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When he finally reached the movie theater, the crowd outside looked much bigger than it had before. There were at least four different TV station vans with lights and cameras next to them and people holding microphones and talking at the cameras while some people stood around watching them. An old man in a three-cornered hat like Paul Revere and with a big crudely painted banner with pictures of Jesus and stuff on it that looked like he’d made it himself was still caterwauling as he had been early that morning, but his voice was all hoarse so you couldn’t understand what he was saying and nobody was paying much attention to him. There was a little group of children singing church stuff real offkey, but you couldn’t make out the words to those either. Other people were laughing or yelling, though an awful lot of them, the younger people who looked like the kind who’d go to movies there, looked like they were all drunk or maybe on drugs. Some were rolling around together on the ground, not just in pairs but bunches of them, and some weren’t wearing a lot of clothes, even though it was pretty chilly out. Some people standing around watching were laughing like they couldn’t stop, grabbing their stomachs like they hurt, while a few other people were crying and yelling. It reminded Jaime of the time his brother Marlon got put in the state hospital after getting arrested trying to shop at the supermarket naked—“thrown in the looney bin” Maamaw had said—and they all went out to visit him, and Jaime and Dawnie had gotten separated from the others and walked around this one building there where you could hear a bunch of people inside the buildings yelling and crying. It had scared the two of them so much they’d run like crazy to get away from there.

Then Jaime saw a bunch of cops in front of the wall and they’d put up a bunch of that yellow police tape they use to keep people from getting too close to the picture of the man on the wall. Big bright lights on poles had been set up to shine on the wall. He walked near to where one of the TV people was talking excitedly into a microphone with a big TV camera pointed at her face, a real pretty woman with red hair whom he’d seen on TV before.

“—where only minutes ago a young woman hurled a severed human head at the image on the wall. Many onlookers believed it was a prank, but police have now confirmed that the severed head was indeed real. The woman was arrested on the spot, but both she and the victim remain unidentified at this time. As you at home can likely see, as we here on the scene can see plainly, a smear of blood remains on the wall directly over the image, left when the head slid down the wall after being thrown, horrifying witnesses.”

Jaime walked up closer, standing behind the TV reporter and gawking at the wall. Some guy grabbed his arm and yanked him to one side, giving him a real dirty look. He must have been too close to the reporter and visible on TV. He walked around to another spot, right by the police tape, where he could still see. The blood smear was a faint, uneven line running down from the area near the figure’s head, reminding him of a shit-stain in underpants. That, in turn, brought a realization: the wall was right below where his apartment was. Could the image have maybe come from all that backed-up poop that disappeared from the toilet when he was pumping it with the plunger? Uh-oh.

He was dazed, and his chest started hurting again. The picture, maybe just a big poop stain from the toilet in his apartment he wasn’t supposed to be living in. And a woman threw a head at it. It must have been Clare with Todd’s head. Now Jaime was worried he might get in some bad trouble over this stuff.

At that scary thought, as if provoked by it, it began to rain, really hard. A groan went up from some in the crowd. “Wash it away, Lord!” someone called out, and Jaime wondered whether they meant the blood smear or the other one. In fact, the rain was slanted so it hit the image directly, as if it were aimed in that way. It did seem to be having an effect on not only the blood but the human-like image as well, which began to shift, as if morphing slowly. What appeared to be its belly swelled while its legs thinned and twisted inward.

Jaime decided to look around the opposite side of the building, to where the fire escape was that he used to get in and out of what he thought of as his apartment upstairs, but some guys in yellow helmets and some kind of uniform were on the fire escape, talking and pointing upward. Maybe they had figured something out about the source of the image on the wall. With a sinking feeling, he stepped back around to the side where the image was, and as he did, a great moan went up from the crowd.

He saw why when he looked again at the image. It was still changing and far more rapidly than before. Its head and upward arm became freakishly thicker, and the arm sprouted a lump that elongated quickly. “Look, now he’s giving us the finger!” someone shouted, and that was followed by more groans and some wailing and loud, if muddled, appeals to the Lord, accompanied by bursts of delighted laughter. “I’m melting, I’m melting!” someone shrieked in plain imitation of the Wicked Witch of the West. A lone voice began to chant ,“No rain, no rain!” and one or two others chimed in, but the effort soon died away. Meanwhile, the image continued to shift, now shrinking into a formless blob. There was much lamenting, and the laughter seemed to fall silent.

By this time Jaime had to pee pretty badly—perhaps the rain itself had brought that need to the forefront of his mind—and walked around to the far side of the building, past the front, where police cars and fire engines with flashing lights were parked. He thought he might find an isolated section of wall there to pee against, since there were a lot of weeds growing there and there wasn’t room for people to stand around. As it happened, the area around that wall was empty of people. He hurried up to it, pulled out his dick and began to pee. While doing so, he noticed a window at the very bottom of the wall that appeared to be open a bit. Walking over and pulling at it, it came open easily. And it was wide enough for him to squeeze through…

CHAPTER 39

MEG AND HER FRIENDS IN THE CAR

“They just gave you this car?” Tyler was holding on to the edges of his seat like he expected the car to go off the road any minute.

“I swear,” said Meg. “It was this woman. She was talking about how the world was going to end so she wouldn’t need it.”

“Jesus fuck,” said Ryan, lounging in the back seat. “These people are so nuts. You should have seen the woman at the thing who threw the head at Jesus!”

“Omigod, yes, it was insane!” said Tyler. “She was—”

“What? She threw a head? A human head?” Meg stepped harder on the gas pedal for a moment and the car jounced in protest.

“Yes, a real head,” said Ryan. “Somebody said she’d been talking to the head, too. And somebody tackled her and then the police came up and she was like having a connip—”

“The old gal who gave me this fucking car had a head with her, too!”

“You’re kidding,” said Ryan, shaking his dreadlocks.

“No! And she was kind of talking to it. I asked her where she got it. It looked real, almost.”

“No way! That was fucking her!” Ryan sat up, grabbing the back of Meg’s seat as the car jounced again. “It was real! The head!”

“What?!”

“It was a real severed head! The TV lady said!”

Meg screamed briefly and the car swerved.

“Hey, watch it! Don’t get freaked out!”

“It was a real head, and I was right here in the car with her!” Megs scream was louder and more sustained than before.