Night Shift - Stephen King [70]
The tiny foot soldiers scattered into the footlocker.
After that, it all happened very rapidly.
Renshaw threw the lighter fluid. The can caught, mushrooming into a licking fireball. The next instant he was reversing, running for the door.
He never knew what hit him.
It was like the thud that a steel safe would make when dropped from a respectable height. Only this thud ran through the entire high-rise apartment building, thrumming in its steel frame like a tuning fork.
The penthouse door blew off its hinges and shattered against the far wall.
A couple who had been walking hand in hand below looked up in time to see a very large white flash, as though a hundred flashguns had gone off at once.
'Somebody blew a fuse,' the man said. 'I guess -'What's that?' his girl asked.
Something was fluttering lazily down towards them; he caught it in one outstretched hand. 'Jesus, some guy's shirt. All full of little holes. Bloody, too.'
'I don't like it,' she said nervously. 'Call a cab, huh, Ralph? We'll have to talk to the cops if something happened up there, and I ain't supposed to be out with you.'
'Sure, yeah.'
He looked around, saw a taxi, and whistled. It's brake lights flared and they ran across to get it.
Behind them, unseen, a tiny scrap of paper floated down and landed near the remains of John Renshaw's shirt. Spiky backhand script read:
Hey, kids! Special in this Vietnam Footlocker!
(For a Limited Time Only)
1 Rocket Launcher
20 Surface-to-Air 'Twister' Missiles
1 Scale-Model Thermonuclear Weapon
* * *
TRUCKS
The guy's name was Snodgrass and I could see him getting ready to do something crazy. His eyes had got bigger, showing a lot of the whites, like a dog getting ready to fight. The two kids who had come skidding into the parking lot in the old Fury were trying to talk to him, but his head was cocked as though he was hearing other voices. He had a tight little potbelly encased in a good suit that was getting a little shiny in the seat. lie was a salesman and he kept his display bag close to him, like a pet dog that had gone to sleep.
'Try the radio again,' the truck driver at the counter said. The short-order cook shrugged and turned it on. He flipped it across the band and got nothing but static.
'You went too fast,' the trucker protested. 'You might have missed something.'
'Hell,' the short-order cook said. He was an elderly black man with a smile of gold and he wasn't looking at the trucker. He was looking through the diner-length picture window at the parking lot.
Seven or eight heavy trucks were out there, engines rumbling in low, idling roars that sounded like big cats purring. There were a couple of Macks, a Hemingway, and four or five Reos. Trailer trucks, interstate haulers with a lot of licence plates and CB whip antennas on the back.
The kids' Fury was lying ~n its roof at the end of long, looping skid marks in the loose crushed rock of the parking lot. It had been battered into senseless junk. At the entrance to the truck stop's turnaround, there was a blasted Cadillac. Its owner stared out of the star-shattered windshield like a gutter fish. Hornrimmed glasses hung from one ear.
Halfway across the lot from it lay the body of a girl in a pink dress. She had jumped from the Caddy when she saw it wasn't going to make it. She had hit running but never had a chance. She was the worst, even though she was face down. There were flies around her in clouds.
Across the road an old Ford station wagon had been slammed through the handrails. That had happened an hour ago. No one had been by since then. You couldn't see the turnpike from the window and the phone was out.
'You went too fast,' the trucker was protesting. 'You oughta -'
That was when Snodgrass bolted. He turned the table over getting up, smashing coffee cups and sending sugar in a wild spray. His eyes were wilder than ever, and his mouth hung loosely and he was blabbering: 'We gotta get outta here we gotta get-outta here we gotta get outta here -'
The kid shouted