Kevin raised a wildly shaking arm and fired again, knowing as soon as he squeezed the round off that he probably had shot so high that he'd missed the front of the school, much less the steel tank.
He tried to remember why he was doing this. It eluded him, but he knew that it was important. Something about his friends.
Kevin rolled onto his stomach, lay prone with the automatic braced on his damaged wrist, and squeezed the trigger, half expecting the hammer to fall on an empty chamber.
There was a recoil, the glimpse of a flash just below the shattered filler cap on top of the tank, and eight hundred gallons of the remaining gasoline ignited.
Dr. Roon had just gotten to his feet when the explosion blew the railing into a thousand pieces and sent a solid mushroom of flame billowing up the open stairwell. Roon stepped back against the wall almost calmly, glancing down with what appeared to be almost academic interest at the two-foot shaft of splintered balustrade that had pierced his chest like a stake. He set a tentative hand on the end of it but did not tug at it. Instead, he leaned against the wall and sat down slowly.
Dale had rolled up against the wall and covered his head with his arms. What was left of the railing was on fire, the bookshelves on the lower mezzanine had erupted into flames, the stained glass had melted and was running down the north wall, and every inch of the second-floor landing was smoking and charring beneath him.
Six feet away, Dr. Roon's pantlegs began smoldering and the soles of his shoes grew soft and shapeless.
In the open stairwell ten feet to Dale's left, the webs of pink flesh were flaming and melting like clotheslines in a burning tenement complex. The hissing of the soft material sounded like screams.
Dale stumbled through the smoldering doorway. "
The classroom was on fire. The explosion had knocked everyone off their feet-living and dead alike-but Harlen had helped Mike to his feet and both boys were ripping at the bonds on Lawrence. Dale took time to sweep up Mike's squirrel gun from the floor and then joined them, pulling away the hardened strands from his brother's arms and throat.
Dale pulled Lawrence to his feet while Harlen tugged the chair away. Strands still remained, but Lawrence was able to stand and speak. He threw one arm around Dale, the other around Mike. He was crying and laughing at the same time.
"Later," shouted Dale, pointing toward the burning mass of desks and darkness where the Soldier and Van Syke had struggled to their feet. Tubby was in there somewhere.
Mike rubbed blood and sweat out of his eyes and fumbled the last shotgun shell from his pocket. He took the squirrel gun from Dale and loaded it. "Go on," he shouted through the smoke. "Get going. I'll cover you."
Dale half-led, half-carried his brother out onto the landing. Roon was gone. The edge of the landing was a wall of flame with bits of the web and egg sac falling in molten spheres from above.
Dale and Harlen staggered to the stairs with Lawrence between them. The library mezzanine and stairway below them was gone, replaced by a thirty-foot pyre of flames. It looked as if the stairway had collapsed all the way into the basement. The bricks glowed white hot.
"Up," said Dale. Mike backed out of the classroom and joined them as they moved quickly up the stairs to the next landing, then kept on going to the third floor that had been closed off for so many years.
There were hisses and screams from the "empty" high school classrooms up there . . . rooms that had lain in darkness and cobwebs for decades. The boys did not wait around to investigate.
"Up." It was Mike speaking this time, pointing toward the narrow stairs to the belfry. The boards smoked and charred underfoot as they climbed. Dale heard noises below which might have been the central stairway collapsing into the inferno below.
They came out onto the narrow catwalk that ran around the inside of the belfry. The boards were narrow and rotten and Dale looked down once, saw the flames licking up toward him from the floor fifty feet below, and he did not look down again.
Instead he looked straight out at the thing hanging from its web in the center of the belfry.
The bulbous, translucent sac may have been bell-shaped at one time. Dale thought he saw the mountings and fixtures for a bell where the thing had anchored itself with the most tendrils and web attachments. It did not matter.
What he saw now looked back at him ... at all of them . . . with a thousand eyes and a hundred pulsing mouths. Dale sensed the thing's outrage, the total disbelief that ten thousand years of quiet dominance could end in such farce . . . but mostly he sensed its rage and power.
You can still serve me. The Dark Age can still begin.
Dale and Lawrence and Harlen were staring right at the thing. They felt the tremendous warmth touch them ... not just the heat from the flames, but the deeper warmth at knowing that they could serve the Master, possibly even save Him through their service.
Together, legs moving as a creature with one mind, the three of them took two steps toward the edge of the catwalk and the Master.
Mike raised Memo's squirrel gun and fired into the egg sac from a distance of six feet. The sac ruptured and dribbled its contents, hissing, into the rising flames.
Mike tugged them back and used the gun as a hammer to bash out the rotted slats on the side of the belfry.
Cordie woke up in time to drag the unconscious Grumbacher back from the conflagration. The front of his clothes was blackened, his eyebrows were gone, and it looked as if the explosion had knocked him back some distance.
She pulled him back to the elms and slapped his face until his eyes flickered open. Together they watched the small figures crawl onto the roof of the burning school.
"Shit," said Harlen, sliding down a steep pitch of gable to the edge of the roof, "I think I saw this scene in Mighty Joe Young." They all stood at the south edge of the school roof, hanging on to whatever handholds they could find. It was at least four stories to the hard-packed gravel and cement walks of the playground straight below.
"Look at it this way," gasped Dale, hanging on to Lawrence while Lawrence clung to a fist-sized hole in the shingled roof. "At least you'll get to use your ropes."
Harlen had unwound the first of two twenty-five-foot lengths of rope. Parts of it were charred and it looked anything but safe."Yeah," he said to himself,"but how?"
"Uh-oh," said Mike. He had been gripping the corner of a chimney and staring back the way they had come across the gable tops.
Behind them, a tall figure fought its way through the smoking belfry slats.
Dale couldn't make out anything except a black silhouette. "Is it the Soldier? Van Syke?"
"I don't think so," said Mike. "It must be Roon. I don't think the other things can move or act with their Master dead. They were like parts of a bigger thing." The boys watched as the dark figure disappeared behind a gable, moving toward them quickly. Mike turned and said quietly to Harlen, "If you're going to use that rope, I'd suggest you hurry.''
Harlen had tied a slip knot and now made a lasso. "I could rope that branch out there, we could swing out and down."
Dale and Lawrence and Mike stared at the high branches of the elm. They were at least thirty feet away and much too thin to hold even one of the boys.
Behind them, the figure reappeared along the central roofline and followed the same path to the south gable that they had. Smoke billowed from between the old shingles, half-obscuring the form, but Dale thought that he could make out Dr. Roon's black suit and bloodied features.
The heat from the burning north end of the building was terrible. The boys had to turn their faces away as the entire belfry went up.
"Hey," said Lawrence. "Look." Two or three miles away, illuminated by the wild strobes of lightning, a tornado had lowered itself from the black clouds whirling out of the southwest, the funnel rising and falling. For a long second the boys simply stared. Dale found himself silently urging the twister on, inviting it to come their way and finish everything here in a final maelstrom of destruction.