He had one chance, and he needed to execute his plan — his feeble, pathetic plan — smoothly, quickly, confidently, before P.J. realized what was happening.
He hesitated. Didn't want to act precipitously, before he was sure that he had summoned all his depleted resources. Wait. Wait. Be sure. Wait forever? The ultimate consequences of inaction could be greater than the consequences of action. Now or never. Do or die. Do and die, but at least, for God's sake, do something!
In one fluid movement, clenching his broken teeth against the explosion of pain that he knew would come — that came — Joey rolled up from his side into a sitting position, pulling the shotgun with him, bracing his back against the wall.
Even over his muttering and the persistent rumbling in the earth under the church, P.J. heard and reacted, simultaneously rising from his crouch and turning.
Joey had both hands on the Remington. The butt of the stock was jammed against his shoulder.
The baleful light that glimmered on the switchblade also leaped in P.J.'s eyes.
Pointblank. Joey squeezed the trigger.
The boom seemed loud enough to shatter the stone around them, and echoes of the shot crashed back and forth from one end of the room to the other, from ceiling to floor, with a volume that seemed to swell rather than diminish.
The recoil from the Remington struck lightning bolts of pain through Joey's entire body, and the shotgun fell out of his hands, clattering to the floor beside him.
The powerful blast took P.J. in the belly and chest, lifted him off his feet, spun him all the way around. He stumbled and went to his knees still facing Joey, folding his arms around his torso, bending forward, hugging himself as though to prevent his buckshot-riddled intestines from spilling out.
If Joey could have lifted his arms, he would have picked up the shotgun and fired again. He would have emptied the magazine. But his muscles would no longer even so much as twitch. His hands wouldn't even flop convulsively at his sides. He suspected that he was paralyzed from the neck down.
The rumble under the church grew louder.
Thin exhalations of sulfurous steam rose through cracks in the mortar between the flooring stones.
P.J. slowly raised his head, revealing a face that was hideously contorted in agony, eyes wide with shock, mouth stretched in a silent scream. He gagged, retched, choked rackingly. A phlegmy gurgle in his throat suddenly became a violent series of disgorging spasms. From his mouth gushed not rich arterial blood but a grotesque silver vomit, a stream of small glittering coins that rang onto the floor, as though he were a human slot machine.
Repulsed, astonished, stone-cold terrified, Joey looked up from the silver hoard as P.J. spat out one last coin and broke into a grin that could have been no more malevolent if it had been on the bare-bone face of Death himself. He unfolded his arms from his blasted torso and held his pale hands out in the manner of a magician saying Presto!, and although his clothes had been torn by the buckshot, he seemed to have suffered no wounds at all.
Joey knew that he must be dying, hallucinating, more than halfway to the Other Side and out of his head with pain. The delirium tremens of death made the crawling walls of a drunkard's nightmares seem amusing by contrast.
He screamed at Celeste to wake up, to run, but the warnings were only whispers that even he could barely hear.
The quaking, steaming floor abruptly cracked the width of the room. Along that jagged line, thin spears of fierce orange light stabbed up from the realm below. Mortar crumbled into the burning mine. Stones broke loose and tumbled out of sight. The overhead timbers cracked, and the cellar walls shook. The fissure in the floor rapidly widened to an inch, two inches, six inches, a foot, two feet, filling the room with blinding light, providing a glimpse of white-hot mine walls below, separating Joey from P.J. and Celeste.
Over the groans and skreeks of the shaken church, over the roar of the fire below and the thunder of subsidence, P.J. said, "Better say goodbye to the bitch, altar boy." He shoved Celeste into the blaze beneath Coal Valley, into volcanic heat and molten anthracite and instant death.
Ah, no! No! Please, God, no, no, please, no, not her, not her. Me, but not her. I'm self-pitying, arrogant, weak, blind to the truth, too ignorant to know what a second chance means, and I deserve whatever happens to me, but not her, not her in all her beauty, not her in all her kindness, not her!
A flutter. Behind Joey's eyes.
A flutter like the feathery shadows of many wings taking flight across a mysterious, great sphere of light.
Everything had changed.
He was uninjured. Free of pain. On his feet.
He was upstairs in the church.
Replay.
The Mustang had already crashed through the wall. P.J. already had Celeste.
Time had been wound backward but not far enough to give him an opportunity to think through his predicament. Only a couple of minutes remained until the subsidence would hit, not a second to waste.
Joey knew beyond doubt that this was his last chance, that the next spiral of events would not be rewound to bring him back to any moment of fatal error. The next damnation he earned would be his to keep. So there must be no errors this time, no mistakes, no failure to believe.
He was running between two rows of pews toward the side aisle along the east wall of the nave.
In the sanctuary at the front of the church, a slouching figure hunched along the ambulatory, through the dervish reflections of the altar fire above. It was P.J. He was carrying Celeste.
Joey reached the side aisle and raced forward along the unbroken panes of rain-beaten glass toward the sanctuary railing. He threw down the shotgun. He had no faith in it any more.
P.J. disappeared with Celeste through the door to the sacristy, slamming it behind him.
Joey vaulted over the sanctuary railing, followed the ambulatory to the sacristy door, but didn't stop there. He continued to the presbytery, to the altar stairs, to the altar platform, sidled around the overturned candles and the burning sheets, and went to the back wall of the sanctuary.
The crucifix had been shaken off its nail when the Mustang had crashed into the church. It lay facedown on the floor.
Joey picked up the bronze figure on the wooden cross and rushed back to the sacristy door. Locked.
The previous time, he'd blown it open with one round from the Remington. Now he considered returning to the nave to retrieve the discarded weapon.
Instead, he reared back and kicked the door as hard as he could, kicked it again, kicked, kicked. The stop molding cracked on the other side, a little play came into the door, he kicked it again, and yet again, was rewarded by a twang of metal, by splintering wood. He kicked it once more. The lock sprang, the stop molding shattered, the door flew open, and he went into the sacristy.
The cellar door.
The wooden stairs.
Because he'd had to batter down the door, Joey was now behind schedule. He was arriving at this point later in the replay than he had the first time. His brother's serpentine shadow had already slithered out of the moon-yellow light below and was nowhere to be seen. P.J. was farther into the labyrinthine cellar than before. With Celeste.
Joey started to descend the stairs two at a time, then realized that caution was still required. By discarding the gun and taking up the crucifix, he had altered the future that would unfold from this point on. Previously, he had reached the final chamber in the cellar before encountering P.J., but this time his brother might be waiting elsewhere along the way. He clutched the stair railing with one hand and continued downward with circumspection.