Uncollected Stories 2003 by Stephen King Page A

push it off. His arms wouldn't move.
Spinal shock, he thought. Paralyzed. Maybe temporary. More likely
permanent. The cat purred in his ear like thunder.
    "Get off me," Halston said. His voice was hoarse and dry. The cat
tensed for a moment and then settled back. Suddenly its paw batted
Halston's cheek, and the claws were out this time. Hot lines of pain
down to his throat. And the warm trickle of blood.
    Pain.
Feeling.
He ordered his head to move to the right, and it complied. For a
    moment his face was buried in smooth, dry fur. Halston snapped at the
cat. It made a startled, disgruntled sound in its throat – yowk! – and
leaped onto the seat. It stared up at him angrily, ears laid back.
    "Wasn't supposed to do that, was I?" Halston croaked. The cat opened
its mouth and hissed at him. Looking at that strange, schizophrenic face,
Halston could understand how Drogan might have thought it was a
hellcat. It –
    His thoughts broke off as he became aware of a dull, tingling feeling
in both hands and forearms. Feeling. Coming back. Pins and needles.
The cat leaped at his face, claws out, spitting. Halston shut his eyes and
opened his mouth. He bit at the cat's belly and got nothing but fur. The
cat's front claws were clasped on his ears, digging in. The pain was
enormous, brightly excruciating. Halston tried to raise his hands. They
twitched but would not quite come out of his lap. He bent his head
forward and began to shake it back and forth, like a man shaking soap
out of his eyes. Hissing and squalling, the cat held on. Halston could
feel blood trickling down his cheeks. It was hard to get his breath. The
cat's chest was pressed over his nose. It was possible to get some air in
by mouth, but not much. What he did get came through fur. His ears felt
as if they had been doused with lighter fluid and then set on fire.
    He snapped his head back and cried out in agony – he must have
sustained a whiplash when the Plymouth hit. But the cat hadn't been
expecting the reverse and it flew off. Halston heard it thud down in the
back seat. A trickle of blood ran in his eye. He tried again to move his
hands, to raise one of them and wipe the blood away. They trembled in
his lap, but he was still unable to actually move them. He thought of the
.45 special in its holster under his left arm. If I can get to my piece, kitty,
the rest of your nine lives are going in a lump sum .
    More tingles now. Dull throbs of pain from his feet, buried and surely
shattered under the engine block, zips and tingles from his legs – it felt
exactly the way a limb that you've slept on does when it's starting to
wake up. At that moment Halston didn't care about his feet. It was
enough to know that his spine wasn't severed, that he wasn't going to
finish out his life as a dead lump of body attached to a talking head.
    Maybe I had a few lives left myself.
Take care of the cat. That was the first thing. Then get out of the
wreck – maybe someone would come along, that would solve both
problems at once. Not likely at 4:30 in the morning on a back road like
this one, but barely possible. And –
And what was the cat doing back there?
He didn't like having it on his face, but he didn't like having it behind
him and out of sight, either. He tried the rearview mirror, but that was
useless. The crash had knocked it awry and all it reflected was the
grassy ravine he had finished up in.
A sound from behind him, like low, ripping cloth.
Purring.
Hellcat my ass. It's gone to sleep back there.
And even if it hadn't, even if it was somehow planning murder, what
could it do? It was a skinny little thing, probably weighed all of four
pounds soaking wet. And soon ... soon he would be able to move his
hands enough to get his gun. He was sure of it. Halston sat and waited.
Feeling continued to flood back into his body in a series of
pins-andneedles incursions. Absurdly (or maybe in instinctive reaction
to his close brush with death) he