“I haven't seen Sir Intellectualoid.” Bocanegra speaks in a nasty tone. While still working on the detonator. “What makes you think I've seen Mister Tightass Bookworm? Mister I'm More Important Than Everybody Else Because I've Read A Lot Of Books And My Ass Is Shaped Like A Library Chair?”
Lucas Giraut's gaze follows the different-colored cables that come out of the detonator and go up one wall and continue along the ceiling to the far end of the room. And which then go down the opposite side until they reach the spot where Koldo Cruz is standing on top of the bar. Clinging to a large bottle rack to keep from being dragged down by the waves. The cables connected to the detonator end in a string of dynamite sticks that someone has tied around Cruz's waist with strips of black adhesive tape. The sticks of dynamite have the peace sign drawn on them.
“Mr. Cruz!” shouts Giraut, splashing around in the water. “Be careful…!” he starts to say.
But a tremendous explosion blows Koldo Cruz to bits. The entire wall collapses onto the spot where Koldo Cruz was just a second before. Creating a cloud of smoke. Creating a tsunami that instantly sweeps away Giraut and everything around Giraut.
WONDERFUL WORLD
By Stephen King
CHAPTER 42
Chuck Kimball woke up on his third day in Boston beneath a layer of cardboard boxes and lice-infested blankets in an alley without streetlights or lights of any kind. It was obvious that the cardboard boxes and blankets had belonged to someone else at some point, to one of the many bums and drunks that used to fill the streets of the historic Beacon Hill neighborhood. They had disappeared, too. A couple of bottles of cheap wine in brown paper bags marked that corner of the alley as the former property of one of those modern nomads. Chuck stretched and looked around him, slightly alarmed. The street at the end of the alley seemed calm. Since he had taken apart his wristwatch, his notion of time had almost completely disappeared. He slept for intervals of several minutes at a time, always waking up with a start and drifting back into nervous lethargy. His cravings for Dexedrine seemed to have completely disappeared.
After peeing in a corner, Chuck studied himself in a piece of broken mirror. There was no doubt his appearance would give him away if he dared to go out onto a busy street. Judging by the light, the sun should be coming up in less than an hour. His stomach sent him one of its irritated messages. A hungry grumbling mixed with a warning that diarrhea, and the danger of dehydration, could arrive at any moment.
First crawling and then dragging himself along the ground, Chuck got to the end of the alley and peeked out. He was about fifty yards from the corner, between Beacon and Dartmouth. The landscape was strangely familiar and at the same time ineffably disturbing. With its old gas streetlights and cobble-stoned streets and the rolling rows of elegant redbrick houses. There wasn't a soul out at that hour. Not a car. Not a bird. The desolation that had been following him for the last few weeks seemed to have taken on a decidedly different component.
Where were the groups of people chatting in front of the stores? The happy-looking pedestrians walking to their workplaces or exiting the T stations in an orderly fashion? In that moment he understood what was newly disturbing. It was the silence. First the animals had disappeared and now the people. When they began their transmissions, little more than a month ago, the populated areas had kept up the semblance of normality. Everyone had maintained that irritating farce of routines and jobs and family life. Something in the atmosphere of that deserted corner told him that things had changed. That they were entering a new phase of the colonization.
Chuck started walking along Beacon Street. At first he walked with hurried steps, plastered to the gates of buildings and to the redbrick walls. Looking over his shoulder for signs of Captors in the sky. They seemed to be hiding, too. There was no smoke coming from the chimneys of the houses, in spite of the cold. No movement could be seen at the window curtains. Chuck shivered and slowed his pace. There was a supermarket cart abandoned in the middle of the street. With bags inside. Something that They would undoubtedly never do.
He approached the cart, still studying the sky, and examined the bags' contents. He was so hungry that, for a few moments, he forgot to keep his guard up and monitor his surroundings. He found several bags of snacks, which he tore open and devoured like an animal. Bringing fistfuls of potato chips to his mouth and swallowing them without chewing. He drank sips of soda until he could feel the stimulating rush of sugar in his veins. He ate a piece of ham and took several bites of a still bleeding steak. And then he saw it. While he was still pulling on the piece of meat with his teeth, streams of blood sliding down his chin.
There They were. They were all there. He didn't need to see anything more than the black cloud to understand that. The black cloud that floated over the giant golden dome of the State House, at the peak of Beacon Hill, above the trees and avenues of Boston Common. It was blacker and denser than any cloud Chuck had seen before. There must have been dozens of Them flying in circles over the dome, maybe hundreds. Up until then Chuck had seen some of the Captors flying low above rooftops or floating in groups of three or four above their centers of control. It was their way of communicating, that he was sure of. Of creating focal points of transmission with whatever it was that They were transmitting. Places where their waves were concentrated and therefore dangerous places that not even someone immune like him could go near without running certain risks.
Chuck dropped the piece of raw meat and spit out the pieces he still had in his mouth. He set off running down the deserted street without taking his eyes off the black cloud of Captors. Like every time he saw Them, there was something that attracted his gaze fatefully. Something impossible to define, which was surely the explanation of why some cultures in the past had confused them with angels. That's if the Captors weren't the basis of human belief in angels to begin with. Now, due to the concentration of all those dozens of specimens, Chuck felt that mesmerizing effect stronger than ever. Each Captor must have been between ten and fifteen feet long from the top of their snakelike heads to the tip of their tails, although with their wings completely unfolded They could sometimes double that figure. They flew in circles over their control centers like some sort of established dance, with concentric turn after concentric turn that Chuck suspected must have something to do with those vortexes that Saunders had told him about. Creating vaguely conical black clouds, like tornado funnels.
Judging by the concentration of Captors over the gold dome, Boston's State House must be the main control center in the city, if not the state. Chuck advanced slowly. Now it seemed that he could hear them, too. Some sort of deep, constant buzzing that either came from the beating of their wings or from some kind of frequency that They used to communicate among themselves.
The fact that he had never heard them before didn't surprise him in the slightest. As the colonization grew day by day, the signs had been multiplying. The night he saw them for the first time soaring over the highway he had had that powerful sensation that he had noticed their presence before. Of course, that had to do with the mechanisms They used in order to not be seen. Chuck suspected that their previous invisibility must have been due to something like collective hypnosis. Something that made people not notice them in spite of the fact that They were right in front of them and could be easily seen.