Dess blinked as she took in the sight: instead of throwing Melissa through the windshield, the pink Cadillac had maintained its momentum.
“Is she okay in there?” Flyboy asked.
Rex nodded. “She’s fine. As I suspected, the rip brings everything into the blue time, not just people. I figured if dead leaves could still fall, then dead metal would cross over too.”
“It’s awfully lucky you figured right.” Dess didn’t much care for Melissa anymore, but it wasn’t like she wanted her back in the hospital. Her current scars were creepy enough.
“She was wearing a seat belt,” Rex said calmly.
“Wait a minute, Rex,” Dess said. “How did you know there was going to be an eclipse?”
He was silent for a moment, his violet eyes narrowing. “There’s a pattern. I can see when they’re coming, all of them between now and Samhain. This one should last for a while longer.”
“You can see a pattern?” Dess cried. “Then write it down for me.”
He shook his head. “I can’t express it in numbers, not without my head exploding. But she can give it to you.” He pointed toward the Cadillac.
The driver’s side door opened, and Melissa got out shakily, grinning from ear to ear. “That was cool!”
Dess shook her head. No way was Melissa touching her again.
“I thought you were afraid of driving fast,” Jessica said.
The bitch goddess shrugged. “You have to face your fears to conquer them, Jess. That’s what Rex has been telling me lately.”
“You two are both nuts,” Dess said softly.
Rex raised an eyebrow. “This experiment wasn’t just for kicks, Dess. We had to make sure that when midnight falls on Samhain, it won’t kill everyone who happens to be in a car. Which is one less thing to worry about.”
Everyone was quiet for a second, and Dess realized she hadn’t even thought about that. If the rip really did expand to consume a million people, and only one percent of them were driving at midnight, that would have been ten thousand Melissas going through their windshields all at once.
She swallowed. This thing just got bigger and bigger the more she thought about it.
“So cars are okay,” Flyboy said, pushing himself up into the air. “But what about planes?”
Rex thought for a moment. “Small aircraft can do dead-stick landings. But the big airliners will be a problem.”
“We could phone in bomb threats to all the airports on Halloween,” Jonathan suggested from above.
“Bomb threats?” Jessica cried. “Wait a second, Rex. Why are we even talking about all this? Didn’t you say we were going to try to prevent Samhain? I thought the point was to make sure that half of Oklahoma doesn’t get sucked into the blue time.”
Rex took a slow breath, then shook his head. “We can try to stop some of what’s going happen—the worst accidents, some of the panic. We can prevent most of the unnecessary deaths.”
“The ‘unnecessary’ deaths, Rex?” Dess said. “Are you saying that some deaths are necessary?”
He fixed her with a cold stare. “The predators are coming back, Dess. We have to get used to the fact that we can’t save everyone.”
She stared back at him. This new darkling-infected Rex seemed perfectly happy thinking the unthinkable. The old Rex would have been appalled by the thought of one death, but here he was, talking about thousands like it was just the Bixby Tigers losing again.
“All we can do is follow the old traditions,” Melissa said. She was leaning against Rex, her legs still unsteady after her maniacal ride.
“Like what?” Dess asked. “Dressing up in costumes?”
“Be my guest,” Rex said. “But that’s not the tradition I was thinking about. We have to organize people, bring them together and teach them how to protect themselves. In the meantime we have to keep the darklings away as long as we can.” He looked at Jessica. “Maybe that’s why you’re here.”
“Why I’m where?” said Jessica.
Rex’s eyes narrowed. “Here in Bixby, Jessica. Here on earth. You’re the flame-bringer, after all, and we’re going to need a really big bonfire.”
Rex had brought three experiments for the rip.
First he had Jessica light a candle and step away from it. Normally it would have sputtered out when she took her hand away—without the flame-bringer, fire couldn’t exist in the blue time.
Yet as Jessica stepped back, first one yard, then a few more, then finally walking to the other side of the glowing red boundary, the candle stayed alight. Her eyes widened. The rip really did have different rules. Like the pink Cadillac, a fire would keep going once it was started.
“That’s the price the darklings pay for making the blue time weaker,” Rex said. “If normal people can move through the rip, so can flame.”
“So anyone can start a fire?” Dess asked.
“I doubt that.” Rex flicked his lighter a few times; it didn’t even make a spark. But when he held down its button and placed its jet of gas to the candle, it came back alight. He smiled, lifting the tiny yet blinding flame. “But once Jessica’s started it, a fire can spread on its own. People can pass it to each other.”
“Whoa, Jess,” Jonathan said. “See if your flashlight works the same way.”
Jessica waited until all their eyes were covered, then whispered Enlightenment’s name and switched it on. Squinting through her fingers, Dess saw its white beam cut through the blue time in a blinding wedge.
But when Jess put it on the tracks and stepped away from it, the light sputtered and died.
“I didn’t think so,” Rex said. “The chemical reaction in a battery is too complicated to sustain itself—like a car engine. But if Jessica lights a bunch of torches, we can protect a lot of people at once.”
“Yeah, eventually. But this happens at midnight, Rex,” Jonathan said. “People will be scattered all over Bixby or however far the rip spreads. So how do we organize everyone without radio or phones?”
“We don’t organize everyone, Jonathan. We save who we can.”
They were all silent for a moment.
Dess realized that an awful feeling was growing in her stomach. For the first time she was starting to take this end-of-the-world thing seriously. This wasn’t like saving one little kid. The lives of uncountable strangers depended on the five of them.
How many people could one darkling eat in a night? How many darklings were there altogether? The math almost made her head spin. Numbers were one thing when they were abstract: coordinates or computer bits or seconds between now and midnight. But when they represented human lives, the thought of all those numerals in a row suddenly became obscene.
Yet Rex stood there, calmly planning the long midnight.
“First we’ll need a way to get the maximum number of people awake,” he was saying. “Then we should create some sort of signal that’s visible from all over town. Hopefully that will gather people together. And finally, we’ll need a way to defend them all from the darklings.”
Rex produced a bottle rocket. “I was thinking fireworks might do all three things at once.”
Dess nodded. Rex might be cold-blooded about this, but at least he was making sense. When Jessica had first discovered her talent, she’d tried to shoot Roman candles in the blue time out of curiosity, but the flaming balls always sputtered out after flying a few feet. Inside the rip, though, they would keep burning—an instant antidarkling flamethrower.
Jessica was just standing there, looking stunned by what they were talking about. But when Rex stuck the rocket’s stick into the gravel, she got herself together. Kneeling, she lit the fuse, then stepped back as the blinding sparkles made their way up into its tail….