Stinger

by Robert McCammon

It was hunchbacked, a grotesque mockery of a human being, and as it got nearer the boy could see a grin of needles.

It was the boy’s usual roost when he slept out here, and from this vantage point he could see the edges of his world.

The Bob Wire Club was the only place in town making money anymore. Beer and whiskey were mighty potent painkillers.

Maybe it was easier to kick Mexican ass than to let yourself think too much,

The future was a place he avoided thinking about,

Soon those alarm clocks would go off, shocking the sleepers into another day;

He figured the old man didn’t even know he hadn’t come home last night, wouldn’t have cared anyway. All his father needed was a bottle and a place to sleep it off.

The scorpion stood its ground, and Cody lifted his boot to smash the little bastard to eternity.

Anyway, there was too much death in the air today, and Cody decided not to add to it.

Out on Highway 67, once he was far beyond Inferno, he could coax the engine up to seventy, and there were few things he enjoyed better than its husky growl and the wind hissing past his ears.

It was at times like that, when he was alone and depending on no one but himself, that Cody felt the most free.

Because he knew depending on people freaked your head. In this life, you were alone and you...

Cody glanced at the straight line of Highway 67, and he vowed that very soon, maybe right after Graduation Day, he was going to hit that damned road and keep on riding, following the telephone poles north, and he would never look back at what he was leaving.

The sun lay hot and red in the east, and another day had begun in Inferno.

“Bacon’ll get cold,” he answered. His accent was the unhurried drawl of east Texas, whereas Jessie’s was west Texas’s gritty twang.

Eleven years, and tomorrow was his final day. After the senior class walked out at last period, it would be over. And what haunted him, day after day, was the realization that he could recall maybe fifteen kids who’d escaped the Great Fried Empty.

The Great Fried Empty could suck the brains out of a kid’s skull and replace it with dope smoke, could bum out the ambition and dry up the hope, and what almost killed Tom was the fact that he’d fought it for eleven years but the Great Fried Empty had always been winning.

The harsh desert sun had added lines to Jessie’s face, but she possessed a strong, natural beauty that required no aid from jars and tubes.

She got her sunglasses and a baseball cap, stopped in the kitchen to fill up two canteens because you never knew what might happen in the desert,

Check six? she thought as she and Stevie went out into the already-searing sunlight. Whatever happened to a simple ’Bye, Mom? Nothing made her feel more like a fossil, at thirty-four, than not understanding her own son’s language.

“No sir. Quiet as a whore in church.”