His fingers were barely there. He could see only the stubs of them, just below the last knuckles where the back of his hand started. The rest had somehow been swallowed by the door. As Doug watched, the third finger broke. His wedding ring fell off and clinked to the pavement.
He could feel something, oh dear God and dear Jesus, something like teeth. They were chewing. The car was eating his hand.
Doug tried to pull back. Blood flew, some against the muddy door, some splattering his slacks. The drops that hit the door disappeared immediately, with a faint sucking sound: slorp. For a moment he almost got away. He could see glistening fingerbones from which the flesh had been sucked, and he had a brief, nightmarish image of chewing on one of the Colonel’s chicken wings. Get it all before you put that down, his mother used to say, the meat’s sweetest closest to the bone.
Then he was yanked forward again. The driver’s door opened to welcome him: hello, Doug, come on in. His head connected with the top of the door, and he felt a line of coldness across his brow that turned hot as the station wagon’s roofline sliced through his skin.
He made one more effort to get away, dropping his cell phone and pushing at the rear window. The window yielded instead of supporting, then enveloped his hand. He rolled his eyes and saw what had looked like glass now rippling like a pond in a breeze. And why was it rippling? Because it was chewing. Because it was chowing down.
This is what I get for being a good Sam —
Then the top of the driver’s door sawed through his skull and slipped smoothly into the brain behind it. Doug Clayton heard a large bright SNAP, like a pine knot exploding in a hot fire. Then darkness descended.
A southbound delivery driver glanced over and saw a little green car with its flashers on parked behind a mud-coated station wagon. A man — presumably he belonged to the little green car — appeared to be leaning in the station wagon’s door, talking to the driver. Breakdown, the delivery driver thought, and returned his attention to the road. No good Samaritan he.
Doug Clayton was jerked inside as if hands — ones with big palms and pencil-thin fingers — had seized his shirt and pulled him. The station wagon lost its shape and puckered inward, like a mouth tasting something exceptionally sour. or exceptionally sweet. From within came a series of overlapping crunches — the sound of a man stamping through dead branches in heavy boots. The wagon stayed puckered for ten seconds or so, looked more like a lumpy clenched fist than a car. Then, with a pouck sound like a tennis ball being smartly struck by a racquet, it popped back into its station wagon shape.
The sun peeked briefly through the clouds, reflecting off the dropped cell phone and making a brief hot circle of light on Doug’s wedding ring. Then it dived back into the cloud cover.
Behind the wagon, the Prius blinked its four-ways. They made a low clocklike sound: Tick. tick. tick.
A few cars went past, but not many. The two workweeks surrounding Easter are the slowest time of year on the nation’s turnpikes, and afternoon is the second-slowest time of the day; only the hours between midnight and 5 AM are slower.
Tick. tick. tick.
In the abandoned restaurant, Pete Simmons slept on.
3. JULIANNE VERNON (‘05 Dodge Ram)
Julie Vernon didn’t need King James to teach her how to be a good Samaritan. She had grown up in the small town of Readfield, Maine (population 2,400), where neighboring was a way of life, and strangers were also neighbors. Nobody had told her this in so many words; she had learned from her mother, father, and big brothers. They had little to say about such issues, but teaching by example is always the most powerful teaching of all. If you saw a guy lying by the side of the road, it didn’t matter if he was a Samaritan or a Martian. You stopped to help.