Lanya pressed his shoulder, gasping.
Denny was saying, “Huh…?” and taking a step backward, and saying, “Huh…?” again. He backed into Kid. His head snapped around, and the expression (the sockets of his eyes were cups of molten brass spilling down his cheeks) was maniacal. “Hey, that’s really…something, ain’t it?” The question was not rhetorical. “Ain’t it something?” He turned to squint again.
“What is it?” Lanya whispered.
“It’s the sun,” Kid said. “Don’t you see, it’s just the sun.”
“My God we’re falling into it…” Lanya caught her breath, released it, then began to cry.
“Aw, come on!” Kid said. “Cut it out, will you—”
“My God…” she whispered and looked again.
He watched her face, open and glistening and shaking.
“Is it dangerous?” Denny whispered. “I’m scared as a motherfucker!”
“It’s getting bigger!” Lanya shrieked, turned, and crouched with her hands against the side of her face.
“No, it’s not,” Kid said. “At least not fast enough to see! Hey, come on!” He hit at her shoulder.
The orchid swung from the chain on his chest, tickling and glittering. It isn’t a dream, Kid thought. I was dreaming already. It isn’t a dream; that would make it…Bands of muscle made his throat so tight it hurt. “Hey!” He pounded his fist on Denny’s back. “Hey, are you okay?”
Eyes wide, and chest all filled up with air, Denny got out, “Yeah!”
Lanya knuckled at her face, pulling creases into it, as she squinted at the great, great, great circle.
“Come on,” Kid reiterated. “Let’s go, huh?”
Denny followed, too quickly to tell why.
Lanya waited till they had gone three steps (Kid looked back), then ran after them, her face bewildered. She caught Kid’s hand. Kid held his other one to Denny who took it tightly. Denny was sweating: “That is something.” (Kid glanced up again.) “I never seen anything like that before in my life.”
Kid looked at Lanya who was watching him oddly, and not where she was going. “We’re not falling into the sun or anything like that,” Kid said. “Otherwise we’d be burned up already. It isn’t even hot.” He looked at Denny, who dropped his eyes from the sky and looked back. “Well, Jesus Christ,” Kid said. “Don’t you think it’s pretty fucking funny?” They didn’t laugh. “I mean, there’s nothing you can do about it.” He did, alone. It felt good.
“What in the world is it?” Lanya repeated. Her voice was calmer.
“I don’t know,” Kid said. “I don’t know what the fuck it is!”
Copperhead, hair like hell-bright rust, sprinted around the corner, and stopped in the middle of the street, boots apart, elbows bent, fists swinging about his hips and belly.
The other scorpions caught up. Among them was Siam and Jack the Ripper and Denny’s girl, but neither Dragon Lady nor Nightmare.
Kid let go their hands and pointed to the sky. “Ain’t that too fucking much!” He laughed, and the tight things in his throat loosened. He came out of the laughter, which had closed his eyes and jerked the small of his back almost into spasm, to find them watching. “Hey, Copperhead! Where you going? You going to come with me?”
“What…” Copperhead began to bellow, then coughed, and there was nothing left in his voice to sustain. “What is that?” His voice was tearfully inane. “Is it some kind of heat lightning?”
Someone else said: “Does that look like lightning to you?”
Kid blinked and wondered. “You better come on with me,” he dared.
“You all right, Kid?” the black in the vinyl vest asked from behind Copperhead, drifting there as Lady of Spain drifted behind him.
“You,” Kid spoke carefully, explaining to them as though it were a lesson, “come on with me!” He took a breath and started across the street. As he stepped up on the curb, a hand caught his shoulder. He looked back; it was Denny, and behind him, Lanya; black scorpions moved around them, passed in front of them.
And footsteps.
He didn’t look back again.
Perhaps, he thought, we are all going to die in moments, obscured by flame and pain. That is why this. And then, perhaps we are not. That is why this in this way.
Scorpions milled and clustered, and he chuckled again.
That was as silly as the blades tickling his chest.
Laughter grasped the back of his tongue to shake it loose. Flesh lay too heavy in his mouth. So it retreated, and heaved itself against the spoke of his spine. I am happy, he thought. And heard somebody else, a white girl (not Lanya; the scorpion, who wore a vest and was called Filament), laughing too.
So he let his own.
It doubled him up, staggering.
Somebody—that was Lanya, and that was, almost, enough to stop him—cried out.
But others laughed.
Somebody else—that was Denny, and when he saw it was, he kept laughing through his puzzlement—ran past, picked up the lid of a garbage can leaning against the curb, and hurled it up the street. It went clattering against a stoop. Denny danced back in the blood-colored light.
Gold nodes ground in the clouds.
Kid reached out, had to lean to catch Lanya’s fingers; his fingers, between hers, pummeled the back of her hand. She came up against his side, and watched in wonder as others pushed ahead on the cobbled street.
“Pick a house,” he told her.
“Huh—?”
“Just pick a house on the street,” he whispered (she bent nearer to hear). “Maybe one you don’t like very much.”
Copperhead bounded past them, flung his arm: The brick-shard flew across the street, shattered the window; Copperhead, full hair and sparse beard furious, turned back, grinning.
“That one?” Kid asked.
“No!” with an urgency he could not follow. “At the top of the hill. That one. There.”
“Okay.” Kid wheeled.
The blond girl in the pea jacket was falling back through the loose blacks. She was crying; she looked at the sky, and cried harder. Denny’s girl put her arm around her, was talking, was making consoling motions with her head. Once she glanced at the great, burning wheel; her face was webbed with rage.
Kid’s hand went up across his cheek. Bristle clawed his palm. “This way!” He waved and turned again. They passed around him as he turned in the light. “Hey, Ripper, Denny, Copperhead!” He caught at the jouncing projector, and thumbed at the bottom pip. “How do you turn this thing on?”
“Huh?” Ripper looked back. “Oh…to the side. Not in.”
The pip slid.
Of course, he thought, I can’t see anything from inside. And wondered what he looked like.
Lanya had stepped away and was looking all over him. Kid beat his knees, and swung about. And Denny had disappeared in his own deformed explosion.
“Hey,” the espresso-hued Ripper called, “we goin’ on!”
Figure passed figure as they milled about the cobbles. Kid looked where Copperhead was laughing; and Copperhead disappeared in his lucent arachnid. The menagerie formed in the terrible light.
Thirteen, whom Kid hadn’t seen till now, passed him. “Come on,” he whispered to Smokey beneath his arm, “let’s get out of out here. This ain’t gonna be no good—”
“I want to watch!” she insisted. “I want to watch!”
Kid reached the porch. Some people were running behind him. He’d broken down three doors in his life: so he expected to bruise his shoulder. (The light that was Denny blinked beside him: the boy was climbing the rail.) Kid crashed into the weathered wood. It flew back so easily he went down on one knee and grabbed at the jamb. (About him, the mystic aspects lurched.) At the same time, glass broke and light filled the hallway as Denny’s apparition came through the shattered porch window.