One Door From Heaven

fear.
        Although the boy is mortified by this discovery, he's also still unable to get a grip on the tossing reins of his panic. He throws the door open, plunges down the steps, and stumbles recklessly onto the blacktop with such momentum that he crashes into the side of a Lexus stopped in the lane adjacent to the motor home.
        Face to glass, nose flattened a millimeter short of fracture, he peers into the car as if into an aquarium stocked with strange fish. The fish-actually a man with a buzz cut behind the wheel, a brunette with spiky hair in the passenger's seat-stare back at him with the lidless eyes and the puckered-O mouths that he would have encountered from the finny residents of a real aquarium.
        Curtis pushes away from the car and turns just as Old Yeller, no longer barking savagely, leaps out of the motor home. Grinning, wagging her tail, aware that she's the hero of the hour, she turns left and trots away with the spring of pride in her step.
        The dog follows the broken white line that defines this lane of stopped traffic from the next, and the boy hurries after the dog. He's no longer screaming, but he's still sufficiently addled by fear to concede leadership temporarily to his brave companion.
        He glances back into a blaze of headlights and sees the white-haired woman gazing out and down at him from behind the windshield of the Windchaser. She's half out of her seat, pulling herself up with the steering wheel, the better to see him. From here, she might be mistaken for an innocent and kindly woman-perhaps a librarian, considering that a librarian would know how easily a book of monsters could be disguised as a sweet romance novel with just a switch of the dust jackets.
        A whiff of the city has come to this high desert. The warm air is bitter with the stink of exhaust fumes from the idling engines of the vehicles that are backed up from the roadblock.
        Some motorists, recognizing the length of the delay ahead of them, have switched off their engines and gotten out of their cars to stretch their legs. Not all have fled the showdown at the truck stop; and as they rub the backs of their necks, roll their shoulders, arch their spines, and crack their knuckles, they ask one another what's-happening-what's-up-what's-this-all-about.
        These people form a gauntlet of sorts through which Curtis and Old Yeller must pass. Twisting, dodging, the boy treats them with equal courtesy, although he knows that they may be either ministers or murderers, or murdering ministers, either saints or sinners, bank clerks or bank robbers, humble or arrogant, generous or envious, sane or quite mad. "Excuse me, sir. Thank you, ma'am. Sorry, sir. Excuse me, ma'am. Excuse me, sir."
        Eventually, Curtis is halted by a tall man with the gray pinched face and permanently engraved wince lines of a long-term sufferer of constipation. Between a Ford van and a red Cadillac, he steps in the boy's way and places a hand on his chest. "Whoa there, son, what's the' matter, where you going?"
        "Serial killers," Curtis gasps, pointing toward the motor home, which is more than twenty vehicles behind him. "In that Windchaser, they keep body parts in the bedroom."
        Disconcerted, the stranger drops his restraining hand, and his wince lines cut deeper into his lean face as he squints toward the sixteen-ton, motorized house of horrors.
        Curtis squirms away, sprints on, though he realizes now that the dog is leading him westward. The roadblock is still a considerable distance ahead, beyond the top of the hill and not yet in sight, but this isn't the direction that they ought to be taking.
        Between a Chevy pickup and a Volkswagen, a jolly-looking man with a freckled face and a clown's crop of fiery red hair snares Curtis by the shirt, nearly causing him to skid off his feet. "Hey, hey, hey! Who're you running from, boy?"
        Sensing that this guy won't be rattled by the serial-killer alert-or by much else, for that matter-Curtis resorts to the excuse that Burt Hooper, the waffle-eating trucker in Donella's restaurant, made for him earlier. He isn't sure what it means, but it got him out of trouble before, so he says, "Sir, I'm not quite right."
        "Hell, that's no surprise to me," the red-haired man declares, but the tail of Curtis's shirt remains twisted tightly in his fist. "You steal something, boy?"
        No rational person would suppose