Shattered

forgotten all about Doyle and the boy. He fumbled with his keys, dropped them. He pawed clumsily in an inch-deep puddle until he found them again. Unlocking the cab door, he climbed into the truck, unable to recall the silent chase through the motel corridors or the ax-swinging madness in the maintenance room when he had come within seconds and inches of killing a man. He was too beaten down with pain to care about this sudden amnesia.
        It was the worst headache yet. The pain was most fierce in and area around the right eye, but now it also fanned out across his entire forehead and back to the top of his skull. It brought tears to his eyes. He could even hear his teeth grinding together like sandstone wheels, but he could not stop the hard, involuntary chewing motion; it was as if he were possessed, and as if his possessor thought that the pain could be masticated, shredded into fine pieces, swallowed, and digested away.
        There had been no warning signs. Usually, at least one hour in advance of the first wave of pain, he grew dizzy and nauseated, and he saw that spiral of hot multicolored light turning around and around behind his eye. But not tonight. One moment he had felt just fine, even exhilarated, and the next, pain had hit him like a hammer blow. It had been an ugly but comparatively small pain to begin with-hadn't it? A small pain at the start? He could not remember exactly where he had been when it first struck him, but he was sure the pain had been only mild, initially. Certainly bearable. However, it had rapidly gotten worse until, now, he despaired of reaching his own motel before he was completely incapacitated.
        He drove out of the motel lot, slammed off a four-inch curb and onto the highway, the van's springs squealing beneath him. He did not feel like a part of the vehicle tonight. He was no extension of it. He had lost his usual empathy with machines. He was a stranger in this contraption, and the steering wheel felt like an alien artifact, an inhuman device, under his large hands.
        He squinted at the wet pavement as he drove, tried to push back the rain and the ghostly tendrils of fog.
        A low, sleek car approached from the opposite direction, flashed past in a violent spray of water. Its four headlights were much too bright; they sliced into Leland's eyes like a quartet of knives and drew a painful wound across his forehead.
        Unconsciously he pulled the wheel hard to the right, away from the light which so offended him. The van crunched onto the shoulder of the road, nosed down, bounced in a rut, came up again with a prolonged shudder. In the cargo hold, furniture shifted noisily. Suddenly, immediately ahead, a waist-high brown-brick wall loomed out of the night, stark and deadly, Leland cried out and wheeled hard to the left. The right front fender nicked the bricks. Then the Chevrolet jumped back onto the pavement, sliding in the rainwater for a long, dangerous moment before it finally, reluctantly came back under his control.
        He reached the motel only because he encountered no other traffic. If even one other car had passed him, he would have demolished the Chevrolet and killed himself.
        At the door of his room, rain beating against his back, he had trouble inserting the key in the lock, and he cursed nearly loudly enough to wake the other guests.
        Inside, as he closed the door, the pain abruptly worsened, driving him to his knees on the stained carpet. He was sure that he was dying.
        But the new pain passed, and the agony became merely unbearable pain.
        He went to the bed and almost lay down before he realized that he had to get out of his clothes first. They were wet clear through. If he passed the rest of the night in them, he would be ill in the morning… Slowly, with exaggerated movements, he undressed and dried himself on the tufted bedspread. Even then, he was chilled to the bone. Trembling, he got into bed and pulled the cover up to his chin. He gave himself over to the unrelenting pain and tried to ride with it.
        It lasted more than twice as long as usual. And when, well after dawn, it was finally gone, the nightmares which always followed it were also worse than they had ever been. The only lovely thing in that parade of grisly images was Courtney. She kept popping up. Nude and beautiful. Her full, round breasts and delightfully long legs were welcome relief from the other visions… Yet,