I climbed quickly. The parapet wall, encircling the flat roof, was about three feet high, maybe higher. On my hands and knees, I crawled across the forty-foot-wide roof, intending to take a position directly opposite the ladder.
Halfway across the roof, I realized my mistake. Forty feet would be too far from the ladder. In spite of my aversion to guns, I had learned to use them, but I was not a skilled sniper. And the Glock wouldn’t be as reliable at forty feet as it would be from a distance of, say, six inches.
As I crawled back the way that I’d come, I heard the rattle and crunch of footsteps on gravel. I kept moving, making a lot less noise than the hunters were. Sitting with my back pressed to the parapet wall, immediately to the right of the ladder, I drew the Glock.
As dark as it was on the roof, I could nevertheless see the pale-white stucco of the parapet, the clean sweep of it. If I had been sitting directly opposite the ladder, I would have been spotted the instant the climber’s eyes cleared the top. I would have been the only dark shape silhouetted against the stucco, except for a few low vent stacks.
On the ground, the cultists didn’t like the gravel. Moving among the buildings, they tried to place their feet cautiously, but the loose stones defeated them. After taking several careful steps, each of them made the same decision: to bull forward, clattering through the pebbles without regard to the noise, evidently convinced that too much caution was more dangerous than advancing boldly.
The distant siren had faded to silence. Either the patrol car had been responding to a call about the shooting at the Explorer or to something else altogether that had nothing to do with me and the posse on my trail.
As I waited for the sound of feet on the ladder rungs, I tried to figure out how these people kept finding me. After the events in Nevada, they had revenge on their minds. They were using all of their considerable resources, all their corrupt contacts in everything from the political establishment to law enforcement, to get their hands on me. If they had known about the beach cottage where I’d been living for a couple of months, they would have tried to kill me there. They knew about the Big Dog Bulldog Bagger, but apparently didn’t know that it had been garaged at the cottage.
With my left hand, through my T-shirt, I felt the tiny silver bell at the end of the chain. I pulled it out from under the T-shirt and held it between thumb and forefinger. My racing heart slowed, and my fear diminished.
If my enemy with a million eyes remained blind to the cottage, if they were unable to locate it, their failure had something to do with Annamaria. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed as though I was not only safe from them but also invisible to them while in Annamaria’s company. Almost from the day I met her, I had known that she was more than she appeared to be, that the eccentric things she often said would in fact prove to be the plainest truth if only I knew who and what she was and could consider her words in the context of her identity. I remembered what Mrs. Fischer said: For all you may think differently, I’m only human. Annamaria’s human, too, though she’s more than that, as you no doubt suspect. Human but more than human — and with curious powers that, if fully known, would probably make my paranormal abilities seem pathetic by comparison.
Below, the searchers were still crunching through the gravel, but not with as much enthusiasm. Not as many of them, either. From over near the largest building, the one I’d first come upon, I heard voices, but I couldn’t make out the words.
I turned the miniature bell back and forth between thumb and forefinger, pleased by the smoothness of it. It remained pleasantly cool. Neither the warm night nor my body heat nor the friction of my fingers rubbing the smooth, smooth silver could steal the coolness from it.
Okay, the Big Dog motorcycle. I had known since March, since Nevada, that sooner or later I would be returning to Pico Mundo, that the cultists had plans for my hometown. I knew, as well, I must make the trip alone. This threat was mine to thwart or fail to thwart. My fate, whether or not the promise of the fortune-teller’s card would be kept, depended on my success or failure. Mrs. Fischer insisted on buying a car for me, but I worried that Tim and Annamaria would be determined to make the trip with me if I had a car. I would not put them so directly at risk. Furthermore, Blossom Rosedale had sold her house in Magic Beach and had been intending to join us as soon as her affairs there were concluded; I couldn’t put her in jeopardy, either. Finally, and most important, I didn’t want to rely on whatever protection Annamaria’s immediate presence might afford me. This battle was mine to win or lose, by my best efforts, by my choices, by the right or wrong exercise of my free will. And so Mrs. Fischer had bought for me instead the Big Dog bike.
The cultists found me as I’d driven home to Pico Mundo, found me more than once thereafter; and not all of their success in that regard could be attributed to reverse psychic magnetism. If you believed the condition of humanity to be what they believed it to be, then their patron was the prince of this world, and at least some of his dark power was theirs to draw upon. The quest to find and kill a fry cook with a few marginal psychic talents that he couldn’t fully control might not be a war to them, might be instead a pleasant game. For all of Mrs. Fischer’s wealth and cleverness and loyal friends and courage, she and I might be hopelessly outmatched by the cult.
Two floors below, the sound of gravel scattering underfoot had ceased. I listened, wondering if they had gone or were only standing still, waiting for me to emerge from hiding. The voices over by the main building had fallen silent a couple of minutes earlier.
Although I continued to rub it, the bell remained cool, cool and smooth. I was still sheathed in sweat, dripping — except for the thumb and forefinger on my left hand, which were perfectly dry as they held the tiny silver bell.
I strained to hear the stealthy tread of shoes on ladder rungs. Nothing. There was no climber. No one could ascend that ladder in absolute silence.
I felt the night moving like a sea toward some shore, a great wave of darkness swelling under me, a tsunami under Pico Mundo, under Maravilla County, rising toward a terrible height from which it would fall in upon us, smash us, and sweep us away. And not just the town and county but the state, too, and the country. The feeling grew so strong that I was tempted to rise to my feet and survey the land in all directions, as if the darkness itself might in fact have acquired real mass and the power to wash destruction across a continent.
Just then the largest building in the orchard complex was torn by a massive explosion.
Thirty-nine
The blast rocked the ground, the building under me shuddered, and I nearly bit my tongue as my teeth clacked together. The flash left my eyes less adapted to the dark than they had been an instant earlier. Louder than any crack of thunder that I’d ever heard, the detonation rolled away through the orchard, but in the aftermath a solemn tolling continued in my ears, as if I were not atop a two-story building but were inside the bell tower of a cathedral.
A sudden downpour clattered onto the roof. Not rain. Debris. Splinters of wood. Slabs of wood as long as my arm. Dirt and gravel. Scraps of metal, twisted and hot and smoking. I closed my eyes and averted my face and covered my head with both arms until the stuff stopped peppering me.
Torn and burning, the massive edifice, the almond-processing plant, groaned as if it were a living leviathan, groaned and torqued out of true. At the sight of that structural torment, a woman below let out a wild rebel yell of exaltation, her voice shrill with glee. Another cultist answered her. A second. A third. A fourth. The curved metal roof of the tortured structure bulged and buckled, rivets popping like corn, welded joints shrieking as they separated, widths of sheet metal peeling up to claw like robot hands at the night sky, where the low clouds reflected the sudden rush of fire.