Strange Highways

waiting to drop upon his prey, but scuttling straight at Joey from the right side of the chamber with all the horrid grace of a spider, diabolically nimble and impossibly silent, upside down, clinging to the ceiling by means unknowable, softly ricocheting back and forth between the timbers, defying gravity, defying reason, his eyes gleaming like polished coal, teeth bared - and there could no longer be any doubt that he was something other than merely a man.
     Joey started to raise the 20-gauge, which felt like a ton weight in his arms. Too late and far too slow, he knew the despair of defeat even as he reacted, felt himself in the cold and paralyzing grip of nightmare though he was awake.
     Like a bat erupting from its roost, P.J. sprang out of the well between the rough-hewn beams, swooped down, and knocked Joey off his feet. The shotgun spun away across the concrete, out of reach.
     As boys, they had occasionally wrestled and roughhoused, but they had never actually fought each other with serious intention. They had always been too tight for that - the Shannon brothers against the world. But now twenty years of pent-up rage flashed through Joey with atomic heat, instantly purging him of all lingering affection and compassion for P.J., leaving only an energizing remorse-regret-resentment. He was determined not to be a victim any more. He had a passion for justice. He punched and clawed and kicked, fighting for his life and for Celeste's, tapping a wrath that was Biblical in its power, a righteous and frightening fury that freed a savage avenger within him.
     But even driven by rage and desperation, Joey was no match for whomever and whatever his brother had become. P.J.'s stone-hard fists landed an avalanche of punches, and no blocking arm or turned head seemed able to deflect the power of a single blow. His fury was inhuman, his strength superhuman. As Joey's resistance collapsed, P.J. grabbed him, lifted him half off the floor, slammed him down, slammed him down, slammed him down again, bouncing the back of his skull off the stone.
     P.J. rose from him, stood, loomed over him, looking down with scorching contempt. "Fucking altar boy!" The angry, sneering voice was P.J.'s but changed , deeper than it had ever been before, fierce and reverberant, like a raging voice out of an abysmal stone place, out of iron walls and inescapable prisons, shivering with icy hatred, each word echoing as hollowly as if it were a dropped stone that had found the impossible bottom of eternity. "Fucking altar boy!" With the repetition of those words came the first kick, delivered with incredibly vicious power, landing in Joey's right side, cracking his ribs, as if P.J. was wearing steel-toed boots. "Rosary-kissing little bastard." Another kick, another, and Joey tried to curl up defensively, as though he were a pill bug turning its armor to the world. But each furious kick found a vulnerable spot - ribs, kidneys; the base of his spine - and seemed to have been meted out not by a man but by a pile driver, a mindless robotic torture machine.
     Then the kicking stopped.
     With one throttling hand clamped on Joey's throat and the other hand on the belt of his blue jeans, P.J. snatched him off the floor as a world champion power lifter might clean-and-jerk a barbell that carried only light-workout weights. He hoisted him overhead, turned, and threw him.
     Joey bounced off the wall beside the archway and crashed to the floor in a broken-marionette heap. Mouth full of cracked teeth. Choking on blood. Chest tight. Lungs painfully compressed, maybe even punctured by a splintered rib. Inhaling with a consumptive wheeze, exhaling with a thick wet rattle. His heart was stuttering arrhythmically. Precariously balanced on a high wire of consciousness over a bottomless dark, he blinked through scalding tears and saw P.J. turn away from him and toward Celeste.
     He also saw the shotgun. Within reach.
     He could not control his extremities. He strove determinedly to reach out to the Remington, but his muscles spasmed. His arm merely twitched, and his right hand flopped uselessly on the floor.
     A menacing rumble rose under him. Vibrations in the hot stone.
     P.J. crouched over Celeste, turning his back to Joey, giving him up for dead.
     The Remington.
     So close. Tantalizingly close.
     Joey focused all his attention on the shotgun,