Yes-she can shoot him in her own way.
He didn’t know why he was so sure of that, but suddenly he was.
He grabbed Lois by the shoulders to make her look at him, then raised his right hand. He cocked his thumb and pointed his forefinger at the bald man. He looked like a small child playing cops and robbers.
Lois responded with a look of dismay and incomprehension.
Ralph grabbed her hand and stripped off her glove.
[“You! You, Lois.” She got the idea, raised her own hand, extended her forefinger, and made the child’s shooting gesture: Pow!
Pow!
Two compact lozenge shapes, their gray-blue shade identical to Lois’s aura but much brighter, flew from the end of her finger and streaked down the hill.
Doc #3 screeched and leaped upward, fisted hands held at shoulder-height, the heels of his black shoes clipping against his buttocks, as the first of these “bullets” went under him. It struck the ground, rebounded like a flat stone skipped across the surface of a pond, and hit the Portosan marked WOMEN. For a moment the entire front of it glowed fiercely, as the window of the Burry-Burry had done.
The second blue-gray pellet clipped the baldy’s left hip and ricocheted up into the sky. He screamed-a high, chattery sound that seemed to twist like a worm in the middle of Ralph’s head. Ralph raised his hands to his ears even though it could do no good, and saw Lois doing the same thing, He felt sure that if that scream went on for long, it would burst his head open just as surely as high C shatters fine crystal.
Doc #3 fell to the needle-carpeted ground beside Rosalie and rolled back and forth, howling and holding his hip the way a small child will hold the place he banged when he tumbled off his tricycle.
After a few moments of this, his cries began to diminish and he scrambled to his feet. His eyes blazed at them from below the white expanse of his brow. Bill’s Panama was tilted far back on his head now, and the left side of his smock was black and smoking.
[I’ll get you I’ll get you both! Goddam interfering Short-Timed fucks! I’ll GET YOU BOTH.” He whirled and bounded down the path which led to the playground and the tennis courts, running in big flying leaps like an astronaut on the moon. Lois’s shot didn’t appear to have done any real damage, judging by his speed afoot.
Lois seized Ralph’s shoulder and shook him. As she did, the auras began to fade again.
“The children! It’s going to-” She was fading out, and that seemed to make perfect sense, because he suddenly saw that Lois wasn’t really talking at all, only staring at him fixedly with her dark eyes as she clutched his shoulder.
“I can’t hear you!” he yelled. “Lois, I can’t hear you!”
“What’s wrong, are you deaf? It’s going toward the playground!
Toward the children! We can’t let it hurt the children-!”
Ralph let out a deep, shuddering sigh. “It won’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
“I shot it.” She turned her finger toward her face, for a moment looking like a woman who mimes suicide. “I shot it with my finger.”
“Uh-huh. It stung him, too. Hard, from the way he looked.”
“I can’t see the colors anymore, Ralph.”
He nodded. “They come and go, like radio stations at night.”
“I don’t know how I feel… I don’t even know how I want to feel!” She wailed this last, and Ralph folded her into his arms. In spite of everything that was going on in his life right now, one fact registered very clearly: it was wonderful to be holding a woman again.
“That’s okay,” he told her, and pressed his face against the top of her head. Her hair smelled sweet, with none of the underlying murk of beauty-shop chemicals he’d gotten used to in Carolyn’s hair over the last ten or fifteen years of their life together. “Let go of it for now, okay?”
She looked at him. He could no longer see the faint mist drifting across her pupils, but felt sure it was still there. And besides, they were very pretty eyes even without the extra added attraction.
“What’s it for, Ralph? Do you know what it’s for?”
He shook his head. His mind was whirling with igsaw pieceshats, docs, bugs, protest signs, dolls that exploded in splatters of fake blood-that would not fit together. And for the time being, at least, the thing that seemed to recur with the most resonance was Old Doris nonsense saying: Done-bun-can’the-undone.
Ralph had an idea that was nothing but the truth.
A sad little whine came to his ears and Ralph looked down the hill.
Rosalie was lying at the base of the big pine, trying to get up.
Ralph could no longer see the black bag around her, but he was sure it was still there.
“Oh Ralph, the poor thing! What can we do?”
There was nothing they could do. Ralph was sure of it. He took Lois’s right hand in both of his and waited for Rosalie to lie back and die.
Instead of that, she gave a whole-body lurch that sent her so strongly to her feet that she almost toppled over the other way. She stood still for a moment, her head held so low her muzzle was almost on the ground, and then sneezed three or four times, With that out of the way, she shook herself and looked up at Ralph and Lois. She yapped at them once, a short, brisk sound. To Ralph it sounded as if she were telling them to quit worrying. Then she turned and made off through a little grove of pine trees toward the park’s lower entrance. Before Ralph lost sight of her, she had achieved the limping yet insouciant trot which was her trademark. The hum leg was no better than it had been before Doc #3’s interference, but it seemed no worse. Clearly old but seemingly a long way from dead (just like the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks, Ralph thought), she disappeared into the trees.
“I thought that thing was going to kill her,” Lois said. “In fact, I thought it had killed her.”
“Me too,” Ralph said.
“Ralph, did all that really happen? It did, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“The balloon-strings… do you think they’re lifelines?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. Like umbilical cords. And Rosalie.
He thought back to his first real experience with the auras, of how he’d stood outside the Rite Aid with his back to the blue mailbox and his jaw hanging down almost to his breastbone. Of the sixty or seventy people he had observed before the auras faded again, only a few had been walking inside the dark envelopes he now thought of as deathbags, and the one Rosalie had knitted around herself just now had been blacker by far than any he had seen that day. Still, those people in the parking lot whose auras had been dingy-dark had invariably looked unwell… like Rosalie, whose aura had been the color of old sweat-socks even before Baldy #3 started messing with her.
Maybe he Just hurried up what may otherwise be a perfectly natural process, he thought.
“Ralph?” Lois asked. “What about Rosalie?”
“I think my old friend Rosalie is living on borrowed time now,” Ralph said.
Lois considered this, looking down the hill and into the sun-dusty grove where Rosalie had disappeared. At last she turned to Ralph ’ “That midget with the scalpel was one of the men you saw again coming out of May Locher’s house, wasn’t he?”
“No. Those were two other ones.”
“Have you seen more?”
“No.”
“Do you think there are more?”
“I don’t know.”
He had an idea that next she’d ask if Ralph had noticed that the creature had been wearing Bill’s Panama, but she didn’t. Ralph supposed it was possible she hadn’t recognized it. Too much weirdness swirling around, and besides, there hadn’t been a chunk bitten out of the brim the last time she’d seen Bill wearing it. Retired history teachers just aren’t the hat-biting type, he reflected, and grinned.
“This has been quite a morning, Ralph.” Lois met his gaze frankly,?
eye to eye. “I think we need to talk about this, don’t you I really need to know what’s going on.”