Intensity

leaned her right side against the steering wheel.
        The air was thick with gasoline fumes. Breathing was difficult.
        She reached to Ariel and said, "Come on, baby, out through the windshield, quickly now."
        When the girl failed to look at her but clung to the door and stared out the side window at the night sky, Chyna took her by the shoulder and pulled.
        "Come on, honey, come on, come on, come on," she urged. "It's damn stupid if we die now, after getting this far. If you die now, won't the dolls laugh? Won't they laugh and laugh? "
        

    
        Here, now, comes Sheriff Edgler Vess, battered and bleeding but sprightly in his step, past the roof of the motor home, which is now essentially the vehicle's port flank as it lies half capsized on this sea of blacktop and spilled gasoline. He glances curiously at the broken-out skylight but proceeds without hesitation to the front of the vehicle where he discovers Chyna and Ariel, naughty girls, who have just come out through the windshield.
        Their backs are to him, and they are moving away, heading toward the west side of the highway, where a sheltering grove of pines stands not far beyond the pavement, surely hoping to scuttle out of sight before he finds them. The woman is hobbling, urging the girl along with a hand in the small of her back.
        Though the sheriff was unable to find his revolver, he has the 20-gauge, which he holds in both hands by the barrel. He comes in fast behind them. The woman hears the odd squish that he makes limping on one bad boot heel across the reeking wet pavement, but she doesn't have a chance to turn fully and confront him. Vess swings the shotgun like a club, putting everything he has into it, smashing the flat of the stock across her shoulder blades.
        The woman is knocked off her feet, the breath hammered from her, unable to cry out. She pitches forward and sprawls facedown on the pavement, perhaps unconscious but certainly stunned immobile.
        Ariel totters forward in the direction that she was headed, as though she knows nothing of what happened to Chyna, and perhaps she doesn't. Maybe she is desperate for freedom, but more likely she is stumbling across the blacktop with no more awareness than a wind-up doll.
        The woman rolls onto her back, looking up at him, not dazed but white and wild-eyed with rage.
        "God fears me," he says, which are words that can be formed from the letters of his name.
        But the woman seems unimpressed. Wheezing, because of either the fumes or the blow to the back, she says, "Fuck you."
        When he kills her, he will have to eat a piece of her, as he ate the spider, because in the difficult days ahead, he may need a measure of her extraordinary strength.
        Ariel is fifty or sixty feet away, and the sheriff considers going after her. He decides to finish the woman first, because the girl can't get far in her condition.
        When Vess looks down again, the woman is withdrawing a small object from a pocket of her jeans.

    
        Chyna held the butane lighter that she'd been carrying since the service station where Vess had murdered the clerks. She released the childproof lock on the gas lever and slid her thumb onto the striker wheel. She was terrified to ignite it. She lay in gasoline, and her clothes, her hair, were soaked with it. She could barely draw breath through the suffocating fumes. Her trembling hand was damp with gasoline too, and she figured that the flame would leap immediately to her thumb, travel down her hand, her arm, enshrouding her entire body in only seconds.
        But she had to trust that there was justice in the universe and meaning in the redwood mists, for without that trust, she would be no better than Edgler Vess, no better than a mindlessly seeking palmetto beetle.
        She was lying at Vess's feet. Even if the worst happened, she would take him with her.
        "Forever," she said, because that was another word that could be formed from the letters of his name, and she thumbed the striker wheel.
        A pure flame spurted from the Bic but didn't instantly leap to her thumb, so she thrust the lighter against Vess's boot, dropped it, and the flame went out at once but not before igniting the gasoline-soaked leather.
        Even as Chyna let go of the lighter, she rolled away from Vess, arms tucked against her breast, spinning across the blacktop,