Coming downhill from Bear Street, Dream Floater and the Justice Wagon pour fire into 251 and 249-the Josephson house and the Soderson house. The windows blow in. The doors blow open. A round that sounds like something thrown from a small anti-aircraft gun hits the back of Gary’s old Saab. The back end crumples in, shards of red taillight glass fly, and there’s a whoomp! as the gas-tank explodes, engulfing the little car in a ball of smoky orange flame. The bumper-stickers-I MAY BE SLOW BUT I’M AHEAD OF YOU on the right, MAFIA STAFF CAR on the left-shimmer in the heat like mirages. The south-moving trio of vans and the trio moving north meet, cross, and stop in front of the stake fences separating the Billingsley place from the Carver house above it and the Jackson house below it.
Audrey Wyler, who was eating a sandwich and drinking a can of lite beer in the kitchen when the shooting started, stands in the living room, staring out at the street with wide eyes, unaware that she’s still holding half of a salami and lettuce on rye in one hand. The firing has merged into one continuous, ear-splitting World War III roar, but she is in no danger; all of it is currently being directed at the two houses across from her.
She sees Ralphie Carver’s red wagon-Buster-rise into the air with one side blown into a twisted metal flower. It cartwheels over David Carver’s soggy corpse, lands with its wheels up and spinning, and then another hit bends it almost double and sends it into the flowers to the left of the driveway. Another round blows the Carver screen door off its hinges and hammers it down the hall; two more from Bounty’s Freedom van vaporize most of Pie’s prized Hummel figures.
Holes open in the crushed back deck of Mary Jackson’s Lumina, and then it too explodes, flames belching up and swallowing the car back to front. Bullets tear off two of Old Doc’s shutters. A hole the size of a baseball appears in the mailbox mounted beside his door; the box drops to the welcome mat, smoking. Inside it, a Kmart circular and a letter from the Ohio Veterinary Society are blazing. Another KA-BAM and the bungalow’s door-knocker-a silver St Bernard’s head-disappears as conclusively as a coin in a magician’s hand. Seeming oblivious of all this, Peter Jackson struggles to his feet with his dead wife in his arms. His round rimless glasses, the lenses spotted with water, glint in the strengthening light. His pale face is more than distracted; it is the face of a man whose entire bank of fuses has burned out. But he’s standing there, Audrey sees, miraculously whole, miraculously-
Aunt Audrey!
Seth. Very faint, but definitely Seth.
Aunt Audrey, can you hear me?
Yes! Seth, what’s happening?
Never mind! The voice sounds on the edge of panic. You have the place you go, don’t you?
The safe place?
Mohonk? Did he mean Mohonk? He must, she decided.
Yes, I-
Go there! the faint voice cries. Go there NOW! Because-
The voice doesn’t finish, and doesn’t have to. She has turned away from the furious shooting-gallery in the street, turned toward the den, where the movie-The Movie-is playing again. The volume has been cranked, somehow, far beyond what their Zenith should be able to produce. Seth’s shadow bounces ecstatically up and down on the wall, elongated and somehow horrible; it reminds her of what scared her most as a child, the horned demon from the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of Fantasia. It’s as if Tak is twisting inside the child’s body, warping it, stretching it, driving it ruthlessly beyond its ordinary limits and boundaries.
Nor is that all that’s happening. She turns back to the window, stares out. At first she thinks it’s her eyes, something wrong with her eyes-perhaps Tak has melted them somehow, or warped the lenses-but she holds her hands up in front of her and they look all right. No, it’s Poplar Street that’s wrong. It seems to be twisting out of perspective in some way she can’t quite define, angles changing, corners bulging, colors blurring. It’s as if reality is on the verge of liquefying, and she thinks she knows why: Tak’s long period of preparation and quiet growth is over. The time of action has come. Tak is making, Tak is building. Seth told her to get out, at least for a while, but where can Seth go?
Seth! she tries, concentrating as hard as she can. Seth, come with me!
I can’t! Go, Aunt Audrey! Go now!
The agony in that voice is more than she can endure. She turns toward the arch again, the one which leads into the den, but sees a meadow slanting down to a rock wall instead. There are wild roses; she smells them and feels the sexy, delicate heat of spring now tending toward summer. And then Janice is beside her and Janice is asking her what her all-time favorite Simon and Garfunkel song is and soon they are deep in a discussion of “Homeward Bound” and “I Am a Rock”, the one that goes “If I’d never loved, I never would have cried.”
In the Carver kitchen, the refugees lie on the floor with their hands laced over the backs of their heads and their faces pressed to the floor; around them the world seems to be tearing itself apart. Glass shatters, furniture falls, something explodes. There are horrible punching sounds as bullets pound through the walls.
Suddenly Pie Carver can stand Ellie’s clinging to her no more. She loves Ellen, of course she does, but it’s Ralphie she wants now, and Ralphie she must have; smart, sassy Ralphie, who looks so much like his father. She pushes Ellen roughly away, ignoring the girl’s cry of startled dismay, and bolts for the niche between the stove and the fridge, where Jim is hunched over the frantic, screaming Ralphie, holding one hand over the back of Ralphie’s head like a cap.
“Mommmmeeee!” Ellen wails, and attempts to run after her. Cammie Reed pushes away from the pantry door, grabs the little girl around the waist, and drops her back to the floor just as something that sounds like a monster locust drones across the kitchen, strikes the kitchen faucet, and backflips it like a majorette’s baton. Most of the spinning faucet tears through the screen and the spider’s web on the other side. Water spouts up from what’s left, at first almost all the way to the ceiling.
“Give him to me!” Pie screams. “Give me my son! Give me my s-”
Another approaching drone, this one followed by a loud, unmusical clang as one of the copper pots hanging by the stove is hammered into a hulk of twisted fragments and flying shrapnel. And Pie is suddenly just screaming, no words now, just screaming. Her hands are clapped to her face. Blood pours through her fingers and down her neck. Threads of copper litter the front of her misbuttoned blouse. More copper is in her hair, and a large chunk quivers in the center of her forehead like the blade of a thrown knife.
“I can’t see!” she shrieks, and drops her hands. Of course she can’t; her eyes are gone. So is most of her face. Quills of copper bristle from her cheeks, her lips, her chin. “Help me, I can’t see! Help me, David! Where are you?”
Johnny, lying face-down beside Brad in Ellen’s room upstairs can hear her screaming and understands that something terrible has happened. Bullets hemstitch the air above them. On the far wall is a picture of Eddie Vedder; as Johnny starts to wriggle toward the doorway to the hall, a huge bullet-hole appears in Eddie’s chest. Anothe r one hits the child-sized vanity mirror over Ellen’s dresser and hammers it to sparkling fragments. Somewhere on the block, blending hellishly with the sounds of Pie Carver’s screams from downstairs, comes the bray of a car alarm. And still the gunfire goes on.