Collie looks toward Gary, wanting to make sure he’s out of earshot, and spots him poking around in Doc’s kitchenette, oblivious to the screaming and the weeping children next door, unaware that the operation on his wife is finished; he’s opening and closing cupboards with the thoroughness of a dedicated alcoholic hunting for booze. His look into the fridge for beer or maybe some chilled vodka was an understandably short one; his wife’s arm is there, on the second shelf. Collie put it in himself, sliding stuff around-salad dressing, pickles, the mayonnaise, some left-over sliced pork in Saran Wrap-until there was room for it. He doesn’t think it will ever be reattached, not even in this age of miracles and wonders can such a thing be done, but he still couldn’t bring himself to put it in Doc’s pantry. Too warm. It would draw flies.
“Is she going to die?” Collie asks.
“I don’t know,” Billingsley says. He pauses, takes his own look at Gary, sighs, runs his hands through his Albert Einstein tangle of white hair. “Probably. Certainly, if she doesn’t get to a hospital soon. She needs a lot of help. Most of all, a transfusion. And there’s someone hurt next door, by the sound. Kirsten, I think. And maybe she’s not the only one.”
Collie nods.
“Mr Entragian, what do you think is going on here?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea.”
Cynthia grabs a newspaper (it’s the Columbus Dispatch, not the Wentworth Shopper) that has fallen to the living-room floor during the rumpus, rolls it up, and crawls slowly to the front door. She uses the newspaper to sweep broken glass-there is a surprising amount of it-out of her way as she goes.
Steve thinks of objecting, asking her if she maybe has a deathwish, then stows it. Sometimes he gets ideas about things. Pretty strong ones, as a matter of fact. Once, while peaceably reading palms on the boardwalk in Wildwood, he had an idea so strong that he quit the job that very night. It was an idea about a laughing seventeen-year-old girl with ovarian cancer. Malignant, advanced, maybe a month beyond any possible human remedy. Not the sort of idea you wanted to have about a pretty green-eyed high-school kid if your life’s motto was
The idea he’s having now is every bit as strong as that one but quite a bit more optimistic: the shooters are gone, at least for the time being. There’s no way he can know that, but he feels certain of it, just the same.
Instead of calling Cynthia back, he joins her. The inside door has been blown open by several gunshots (it has also been so severely warped that Steve doubts it will ever close again), and the breeze coming through the shattered screen is heaven-sweet and cool on his sweaty face. The kids are still crying next door, but the screaming has stopped, at least for the time being, and that’s a relief.
“Where is he?” Cynthia asks, sounding stunned. “Look, there’s his wife-” she points to Mary’s body, which is now lying in the street, close enough to the far side so that tendrils of her hair are wavering in the water rushing down the west gutter-“but where’s he? Mr Jackson?”
Steve points through the torn lower half of the screen. “In that house. Must be. See his glasses on the path?”
Cynthia squints, then nods.
“Who lives there?” Steve asks her.
“I don’t know. I haven’t been here anywhere near long enough to-”
“Mrs Wyler and her nephew,” Collie says from behind them. They turn and see him squatting on his hunkers, looking out between them. “The boy’s autistic or dyslexic or catatonic… one of those damned icks, I can never keep them straight. Her husband died last year, so it’s just the two of them. Jackson… must… must have… “He doesn’t break off but runs down, the words getting smaller and smaller, finally diminishing into silence. When he speaks again, his voice is still low… and very thoughtful. “What the hell?”
“What?” Cynthia asks uneasily. “What?”
“Are you kidding me? You don’t see?”
“See what? I see the woman, and I see her husband’s gla-” Now it’s her turn to run down.
Steve starts to ask what the deal is, then understands-sort of. He supposes he would have seen it earlier, even though he’s a stranger to the street, if his attention hadn’t been diverted by the body, the dropped spectacles, and his concern for Mrs Soderson. He knows what he must do about that, and more than anything else he has been nerving himself up to do it.
Now, though, he simply looks across the street, letting his eyes move slowly from the E-Z Stop to the next building up, from that one to the one where the kids were playing Frisbee when he turned on to the street, and then on to the one directly opposite them, the one where Jackson must have gone to ground when the shooting got too hot.
There has been a change over there since the coming of the shooters in the vans.
Just how much he cannot tell, mostly because he is a stranger here, he doesn’t know the street, partly because the smoke from the burning house and the mist still rising off the wet street give the houses over there a look which is almost spectral, like houses seen in a mirage… but there has been a change.
Siding has been replaced with logs on the Wyler house, and where there was a picture window there are now three more conventional-old-fashioned, one might almost say-multi-pane windows. The door has wooden supports hammered across its vertical boards in a Z-shape. The house next to it on the left…
“Tell me something,” Collie says, looking at the same one. “Since when did the Reeds live in a log-fucking-cabin?”
“Since when did the Gellers live in an adobe hacienda!” Cynthia responds, looking one farther down.
“You guys’re kidding,” Steve says. Then, weakly: “Aren’t you?”
Neither of them replies. They look almost hypnotized.
“I’m not sure I’m really seeing it,” Collie says at last. His voice is uncharacteristically hesitant. “It’s…”
“Shimmery,” the girl says.
He turns to her. “Yeah. Like when you look at something over the top of an incinerator, or-”
“Somebody help my wife!” Gary calls to them from the shadows of the living room. He has found a bottle of something-Steve can’t see what-and is standing by the photo of Hester, a pigeon who liked to fingerpaint. Not, Steve thinks, that pigeons exactly have fingers. Gary isn’t steady on his feet and his words sound slurry. “Somebody help Mar'elle! Losser damn arm!”
“We need to get help for her,” Collie says, nodding. “And-”
“-for the rest of us,” Steve finishes. He’s relieved, actually, to know that someone else realizes this, that maybe he won’t have to go on his own. The boy next door has stopped crying, but Steve can still hear the girl, sobbing in big, watery hitches. Margrit the Maggot, he thinks. That’s what her brother called her. Margrit the Maggot loves Ethan Hawke, he said.
Steve has a sudden urge, as strong as it is unaccustomed, to go next door and find that little girl. To kneel in front of her and take her in his arms and hug her and tell her she can love anyone she pleases. Ethan Hawke or Newt Gingrich or just anybody. He looks down the street instead. The E-Z Stop, so far as he can tell, hasn’t changed; its style is still Late-century Convenience Store, sometimes known as Pastel Cinderblock, sometimes known as Still Life with Dumpster. Not beautiful, far from it, but a known quantity, and under the circumstances, that’s a relief. The Ryder truck is still parked in front, the blue phone-sign is still hanging down from its hook, the Marlboro Man is still on the door, and…
… and the bike rack is gone.
Well, not gone, exactly; replaced.
By something that looks suspiciously like a hitching-rail in a Western movie.