Freezer Burn Read Free Page A

“Fuck!”
    Bill looked over his shoulder.
    Lights flashing. A moment later, sirens. Chaplin’s body bounced around the back seat like a jumping bean, the Roman candle sticking out of his face, his dead hand clutching it as if holding a telescope to his eye.
    “Goddamn,” Fat Boy said. “Cop turned around. Someone must have given them a make on the car.”
    “Probably one of my nosy neighbors ’cross the highway,” Bill said. “Show them fuckers you know how to drive.”
    Fat Boy put his foot to the floor. The car leaped. A curve showed up in the headlights, Fat Boy made it, threw dirt as he went. The dirt reflected in the red tail-lights like a bloody mist. In the back seat, Chaplin hopped about as if excited.
    The cop car made the turn too. When Bill looked back the cop car was rocking left and right, but it fell in line and jumped close to them.
    “Go! Go! Go!” Bill yelled.
    There was a big curve coming up. Fat Boy went around it, pedal to the metal, nose forward, ears back, balls sucked up tight as mad baby fists.
    They made the curve and the cop didn’t. His car went through a barbed wire fence and smacked a tree. The front turned butter soft and looked like an accordion. Steam hissed out from under the crumpled hood and made a white mushroom cloud.
    Just as they approached another curve, Bill looked back and was amazed to see the cop car back away from the tree and onto the road. It wasn’t exactly motoringlike it had a rocket in its ass, but it was coming. The hood flapped up and down like a gossip’s tongue.
    “He ain’t got a prayer and a sandwich now,” Fat Boy said, laughed, and they made the curve. Then there was a clunk and a grind and a bumpty-bumpty, bumpty-bump.
    Fat Boy said, “Goddamn muffler’s hangin’. But we ain’t gonna let that stop us.”
    Around another curve they went, and the muffler swung to the left and came loose. But not before the rear tire met it and the muffler snapped and the end of it drove into the rubber and the tire blew. The Chevy, going about eighty, spun around in the road and left it, knocked through a barbed wire fence, rampaged over a few small trees, slapped the hell out of a couple of unsuspecting frogs, then sailed out into the water.
    It was odd the way that car went in. All white and shiny, spinning around and around, almost levitating across the top of the water, then suddenly it nosed down fast. Then, as if it were a cork, it bobbed in the swamp a moment next to a blackened cypress stump.
    Creatures in the water and the woods moved. The car gave off steam. The water rippled way out from the impact and frogs croaked and hopped away. The moon’s image lay full and huge on the swampy water, as if God had dropped a greasy dinner plate. Inside, Chaplin had been tossed over the seat to join Bill and Fat Boy. Bill pushed Chaplin aside, put his foot on the corpse’s head, climbed over the seat, and rolled down a back window as the Chevy began to slide into the gloom.
    Bill climbed out. Fat Boy, wearing a steering wheel tattoo on his forehead next to the mountainous knot he had acquired earlier, fought the floating body of Chaplin off, and followed.
    Moments after they abandoned the Chevy, the car went down, along with the firecrackers, the money, and Chaplin.
    Bill and Fat Boy swam in the warm water. The water was thick as good beef stew. Underwater weeds and vines grabbed at their ankles and tried to hold them. They swam back toward the road. But as they did, the injured deputy’s car, hissing smoke from under its hood, pulled up and stopped and the deputy, his cowboy hat twisted to one side on his head, got out, pulled a pistol, and started shooting at them.
    Bill and Fat Boy turned and swam and clawed in the other direction. The shots hopped all around them, like corn popping. They kept swimming, made some thick grass that grew high out of the water, grabbed hold of it and pulled themselves into a maze of cattails, then onto a spur of land and into a nest