Thinner - Stephen King [81]
The man in the vest grunted, Billy was swung like a sack of grain (a very underweight sack of grain), and then for a moment he was flying. He landed in the timothy grass beyond the parked vehicles with a thud. This hurt a good deal more than the hole in his hand; there were no padded places on him anymore, and he felt his bones rattle inside his body like loose stakes in an old truck. He tried to get up and at first could not. White lights danced in front of his eyes. He groaned.
Samuel Lemke came toward him. The boy's handsome face was smooth and deadly and expressionless. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out something - Billy at first thought it was a stick and only recognised it for what it was when Lemke unfolded the blade.
He held his bleeding hand out, palm up, and Lemke hesitated. Now there was an expression on his face, one Billy recognized from his own bathroom mirror. It was fear.
His companion muttered something to him.
Lemke hesitated for a moment, looking down at Billy; then he refolded the blade into the knife's dark body. He spat in Billy's direction. A moment later the two of them were gone.
He lay there for a moment, trying to reconstruct everything, to make some sense of it but that was a lawyer's trick, and it would not serve him here in this dark place. His hand was starting to talk very loudly about what had happened to it now, and he thought that very soon it would hurt a lot more. Unless, of course, they changed their minds and came back here for him. Then they might end all hurting in very short order, and forever.
That got him moving. He rolled over, slid his knees up to what was left of his stomach, then paused there a moment with his left cheek pressed against the beaten timothy and his ass in the air while a wave of faintness and nausea rode through him like a breaking wave. When it passed he was able to get to his feet and start up the hill to where his car was parked. He fell down twice on the way. The second time he believed it was going to be impossible to get to his feet again. Somehow -mostly by thinking about Linda, sleeping quietly and blamelessly in her bed - he was able to do it. Now his hand felt as if a dark red infection was pulsing in it and working its way up his forearm toward his elbow.
An endless time later he reached the rental Ford and scrabbled for the keys. He had put them in his left pocket, and so had to reach across his crotch with his right hand to get at them.
He started the car and paused for a moment, his screaming hand lying palm-up on his left thigh like a bird that has been shot. He looked down at the circle of vans and campers and the twinkle of the fire. A ghost of some old song came to him: She danced around the fire to a Gypsy melody/Sweet young woman in motion, how she enchanted me
He lifted his left hand slowly in front of his face. Ghostly green light from the car's instrument panel spilled through the round dark hole in his palm.
She enchanted me, all right, Billy thought, and dropped the car in Drive. He wondered with almost clinical detachment if he would be able to make it back to the Frenchman's Bay Motel.
Somehow, he did.
Chapter Twenty
118
'William? What's wrong?'
Ginelli's voice, which had been deeply blurred with sleep and ready to be angry, was now sharp with concern. Billy had found Ginelli's home number in his address book below the one for Three Brothers. He had dialed it without much hope at all, sure it would have been changed at some point during the intervening years.
His left hand, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay in his lap. It had turned into something like a radio station and was now broadcasting approximately fifty thousand watts of pain - the slightest movement sent it raving up his arm. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Images of crucifixion kept