The others had suffered minor injuries; Johnny had considered himself lucky to get off with a bruised spleen and a broken foot. But the thing was, he was the only one who remembered what had happened.
Johnny found this so curious that he had questioned the survivors carefully, even Sean, who kept crying and telling him to go away (Johnny hadn’t obliged until he’d gotten what he wanted; what the hell, he figured, Sean owed him). Patti Nickerson said she had a vague memory of Sean saying Hold on, we‘re going for a ride just before it happened, but that was it. With the others, recall simply stopped short of the accident and then picked up again at some point after it, as if their memories had been squirted with some amnesia-producing ink. Sean himself claimed to remember nothing after getting out of the shower that afternoon and wiping the steam off the mirror so he could see to shave. After that, he said, everything was black until he’d awakened in the hospital. He might have been lying about that, but Johnny didn’t think so. Yet he himself remembered everything. Sean hadn’t said Hold on, we’re going for a ride; he had said Hang on, we’re going wide. And laughing as he said it. He went on laughing even when the Partymobile had started to roll. Johnny remembered Patti screaming “My hair! Oh shit, my hair!,” and how she had landed on his crotch with a ball-numbing thud when the car went over. He remembered Bruno Gartner bellowing. And the sound of the Partymobile’s collapsing roof driving Rachel Timorov’ s head down into her neck, splitting her skull open like a bone flower. A tight crunching sound it had been, the sound you hear in your head when you smash an ice cube between your teeth. He remembered shit.
He knew that was part of being a writer, but he didn’t know if it was nature or nurture, cause or effect.
He sup-posed it didn’t matter. The thing was, he remembered shit even when it was as confusing as the final thirty seconds of a big fireworks display.
Stuff that overlapped seemed to automatically separate and fall into line even as it was happening, like
iron filings lining up under the pull of a magnet. Until the night Sean Hutter had rolled his Party- mobile, Johnny had never wished for anything different. He had never wished for anything different since . . . until now. Right now a little ink squirted into the old memory cells might be just fine.
He saw splinters jump from the jamb of the projection- booth door and land in Cynthia’s hair when Audrey fired the pistol. He felt one of the slugs drone past his right ear. He saw Steve, down on one knee but apparently okay, bat away the revolver when the woman hucked it at him. She lifted her upper lip, snarled at Steve like a cornered dog, then turned back and clamped her hands around the kid’s throat again.
Go on! Johnny shouted at himself. Go on and help him! Like you did before, when you shot the cat!
But he couldn’t. He could see everything, but he couldn’t move.
Things began to overlap then, but his mind insisted on sequencing them, neatening them, giving them a coherent shape, like a narrative. He saw Steve leap at Audrey, telling her to quit it, to let the boy go, cupping her neck with one hand and grabbing her wrists with the other. At this same moment, Johnny was slammed past the skinny girl and into the room with the force of a stuntman shot from a cannon. It was Ralph, of course, hitting him from behind and bawling his son’s name at the top of his lungs.
Johnny flew out over the two-step drop, knees bent, convinced he was going to sustain multiple fractures at the very least, convinced that the boy was dying or already dead, convinced that Audrey Wyler’s mind had snapped under the strain and she had fallen under the delusion that David Carver was either the cop or a minion of the cop . . . and all the time his eyes went on recording and his brain kept on receiving the images and storing them. He saw the way Audrey’s muscular legs were spread, the material of her skirt strained taut between them. He also saw he was going to touch down near her.
He landed on one foot, like a skater who has forgotten his skates. His knee buckled. He let it, throwing himself forward into the woman, grabbing her hair. She pulled her head back and snapped at his fingers.
At the same instant (except Johnny’s mind insisted it was the next instant, even now wanting to reduce this madness to something coherent, a narrative which would flow in train), Steve tore her hands away from the kid’s throat.
Johnny saw the white marks of her palms and fingers there, and then his momentum was carrying him by.
She missed biting him, which was the good news, but he missed his grip on her hair, which was the bad.
She voiced a guttural cry as he collided with the wall. His left arm shot out through one of the projection-slots up to the shoulder, and for one awful moment he was sure that the rest of him was going to follow it-out, down, goodbye. It was impossible, the hole was nowhere near big enough for that, but he thought it anyway.
At this same moment (his mind once more insisting it was the next moment, the next thing, the new sentence) Ralph Carver yelled: “Get your hands off my boy, bitch!”
Johnny retrieved his arm and turned around, putting his back to the wall. He saw Steve and Ralph drag the screaming woman off David. He saw the boy collapse against the wall and slide slowly down it, the marks on his throat standing out brutally. He saw Cynthia come down the steps and into the room, trying to look everywhere at once.
“Grab the kid, boss!” Steve panted. He was struggling with Audrey, one hand still clamped on her wrists and the other now around her waist. She bucked under him like a canyon mustang. “Grab him and get him out of h-”
Audrey screamed and pulled free. When Ralph made a clumsy attempt to get his arms around her neck and put her in a headlock, she shoved the heel of one hand under his chin and pushed him back. She retreated a step, saw David, and snarled again, her lips drawing away from her teeth. She made a move to go in his direction and Ralph said, “Touch him again and I’ll kill you. Promise.”
Ah, fuck this, Johnny thought, and snatched the boy up. He was warm and limp and heavy in his arms.
Johnny’s back, already outraged by nearly a continent’s worth of motorcycling, gave a warning twinge.
Audrey glanced at Ralph, as if daring him to try and make good on his promise, then tensed to leap at Johnny. Before she could, Steve was on her once more. He grabbed her around the waist again, then pivoted on his heels, the two of them face to face. She was uttering a long and continuous caterwauling that made Johnny’s fillings ache.
Halfway through his second spin, Steve let her go. Audrey flew backward like a stone cast out of a sling, her feet stuttering on the floor, still caterwauling. Cynthia, who was behind her, dropped to her hands and knees with the speed of a born playground survivor.
Audrey collided with her shin-high and went over backward, sprawling on the lightercolored rectangle where the second projector had rested. She stared up at them through the tumble of her hair, momentarily dazed.
“Get him out of here, boss!” Steve waved his hand at the steps leading up to the projection-booth door.
“There’s something wrong with her, she’s like the animals!”
What do you mean, like them? Johnny thought. She fucking well is one. He heard what Steve was telling him, but he didn’t start toward the door. Once again he seemed incapable of movement.
Audrey scrambled to her feet, sliding up the corner of the room. Her upper lip was still rising and falling in a jagged snarl, eyes moving from Johnny and the unconscious boy cradled in his arms to Ralph, and then to Cynthia, who had now also gotten to her feet and was pressing against Steve’s side. Johnny thought briefly and longingly of the Rossi shotgun and the Ruger .44. Both were in the lobby, leaning against the ticket-booth. The booth had offered a good view of the street, but it had been easier to leave the guns outside it, given the limited space. And neither he nor Ralph had thought to bring them up here He now believed that one of the scariest lessons this nightmare had to offer was how lethally unprepared for survival they all were. Yet they had survived. Most of them, anyway. So far.