The bartender started to pray out loud, but he wasn't putting his faith in prayer alone. He reached down to his side and picked Tommy-Ray up one-handed, hauling him close. Then, with his hostage taken, he opened the door to the sex arena and backed through it. Tommy-Ray heard him repeating something as they went, the hook of the prayer perhaps? Santo Dios! Santo Dios! But neither words nor hostage slowed the advance of the wind and its dusty freight. They came after him, throwing the door wide.
Tommy-Ray saw their mouths grow huger still, and then the blur of faces was upon them both. He lost sight of what happened next. The dust filled his eyes before he had an opportunity to close them. But he felt the bartender's grip slide from him, and the next moment a rush of wet heat. The howling in the wind instantly rose in volume to a keening that he tried to stop his ears against, but it came anyway, boring into the bone of his head like a hundred drills.
When he opened his eyes he was red. Chest, arms, legs, hands: all red. The bartender, the source of the color, had been dragged on to the stage where the night before Tommy had seen the woman and the dog. His head was in one corner, upended; his arms, hands locked in supplication, in another; the rest of him lay center stage, the neck still pumping.
Tommy-Ray tried not to be sickened (he was the Death-Boy, after all) but this was too much. And yet, he told himself, what had he expected when he'd invited them over the threshold? This was not a circus he had in tow. It was not sane; it was not civilized.
Shaking, sickened and chastened, he got to his feet and hauled himself back out into the bar. His legion's labors here were as cataclysmic as those he'd turned his back upon. All three of the bar's occupants had been brutally slaughtered. Giving the scene only the most casual perusal, he crossed through the destruction to the door.
Events inside the bar had inevitably attracted an audience outside, even at such an early hour. But the velocity of the wind—in which his ghost army was once more dissolved—kept all but the most adventurous, youths and children, from approaching the scene, and even they were cowed by the suspicion that the air howling around them was not entirely empty.
They watched the blond, blood-spattered boy emerge from the bar and cross to his car, but made no attempt to apprehend him. Their scrutiny made Tommy-Ray take note of his gait. Instead of slouching he walked more upright. When they remembered the Death-Boy, he thought, let them remember someone terrible.
As he drove he began to believe he'd left the legion behind; that they'd found the game of murder more exciting than follow the leader and were going on to slaughter the rest of the town. He didn't much mind the desertion. Indeed he was in part thankful for it. The revelations that had seemed so welcome the previous night had lost some of their glamour.
He was sticky and stinking with another man's blood; he was bruised from the bartender's handling of him. Naively enough he'd believed that the touch of the Nuncio had made him immortal. What was the use of being the Death-Boy, after all, if death could still master you? In learning the error of his ways he'd come closer to losing his life than he cared to think too hard about. As to his saviors, his legion—he'd been equally naive in his belief that he had control of them.
They were not the shambling, fawning refugees he'd taken them for the previous night. Or if they had been, their being together had changed their nature. Now they were lethal, and would probably have slipped from his control sooner or later anyhow. He was better off without them.
He stopped to wipe the blood from his face before crossing the border, turned his bloodied shirt inside out to conceal the worst of the stains, then drove on. As he reached the border itself he saw the dust cloud in the mirror, and knew his relief at losing his legion had been premature. Whatever slaughter had detained them they'd done with it. He put his foot down, hoping against hope to lose them, but they had the scent of him, and followed like a pack of loyal but lethal dogs, closing on the car till they were once more swirling behind him.
Once over the border the cloud picked up its pace, so that instead of following, it surrounded the car to left and right. There was more purpose in the maneuver than mere intimacy. Spirits hauled the windows and rattled at the passenger door, finally pulling it open. Tommy-Ray reached to drag it closed again. As he did so the bartender's head, much battered by being carried by the storm, was pitched out of the dust on to the seat beside him. Then the door was slammed, and the cloud once more took its dutiful place as his train.
His instinct was to stop and throw the trophy out on to the street, but he knew that to do so would confirm his weakness in his legion's estimation. They'd not brought him the head simply to humor him, though that might be their pretense. There was a warning here; even a threat. Don't try to cheat or betray them, the dusty, bloody ball announced from its gaping mouth, or you and I'll be brothers.
He took the silent message to heart. Though he was still ostensibly the leader, the dynamic changed thereafter. Every few miles the cloud would once more pick up its pace and merge one way or another, pointing him towards more of their number; many waiting in the unlikeliest of places: squalid street corners and minor intersections (often at intersections); once in the lot of a motel; once outside a boarded-up gas station, where a man, a woman and a child all waited, as though they'd known this transport would be coming along.
As the numbers swelled, so did the scale of the storm that carried them, until its passage was sufficient to cause minor damage along the highway, driving cars off the road, and blowing down signs. It even made the news bulletin. Tommy-Ray heard the report as he drove. It was described as a freak wind, which had blown up off the ocean and was proceeding north towards Los Angeles County.
He wondered, as he listened, if anyone in Palomo Grove would hear the report. The Jaff maybe; or }o-Beth. He hoped so. He hoped they heard, and understood what was coming their way. The town had seen some strange sights since his father's return from the rock, but nothing, surely, the equal of the wind he had in tow, or the living dust that danced on its back.
It was hunger that drove William out from his home on Saturday morning. He went reluctantly, like a man at an orgy suddenly aware that his bladder had to be emptied, and exiting with many a backward glance. But hunger, like the need to piss, couldn't be ignored forever, and William had exhausted what few supplies his refrigerator had contained very quickly. Working as he did at the Mall he'd never stocked up on food, but taken a quarter of an hour every day to wander around the supermarket and pick up whatever got him salivating. But he'd not been shopping now for two days, and if he wasn't to starve to death in the lap of the tasty but inedible luxuries gathered behind the drawn blinds of his home he had to fetch himself something to eat. This was easier said than done. His mind was so wholly obsessed by the company he was keeping that the simple problem of making himself presentable for a public appearance and going down to the Mall became a major challenge.
Until recently, his life had been so very organized. The week's shirts were always washed and pressed on a Sunday, laid out on his dresser with the five bow ties selected from his hundred and eleven to complement the shade of the shirt; his kitchen could have been shot for an ad campaign, its surfaces always pristine; the sink smelled of lemon; the washing machine of his flower-scented fabric conditioner; his toilet bowl of pine.