Dex did not begin to make sense of events until he was in the alley, his good arm over Howard Poole’s shoulder and his feet moving by some logic of their own.
He looked at Howard, who was breathless and bleeding from what looked like a hundred small cuts. “What,” he said. It was meant to be, What are we doing? But the words evaded his grasp.
Howard gave him a brief look. “Run. If you can run, just do it.”
They jogged together. Each step triggered new fireworks from his shoulder and arm, no longer numb, alas. He didn’t look at the wound. He had never been keen on the sight of blood, his own or anyone else’s, and he couldn’t afford another spell of light-headedness.
He did risk a glance behind him. He saw what appeared to be a large-scale hallucination.
Above the pebbled roofs of the Beacon Street shops, above the rain gutters and the tangled telephone wires, a column of fire had risen into the cloudless night sky. The flames as they ascended became a luminous shade of blue, and in that coruscating substance, it seemed to Dex, there were faces, immense and endlessly shifting.
“God’s sake,” Howard rasped, “don’t stop!”
They crossed Oak and were some yards uphill along the crowded lane when Dex said, “Wait.”
Howard regarded him with a desperate impatience. “We’re leaving a trail,” Dex said. “Look.”
Bright drops of blood had speckled the asphalt. Connect the dots, Dex thought. They’ll find us by morning.
Lights had winked on in all these houses, but there were deep shadows among the alleyside sheds and fences, and all attention must be focused on the fire. They crouched in a tangle of darkness.
“It’s mostly me. Howard, you have to bind this wound. Or apply a tourniquet.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I’ll tell you how. Put down that box, first of all.” Dex squinted at it. The optical reader. “You stole the damn thing after all, didn’t you? In spite of all this?”
“I had it in my hands when the soldier came in. It’s what we went for.”
“You’re a single-minded son of a bitch, Howard.”
“You learn that in grad school.” He took a breath. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like the wound is in the fleshy part of your arm. Clear through. It’s bleeding a lot but it’s not, uh, gushing. What do I tie it with?”
“Use your belt for a tourniquet. Tight above the injury. Any kind of cloth to soak up what leaks.”
Howard worked while Dex sat on the cold ground and fixed his attention on the board fence next to him. It had once been painted, but the paint had all peeled away except for a few flakes clinging to the grain. The fence had once been white. Tonight it was gray, mottled by the light of the distant fire.
The pain was enormous and his grip on consciousness a little uncertain. He said, “Howard?”
“Uh?”
“What the hell happened back there?”
“I don’t know. Something blew up. Lucky for us.”
“A coincidence?”
“I suppose so. Synchronicity, at least. I’m about to tighten this.” Dex counted silently to ten. His vision blurred somewhere around seven. Make words, he instructed himself.
“What happened back there … it was strange.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not natural.”
“I guess not.”
“Basically, it was weird.”
“You could say so. There.” A final tug. “Can you stand up?”
“Yeah.” But he was unsteady.
“Can you walk?”
“Oh, yeah. I’d better walk. It’s pretty much walk or die, don’t you think?”
Howard didn’t answer.
Clifford turned and ran when he saw the pillar of blue fire. He was halfway up the block when he remembered his bike. He screwed up his courage and went back, grabbed the bike and straddled it, and cut west on Oak because it was the quickest, if not the least conspicuous, way home.
His view of the events on Beacon Street had been comprehensive, and he understood everything up until the moment of the explosion. It unrolled inside him like a movie, like a videotape spliced into a maddening loop. His anger. The empty patrol car. Working the gear lever. His rising dread when he understood what the consequences would be. And the explosion at the gas pumps, and then—
But that part made no sense. In his tape-loop memory, it looked like this: the gas pumps detonated in a ball of fire… and then something, something like a vast ethereal blue spark, had come down from the sky to touch the fireball; and the spark had coalesced into a cobalt-colored snake about as wide as the Gulf station and twisting up into the night sky as far as the eye could reach. It seemed to Clifford that the column had curved a little to the west, but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t been looking at it with scientific detachment. With panic, if anything. In that terrible moment it had occurred to him that he might somehow have caused the end of the world itself, because the blue light had not been merely light; it had been full of faces and forms—human faces and forms. One in particular. A grim, bearded face. God or the devil, Clifford thought.
His bike flew through the November darkness like a wild bullet. His legs pumped in a ceaseless fury that would have startled him if he had been aware of it. His only thought was of home; his house, his room, his bed.
He slowed when he reached the suburban part of town. He had to; his breathing was so labored it hurt his lungs, and he had a painful stitch in his side. He let the bike drift to a stop and put one leg down to steady himself. Reluctantly, fearfully, he turned and looked back at Two Rivers.
The pillar of blue flame was gone, to Clifford’s immense relief. Maybe he had only imagined it. He must have. But the ordinary fire burned on; he could see the glow of it reflected from houses on the high ground near Powell Creek Park. What pained him now was the knowledge that none of this could be taken back, not ever—for the rest of his life he would be responsible for blowing up the Gulf station (and please God, Clifford thought, let no one have been inside it)… The memory was part of his permanent luggage, and worse, it would have to remain a secret. This was something he could never be caught at or confess to, not in Two Rivers under the rule of the soldiers. There was no juvenile court in Two Rivers anymore; there was only the executioner.
He pedaled the rest of the way home unaware of the tears on his face. Home, he parked his bike out of sight; he unlocked the door, stepped inside, locked it behind him; unlaced his sneakers and put them in the hall closet; padded upstairs to his room. The sight of the bed made him instantly, staggeringly tired. But there was work yet to do.
He stripped his torn and dirty clothes and took them to the bathroom. He wedged them into the dirty-clothes hamper, down toward the bottom; his mother was lax about the wash these days and she probably wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary—his clothes were often dirty and many of them had been torn since June.
Then he turned on the taps, hoping the sound of running water wouldn’t wake his mother. He stood in the tub and used a washcloth to soak the dirt off his face and sponge the clotted blood from his hands and elbows. Whence seemed clean, front and back, he wiped down the tub, then rinsed the cloth and stuffed it into the hamper with everything else.
He turned off the water and the light and tiptoed back to his room. He put on pajamas: his old ones, a little too tight nowadays, flannel with blue and white stripes. Then, only then, he allowed himself the bed.
The sheets were as cool and welcoming as absolution and the blanket contained him like a prayer. He meant to plan his excuses if anyone questioned him tomorrow, but his thoughts quickly turned to nonsense and a tide of sleep carried him far away.