Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop Read Free

road dropped suddenly away beneath them, the hulking sedan would magically lift from the ground like the pirate ship rising from the Blue Lagoon. Then, for one eternal moment, Kathryn would float weightless above the seat, above the car, above even the gigantic town of Rayford itself. It was the longest two seconds in the universe, an entire world within a world, a glimpse of eternity—and Kathryn was not about to let her father forget about it.
    “Faster, Daddy! Faster!”
    The signs flashed past like confetti now, and the code of dots and dashes on the pavement blurred together into yellow and white ribbons streaming out behind the car. She heard the growling complaint from the aging engine and the rising pitch of her father’s voice.
    “Here it comes, sweetheart! Get ready!”
    Zachary Sloan glared at the center of the intersection and shot defiant glances at the great white blur closing fast from the left.
    Two hundred yards …
    One hundred yards …
    Fifty yards from the intersection, Sloan slammed his hand down on the horn in a final act of anger and defiance and was instantly answered by the shattering bellow of the diesel’s great air horn. Both vehicles went raging, shouting, screaming into the center of the intersection.
    The Ford arrived a split second before the flatbed. The left headlight of the pickup smashed into the right fender of the diesel just behind the bumper. The hood sprung open and was instantly ripped away in the wind. The pickup spun right across the front of the flatbed, heaved onto its side, and continued through the intersection amid a shower of sparks and the deafening scream of metal on concrete.
    The force of the impact spun the diesel cab fully to the left, jackknifed at a right angle to the flatbed behind it. The aging retreads of the diesel skidded, then stretched, then exploded into shards of smoking rubber. The bare metal wheel rims dug into the pavement, and the cab slammed onto its side with astounding force. The flatbed trailer, sheared from its shattered cab, lurched right, then left, then right once again—and then flipped side-over-side down the middle of County Road 42.
    The hives that were not strapped down seemed to float in the air for an instant before crashing to the roadway below. Those that were bound to the bed of the trailer were whipped to the pavement as the flatbed began its roll. In both cases, the hives did not seem to simply break or crush or fall apart; they literally exploded. Eighty-five hives had lined that trailer, each weighing almost a hundred pounds. As each hive struck the roadway, thebrittle drawer-like supers separated, then splintered into a thousand pieces, vomiting a tangle of wood, wire, wax, and honey. At first, the bees seemed to spill out from the wreckage like pouring gravel. Then, slowly, the million-or-so that survived the crash began to rise into the sky in a black, boiling, living cloud of venom.
    Pete sat upright in the center of the road.
    All three boys stared wild-eyed, gawking at the carnage spewed out on the road behind them and the slowly rising cloud above. Almost simultaneously they remembered—and they turned back again to see the flash of the green Bel Air less than a quarter of a mile away.
    Andy and Jimmy dropped to the roadway and Pete scrambled to his feet. All three boys stood jumping, shrieking, and waving their arms in frantic, futile arcs.
    “There they are!” Kathryn’s father called to the backseat. “All three of them, waving their hellos!” He lay on the horn and shoved the accelerator to the floor.
    The nose of the sedan tipped upward as they reached the rise. Kathryn heard the whine of the engine as the wheels spun free of the ground, and she felt the lug of the tires as they dropped away below the car. Then at last came the glorious moment when she floated free of the car—or was the car falling away from her? It didn’t matter. To Kathryn, it was the sacred moment when she rose from the dead and ascended