Different Seasons - Stephen King [210]
'Jeezis!' Vern screamed in a high, fainting voice. 'Oh my Jeezis Chrise, lookit
that!'
I looked in the direction Vern was pointing and saw a blue-white fireball bowling its way up the lefthand rail of the GS&WM tracks, crackling and hissing for all the world like a scalded cat. It hurried past us as we turned to watch it go,
dumbfounded, aware for the first time that such things could exist. Twenty feet beyond us it made a sudden -pop!!-and just disappeared, leaving a greasy smell of ozone behind.
'What am I doin' here, anyway?' Teddy muttered.
'What a pisser!' Chris exclaimed happily, his face upturned. This is gonna be a pisser like you wouldn't believer But I was with Teddy. Looking up at that sky gave me a dismaying sense of vertigo. It was more like looking into some deeply mysterious marbled gorge.
Another lightning-bolt crashed down, making us duck. This time the ozone smell was hotter, more urgent. The following clap of thunder came with no perceptible pause at all.
My ears were still ringing from it when Vern began to screech triumphantly: 'THERE! THERE HE IS! RIGHT THERE! I SEE HIM!'
I can see Vern right this minute, if I want to-all I have to do is sit back for a minute and close my eyes. He's standing there on the lefthand rail like an explorer on the prow of his ship, one hand shielding his eyes from the silver stroke of lightning that has just come down, the other extended and pointing.
We ran up beside him and looked. I was thinking to myself: Vern's imagination just ran away with him, that's all. The suckers, the heat, now this storm his eyes are dealing wild cards, that's all. But that wasn't what it was, although there was a split second when I wanted it to be. In that split second I knew I never wanted to see a corpse, not even a runover woodchuck.
In the place where we were standing, early spring rains had washed part of the embankment away, leaving a gravelly, uncertain four-foot drop-off. The railroad maintenance crews either not yet gotten around to it in their yellow diesel-operated repair carts, or it had happened so recently it hadn't yet been reported. At the bottom of this washout was a marshy, mucky tangle of undergrowth that smelled bad. And sticking out of a wild clockspring of blackberry brambles was a single pale white hand.
Did any of us breathe? I didn't.
The breeze was now a wind-harsh and jerky, coming at us from no particular direction, jumping and whirling, slapping at our sweaty skins and open pores. I hardly noticed. I think part of my mind was waiting for Teddy to cry out Paratroops over the side!, and I thought if he did that I might just go crazy. It would have been better to see the whole body, all at once, but instead there was only that limp outstretched hand, horribly white, the fingers limply splayed, like the hand of a drowned boy. It told us the truth of the whole matter. It explained every graveyard in the world. The image of that hand came back to me every time I heard or read of an atrocity. Somewhere, attached to that hand, was the rest of Ray Brower.
Lightning flickered and stroked. Thunder ripped in behind each stroke as if a drag race had started over our heads.
'Sheeeee ' Chris said, the sound not quite a cuss word, not quite the country version of shit as it is pronounced around a slender stem of timothy grass when the baler breaks down-instead it was a long, tuneless syllable without meaning; a sigh that had just happened to pass through the vocal cords.
Vern was licking his lips in a compulsive sort of way,