From a Buick 8(42)

Tony stopped just before they reached it. 'Photo that,' he said, pointing to a place high on the roll-up door behind the Buick ? the door through which Johnny Parker had towed the car in the first place. To Tony Schoondist and Sandy Dearborn, that already seemed like a long time ago. 'And that, and there, and over there.'

At first Sandy didn't see what the Sarge was pointing at. He looked away, blinked his eyes once or twice, then looked back. And there it was, three or four dark green smudges that made Sandy think of the dust that rubs off a moth's wings. As kids they had solemnly assured each other that mothdust was deadly poison, it would blind you if you got some on your fingers and then rubbed your eyes.

'You see what happened, don't you?' Tony asked as Sandy raised the Polaroid and sighted in on the first mark. The camera seemed very heavy and his hands were still shivering, but he got it done.

'No, Sarge, I, ah . . . don't guess I do.'

'Whatever that thing is ? bird, bat, some kind of robot drone ? it flew out of the trunk when the lid came open. It hit the back door, that's the first smudge, and then it started

bouncing off the walls. Ever seen a bird that gets caught in a shed or a barn?'

Sandy nodded.

'Like that.' Tony wiped sweat off his forehead and looked at Sandy. It was a look the younger man never forgot. He had never seen the Sarge's eyes so naked. It was, he thought, the look you sometimes saw on the faces of small children when you came to break up a domestic disturbance.

'Man,' Tony said heavily. 'Fuck.'

Sandy nodded.

Tony looked down at the bag. 'You think it looks like a bat?'

'Yeah,' Sandy said, then, 'No.' After another pause he added, 'Bullshit.'

Tony barked a laugh that sounded somehow haggard. 'That's very definitive. If you were on the witness stand, no defense attorney could peel that back.'

'I don't know, Tony.' What Sandy did know was that he wanted to stop shooting the shit and get back out into the open air. 'What do you think?'

'Well, if I drew it, it'd look like a bat,' Tony said. The Polaroids we took also make it look like a bat. But. . . I don't know exactly how to say it, but . . .'

'It doesn't feel like a bat,' Sandy said.

Tony smiled bleakly and pointed a finger at Sandy like a gun. 'Very zen, Grasshoppah. But those marks on the wall suggest it at least acted like a bat, or a trapped bird. Flew around in here until it dropped dead in the corner. Shit, for all we know, it died of fright.'

Sandy recalled the glaring dead eye, a thing almost too alien to look at, and thought that for the first time in his life he could really understand the concept Sergeant Schoondist had articulated. Die of fright? Yes, it could be done. It really could. Then, because the Sarge seemed to be waiting for something, he said: 'Or maybe it hit the wall so hard it broke its neck.' Another idea came to him. 'Or ? listen, Tony ? maybe the air killed it.'

'Say what?'

'Maybe ? '

But Tony's eyes had lit up and he was nodding. 'Sure,' he said. 'Maybe the air on the other side of the Buick's trunk is different air. Maybe it'd taste like poison gas to us . . . rupture our lungs . . .'

For Sandy, that was enough. 'I have to get out of here, Tony, or I'm gonna be the one who throws up.' But what he really felt in danger of was choking, not vomiting. All at once the normally broad avenue of his windpipe was down to a pinhole.

Once they were back outside (it was nearly dark by then and an incredibly sweet summer breeze had sprung up), Sandy felt better. He had an idea Tony did, too; certainly some of the color had come back into the Sarge's cheeks. Huddie and a few other Troopers came over to the two of them as Tony shut the walk-in side door, but nobody said anything. An outsider with no context upon which to draw might have looked at those faces and thought that the President had died or war had been declared.

'Sandy?' Tony asked. 'Any better now?'

'Yeah.' He nodded at the garbage bag, hanging like a dead pendulum with its strange weight at the bottom. 'You really think it might have been our air that killed it?'

'It's possible. Or maybe just the shock of finding itself in our world. I don't think I could live for long in the world this thing came from, tell you that much. Even if I could breathe the . . .' Tony stopped, because all at once Sandy looked bad again. Terrible, in fact. 'Sandy, what is it? What's wrong?'

Sandy wasn't sure he wanted to tell his SC what was wrong, wasn't even sure he could. What he'd thought of was Ennis Rafferty. The idea of the missing Trooper added to what they had just discovered in Shed B suggested a conclusion that Sandy didn't want to consider. Once it had come into his mind, though, it was hard to get it back out. If the Buick was a conduit to some other world, and the bat-thing had gone through it in one direction, then Ennis Rafferty had almost certainly gone through in the other.

'Sandy, talk to me.'

'Nothing wrong, boss,' Sandy replied, then had to bend over and grip his shins in both hands. It was a good way to stop yourself from fainting, always assuming you had enough time to use it. The others stood around watching him, still saying nothing, still wearing those long faces that said the King is dead, long live the King.

At last the world steadied again, and Sandy straightened up. 'I'm okay,' he said. 'Really.'