00:09:21:27
WHEN BARBARA Walters leans forward to emphasize her next question, Brandon Bazin seizes his chance and meets her with an open-mouthed kiss. They are floating in a hot fragrant bubble bath, submerged up to their shoulders. Brandon feels tingly and aware. He has never kissed an old lady before, except his mother and those weird aunts from Cedar Rapids. Barbara’s body loosens in his arms. She reciprocates with her tongue. Her bony hand slides down between his legs through the water and squeezes. Brandon gets an instantaneous erection so hard it hurts. Chest swelling with optimism, he doesn’t know what it is he has been looking for all his life, but he knows this is it. A single red rose leans in a green glass vase at the far end of the tub. Brandon reaches forward to offer it to Barbara, but by chance his elbow knocks into the boombox playing Plato’s Deathmetal Tumors on the stool beside him. The boombox tips before either can respond and splashes into the sudsy water in a silverwhite flash of sparks and smoke. Barbara Walters and Brandon Bazin lunge and twist in place.
00:09:22:12
OH MY, WORRIES Betsi Bliss. Something is happening, but what? Nothing was happening and then something began happening. Then the next thing happened before Betsi had a chance to understand the last. And presently more things are happening one after the other after the other. Everything seemed so straightforward a minute ago. Now it’s all sixes and sevens. Perhaps what is happening is a preview for one of those French films. If so, this is why Betsi Bliss prefers American food. Something continues to happen, and at the moment Betsi has no idea what is going to happen after it. She cannot put her finger on it, exactly, but she senses maybe she is becoming somehow more abstract. She doesn’t quite know what she means by that, but she certainly does feel lost.
00:09:23:12
A SHRIEKING FROM above. Byron looks up from his deck of cards. He sees his buddies throwing themselves onto their stomachs, hands clamping down over helmets. His own body begins a slo-mo push forward to join them, but it is too late. The mortar slugs in.
00:09:23:13
“JESUS H. CHRIST!” Fred Quock’s father shouts, throwing open the door to Leni’s room with a bang. “Turn that goddamn noise duh—” He stops, arms flopping to his sides, face slackening as he takes in the view. “What…what the hell’s going on here? Freddy, you’re wearing a dress. What in god’s name is my son doing wearing a dress?”
00:09:23:14
“STOP IT!” MOIRA screams. “Please stop!” The big one with the smile that won’t go away is slapping her around the mouth and cheeks with the back of his hand. She can taste blood and the taste scares her. She can smell a match igniting, then cigarette smoke. Blindfolded, Moira wafts in nighttime, waiting for what will happen next. The first burn hisses on her thighskin. She lunges and twists in place, but the strips of pillowcase holding her wrists and ankles to the bedposts are too tight. She can’t make any progress. Her blindfold slips up a little on the left. She makes out the nervous second boy leaning against the wall, football helmet still beneath his arm, watching them all. The boy leisurely slides his free hand down the front of his pants. Another cigarette kiss. “Please!” Moira screams. “I can’t remember my goddamn safety word! Cut it out! It hurts!” A set of heavy knuckles cracks into her right temple. Light swarms her head. Moira hopes the video camera on the tripod is able to capture her look of disbelief mixed with anguish.
00:09:24:06
“HEY, HEY, BABES,” says Vladislav, swaggering up to the two girls. His erection, wedged between the elastic of his black Calvin Klein briefs and his left leg, smarts. “Feel like a little company this afternoon?” The girls don’t break eye contact with each other. “I’m not your type,” says the one with the small gold ring at the corner of her mouth. “I’m not inflatable.” “If I throw a stick,” says the one with glazed-plum lipstick, “will you leave?” Then they continue their conversation as if Vladislav isn’t there. He looks from one to the other expectantly, waiting for an opening, waiting for one of them to acknowledge the joke and invite him into it. He looks some more. And then, behind him, an explosion. Silverwhite glare. The rolling shockwave. The arcade a windstorm of shrapnel.
00:09:27:10
WHAT THE HELL just happened? Sid Munsterberg wonders, everything all at once black and dusty. He is lying on his side. His right shoulder is numb. He tries to remember what he saw just before the blast. That fat man hefting himself slowly out of his seat, candy boxes, popcorn tub, and cartons junked with food dropping away from him. How he rotated with difficulty to face the projection booth and how his arms rose up along his sides, launched out, spread wide, as if he were offering his chest to the lightmist bombarding him. Only then, his bloodstream lighting up with adrenalin, did Sid put together that something was out of the ordinary. He could make out a device in the guy’s right hand. It looked like a joystick. Next he could feel his own body begin a slo-mo push forward over the empty seat in front of him, but it was too late. The fat man tilted back his head, closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and squeezed the trigger. Stay calm, Sid tells himself, pinned beneath smoking debris, a shrill squeal cycling in his ears. It’s okay. It’s all right. This is exactly what the emergency response teams have trained for. Everybody’s going to be fine, just fine. Hold on tight. It’s beginning.
00:09:31:24
ALL AT ONCE RYAN Moody finds himself on his back beneath jagged rubble, baked dust singing his sinuses, the seat he was sitting in seconds ago somehow on top of him. He tries to get his bearings. It must be snowing through the wide gray absence above him. He can feel icy flakes kissing his thighskin through his shredded jeans. His ears feel clogged with water. He assumes he has gone deaf. Then, in stages, everything muffled, he begins to pick out the girl in front of him crying, and somebody nearby starting to moan. Other dazed voices lift here and there from the wreckage and, beyond, an alarm cycling deliriously.
00:09:36:18
THE GIRLS SCREAM. Vladislav shoves them to the grated metal floor, drops and rolls, freeing his Glock and opening fire. “Stop it!” they cry out behind him, covering their ears. “Please stop!” “Stay down!” he shouts back. It is hard to tell where he is in this existential dimness, how many there are out there, but they are well armed and just keep coming. He pegs one in the head, another in the upper chest, takes off another’s kneecap. Momentum spins the last guy in a ski mask and night goggles through a flimsy banister, except he is somehow able to ignite an incendiary device as he goes over. What looks like a joystick twirls through the air in slo-mo, then plups into a vat filled with black liquid. Everything is flawlessly still. Then the blast. The girls wail. Vladislav ducks and covers. How in the world can he have an erection at a time like this? He closes his eyes, knowing he has to concentrate. The windstorm of shrapnel whirls into him.