By the time he hit Route 924 he was doing 80, able to think of nothing else but tossing Mrs. Dawson into the passenger seat and covering her with a blanket.
You must get a blanket when you grab her. Wrap her up and carry her. Do not risk her being seen.
Then he saw the bright strobe of a police light in his rearview and heard the ‘wew-wew’ that commanded him to pull over. As he eased her over to the shoulder a fire engine with a dozen firemen piled on the back, gripping the ladders with white knuckles and a vacant gleam in their eyes, rushed by screaming like a baritone banshee.
The world has gone insane.
Sam Waterford lowered his window as two cops, one a man, one a woman, walked up to either side of his car.
At least one guy and gal are acting normally today.
“Your I.D. and Your Registration Please, Sir”
Sam looked up at the big clean-cut cop and noticed a slightly less manic version of that vacant look in his eye.
Maybe I can reach him.
The cop’s voice now had a slight edge to it. “Your I.D. and your registration please, sir.”
He reached for his wallet and noticed, with a chilling pang of horror that it was not in his back pocket.
Christ, my pants have been on and off so many times—the car door was yanked open and the officer was dragging him out by his short hair, which really hurt.
“Put your hands on the car, sir!”
The cop then kicked him on the inside of each ankle and began frisking him. He looked pleadingly over the roof into the eyes of the female cop who was wearing sun glasses. She tilted her glasses back and he could see a deep fright in her bloodshot eyes—then the fire truck hit her going ninety and the front of the thundering blaring box-like vehicle with the crazed firemen clinging on vacantly was engulfed in a pink mist.
Oh God!
His right wrist was being pulled behind his back by the big cop.
Oh fuck this!
He pivoted back on his right heel and then slammed his right knee up into the groin. The cuff clicked on his right wrist even as the big cop sunk to his knees with a groan. Sam slammed his knee into the man’s face and felt a gooey wet sensation as the nose gave. The cop fell back with blood gushing out of his nose and Sam stomped on the man’s throat.
Oh God you probably killed a cop!
Sam leaped into the Porsche and punched it, headed for Box Hill South by instinct, the names of the roads, and the business names on the signs not even known to him any longer, as if he raced through the ruins of a long dead world whose hieroglyphics he failed to comprehend.
He banked through an intersection near the highway ramp that was pandemonium.
Horns honked.
An old lady lay under the wheels of an SUV, screaming, while an old man rocked the rear wheels back and forth over her legs.
A young girl was running into the grassy median pursued by her father who had a demonic gleam in his eyes.
A female UPS driver was being dragged from her panel truck by an electrician who had pulled his van in front of her vehicle.
A bus load of old ladies on some kind of field trip had been stopped by two state troopers who were boarding the bus—gun shots rang out from the bus and he floored it, almost getting clipped by an eighteen wheeler that was reeling out of control off the freeway ramp.
This is hell-on-earth!
