Gwendy’s Final Task

The video attachments located at the bottom of the email are labeled MITCHELL and DERRY. Gwendy knows she should open the Ward Mitchell interrogation first—after all, the fate of the world may rest on its contents—but she can’t help herself. Taking slow and steady breaths, like she’s learned from years of yoga classes, she slides the cursor over to the DERRY file and clicks on it. A window opens in her laptop’s upper right-hand corner. She hits the ENLARGE icon and a surprisingly clear wide-angle view of the intersection of Witcham and Carter Streets fills the screen.

On the right side of the video she can see a couple of run-down houses, window shutters hanging crooked or absent altogether, paint peeling in long, curling strips, brown lawns overgrown even in the middle of December. An old bicycle with a missing rear tire leans against one of the porch railings.

Across the street, kitty-corner from the house with the bike, is an abandoned Phillips 66 gas station, the pumps out front long ago removed. Weeds grow in wild spurts between the cracks of broken pavement. Someone has spray-painted DERRY SUCKS across the faded brick façade. Just beyond the boarded-up office, Gwendy can make out the gated entrance to Bassey Park.

Whoever is filming—Beeson, presumably—has the sound turned on and she can hear the loud undulating whistle of a cold late-season wind blowing across the rooftops. A discarded piece of trash tumbles across the sidewalk—Gwendy’s almost certain it’s a McDonald’s hamburger wrapper—and disappears down the deserted street. It’s half past noon on the day after Thanksgiving, but there’s not a single living soul or automobile in sight.

And then there is.

An old Volkswagen Bug, traveling north on Witcham, putters through the intersection. The driver, an older man with a wild tuft of scraggly white hair and round John Lennon eyeglasses, is looking around like he’s lost. And maybe he is; he’s certainly driving slowly enough. Right behind him, riding the VW’s rear bumper, is a black truck with jacked-up snow tires and a full-sized American flag flapping from a metal pole jutting out of the rear of its double-wide bed. She can hear the throaty boom of the truck stereo’s bass even with the dark-tinted windows closed up tight.

Gwendy has just enough time to take it all in and wonder why in the world is the person filming this? when Ryan appears onscreen. It suddenly feels as if all of the air has been sucked from the room. She bites her lower lip and leans closer to the laptop.

He enters from the bottom right corner of the screen, sauntering along the sidewalk with that long confident stride she remembers so well. He’s wearing his favorite winter coat—a long-ago Christmas gift from Gwendy’s parents—and a red-and-white New England Patriots ski cap. Every once in awhile, he sneaks a glance at the row of nearby houses, but it’s clear that the main focus of his attention is the cell phone he’s carrying in his right hand. He’s studying the display like he’s following directions.

Reaching the corner of Witcham and Carter, he stops with the tips of his LL Beans dangling over the curb. He looks both ways, like an obedient little boy who’s promised his mother to always be careful crossing the street, and then down at his phone again.

And then he starts across.

The Cadillac—a garish shade of purple, obscenely wide and long with a pair of dime-store fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror—slams into him before he reaches the street’s centerline. Gwendy hears the meaty thunk of impact, and then her husband is flying through the air. He hits the pavement and actually bounces, not once but twice, before rolling to an abrupt facedown stop at the opposite side of the intersection. A ragged trail of dark blotches tracks his progress across the roadway.

The Caddy keeps on going without even a flash of its brake lights. It’s not until the next day, while showering, that Gwendy realizes she never once heard the sound of the Cadillac’s engine. She could hear the sewing machine putt-putt-putt of the VW Bug, the angry growl of the black pick-up’s V-8, the bass thud of heavy metal from the truck’s sound system, but when it came to the purple Caddy … nothing. Almost as if it had no motor.

What remained of Ryan’s shattered body lay halfway on the shoulder of Carter Street, his broken legs splayed at grotesque angles atop a narrow strip of dirt and grass separating the curb from the sidewalk. His ski cap, along with one of the boots and wool socks he was wearing had been torn away by the force of the crash. The boot and sock are nowhere to be found, but Gwendy can see the pale pink skin of Ryan’s left foot resting mere inches away from a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign poking out of the frozen ground. The back of Ryan’s head—as caved-in and lopsided as a pumpkin left rotting in a field—no longer resembled that of a human being.