He swung open the heavy glass door and stepped into the shabby truck stop diner just as the white girl seated in the booth directly in front of him was jamming a steak knife into her milky throat, her streaking right hand jamming it hard.

M's vision traced the silvery flash and he saw the point of the short, serrated blade passing fast and burying deeply into the girl's thin, corded neck. Then the first terrible spurt and shock of bright blood spurting thin and spindly, frenetic; the sudden initial spiderweb-thin strands of blood looping and splattering and quickly billowing into sodden dots falling heavily on the crushed paper napkins, the crusts of wheat toast, the mucous remnants of egg, a bright glistening globe of blood splattering heavily on the chipped dingy plate there before her on the booth's table.

M. froze in the doorway. Without thinking, he made a move for the Device. He felt a rapid shifting and a swirling pause to his right; the fingers of his right hand snapped out straight and rigid from a rapid cracking movement of his right wrist. His extended fingers pointed through the restaurant's long wall of plate glass windows, pointing out into the night, toward the trucks lined up at the pumps of the fueling station.

The heavy glass door of the restaurant in its closing motion fell into him, banging into his backside, forcing him stumbling toward the girl in the booth, where the scene had changed. The white girl now sat, softly crying, tears streaming down from the dark circles under her pale gray eyes staring into the plate. He focused on the tears, the clear fluid consistency of them, and as he did so, her tears grew in volume, but she did not utter a sound. Not a sob or even a sniffle. The knife was not there.

***

Outside by the filling station where the big trucks sat idling, a scream pierced the night. One of the truckers, a dingy, heavy man with frizzy black hair and enormous black mustaches, fell wailing from his perch in his cab, dumping heavily from behind the wheel to kibbey and claw on the battered concrete fueling platform, his pudgy hands scrabbling at the black plastic handle of the steak knife he'd just jammed through his government-issue olive drab wool dickey collar and directly into his carotid artery for no reason he could think of. His blood making a purple sponge of the dickey under dun-colored lights of the station.

The other truckers howled at the spectacle. A tall one with waxy yellow skin and a wild yellow shock of hair ran over from where he'd stood smoking and gamboling by the pumps, double-stepping fast in a wide capering gait, to the unbridled vocal delight of his now rapidly assembling colleagues. Unbuttoning his fly as he did so, he pissed on the dying man as he died. One by one, the rest of the truckers open their flies to follow in suit, to take part in the hallowed ritual.

***

Anxiety in the trees, the bare winter trees, the spindly, spidery filaments of their branches. A solitary house in a barren field. This is where we must go, thought M., this is where I must take her. Snow falling, softly plummetting from a hard white sky, the same color as the white girl's hair, her white skin the exact hue of the gently falling snow, a dry, papery snow softly filling in the barren field's yellow scrub.