… not that it mattered much at this point. Flaming scraps of wallpaper came wafting in from the hall, and he saw both the room’s curtains and the remaining hair on Gretchen Tillbury’s head ripple toward the doorway as the fire sucked the air out of the room to feed itself. how long would it take for the fire to turn the women and children down cellar into crispy critters? Ralph didn’t know, and suspected that didn’t matter much, either; the people trapped down there would be dead of suffocation or smoke inhalation long before they began to burn.
Lois was staring at the dead women in horror. Tears slipped down her cheeks. The spectral gray light which rose from the tracks they left behind looked like vapor rising from dry ice. Ralph walked her across the parlor toward the closed double doors on the far side, paused before them long enough to take a deep breath, then put his arm around Lois’s waist and stepped into the wood.
There was a moment of darkness in which not just his nose but his entire body seemed suffused with the sweet aroma of sawdust, and then they were in the room beyond, the northernmost room in the house. It had perhaps once been a study, but had since been converted into a group therapy room. In the center, a dozen or so folding chairs had been set up in a circle. The walls were hung with plaques saying things like I CANNOT EXPECT RESPECT FROM ANYONE’ ELSE UNTIL I RESPECT MYSELF. On a blackboard at one end of the room someone had printed WE ARE FAMILY, I’ve GOT ALL MY SISTERS WITH ME in capital letters.
Crouched beside it at one of the east-facing windows that overlooked the porch, wearing his own Kevlar vest over a Snoopy sweatshirt Ralph would have recognized anywhere, was Charlie Pickering.
“Barbecue all Godless women!” he screamed. A bullet whined past his shoulder; another buried itself in the windowframe to his right and flicked a splinter against one of the lenses of his hornrimmed glasses.
The idea that he was being protected returned to Ralph, this time with the force of a conviction. “Lesbian cookout! Give em a taste of their own medicine! Teach em how it feels!”
[“Stay up, Lois-right up where you are now.”] [“What are you going to do?”] [“Take care of him.”] [“Don’t kill him, Ralph! Please don’t kill him!”] Why not? Ralph thought bitterly. I’d be doing the world a favor.
That was undoubtedly true, but this was no time to argue.
[“All right, I won’t kill him! Now stay put, Lois-there’s too many goddam bullets flying around for both of us to risk going down.”] Before she could reply, Ralph concentrated, summoned the blink, and dropped back to the Short-Time level. It happened so fast and hard this time that it left him feeling winded, as if he had jumped out of a second-storey window onto a hard patch of concrete. Some of the color drained out of the world and noise fell in to replace it: the crackle of fire, no longer muffled but sharp and close; the crump of a shotgun blast; the crack of pistol-shots fired in rapid succession.
The air tasted of soot, and the room was sweltering. Something that sounded like an insect droned past Ralph’s ear. He had an idea it was a.45-caliber bug.
Better hurry up, sweetheart, Carolyn advised. When bullets hit you on this level they kill you, remember?
He remembered.
Ralph ran bent-over toward Pickering’s turned back. His feet crunched on slivers of glass and scatters of splinters, but Pickering did not turn. In addition to the automatic weapon in his hands, there was a revolver on his hip and a small green duffel-bag by his left foot. The bag was unzipped, and Ralph saw a number of wine bottles’ inside. Their open mouths had been stuffed with wet rags.
“Kill the bitches!” Pickering screamed, spraying the yard with another burst of fire. He popped the clip and rased his sweatshirt, exposing three or four more tucked under his belt.
Ralph reached into the open duffel-bag, seized one of the gasoline-filled wine bottles by the neck, and swung it at the side of Pickering’s head. As he did, he saw the reason Pickering hadn’t heard his approach: the man was wearing shooter’s plugs. Before Ralph had time to reflect upon the irony of a man on a suicide mission taking pains to protect his hearing, the bottle shattered against Pickering’s temple, dousing him with amber liquid and green glass. He staggered backward, one hand going to his scalp, which was cut open in two places. Blood poured through his long fingers-fingers that should have belonged to a pianist or a painter, Ralph thought-and down his neck.
He turned, his eyes wide and shocked behind the smeary lenses of his spectacles, his hair reaching for the sky and making him look like a cartoon of a man who has just received a huge jolt of electricity.
“You.” he cried. “Devil-sent Centurion! Godless baby-killer!”
Ralph thought of the two women in the other room and was once more overwhelmed with anger… except that anger was too mild a word, much too mild. He felt as if his nerves were burning inside his skin.
And the thought that drummed at his mind was one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer.
Another high-caliber bug droned past his face. Ralph didn’t notice. Pickering was trying to lift the rifle with which he had undoubtedly killed Gretchen Tillbury and her pregnant friend. Ralph snatched it from his hands and turned it on him. Pickering shrieked with fear. The sound of it maddened Ralph even more, and he forgot the promise he had made to Lois. He raised the rifle, fully meanin to empty it into the man who was now cringing abjectly against the wall (in the heat of the moment it occurred to neither of them that there was currently no clip in the gun), but before he could pull the trigger he was distracted by a brilliant swarm of light bleeding into the air beside him. At first it was without shape, a fabulous kaleidoscope whose colors had somehow escaped the tube which was supposed to contain them, and then it took on the form of a woman with a long, gauzy gray ribbon rising from her head.
[“Don’t kill him! Ralph, please don’t kill him!
For a moment he could see the blackboard and read the quote chalked on it right through her, and then the colors became her clothes and hair and skin as she came all the way down. Pickering stared at her in cross-eyed terror. He shrieked again, and the crotch of his army fatigue pants darkened. He stuck his fingers into his mouth, as if to stifle the sound he was making. “A ghose!” he screamed through his mouthful of fingers. “A Hennurt’on anna ghose.” Lois ignored him and grabbed the barrel of the rifle. “Don’t kill him, Ralph! Don’t!”
Ralph was suddenly furious with her, too. “Don’t you understand, Lois? Don’t you get it? He understood what he was doing! On some level, he did understand-I saw it in his goddam aura.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, still holding the barrel of the rifle down so it pointed at the floor. “It doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t understand. We mustn’t do what they do. We mustn’t be what they are.”
“But-’ “Ralph, I want to let go of this gun-barrel. It’s hot.
It’s burning my fingers.”
“All right,” he said, and let go at the same instant she did. The gun fell to the floor between them, and Pickering, who had been sliding slowly down the wall with his fingers still in his mouth am his shining, glazed eyes still fixed on Lois, lunged for it with the speed of a striking rattlesnake.
What Ralph did then he did without forethought and certainly. without anger-he acted purely on instinct, reaching out for Pickering with both hands and grasping the sides of his face.
Something flashed brightly inside his mind as he did it, something that felt like the lens of a powerful magnifying glass. He slammed back up through the levels, for a split second going higher than either of them had yet been. At the height of his ascent, he felt a terrible force flash in his head and explode down his arms. Then, as he dropped back down, he heard the bang, a hollow but emphatic sound which was entirely different from the guns still firing outside.