Which happened more quickly than he expected. Clifford scrambled back across the bench to the open door and found the pavement scrolling past at a surprising speed. He closed his eyes and jumped, an awkward leap; he hit the sidewalk with feet, hips, shoulders. He tore his shirt and scraped his palms bloody. He would have to explain this to his mother, come the morning. If he ever reached home.
He hurried back to the shadow of the tree to watch the empty car, which had already rolled a considerable distance. Its motion was stately at first, then alarming. Its speed increased until it seemed to Clifford as if the car had been launched from some enormous slingshot. It rattled over every bump in the road, took small but perilous leaps; now, well across Oak and down the empty avenue of Beacon, it tilted perilously on two wheels and then righted itself. The slope of the street declined past Oak but the runaway car seemed to take no notice.
He tried to figure out where it would impact. The hardware store, he thought, or, no, it was veering right; the barber shop, the bookstore—the gas station.
Clifford gasped and held his breath.
He felt a sudden awe at the enormity of the events he had triggered. He understood that there was going to be more damage than he’d imagined—damage on a huge scale, damage that made his knees weak with anticipation.
He couldn’t guess at the speed of the patrol car as it left the road, but he thought it might be going faster than any car had ever gone on Beacon Street. The tires came up over the lip of the curb and the whole car seemed to levitate above the air-and-water dispenser at the Gulf station. It rotated as it moved, the back end rising as the nose dipped, and when Clifford realized it was going to collide with the self-serve gas pumps he instinctively covered his ears.
A grinding crash echoed up the empty road. Clifford watched through eyes squeezed nearly shut. He saw the patrol car sheer off a pump unit before it came to a full stop. There was a last rattle, a fading hiss, then silence, and Clifford dared to take a breath.
Then the patrol car’s damaged battery shorted itself into a spreading pool of gasoline, and it looked as if the sun itself had risen over the rooftops of Beacon Street.
Nicodemus Bourgoint, a line soldier of the Fifth Athabasca Infantry, had been due for shipment to the Mexican front when he was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer and transferred to domestic duty in the otherworldly town of Two Rivers. Given a choice, he would have preferred the front.
There, the dangers were predictable. War didn’t frighten him. Getting shot or blown up, that was a human thing. It was a fate anyone might come to.
But Two Rivers frightened him. It had frightened him from the beginning. The soldiers detailed to Two Rivers had been offered no explanation of the existence of the place, barring some aphorisms from a Bureau attache about the bountiful mysteries of God. The Genetrix Mundi was endlessly fecund, Nico supposed, and there might well be an occasional wrinkle in the Pleroma, but that was small consolation when one was condemned to endlessly patrolling the vacant streets of this terrifyingly strange place. Not only that, but the accommodations were crowded, the duties were tedious and repetitive, and the food was bad. The mess sergeant had been promising roast beef since August; it never arrived.
He longed for home. He had been raised on a cattle ranch in the northern province of Athabasca and he felt confined by these wooded hills, these leafless trees, the alien village. Never more so than tonight. He had been assigned night patrol with Filo Mueller, who liked to torture him with campfire stories about headless corpses and one-legged ghosts, and as much as Nico tried to conceal the uneasiness this caused in him, some evidence of it always showed on his face—much to Mueller’s amusement. Such things simply weren’t funny, Nico thought. Not in this place.
Of course, when they turned the corner of Oak and Beacon and saw the figure disappearing down the alleyway, all frivolity ceased. Nico wanted to stop and give chase; but Mueller, a devious sort, argued for calling in reinforcements and circling the block. “Let our trespasser think we gave up. If we chase him, we’ll lose him. You’re not a hunter, are you, Nico?”
“My uncles hunt buck in the mountains,” Nico said defensively.
“But you never went with them. You’re not the type.”
They circled the block. Mueller radioed for another car, and Nico was all in favor of waiting for it to arrive. But Mueller spotted the glint of someone’s flashlight in a store window and fixed his serpentine stare on Nico. “You go in,” he said.
Mueller was Nico’s superior by a degree of rank and technically entitled to give the order, but Nico assumed he was joking. It was the look on Mueller’s face that convinced him otherwise.
The son of Samael was grinning.
“Take your pistol out of its pouch for once,” Mueller said. “Demonstrate some testicles, Nico.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Good for you. Go on.”
But he was afraid. He hated these shops, with their windows full of incomprehensible goods. One of the stupider infantrymen, a huge man named Seth, was forever proclaiming his idea that Two Rivers was actually a settlement on the outskirts of Hell; that these truncated roads had once run straight to the Temple of the Lord of the Hebdomad, the Father of Grief.
The idea was childish but sometimes annoyingly plausible. For instance, tonight. Nico, moving as slowly as his pride permitted, approached the door of a building called Desktop Solutions. The sign, in its odd graceless English script, was confounding. Like so many of the inscriptions on these stores, it made no sense; the words had no comprehensible connection to one another. Just like Unisex Hair or Circuit City, it seemed to promise the impossible or the absurd. The shapes in the window were only gray boxes, small items like miniature television sets, plain and uninviting.
He drew his pistol. A sense of unreality overtook him as he pushed open the door—thank God, it wasn’t locked—and braced himself in a shooter’s stance, pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left. This might be a dream, he thought. He might be in the barracks sleeping. He hoped he was.
He saw a gaunt figure duck behind a desk, and his attention focused instantly. He stepped closer, wishing someone had come with him, even Mueller, but surely Mueller and his reinforcements would be here soon; he came close enough to see the man huddled on the floor without a weapon, and he was about to order the man to stand when a second figure approached from the rear with a crowbar in his hand. Nico aimed his flashlight at this new apparition. The man blinked and turned.
Nico’s finger tightened on the pistol and it bucked in his hand—he wasn’t even certain he had meant to fire; only that it happened almost without his volition, an event to which he was an accessory but not the main cause. The man was wounded. The man fell. Nico took another bewildered step forward. The shot man was unconscious and his friend huddled over him, eyes wide on Nico.
“Don’t move,” Nico said.
“Don’t shoot,” the other man pleaded. Nico held the pistol trembling but level and wondered where Mueller was. Surely he had heard the shot? What was keeping him?
Then there was a thunderous crash from behind him, and a light so bright it seemed to drain the color out of everything. And the window glass came hurtling inward in a thousand fragments.
Nico Bourgoint felt the glass cut his back and arm. He turned, and dropped his pistol in astonishment at what he saw: the Lord of the Hebdomad rising in a pillar of flame from the opposite side of the street.