Sour Candy Read Free Page A

had spoken looked at
him. “What was that, buddy?”
    “ In the car. There’s a kid.
She had a kid with her.”
    He looked from Phil to the encroaching
woman, who was still resisting the best efforts of the crowd to
assist her, to the car. “I’m pretty sure—”
    “ Check,” Phil told
him.
    The young man nodded and set off,
giving the woman a wide berth as if afraid she might attack him.
Phil didn’t blame the guy. Despite her injuries, she looked capable
of anything. There was a madness in her eyes of a kind Phil had
never seen before. It chilled him to the core and he knew he would
be seeing it again, all of this, for many sleepless nights to
come.
    “ Ma’am, you should probably
sit down,” an older gentleman said, his wrinkled hands extended to
catch her if she should fall again. She ignored him and the man
moved away, perhaps assuming she was simply going to sit down
beside Phil to await the paramedics. One look at the lightless
holes where her eyes should have been should have told him
otherwise.
    Phil’s body tensed in anticipation of
a blow. He waited to see a knife or a gun, or just her hands hooked
into claws meant to flay him or pluck out his eyes, all while she
screamed at him that he would never understand the humiliation she
had endured at the store.
    Remembering his first and only
encounter with the woman prior to the accident summoned once more
fear for the wellbeing of the child and he looked past the woman to
the young man by the car, who looked back at him and gave a shrug
and a single shake of his head.
    No kid here,
buddy.
    Phil swallowed and looked up into the
terrible face of the wounded woman as she loomed over him. He was
too weak to defend himself, too dazed to understand all that had
happened in the past few minutes, and was happening still.
Somewhere along the line his life had jumped the tracks and he had
found himself in a nightmare, and like the worst kind of nightmare,
he could not move, the people around him too busy chatting,
redirecting traffic, or filming the scene with their iPhones to
realize the very real and possibly dangerous drama taking place on
the edge of it.
    The woman looked down at him. This
close he could see that the side of her face was swelling,
darkening, and her lower lip had split almost down to the cleft in
her chin, exposing the dots of blood on her gums. Nausea rose in
his chest and he prayed he wouldn’t vomit, for surely the violence
of that response would further aggravate his own
injuries.
    “ Don’t,” was all the
self-defense he could muster.
    “ Yours now,” the woman said,
though her split lip made it Yoursh
now , her voice the sound of a rake through
dead leaves, each word forcing the rent in her chin to widen like
some strange vertical second mouth. Blood spattered her feet and
speckled Phil’s shoes.
    “ What is?” he asked, and
flinched as she held out her fist as if she were indicating
solidarity, and then opened it.
    Something fell into his lap and he
grimaced, aware only that whatever it was, it was covered in her
blood. It appeared to be one of her teeth.
    When next he looked up, she had
wandered away from him, off through the crowd to the
intersection.
    The paramedics and the police arrived
within minutes of each other. Any relief Phil might have felt at
escaping a more violent encounter with the woman—assuming the
accident itself had not been violent enough—fled a few moments
later when a shrill scream erupted from the crowd. He heard people
yelling, a car horn, and then a thump and the prolonged screech of
tires as a vehicle struggled to stop after colliding with
something. Phil could not see what happened, his view blocked by
the immobilized vehicles and the crowd that had filled the spaces
between them. The screaming intensified as the police hurried
through the crowd and out into the intersection. A moment later
their radios crackled and Phil learned that the woman from the
store, the woman who had rammed her car into his