NOS4A2(186)

“Leave him, Millie! There isn’t time!” Manx hollered at her. “Leave him and let’s go!”

Millie sank her flukeworm teeth into Wayne’s ear. Wayne screamed and thrashed and snapped his head, and the lobe of his ear parted company with the rest of his face. He ducked and made a funny corkscrewing motion in the same instant and came right out of his T-shirt, leaving Millie holding an empty, blood-streaked rag.

“Oh, Mom! Oh, Mom! Oh—” Wayne shouted, which was the same thing backward as it was forward. He took two running steps, slipped in the snow, went down on all fours in the road.

And dust swirled in the air. And the darkness shook with cannonades, blocks of stone falling into more stone, a hundred fifty thousand tons of snow, all the snow Charlie Manx had ever seen and ever imagined, came crashing toward them, flattening everything before it.

Manx stalked on, six strides from Wayne, already lifting his arm back to drop his silver hammer on Wayne’s lowered head. It had been designed for crushing skulls, and Wayne’s would be child’s play.

“Get out of my way, Charlie!” Vic hollered.

Manx half turned as she blew past him. Her slipstream grabbed and spun him, sent him staggering back on his heels.

Then the last of the ANFO, the backpack of it, exploded beneath the tree and seemed to take the entire world with it.





Gumdrop Lane


HIGH-PITCHED WHINE.

A confusion of dust and drifting motes of flame.

The world slid itself into an envelope of silence, in which the only sound was a soft droning, not unlike the emergency broadcasting signal.

Time softened, ran with the sweet drag of syrup trickling down the side of a bottle.

Vic glided through the atmosphere of ruin and watched a chunk of burning tree the size of a Cadillac bounce in front of her, appearing to move at less than a fifth of its actual speed.

In the silent snowstorm of debris—a whirling pink smoke—Vic lost sight of Charlie Manx and his car. She only dimly apprehended Wayne pushing himself up off all fours, like a runner coming out of the blocks. The girl with the long red hair was behind him with the knife, clutching it in both hands now. The ground shuddered and tipped her off balance, sent her reeling back into the stone wall at the edge of the drop.

Vic weaved around the girl. The child, Millie, turned her head to watch Vic go, her flukeworm mouth open in a sickened look of rage, the rows of teeth churning inside her throat hole. The girl pushed off the wall, and as she did, it gave way and took her along with it. Vic saw her lurch back into nothing and drop into that white storm of light.

Vic’s ears whined. She believed she was calling Wayne’s name. He ran from her—running blind and deaf—and did not look back.

The Triumph carried her up alongside him. She twisted at the waist and reached and caught him by the back of his shorts and hauled him onto the bike behind her, without slowing. There was plenty of time to manage this. Everything was moving so quietly and slowly, she could have counted each individual ember floating in the air. Her perforated kidney twanged in shock at this abrupt movement from the waist, but Vic, who was dying quickly now, did not let it trouble her.

Fire flurried from the sky.

Somewhere behind her, the snow of a hundred winters smothered Christmasland, a pillow pressed over the face of a terminally ill man.

It had felt good, to be held by Lou Carmody, to smell his odor of pines and of the garage, and even better to have her own son’s arms around her again, cinching her waist.

In the droning, apocalyptic darkness, there was at least no Christmas music. How she hated Christmas music. She always had.

Another burning lump of tree fell to her right, hit the cobbles, and exploded, throwing coals the size of dinner plates. A fiery arrow, as long as Vic’s forearm, whizzed through the air and sliced her forehead open above her right eyebrow. She did not feel it, although she saw it pass by before her eyes.

She clicked the Triumph effortlessly into fourth gear.

Her son squeezed her tighter. Her kidney twanged again. He was squeezing the life out of her, and it felt good.

She put her left hand over his two hands, knotted together at her navel. She stroked his small white knuckles. He was still hers. She knew because his skin was warm, not frozen and dead, like Charlie Manx’s pint-size vampires. He would always be hers. He was gold, and gold didn’t come off.

NOS4A2 erupted from the billowing smoke behind her. Through the dead, droning silence, she heard it, heard an inhuman growl, a precision-engineered, perfectly articulated roar of hate. Its tires carried it juddering and crashing over a field of smashed rock. Its headlights made the storm of dust—that blizzard of grit—shine like a flurry of diamonds. Manx was bent to the wheel, and he had his window down.

“I’LL SLAUGHTER YOU, YOU MISERABLE BITCH!” he screamed, and she heard that, too, though distantly, like the hush heard in a seashell. “I’M GOING TO RUN YOU DOWN, THE BOTH OF YOU! YOU KILLED ALL OF MINE, AND I’M GOING TO KILL YOURS!”

The bumper struck her rear tire, gave the Triumph a hard jolt. The handlebars jerked, trying to pull out of her grip. She held on. If she didn’t, the front tire would turn sharply to one side or the other, and the bike would dump them, and the Wraith would thud right over them.

The bumper of the Wraith slammed into them again. She was shoved forward, hard, head almost striking the handlebars.