Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [199]
'No, Mort! Please! Please, Mort
He flung himself at her, raising the screwdriver over his head and then bringing it down. Amy shrieked and rolled to the left. Pain burned a line across her hip as the screwdriver blade tore her dress and grooved her flesh. Then she was scrambling to her knees, hearing and feeling the dress shred out a long unwinding strip as she did it.
'No, ma'am,' Shooter panted. His hand closed upon her ankle. 'No, ma'am.' She looked over her shoulder and through the tangles of her hair and saw he was using his other hand to work the screwdriver out of the floor. The round-crowned black hat sat askew on his head.
He yanked the screwdriver free and drove it into her right calf.
The pain was horrid. The pain was the whole world. She screamed and kicked backward, connecting with his nose, breaking it. Shooter grunted and fell on his side, clutching at his face, and Amy got to her feet. She could hear a woman howling. It sounded like a dog howling at the moon. She supposed it wasn't a dog. She supposed it was her.
Shooter was getting to his feet. His lower face was a mask of blood. The mask split open, showing Mort Rainey's crooked front teeth. She could remember licking across those teeth with her tongue.
'Feisty one, ain't you?' he said, grinning. 'That's all right, ma'am. You go right on.'
He lunged for her.
Amy staggered backward. The screwdriver fell out of her calf and rolled across the floor. Shooter glanced at it, then lunged at her again, almost playfully. Amy grabbed one of the living-room chairs and dumped it in front of him. For a moment they only stared at each other over it . and then he snatched for the front of her dress. Amy recoiled.
'I'm about done fussin with you,' he panted.
Amy turned and bolted for the door.
He was after her at once, flailing at her back, his fingertips skating skidding down the nape of her neck, trying to close on the top of the dress, catching it, then just missing the hold which would have coiled her back to him for good.
Amy bolted past the kitchen counter and toward the back door. Her right loafer squelched and smooched on her foot. It was full of blood. Shooter was after her, puffing and blowing bubbles of blood from his nostrils, clutching at her.
She struck the screen door with her hands, then tripped and fell full-length on the porch, the breath whooshing out of her. She fell exactly where Shooter had left his manuscript. She rolled over and saw him coming. He only had his bare hands now, but they looked like they would be more than enough. His eyes were stern and unflinching and horribly kind beneath the brim of the black hat.
'I am so sorry, missus,' he said.
'Rainey!' a voice cried. 'Stop!'
She tried to look around and could not. She had strained something in her neck. Shooter never even tried. He simply came on toward her.
'Rainey! Stop!'
'There is no Rainey h -' Shooter began, and then a gunshot rapped briskly across the fall air. Shooter stopped where he was, and looked curiously, almost casually, down at his chest. There was a small hole there. No blood issued from it - at least, not at first - but the hole was there. He put his hand to it, then brought it away. His index finger was marked by a small dot of blood. It looked like a bit of punctuation - the kind which ends a sentence. He looked at this thoughtfully. Then he dropped his hands and looked at Amy.
'Babe?' he asked, and then fell full-length beside her on the porch boards.
She rolled over, managed to get up on her elbows, and crawled to where he lay, beginning to sob.
'Mort?' she cried. 'Mort? Please, Mort, try to say something!'
But he was not going to say anything, and after a moment she let this realization fill her up. She would reject the simple fact of his death again and again over the next few