 movies or watch them on TV (let alone R; her mother said R stood for Raunchy), but she knew that was the sound of their bones breaking.
The car wasn’t a car. It was some kind of monster.
“Where mommy-n-daddy?” Blakie asked, turning his large eyes — now made even larger by his tears — on her. “Where mommy-n-daddy, Rachie?”
He sounds like he’s two again, Rachel thought, and for maybe the first time in her life, she felt something other than irritation (or, when extremely tried by his behavior, outright hate) for her baby brother. She didn’t think this new feeling was love. She thought it was something even bigger. Her mom hadn’t been able to say anything in the end, but if she’d had time, Rachel knew what it would have been: take care of Blakie.
He was thrashing in his car seat. He knew how to undo the straps, but in his panic had forgotten how.
Rachel opened her seat belt, slid out of her booster seat, and tried to do it for him. One of his flailing hands caught her cheek and administered a ringing slap. Under normal circumstances that would have earned him a hard punch on the shoulder (and a time-out in her room, where she would have sat staring at the wall in a boiling fugue of fury), but now she just grabbed his hand and held it down.
“Stop it! Let me help you! I can get you out, but not if you do that!”
He stopped thrashing, but kept on crying. “Where Daddy? Where Mommy? I want Mommy!”
I want her too, asshole, Rachel thought, and undid the car seat straps. “We’re going to get out now, and we’re going to. ”
What? They were going to what? Go up to the restaurant? It was closed, that was why there were orange barrels. That was why the gas pumps in front of the gas station part were gone and there was grass poking out of the empty parking lot.
“We’re going to get away from here,” she finished.
She got out of the car and went around to Blakie’s side. She opened his door but he just looked at her, eyes brimming. “I can’t get out, Rachie, I’ll fall.”
Don’t be such a scaredy-baby, she almost said, then didn’t. This wasn’t the time for that. He was upset enough. She opened her arms and said, “Slide. I’ll catch you.”
He looked at her doubtfully, then slid. Rachel did catch him, but he was heavier than he looked, and they both went sprawling. She got the worst of it because she was on the bottom, but Blakie bumped his head and scraped one hand and began to bawl loudly, this time in pain instead of fear.