NOS4A2(182)
The fat girl in the fur coat took another shuffling half step forward. Her eyes, set back in small piggy folds, flashed red in a way that made Vic think of rabies. Vic gave the bike a smidge of gas, and it jumped forward a few feet. She wanted to put a bit of distance between her and the children closing in on her. She turned the ANFO over, found the timer, set it for what looked like about five minutes, pressed the button to start it running. In that instant she expected a final annihilating flash of white light to wipe away the world, and her insides squeezed tight, preparing for some last, rending burst of pain. Nothing of the sort happened. Nothing happened at all. Vic was not even sure it was running. It didn’t make a sound.
She held the plastic pack of ANFO over her head.
“There’s a shitty little timer on this thing, Manx. I think it’ll go off in three minutes, but I could be wrong a minute or two in either direction. There’s a whole bunch more in this sack. Send Wayne to me. Send him now. When he’s on the bike, I turn it off.”
He said, “What do you have there? It looks like one of those little pillows they give you on an airplane. I flew once, from St. Louis to Baton Rouge. I will never do that again! I was lucky to get off alive. It bounced the whole way, as if it were on a string and God was playing yo-yo with us.”
“It’s a bag of shit,” Vic said. “Like you.”
“It’s a— What did you say?”
“It’s ANFO. An enriched fertilizer. Soak this shit in diesel and it’s the most powerful explosive this side of a crate of TNT. Timothy McVeigh destroyed a twelve-story federal building with a couple of these. I can do the same to your entire little world and everything in it.”
Even across a distance of thirty feet, Vic could see the calculation in his eyes while he thought it through. Then his smile broadened. “I don’t believe you’ll do that. Blow yourself up and your son, too. You’d have to be crazy.”
“Oh, man,” she said. “Are you just figuring that out?”
His grin faded by degrees. His eyelids sank, and the expression in his eyes turned dull and disappointed.
He opened his mouth then and screamed, and when he did, the moon opened its one eye and screamed with him.
The eye of the moon was bloodshot and bulging, a sac of pus with an iris. Its mouth was a jagged tear in the night. Its voice was Manx’s voice, so amplified that it was nearly deafening:
“GET HER! KILL HER! SHE CAME HERE TO END CHRISTMAS! KILL HER NOW!”
The ledge shook. The branches of that enormous Christmas tree flailed at the darkness. Vic lost her grip on the brake, and the Triumph jerked forward another six inches. The backpack full of ANFO slithered out of her lap and fell onto the cobblestones.
Buildings shuddered beneath the shouting of the moon. Vic had never experienced an earthquake before and could not catch her breath, and her terror was a wordless thing that existed below the level of conscious thought, below the level of language. The moon began to scream—just scream—an inarticulate roar of fury that caused the falling snowflakes to whirl and blow about madly.
The fat girl took a step and threw the hatchet at Vic, like an Apache in a Western. The heavy, blunt edge clubbed Vic in her bad left knee. The pain was transcendent.
Vic’s hand came off the brake again, and the Triumph lunged once more. The backpack was not left behind, however, but was dragged along behind the Triumph. A strap had caught on the rear foot peg, which Lou had put down when he climbed on the bike behind her. Lou Carmody, as always, to the rescue. She still had the ANFO, even if it was out of reach.
ANFO. She was even now holding one package of ANFO, clutched to her chest with her left hand, the timer presumably ticking away. Not that it actually ticked, or made any sound whatsoever to suggest that it was working.
Get rid of it, she thought. Somewhere that will show him how much damage you can do with these things.
The children surged at her. They rushed from beneath the tree, pouring onto the cobblestones. She heard the soft pattering of feet behind her. She looked around for Wayne and saw the tall girl still holding him. They stood beside the Wraith, the girl behind him with an arm gently encircling his chest. In her other hand was her crescent-shaped knife, which Vic knew she would use—on Wayne—before letting him go.
In the next instant, a child leaped, throwing himself at her. Vic yanked the throttle. The Triumph bolted forward, and the child missed her entirely, crunched into the road on his stomach. The backpack full of ANFO skipped and bounced over the snowy cobbles, hung up on that rear peg.
Vic gunned the bike straight at the Rolls-Royce, as if she meant to drive right into it. Manx grabbed the little girl—Lorrie?—and shrank back toward the open door, the protective gesture of any father. In that gesture Vic understood everything. Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.
She pushed down on the brake, clenching her teeth against the stabbing, ferocious pain in her left knee, and twisted the handlebars, and the bike was slung around, almost a hundred eighty degrees. Behind her was a line of children—a dozen of them, running up the road after her. She gave it gas again, and the Triumph came screaming at them, and almost all of them scattered like dry leaves in a hurricane.
One of them, though, a willowy girl in a pink nightdress, crouched and remained in Vic’s path. Vic wanted to blow right through her, run her the f*ck down, but at the last moment Vic gave the handlebars a twist, trying to veer around her. She couldn’t help herself, couldn’t drive into a child.