Throttle (Kindle Single) by Stephen King, Joe Hill Read Free Book Online

swerve was only reflex, Laughlin trying to get away from a thrown object. But it was enough to save his life, because Little Boy did its thing before the driver could course-correct and drive Vince Adamson off the road.
    The cab lit up in a vast white flash, as if God Himself had bent down to take a snapshot. Instead of swerving back to the left, LAUGHLIN veered away to the right, first back into the lane of Route 6 bound for Show Low, then beyond. The tractor flayed the guardrail on the right-hand side of the road, striking up a sheet of copper sparks, a shower of fire, a thousand Catherine wheels going off at once. Vince thought madly of July 4th, Race a child again and sitting in his lap to watch the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air: sky flares shining in his child’s delighted, inky eyes.
    Then the truck crunched through the guardrail, shredding it as if it were tinfoil. LAUGHLIN nosed over a twenty-foot embankment, into a ravine filled with sand and tumbleweeds. The wheels caught. The truck slewed. The big tanker rammed forward into the back of the cab. Vince had shot beyond that point before he could brake to a stop, but Lemmy saw it all: saw the cab and the tanker form a V and then split apart; saw the tanker roll first and the cab a second or two after; saw the tanker burst open and then blow. It went up in a fireball and a greasy pillar of black smoke. The cab rolled past it, over and over, the cube shape turning into a senseless crumple of maroon that sparked hot shards of sun where bare metal had split out in prongs and hooks.
    It landed with the driver’s window up to the sky, about eighty feet away from the pillar of fire that had been its cargo. By then Vince was running back along his own skid mark. He saw the figure that tried to pull itself through the misshapen window. The face turned toward him, except there was no face, only a mask of blood. The driver emerged to the waist before collapsing back inside. One tanned arm—the one with the tattoo—stuck up like a submarine’s periscope. The hand dangled limp on the wrist.
    Vince stopped at Lemmy’s bike, gasping for breath. For a moment he thought he was going to pass out, but he leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and presently felt a little better.
    “You got him, Cap.” Lemmy’s voice was hoarse with emotion.
    “We better make sure,” Vince said. Although the stiff periscope arm and the hand dangling limp at the end of it suggested that would just be a formality.
    “Why not?” Lemmy said. “I gotta take a piss, anyway.”
    “You’re not pissing on him, dead or alive,” Vince said.
    There was an approaching roar: Race’s Harley. He pulled up in a showy skid stop, killed the engine, and got off. His face, although dusty, glowed with delight and triumph. Vince hadn’t seen Race look that way since the kid was twelve. He had won a dirt-track race in a quarter-midget Vince had built for him, a yellow torpedo with a souped-up Briggs & Stratton engine. Race had come leaping from the cockpit with that exact same expression on his face, right after taking the checkered flag.
    He threw his arms around Vince and hugged him. “You did it! You did it, Dad! You cooked his fucking ass!”
    For a moment Vince allowed the hug. Because it had been so long. And because this was his spoiled son’s better angel. Everybody had one; even at his age, and after all he had seen, Vince believed that. So for a moment he allowed the hug, and relished the warmth of his son’s body, and promised himself he would remember it.
    Then he put his hands against Race’s chest and pushed him away. Hard. Race stumbled backward on his custom snakeskin boots, the expression of love and triumph fading—
    No, not fading. Merging . Becoming the look Vince had come to know so well: distrust and dislike. Quit, why don’t you? That’s not dislike and never was .
    No, not dislike. Hate, bright and glowing.
    All squared away, sir, and fuck you.
    “What was her