Needful Things - Stephen King [136]
She had never run in her life, and she wasn't going to start now.
"Hi!" someone screamed thinly at them from across the street.
"Hi! What are you two ladies doing there? You stop it, whatever it is!
You stop it right now or I'll call the police!"
Wilma turned her head in that direction. The moment her attention was diverted, Nettle stepped in and swung the cleaver in a flat, sweeping arc. It chopped into the swell of Wilma's hip and clanged off her pelvic bone, cracking it. Blood flew in a fan. Wilma screamed and flailed backward, sweeping the air in front of her with her knife. Her feet tangled together and she fell to the sidewalk with a thump.
"Hi! Hi!" It was an old woman, standing on her stoop and clutching a mouse-colored shawl to her throat. Her eyes were mag ould it really be Wilma jerzyck on the nified into watery wheels of terror by her spectacles. Now she trumpeted in her clear and piercing old-lady voice: "Help! Police!
Murder! MURRRDURRRRR!"
The women on the corner of Willow and Ford took no notice.
Wilma had fallen in a bloody heap by the stop-sign, and as Nettle staggered toward her, she pushed herself into a sitting position against its post and held the knife in her lap, pointing upward.
"Come on, you bitch," she snarled. "Come for me, if you're coming."
Nettle came, her mouth working. The ball of her intestines swung back and forth against her dress like a misborn fetus. Her right foot struck Wilma's outstretched left foot and she fell forward.
The carving knife impaled her just below the breastbone. She grunted through a mouthful of blood, raised the cleaver, and brought it down. It buried itself in the top of Wilma Jersyck's head with a single dull sound-chonk! Wilma began to convulse, her body bucking and sunfishing under Nettle's. Each buck and thrash drove the carving knife in deeper.
"Killed my doggy," Nettle gasped, spitting a fine mist of blood into Wilma's upturned face with every word. Then she shuddered all over and went limp. Her head honked the post of the stop-sign as it fell forward.
Wilma's jittering foot slid into the gutter. Her good black forchurch shoe flew off and landed in a pile of leaves with its low heel pointing up at the bustling clouds. Her toes flexed once once more and then relaxed.
The two women lay draped over each other like lovers, their blood painting the cinnamon-colored leaves in the gutter.
"MURRRRRDURRRRRR!" the old woman across the street trumpeted again, and then she rocked backward and fell full-length on her own hall floor in a faint.
Others in the neighborhood were coming to windows and opening doors now, asking each other what had happened, stepping out on stoops and lawns, first approaching the scene cautiously, then backing away in a hurry, hands over mouths, when they saw not only what had happened, but the gory extent of it.
Eventually, someone called the Sheriff's Office.
18
Polly Chalmers was walking slowly up Main Street toward Needful Things with her aching hands bundled into her warmest pair of mittens when she heard the first police siren. She stopped and watched as one of the county's three brown Plymouth cruisers belted through the intersection of Main and Laurel, lights flashing and twirling. It was doing fifty already and still accelerating. It was closely followed by a second cruiser.
She watched them out of sight, frowning. Sirens and racing police cruisers were a rarity in The Rock. She wondered what had happened-something a little more serious than a cat up a tree, she supposed. Alan would tell her when he called that evening.
Polly looked up the street again and saw Leland Gaunt standing in the doorway of his shop, also watching after the cruisers with an expression of mild curiosity on his face. Well, that answered one question: he was in. Nettle had never called her back to let her know one way or another. This hadn't surprised