Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

“I3u bitch,” he says, but his voice is weak; he is already thinking this isn’t the day, there’s something about her he didn’t quite see until he saw her right up close, some blacknigger hougan he didn’t Jel until now, better wait br another day, better- Then he trips over a root or a rock (perhaps it’s the very rock behind which she will finally come to rest)

and falls down. His cap falls off, showing the big old bald spot on top of his head. His pants split all the way up the seam. And Sara makes a crucial mistake. Perhaps she underestimates Jared Devore’s own very considerable personal jrce, or perhaps she just cannot help herself—the sound of his britches ripping is like a loud fart. In any case she laughs that raucous, smoke-broken laugh which is her trademark. And her laugh becomes her doom.

Devore doesn’t think. He simply gives her the leather from where he lies, big]bet in pegged loggers’ boots shooting out like pistons. He hits her where she is thinnest and most vulnerable, in the ankles. She hollers in shockedpain as the left one breaks,’ she goes down in a tumble, losing her furled parasol out of one hand. She draws in breath to scream again and Jared says from where he is lying, “Don’t let her! Dassn’t let her holler!”

Ben Merrill falls on top of her full-length, all one hundred and ninety pounds of him. The breath she has drawn to scream with whooshes out in a gusty, almost silent sigh instead. Ben, who has never even danced with a woman, let alone lain on top of one like this, is instantly excited by the el of her struggling beneath him. He wriggles against her, laughing, and when she rakes her nails down his cheek he barely J%is it. The way it seems to him, he’s all cock and a yard long. When she tries to roll over and get out from under that way, he rolls with her, lets her be on top, and he is totally surprised when she drives her J3rehead down on his. He sees stars, but he is eighteen years old, as strong as he will ever be, and he loses neither consciousness nor his erection.

Oren Peebles tears away the back of her dress, laughing. “Pig-pile!” he cries in a breathy little whisper, and drops on top of her. Now he is dry-humping her topside and Ben is dry-humping just as enthusiastically from underneath, dry-humping like a billygoat even with the blood pouring down the sides of his head j%m the split in the center of his brow, and she knows that if she can’t scream she is lost. If she can scream and if Kito hears, he’ll run and get help, run and get Reg- But bejre she can try again, ole massa is squatting beside her and showing her a long-bladed knij.