From a Buick 8(67)

Sandy yanked Curt out on to the pavement, then grabbed the knob, meaning to shut the door. Curt took hold of his wrist. 'No, Sandy, no! I want to see it! I want ? '

Sandy peeled his hand off, not gently. 'Are you crazy? There's a procedure we follow on this, a goddam procedure. No one should know that better than you! You helped think it up, for God's sake!'

When Sandy slammed the door shut, cutting off any direct view of the Buick, Curt's eyelids fluttered and he twitched like a man waking out of a deep sleep. 'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, boss. I'm sorry.'

'It's all right.' Not really believing it was. Because the damned fool would have stood right there in the doorway. No question about it in Sandy's mind. Would have stood there and been fried, if frying was on that thing's agenda.

'I need to get my goggles,' Curt said. 'They're in the trunk of my car. I have extras, and they're extra dark. A whole box of them. Do you want a pair?' Sandy still got the feeling that Curt wasn't fully awake, that he was only pretending, like you did when the telephone rang in the middle of the night.

'Sure, why not? But we're going to be cautious, right? Because this is looking like a bad one.'

'Looking like a great one!' Curt said, and the exuberance in his voice, although slightly scary, made Sandy feel a little better. At least Curt didn't sound as if he were sleepwalking any longer. 'But yes, Mother ? we'll follow procedure and be as cautious as hell.'

He ran for his car ? not his cruiser but his personal, the restored Bel Aire his boy would wind up driving ? and opened the trunk. He was still rummaging in the boxes of stuff he kept back there when the Buick exploded.

It did not literally explode, but there seemed to be no other word for what it did do. Those who were there that day never forgot it, but they talked about it remarkably little, even among themselves, because there seemed no way to express the terrifying magnificence of it. The power of it. The best they could say was that it darkened the June sun and seemed to turn the shed transparent, into a ghost of itself. It was impossible to comprehend how mere glass could stand between that light and the outside world. The throbbing brilliance poured through the boards of the shed like water through cheesecloth; the shapes of the nails stood out like the dots in a newspaper photograph or purple beads of blood on top of a fresh tattoo. Sandy heard Carl Brundage shout She's gonna blow this time, she most surely will! From behind him, in the barracks, he could hear Mister Dillon howling in terror.

'But he still wanted to get out and get at it,' Orville told Sandy later. 'I had im in the upstairs lounge, as far from that goddam shed as I could get him, but it didn't make any difference. He knew it was there. Heard it, I imagine ? heard it humming. And then he saw the window. Holy Christ! If I hadn't been quick, hadn't grabbed him right off, I think he would have jumped right through it, second story or not. He pissed all over me and I never realized it until half an hour later, that's how scared I was.'

Orville shook his head, his face heavy and thoughtful.

'Never seen a dog like that. Never. His fur was all bushed out, he was foamin at the mouth, and his eyeballs looked like they were poppin right out of his head. Christ.'

Curt, meanwhile, came running back with a dozen pairs of protective goggles. The Troopers put them on but there was still no way of looking in at the Buick; it was impossible to even approach the windows. And again there was that weird silence when they all felt they should have been standing at the center of a cacophony, hearing thunder and landslides and erupting volcanoes. With the shed's doors shut, they (unlike Mister D) couldn't even hear the humming noise. There was the shuffle of feet and someone clearing his throat and Mister Dillon howling in the barracks and Orvie Garrett telling him to calm down and the sound of Matt Babicki's static-drowned radio from dispatch, where the window (now denuded of its flower box, thanks to Curt) had been left open. Nothing else.

Curt walked to the roll-up door like a man walking into a high wind, head bent and hands raised. Twice he tried to lift his face and look inside Shed B, but he couldn't. It was too bright. Sandy grabbed his shoulder and restrained an urge to shout in his ear. There was no need to shout, but the situation made you want to do it, just the same.

'Quit trying to look. You can't do it. Not yet, anyway. It'll knock the eyes right out of your head.'

'What is it, Sandy?' Curt whispered. 'What in God's name is it?'

Sandy could only shake his head.

For the next half hour the Buick put on the lightshow to end all lightshows, turning Shed B into a kind of fireball, shooting parallel lines of light through all the windows, flashing and flashing, a gaudy neon furnace without heat or sound. If anyone from John Q. Public's family had turned up during that time, God knew what they might have thought or who they would have told or how much those they told might have believed, but no outsiders did turn up. And by five-thirty, the D Troopers had started to see individual flashes of light again, as if the power-source driving the phenomenon had begun to wobble. It made Sandy think of the way a motorcycle will lurch and spurt when the gas-tank is almost dry.

Curt edged up to the windows again, and although he had to duck down each time one of those bolts of light shot out, he could take little peeks in between. Sandy joined him, ducking away from the brighter pulses (We probably look like we're practicing some weird drill routine, he thought), squinting, eyes dazzled in spite of the triple layer of polarized glass in the goggles.