The others are unaware she’s left until they hear her voice, querulous and shrilclass="underline" “You get out of here! You just stop it and get out of here right now\ The police are already on their way, you know!”
At the sound of that voice, Susi forgets all about how nice it is to have Dave Reed touching her breast, and how she’d like to help him forget the death of his brother by taking him upstairs and balling him until his liver explodes. “Mummy!” she gasps, and starts to get up.
Dave hauls her back down, then clamps an arm around her waist to make completely sure she doesn’t get up again. He has lost his brother, and he feels like that’s enough for one day.
Come on, come on, come on, Audrey thinks… except she guesses it’s actually a prayer. Her eyes are squeezed so tightly shut she can see exploding red dots behind the lids, and her hands are clamped into fists, the ragged remains of her nails digging into her palms. Come on, go to work the way you’re supposed to, do your job, get started-
“Kick in,” she whispers, unaware she’s speaking out loud. Johnny, who has raised his head at the sound of Kirn’s voice, now looks at Audrey. “Kick in, can’t you? For Christ’s sake, kick in!”
What are you talking about?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer.
Outside, Kim moves down the walk toward the Power Wagons, which are parked at the curb. This is the only place along the former Poplar Street where there is any curb left.
“I’m giving you a chance,” she says, her eyes drifting from one weirdo to the next. Some are dressed in ridiculous outer-space masks, and the one behind the wheel of the lunch-wagon thingy is actually wearing a whole-body robot costume. It makes him look like an oversized version of R2D2 in the Star Wars movies. Others look like refugees from a class in Western line-dancing. A few even seem familiar… but this is no time to be distracted by such foolish ideas.
“I’m giving you a chance,” she repeats, coming to a stop just above the place where the Carvers” cement walk joins the remaining strip of Poplar Street sidewalk. “Go while you still can. Otherwise-”
The slide door of the Freedom van opens, and Sheriff Streeter steps out. His star gleams a dull moonlit silver on the left flap of his vest. He looks up at Jeb Murdock-old enemy, new ally-in the Doom Turret of the Meatwagon.
“Well, Streeter?” Murdock says. “What do you think?”
“I think you should take the yappy bitch,” Streeter says with a smile, and both of Murdock’s sawed-offs explode with noise and white fire. At one moment Kim Geller is standing at the end of the Carvers” walk; at the next she’s entirely gone. No; not quite gone. Her sneakers are still there, and her feet are still inside them.
A split-second later, something that could be a bucket of dark, silty water but isn’t hits the front of the Carver house. Then, with the sound of the twin shotgun blasts still rolling away, Streeter screams: “Shoot! Shoot, goddammit! Wipe them off the map!”
“Get down!” Johnny shouts again, knowing it will do no good; the house is going to disappear like a child’s sand-castle before a tidal wave, and they are going to disappear with it.
The regulators begin firing, and it’s like nothing Johnny ever heard in Vietnam. This, he thinks, is what it must have been like to be in the trenches at Ypres, or in Dresden thirty years or so later. The noise is incredible, a ground-zero concatenation of KA-POW and KA-BAM, and although he feels he should be immediately deafened (or perhaps killed outright by raw decibels alone), Johnny is still able to hear the sounds of the house being blown apart all around them: bursting boards, breaking windows, china figurines exploding like targets in a shooting gallery, the brittle spatter of thrown laths. Very faintly, he can also hear people screaming. The bitter tang of gunsmoke fills his nostrils. Something unseen but huge passes through the kitchen above them, screaming as it goes, and suddenly much of the kitchen’s rear wall is just rubble fanned across the backyard and floating on the surface of the Kmart pool.
Yes, Johnny thinks. This is it, this is the end. And maybe that is just as well.
But then a strange thing begins to happen. The shooting doesn’t stop, but it begins to diminish, as if someone is turning down the volume control. This isn’t just true of the gunshots themselves, but of the screaming sound the shells make as they pass overhead. And it happens fast. Less than ten seconds after he first notices the diminution-and it might be more like five-the sounds are gone entirely. So is the queer, humming beat of the Power Wagons” engines.
They raise their heads and look around at each other. In the pantry, Cynthia sees that she and Steve are both as white as ghosts. She raises her arm and blows. Powder puffs up from her skin.
“Flour,” she says.
Steve rakes through his long hair and holds an unsteady hand out to her. There’s a cluster of shiny black things in the palm. “Flour’s not so bad,” he says. “I got olives.”
She thinks she’ll begin to laugh, but before she can, an amazing and totally unexpected thing happens.
Seth’s Place/Seth’s Time
Of all the passages he has dug for himself during the reign of Tak-Tak the Thief, Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot-this is the longest. He has, in a way, re-created his own version of Rattlesnake Number One. The shaft goes deep into some black earth which he supposes is himself, then rises again toward the surface like a hope. At the end of it is a door of iron bands. He doesn’t try to open it, but not for fear he will find it locked. Quite the opposite. This is a door he must not touch until he is completely ready; once through it, there will never be any coming back.
He prays it goes where he thinks it does.
Enough light comes through the cracks between the door’s iron lengths to illuminate the place where he stands. There are pictures on the strange, fleshy walls; one a group portrait of his family with him sitting between his brother and sister, one a photo of him standing between Aunt Audrey and Uncle Herb on the lawn of this house. They are smiling. Seth, as always, is solemn, distant, not quite there. There is also a photograph of Allen Symes, standing beside (and dwarfed by) one of Miss Mo’s treads. Mr Symes is wearing his Deep Earth hardhat and grinning. No such photograph as this exists, but that doesn’t matter. This is Seth’s place, Seth’s time, Seth’s mind, and he decorates it as he likes. Not so long ago, there would have been pictures of the MotoKops and the characters from The Regulators hung, not just here, but all along the length of the tunnel. No longer. They have lost their charm for him.
I outgrew them, he thinks, and that is the truth of it. Autistic or not, only eight or not, he has gotten too old for shoot-'em-up Westerns and Saturday-morning cartoons. He suddenly understands that this is almost certainly the bottom truth, and one Tak would never understand: he outgrew them. He has the Cassie Styles figure in his pocket (when he needs a pocket he just imagines one; it’s handy) because he still loves her a little, but otherwise? No. The only question is whether or not he can escape them, sweet fantasies which might have been laced with poison all along.
And the time has come to find that out.
Beside the photo of Allen Symes, a little shelf just out of the wall. Seth has seen and admired the shelves in the Carver hallway, each dedicated to its own Hummel figure, and this one was created with those in mind. Enough light seeps through the cracks in the door to see what’s on it-not a Hummel shepherd or milkmaid but a red PlaySkool telephone.
He picks it up and spins out two-four-eight on the plastic phone’s rotary dial. It’s the Carvers” house number. In his ear the toy phone rings… rings… rings. But is it ringing on the other end? Does she hear it? Do any of them hear it?