Mike waved and went down into the Stewarts' basement.
Dale waited an impatient thirty seconds for Jim Harlen and then ran back up the gravel drive. "Are you coming or not?"
Harlen was poking around in the Grumbacher truck shed. "Kev said that there's some rope in here . . .ah, here." He pulled two thick coils of rope from nails on the rafters. "I bet this's twenty-five feet each, easy." He fitted the bulky coils over his shoulders and chest like bandoliers.
Dale turned around, disgusted. He started to jog across the dark playground, not worrying if Harlen could keep up.
Lawrence was in there somewhere. Like Duane. . . . "What the hell do you want rope for anyhow?" snapped Dale as Harlen caught up, already panting from the short run.
"If we're going in that fucking school, I'm going to have a way to get out that's softer than the last time."
Dale shook his head.
Branches were tearing off and falling around them as they passed under the sentinel elms. The short grass of the playing field was rippling and flattening under the wind, as if a huge, invisible hand were stroking it.
"Look," whispered Harlen.
The ridges of the burrowing things were everywhere now, humps of raw soil that curved and wound and intersected, carving the six acres of playground into a wild geometry of wakes.
Dale reached into his belt and pulled out a squirt gun, feeling how foolish that was even as he did so. But he clipped the Boy Scout flashlight onto his belt and kept the squirt gun in his left hand, the Savage over-and-under in his right.
"You got some of Mike's magic water?" whispered Harlen.
"Holy water."
"Whatever."
"Come on," Dale whispered. They leaned into the rising wind. The sky was a mass of boiling black clouds silhouetted by the greenish lightning. Thunder rolled like cannon fire.
"If it rains, that'll really fuck up what Kevin's planning to do."
Dale said nothing. They passed the north porch, went under the boarded windows . . . Dale noticed that the wind had torn the boards off the stained-glass window above the entrance, but that was far too high to reach . . . and they jogged around the northwest corner, past the dumpster where Jim had lain unconscious for ten hours, into the shadow on the north side of the immense building.
"Here are the boards," gasped Harlen. "Grab one and we'll dump it on the front steps like Mike said."
"Screw that,'' said Dale. "Show me that entrance you said you knew about."
Harlen stopped cold. "Look, it may be important ..."
"Show me!" Without planning to, Dale had raised the shotgun so that the barrel was pointing in Jim Harlen's general direction. Harlen's small pistol was tucked in his belt, under the absurd coils of rope. "Listen, Dale ... I know you're half nuts about your brother . . . and I usually don't give a shit about orders from somebody else, but Mike probably had a reason. Now help me with a couple of these boards and I'll show you the way in."
Dale wanted to scream with frustration. Instead, he lowered the shotgun, set it against the wall, and lifted one end of the long, heavy plank. They'd stacked several dozen of these old boards here when they had demolished the west porch of the school last fall; now they still lay there, waterlogged and rotting.
It took the boys five minutes to carry eight of the damn things around to the north porch and to dump them on the stairs. "These things wouldn't even hold up a bicycle if they're supposed to be a ramp," said Dale. "Mike's crazy."
Harlen shrugged. "We said we'd do it. Now we've done it. Let's get going."
Dale hadn't liked leaving the shotgun and he was pleased to find it still leaning against the wall when he got back.. Except when the lightning illuminated everything in its flashbulb explosion of glare, it was quite dark along this wall of the school. All of the schoolyard pole lamps and streetlights were off, but the upper floors of the building itself appeared to be wreathed by a greenish glow.
"This way," whispered Harlen. All of the basement windows had wire-mesh coverings as well as the plywood boards. Harlen stopped at the window closest to the southwest corner of the school, ripped back the long, loose board, and kicked at the rusty mesh. It swung free. "Gerry Daysinger and me kicked the shit out of this thing one dull recess last April," said Harlen. "Give me a hand."
Dale propped the shotgun against the wall and helped to pry the mesh away from the wall. Rusted metal and brick dust sifted into the window well below the sidewalk level.
"Hold it," said Harlen, the words almost drowned by the rising wind and a roll of thunder. He sat on the ground, leaned into the well, pulled the mesh loose, and kicked the pane of glass out with his right sneaker, smashing the wooden mounting while he was at it. He kicked a second pane out, then a third. Half the small window lay open into darkness, the shards of glass reflecting the mad sky.
Harlen scooted back on his rump, extended an arm, palm up. "After you, my dear Gaston."
Dale grabbed the shotgun and lowered himself in, legs scrabbling in the darkness, his left foot finding a pipe, setting the gun in to use both hands to keep himself away from the broken glass. He jumped from the pipe to the floor five feet below, found the shotgun and held it across his chest.
Harlen clambered in behind him. Lightning revealed a riot of iron pipes, massive elbow joints where pipes connected, the red legs of a big worktable, and lots of darkness. Dale undipped the flashlight from his belt, fumbled the squirt gun back into his waistband.
"Turn it on, for Chrissakes," whispered Harlen, his voice taut.
Dale clicked on the light. They were in the boiler room; pipes littered the darkness overhead, and huge metal tanks rose like crematoria on either side. There were shadows between the gigantic furnaces, shadows beneath the pipes, shadows in the rafters, and a darkness deeper than shadows outside the door to the basement hallway.
"Let's go," whispered Dale, holding the flashlight directly over the Savage's barrel. He wished he'd brought .22 shells as well as the .410s.
Dale led the way into the darkness.
"Son of a bitch," whispered Kevin Grumbacher. He almost never cursed, but nothing was going right here.
The others had all left him, and Kevin was doing his best to ruin his dad's truck and livelihood. It made him sick: breaking into the pump and buried gas tank, using the milk hose to pump gasoline up into the stainless-steel bulk tank. No matter how much they cleaned the rubber hose, there'd always be some gasoline left to contaminate the milk. These hoses cost a small fortune. Kevin didn't even want to think about what he was doing to the tanker itself.
The problem was, with the electricity off, the air conditioner in their house would be off and that would wake his mother and father up fairly soon . . . sooner if the storm got any louder. His dad was famous for being a sound sleeper, but his mother often wandered the house during storms. It was just lucky that their bedroom was downstairs next to the TV room.
Still, Kevin had had to get the tanker truck out of the garage without starting the engine; he had the key, but was sure the noise would wake his father up without the air conditioner to shield it. The storm was getting louder, but Kevin couldn't count on the truck engine not being heard.
Luckily the driveway was on the hill, so Kevin had set the truck in neutral and allowed it to coast the ten feet or so necessary to get close enough to the gas pump. He'd run the centrifugal pump cord into the 230-volt outlet in the garage and then remembered that there was no power. Great. Just fucking great.
His father had a Coleman gasoline-powered generator in the back of the truck shed, but that would make more noise than the truck itself.
There was nothing to do but try. Kevin set the proper switches, threw the proper levers, primed the generator's carburetor once with gas from the jerry can in the truck, and jerked hard with the pull-starter. The generator popped twice, coughed once, and started right up.