The Face

to sit upright instead caused him to slide farther down. In fact he seemed about to slip off the seat. [584] His legs buckled and twisted upon themselves, folding into the knee space in front of the dashboard, and his butt hung off the edge of the seat. From the waist to his neck, he was lying flat on the seat, his head tipped up against the back of it.
        He felt his airways narrowing.
        He wheezed, sucked, snorked for breath, drew in little, squeezed out less. That familiar hard-boiled egg settled in his windpipe, that stone, that blocking wad.
        He could not breathe on his back.
        He could not breathe. He could not breathe.
        Moloch stomped the brakes. The car fishtailed, then spun.

        On the driveway, running toward Corky as he sped toward them, were Roman Castevet, whom he’d killed and stored under a sheet in the cold locker at the morgue, and Ned Hokenberry come back to retrieve the locket that contained his third eye, and anorexic Brittina Dowd as naked and bony as he had left her on the floor of her bedroom but not burnt, and Mick Sachatone in Bart Simpson pajamas.
        He should have known them for mirages, should have boldly run them down, but never had he seen the like of this, nor dreamed that such a thing was possible. They were not transparent but appeared to be as solid as a fireplace poker or a bronze-and-marble lamp.
        Tramping the brake pedal, he jammed too hard, and perhaps pulled the wheel without intention. The Buick whipped around so sharply that the pistol on his lap was flung to the floor at his feet and his head rapped the side window hard enough to crack it.
        At the end of the 360-degree pivot, his four victims had not vanished during the rotation, but loomed right there, and all flung themselves at the car, shocking from Corky a scream that sounded too girlish for Robin Goodfellow. One, two, three, four, the angry dead burst against the windshield, against the cracked side window, eager [585] to be at him, but burst, not real after all, merely figures of rain and shadow, plumes of cast-up water that splashed into shapeless sprays, flowed away, were gone.
        A full turn didn’t drain the Buick’s momentum, and they spun another ninety degrees, colliding with one of the trees that lined the driveway, thereby brought to an abrupt stop as the passenger’s door sprung open and the windshield dissolved.
        Laughing in the face of chaos, Corky reached down past the steering wheel, feeling for the Glock on the floor between his feet. He touched the handgrip of the gun, grasped it, brought the weapon up to shoot the boy.
        The driver’s door opened with a shrill protest of buckled metal, and Ethan Truman reached in for Corky, so instead of shooting the boy, he shot the man.

        Arriving at the Buick in the moment that it crashed to a stop, Ethan slammed his pistol down on the roof and left it there because he didn’t want to shoot into the car, not with Fric in the line of fire. Heedless of the risk, he yanked open the tweaked door and reached inside. The driver thrust a handgun at him- thhhup -and he not only saw the muzzle flash but also smelled it.
        He felt no consequence in the instant of the shot, too focused on the struggle for the gun to be able to assess whether he’d been hit or not. He swore he felt the second shot part his hair, and then he had the pistol.
        At once flinging the weapon away into the dark, he would have dragged the driver out of the Buick, but the bastard came without coaxing, barreling into him. They both went down harder than gravity required, Ethan on the bottom, rapping the back of his head against the quartzite cobblestones.

        [586] On impact, when the door flew open, Fric found himself sliding off the seat, out of the Buick, onto the puddled pavement. Flat on his back, the worst of all positions when he couldn’t breathe.
        Rain falling in his eyes blurred his vision, but he worried less about the blurring than about a crimson tint that seeped across the night, making rubies of the raindrops.
        His thoughts clouded to match his vision-too little oxygen to the brain-but he was clearheaded enough to realize that the effect of the crap he had inhaled might be wearing off. He tried to move, and could, but not with any grace or control, rather like a hooked fish flopping on a shore.
        On his side, he had more ability to clench and relax his