Strange Highways by Dean Koontz Page B

her delicate hands, the premonition that the danger to her was increasing with every second they remained at the roadside. He got in behind the wheel, closed the door, and gave her the flashlight.
    “Heat,” she said. “I’m freezing.”
    He was barely aware of being sodden and cold himself. For the moment, numb with wonder, he was sensitive only to the deepening mystery, to the shapes and textures and sounds and smells of the mystical Mustang.
    The keys were in the ignition.
    He started the engine. It had a singular pitch, as familiar to him as his own voice. The sweet, strong sound had such nostalgic power that it lifted his spirits at once. In spite of the flat-out weirdness of what was happening to him, in spite of the fear that had dogged him ever since he’d driven into Asherville the previous day, he was filled with a wild elation.
    The years seemed to have fallen away from him. All the bad choices that he’d made were sloughed off. For the moment, at least, the future was as filled with promise as it had been when he was seventeen.
    The girl fiddled with the heater controls, and hot air blasted from the vents.
    He released the emergency brake and put the car in gear, but before he pulled onto the highway, he turned to her and said, “Show me your hands.”
    Clearly uneasy, regarding him with understandable wariness, she responded to his request.
    The nail wounds remained in her palms, visible only to him, but he thought that they had closed somewhat. The flow of blood had diminished.
    “We’re doing the right thing now, getting out of here,” he said, although he knew that he was making little—if any—sense to her.
    He switched on the windshield wipers and drove onto the two-lane blacktop, heading toward the town of Coal Valley. The car handled like the fine-tuned masterpiece that he remembered, and his exhilaration intensified.
    For a minute or two he was entirely possessed by the thrill of driving—just driving —that he had known as a teenager but never since. Deep in the thrall of the Mustang. A boy and his car. Lost to the romance of the road.
    Then he remembered something that she had said when he had first seen the Mustang and had halted before it in shock. Joey? She had called him by his name. Joey? What’s wrong? Yet he was certain that he had never introduced himself.
    “Some music?” she asked with a nervous tremor in her voice, as though his silent, rapturous involvement with the unrolling road was more disturbing to her than anything he’d previously said or done.
    He glanced at her as she leaned forward to switch on the radio. She had pushed back the hood of her raincoat. Her hair was thick and silky and darker than the night.
    Something else she’d said, which had struck him as peculiar, now came back to him: You sure aren’t anything like I thought you’d be. And before that: You never seemed strange.
    The girl twisted the tuning knob on the radio until she found a station playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.”
    “What’s your name?” he asked.
    “Celeste. Celeste Baker.”
    “How did you know my name?”
    The question made her self-conscious, and she was able to meet his eyes only briefly. Even in the dim backwash of light from the instrument panel, he could see that she was blushing.
    “You never noticed me, I know.”
    He frowned. “Noticed you?”
    “You were two years ahead of me at County High.”
    Joey shifted his attention from the dangerously slick roadway longer than he should have, mystified by what she’d said. “What’re you talking about?”
    Staring at the lighted face of the radio, she said, “I was a sophomore when you were a senior. I had a terrible crush on you. I was in despair when you graduated and went off to college.”
    He was barely able to look away from her.
    Sweeping around a curve, the road passed an abandoned mine head and a broken-down tipple that loomed out of the darkness like the half-shattered skeleton of a prehistoric