Using a flashlight to freeze sparrows in the barn, then shooting them with BB guns. The black eyes staring.He slipped and fell, crushing frozen cornstalks under the snow, then staggered ahead on his knees, fighting his way to his feet again.
Something in the farmhouse, perhaps a gas main, suddenly exploded upward in a curling mushroom of flame and noise. The silhouettes of the skinheads paused a moment by the sheds, looking back at their handiwork. Dale glanced that way, praying to see flashing red lights, emergency vehicles, Sheriff McKown’s car rushing to the rescue. Everything to the east was dark and lost to sight in the falling snow.
He was still a hundred feet from the barn when he lost his footing in the dark and fell again. Dale hit hard on his right side, and this time the pain was very bad. He got to his knees and looked back at the burning farmhouse, noting but not really thinking about all of his books and other possessions burning in there.
What was the word in the Eddic poem for the hero’s funeral pyre?
Hrot-garmr.“Howling dog.” Flames like a howling dog.
zi-ik-wa UR.BAR.RA ki-sa-at.“Thou art become a wolf.”
Kneeling there, hearing the punks shout and howl off to his right, knowing that he was no hero but just an injured and terrified middle-aged man unused to violence and afraid to die, Dale still wished that he could become a wolf. If he became a wolf, he would rip the throat out of the nearest skinhead before the others killed him. If he became a wolf, he would taste their warm blood even as they killed him.
He did not become a wolf.
Dale had just struggled to his feet again when the huge door to the barn exploded outward, ripped away its steel slide suspension, and seemed to plow through the snow toward him in slow motion. Then the door fell away and Dale saw that it was the huge combine lumbering toward him, the thirty-foot-wide harvesting extension shifting snow aside like a plow from hell, its corn head covers missing so that its open maw revealed picker units with their exposed snapping rolls and lugged gathering chains grinding.
This is the last thing Duane McBride ever saw.
The glassed-in driver’s cab, twelve feet above the whirling blades and flying snow, was illuminated by weak interior lights, and Dale stared at the face of the driver, shifting like a poorly done digital effect in a movie—first Bonheur’s, the oldest skinhead’s, leering face, then the Congden corpse face, then Bonheur’s, then Congden’s. The interior light went out. Dale turned and ran.
Forty-one years earlier, Duane had run deeper into this field and died. Dale swung left, back toward the burning farmhouse and its outbuildings, desperate to put something—anything—between himself and the machine lurching and chewing behind him.
Halfway to the nearest shed, Dale knew that he was not going to make it to the chicken coop and other outbuildings. And the shouting in the darkness there told him where the other skinheads waited. Running only thirty feet in front of the rusted gatherer points and whirling chains and snapper rolls, Dale cut right and lurched through the drifts toward the fueling station. There was a chance, just a chance, that he could climb the support girders around the two hundred–gallon fuel tank, jump from there to the roof of the old generator shed, and leap down to the safety of the other outbuildings from there.
Dale leaped for the metal support trusses, slashed his palms on the rusted metal of the girders, pulled himself up with his feet scrabbling against the big cylindrical fuel tank for leverage, and managed to get ten feet above ground level when the giant combine smashed into the tank, ripped the support girders out of the ground, and drove the whole complex into and through the rear of the generator shed. Dale was thrown fifteen feet into the air, and it was only luck and the mysteries of ballistics that brought him down twenty feet north of the combine rather than headfirst into the churning snapper rolls. As it was, the giant machine lurched several yards further, corn pickers boring into and chewing up the rusted fuel tank while spewing gasoline over the combine and everything around it. Just the inertia of the ancient combine smashed the rear wall of the generator shed to kindling while the corn head’s gathering points spewed back splinters and rusted steel within the geyser of gasoline.
Stunned, the wind knocked completely out of him despite the cushioning effect of the foot of snow he had landed in, Dale lay on his back and watched Bonheur’s face melt into C.J. Congden’s face, both visages leering at him from the high driver’s cab. Dale heard the old transmission grind and the combine backed away from the wreckage, the fuel tank still stuck on the corn picker points like a rust-colored rat in a terrier’s teeth. The combine ground another thirty feet back, shaking and scraping the skewered tank off its snapper rolls, and then turned back in Dale’s direction.
Dale had crawled a few feet north, away from the huge circle of fuel-reddened snow, but he knew that he did not have the strength to rise and run again. He barely made it to his knees to face the giant machine.
The combine’s harvesting lights snapped on, pinning Dale in their merciless beams.
“Not this time,” gasped Dale. He pulled Clare’s gift of the Dunhill lighter from his pocket and flicked it. It lighted at once. Almost wearily, Dale tossed the lighter six feet into the circle of soaked snow.
The flames leaped ten feet high at once, roaring in a circle around the combine, leaping up the soaked snapper rolls and climbing like blazing ivy to the high grain bin and soaked driver’s cab. The glass there blackened and buckled. Then the fire ignited the remaining fuel in the lacerated storage tank, and the explosion lifted the front of the combine five feet in the air while blowing Dale twenty feet in the opposite direction.
Dale rolled in the drifts, using his hands to rub snow on his flash-burned eyebrows and hairline.
For a minute the combine just burned steadily, the flames having not yet reached its own interior fuel tank, melting snow, curling paint, and superheating old steel and iron with a hiss that filled the night.
Hrot-garmr,Dale thought dully. Funeral flames like a howling dog. The heat from the flames was intense, but almost pleasant after all the wet cold.
Then, slowly, amazingly, the door to the flaming cab opened and a human figure engulfed in fire stepped out on the burning grain bin deck and jumped out to lie facedown and burning in the snow.
Dale was vaguely aware of the other skinheads fifty feet or so behind him, silhouettes against the other fire—The Jolly Corner—but none of these forms moved. “Shit,” said Dale and staggered to his feet. He rushed as well as he could to the burning man’s side, dragged him out of the circle of burning fuel, and threw snow on the back of the man’s burning jacket and flesh until the flames were smothered. He rolled the man over. Skinhead Lester Bonheur’s features were burned red down to the muscle layer, and his eyes were flickering as if from an epileptic fit.
On his knees next to him, Dale sagged backward and shouted to the unmoving skinheads back by the sheds, “For God’s sake, go for an ambulance.” None of them answered or moved.
The burned shape in front of him seemed to gain mass, rolled over, and got to its knees. “It looks like I have to do this myself,” hissed the corpse of C.J. Congden and lunged at Dale, knocking him onto his back and grabbing him by the throat.
Dale’s gasping breath was visible in the air as he clawed at Congden’s tightening fingers. No breath came from Congden’s broken, open maw. The thing was terribly strong, its rotted mass heavy on him, and Dale felt what was left of his own strength slipping away with the last of his breath.