Strange Highways by Dean Koontz

the car, the girl was caught in the bright beams. She was no longer tinted red. Her black raincoat hung like a cowled robe, and in its folds, her face and hands were white and gloriously radiant.
    He stared at her for a moment, wondering why he had been brought to her and where they would find themselves by the time this strange night had ended. Then he switched off the headlights.
    The girl stood once more in the lambent light of the flares, lashed by crimson rain.
    After leaning across the seat to lock the passenger door, Joey got out of the Valiant, taking the flashlight and the keys with him. “Whatever’s wrong, I don’t have what’s needed to fix it.” He slammed the driver’s door and locked it as well. “You’re right—the best I can do is give you a lift. Where do you live?”
    “Coal Valley. I was on my way home when the trouble started.”
    “Hardly anyone lives there any more.”
    “Yeah. We’re one of the last three families. It’s almost like a ghost town.”
    Thoroughly soaked and cold to the bone, he was eager to get back to the rental car and switch the heater to its highest setting. But when he met her dark eyes again, he felt more strongly than ever that she was the reason that he had been given another chance to take the road to Coal Valley, as he should have done twenty years ago. Rather than run with her to the shelter of the Chevy, he hesitated, afraid that whatever he did—even taking her home—might be the wrong thing to do, and that in choosing a course of action, he would be throwing away this last, miraculous chance at redemption.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked.
    Joey had been staring at her, half mesmerized, contemplating the possible consequences of his actions. His empty gaze must have disconcerted her every bit as much as the concept of consequences disconcerted him .
    Speaking without thinking, surprised to hear these particular words issuing from himself, he said, “Show me your hands.”
    “My hands?”
    “Show me your hands.”
    The wind sang epithalamion in the trees above, and the night was a chapel in which they stood alone.
    With a look of puzzlement, she held out her delicate hands for his inspection.
    “Palms up,” he said.
    She did as he asked, and her posture made her resemble more than ever the Mother of Heaven entreating all to come unto her, into the bosom of everlasting peace.
    The girl’s hands cupped the darkness, and he couldn’t read her palms.
    Trembling, he raised the flashlight.
    At first her hands were unblemished. Then a faint bruise slowly appeared in the center of each rain-pooled palm.
    He closed his eyes and held his breath. When he looked again, the bruises had darkened.
    “You’re scaring me,” she said.
    “We should be scared.”
    “You never seemed strange.”
    “Look at your hands,” he said.
    She lowered her eyes.
    “What do you see?” he asked.
    “See? Just my hands.”
    The storm wind crying in the trees was the voice of a million victims, and the night was filled with their pathetic pleas for mercy.
    He would have been shaking uncontrollably if he had not been paralyzed by fear. “You don’t see the bruises?”
    “What bruises?”
    Her gaze rose from her hands, and her eyes met his again.
    “You don’t see?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “You don’t feel?”
    In fact, the bruises were not merely bruises any more but had ripened into wounds from which blood began to ooze.
    “I’m not seeing what is,” Joey told her, overcome by dread. “I’m seeing what will be.”
    “You’re scaring me,” she said again.
    She wasn’t the dead blonde in the bloodstained plastic shroud. Under her hood, her face was framed by raven-black hair.
    “But you might end up like her,” he said more to himself than to the girl.
    “Like who?”
    “I don’t know her name. But she wasn’t just an hallucination. I see that now. Not a drunk’s delirium. More than that. She was something … else. I don’t know.”
    The grievous stigmata