[“RALPH. HURRY!”] It was Lois, and now she was in terror. He knew why; time had all but run out. He had maybe ten seconds, twenty at most. He lunged forward again, this time not at Ed but at the picture of Helen and Nat that was taped above the altimeter. He snatched it, held it up… and then crumpled it between his fingers. He didn’t know exactly what reaction he’d hoped for, but the one he got exceeded his wildest hopes.
“GIVE THEN BACK!” Ed screamed. He forgot about the controlwheel and groped for the picture instead. As he did, Ralph again saw the man he had glimpsed on the day Ed had beaten Helen-a man who was desperately unhappy and afraid of the forces which had been set loose within him. There were tears not just in his eyes but running down his cheeks, and Ralph thought confusedly: Has he been crying all along?
“GIVE them BACK.I” he bawled again, but Ralph was no longer sure he was the subject of that cry; he thought his former neighbor might be addressing the being which had stepped into his life, looked around itself to make sure it would do, and then simply taken it over.
Lois’s earring glittered in Ed’s cheek like a barbaric funerary ornament. “GltE THEM BACK, THERE MINE!”
Ralph held the crumpled photograph just beyond the reach of Ed’s waving hands. Ed lunged, the seatbelt bit into his gut, and Ralph punched him in the throat as hard as he could, feeling an indescribable mixture of satisfaction and revulsion as the blow landed on the hard, gristly protuberance of Ed’s Adam’s apple. Ed fell back against the cockpit wall, eyes bulging with pain and dismay and bewilderment, hands going to his throat. A thick gagging noise came from somewhere deep inside him. It sounded like some heavy piece of machinery in the process of stripping its gears.
Ralph shoved himself forward over Ed’s lap and saw the Civic Center now leaping up toward the airplane. He turned the wheel all the way to the left again and below him-directly below him-the Civic Center again began to rotate toward the side of the Cherokee’s soon-to-be-defunct windshield… but it moved with agonizing slowness.
Ralph realized he could smell something in the cockpit-some faint aroma both sweet and familiar. Before he could think what it might be, he saw something that distracted him completely. It was the Hoodsie Ice Cream wagon that sometimes cruised along Harris Avenue, tinkling its cheery little bell.
My God, Ralph thought, more in awe than in fear. I think I’m going to wind up in the deep freeze along with the Creamsicles and Hoodsie Rockets.
That sweet smell was stronger, and as hands suddenly seized his shoulders, Ralph realized it was Lois Chasse’s perfume.
“Come up!” she screamed. “Ralph, you dummy, you have to-” He didn’t think about it; he just did it. The thing in his mind clenched, the blink happened, and he heard the rest of what she had to say in that eerie, penetrating way that was more thought than speech.
[”-come up! Push with your feet.” Too late, he thought, but he did as she said nevertheless, planting his feet against the base of the radically canted instrument panel and shoving as hard as he could. He felt Lois rising up through the column of existence with him as the Cherokee shot through the last hundred feet between it and the ground, and as they zoomed upward, he felt a sudden blast of Lois-power wrap itself around him and yank him backward like a bungee cord. There was a brief, nauseating sensation of flying in two directions at the same time.
Ralph caught a final glimpse of Ed Deepneau slumped against the sidewall of the cockpit, but in a very real sense he did not see him at all. The thunderstruck yellow-gray aura was gone. Ed was also gone, buried in a deathbag as black as midnight in hell.
Then he and Lois were falling as well as flying.
CHAPTER 30
Just before the explosion came, Susan Day, standing in a hot white spotlight at the front of the Civic Center and now living through the last few seconds of her fabulous, provocative life, was saying: “I haven’t come to Derry to heal you, hector you, or to incite you, but to mourn with you-this is a situation which has passed far beyond political considerations. There is no right in violence, nor refuge in self-righteousness. I am here to ask that you put your positions and your rhetoric aside and help each other find a way to help each other.
To turn away from the attractions of-” The high windows lining the south side of the auditorium suddenly lit up with a brilliant white glare and then blew inward.
The Cherokee missed the Hoodsie wagon, but that didn’t save it.
The plane took one final half-turn in the air and then screwed itself into the parking lot about twenty-five feet from the fence where, earlier that day, Lois had paused to yank up her troublesome halfslip. The wings snapped off. The cockpit made a quick and violent journey back through the passenger section. The fuselage blew out with the fury of a bottle of champagne in a microwave oven. Glass flew.
The tail bent over the Cherokee’s body like the stinger of a dying scorpion and impaled itself in the roof of a Dodge van with the words PROTECT WOMEN’s IPJGHT TO CHOOSE! stencilled on the side. There was a bright and bitter crunch-clang that sounded like a dropped pile of scrap iron.
“Holy shi-” one of the cops posted on the edge of the parking lot began, and then the C-4 inside the cardboard box flew free like a big gray glob of phlegm and struck the remains of the instrument panel where several “hot” wires rammed into it like hypo needles.
The plastique exploded with an ear-crunching thud, flash-frying the Bassey Park racetrack and turning the parking lot into a hurricane of white light and shrapnel. John Leydecker, who had been standing under the Civic Center’s cement canopy-and talking to a State cop, was thrown through one of the open doors and all the way across the lobby.
He struck the far wall and fell unconscious into the shattered glass from the harness-racing trophy case. At that, he was luckier than the man with whom he had been standing; the State cop was thrown into the post between two of the open doors and chopped in half.
The ranks of cars actually shielded the Civic Center from the worst of the hammering, concussive blow, but that blessing would only be counted later. Inside, over two thousand people at first sat stunned, unsure of what they should do and even more unsure of what most of them had just seen: America’s most famous feminist decapitated by a jagged chunk of flying glass. Her head went flying into the sixth row like some strange white bowling ball with a blonde wig pasted on it.
They didn’t erupt into panic until the lights went out.
Seventy-one people were killed in the trampling, panicked rush to the exits, and the next day’s Derry News would trumpet the event with a forty-eight-point scare headline, calling it a terrible tragedy.
Ralph Roberts could have told them that, all things considered, they had gotten off lucky. Very lucky, indeed.
Halfway up the north balcony, a woman named Sonia Danville-a woman with the bruises of the last beating any man would ever give her still fading from her face-sat with her arms around the shoulders of her son, Patrick. Patrick’s McDonald’s poster, showing Ronald and Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar dancing the BootScootin’ Boogie just outside a drive-thru window, was on his lap, but he had hardly done more than color the golden arches before turning the poster over to the blank side. It wasn’t that he had lost interest; it was just that he’d had an idea for a picture of his own, and it had come, as such ideas often did to him, with the force of a compulsion.
He had spent most of the day thinking about what had happened in the cellar at High Ridge-the smoke, the heat, the frightened women, and the two angels that had come to save them-but his splendid idea banished these disturbing thoughts, and he fell to work with silent enthusiasm. Soon Patrick felt almost as if he were living in the world he was drawing with his Crayolas.