Plymouth up a little, letting her walk. The tuned Spoiler engine purred
like the cat had purred on his lap earlier this evening. Halston grinned at
the simile. They moved between frost-white November fields full of
skeleton cornstalks at a little over seventy.
The cat was in a double-thickness shopping bag, tied at the top with
heavy twine. The bag was in the passenger bucket seat. The cat had
been sleepy and purring when Halston put it in, and it had purred
through the entire ride. It sensed, perhaps, that Halston liked it and felt
at home with it. Like himself, the cat was a one-stick. Strange hit,
Halston thought, and was surprised to find that he was taking it
seriously as a hit. Maybe the strangest thing about it was that he actually
liked the cat, felt a kinship with it. If it had managed to get rid of those
three old crocks, more power to it...especially Gage, who had been
taking it to Milford for a terminal date with a crew-cut veterinarian who
would have been more than happy to bundle it into a ceramic-lined gas
chamber the size of a microwave oven. He felt a kinship but no urge to
renege on the hit. He would do it the courtesy of killing it quickly and
well. He would park off the road beside one of those November-barren
fields and take it out of the bag and stroke it and then snap its neck and
sever its tail with his pocketknife.
And, he thought, the body I'll bury honorably, saving it from the
scavengers. I can't save it from the worms, but I can save it from the
maggots.
He was thinking these things as the car moved through the night like a
dark blue ghost and that was when the cat walked in front of his eyes,
up on the dashboard, tail raised arrogantly, its black-and-white face
turned toward him, its mouth seeming to grin at him.
" Ssssshhhh – " Halston hissed. He glanced to his right and caught a
glimpse of the double-thickness shopping bag, a hole chewed – or
clawed – in its side. Looked ahead again…and the cat lifted a paw and
batted playfully at him. The paw skidded across Halston's forehead. He
jerked away from it and the Plymouth's big tires wailed on the road as it
swung erratically from one side of the narrow blacktop to the other.
Halston batted at the cat on the dashboard with his fist. It was blocking
his field of vision. It spat at him, arching its back, but it didn't move.
Halston swung again, and instead of shrinking away, it leaped at him.
Gage , he thought. Just like Gage –
He stamped the brake. The cat was on his head, blocking his vision
with its furry belly, clawing at him, gouging at him. Halston held the
wheel grimly. He struck the cat once, twice, a third time. And suddenly
the road was gone, the Plymouth was running down into the ditch,
thudding up and down on its shocks. Then, impact, throwing him
forward against his seat belt, and the last sound he heard was the cat
yowling inhumanly, the voice of a woman in pain or in the throes of
sexual climax. He struck it with his closed fists and felt only the
springy, yielding flex of its muscles. Then, second impact. And
darkness.
The moon was down. It was an hour before dawn. The Plymouth lay in
a ravine curdled with groundmist. Tangled in its grille was a snarled
length of barbed wire. The hood had come unlatched, and tendrils of
steam from the breached radiator drifted out of the opening to mingle
with the mist. No feeling in his legs. He looked down and saw that the
Plymouth's firewall had caved in with the impact. The back of that big
Cyclone Spoiler engine block had smashed into his legs, pinning them.
Outside, in the distance, the predatory squawk of an owl dropping onto
some small, scurrying animal. Inside, close, the steady purr of the cat. It
seemed to be grinning, like Alice's Cheshire had in Wonderland.
As Halston watched it stood up, arched its back, and stretched. In a
sudden limber movement like rippled silk, it leaped to his shoulder.
Halston tried to lift his hands to
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