The Brunist Day of Wrath

IV.1 Wednesday 24 June — Friday 3 July

J. P. Suggs looks like a dead man, the reddish gray frizz on his bony skull like some kind of sickly mold. Only his eyes and a finger on one hand work. No expression, just those eyes staring out from some awful depth. Gives Tub the creeps. Is he angry? Can’t tell. He can blink and wag the one finger. Ask him a question, he blinks once to say yes, stares back icily for no. Sometimes he wags his finger to say no, and then it seems like he might be angry that he’s having to work too hard, but mostly he either blinks once or stares back. Tub on occasion has remarked that he and Suggs see eye to eye, and that remark has now taken on a spookier meaning. But give Suggs credit, he’s a tough old bird. Has been in and out of coma, reduced to a stalk of celery with eyeballs, but he refuses to give up. Tub admires that. Bernice, old Tuck Filbert’s quirky widow, is here in the room, working as a private nurse for the old man. It’s not charity and she’s not doing it just for the money. Without Suggs, she’s in deep shit. Like her patient, she mostly lives in her own head; if Suggs’ head is a stone, though, hers is a swamp. She and Suggs have contrived this code of eye blinks and finger twitches, and she has been helping to move the conversation along. “I suppose I could deputize the Patriots.” The man blinks. Suggs wants all the Baxter followers camped on his property arrested for trespassing and either jailed or chased out of the county once and for all. “Baxter has already had the stuffing knocked out of him by that gangster cop, but it has only made him meaner.” The sheriff is talking more than is his habit, filling up the silence, doing Suggs’ talking for him, as it were. Though Tub has used the Christian Patriots against the illegal Baxterite encampments before, he has not sent them in as official sheriff’s deputies. Doing that will pit him against his own sidekick. “I’m having some trouble with Cal Smith.” Suggs blinks once, which Tub takes to mean “I told you so.” “I’m looking around for a new deputy. One of the Patriots probably. Though not many of them are near smart enough.” Suggs’ lids droop slightly as though to say “So what?” Or maybe he’s passing out again. Tub can see all the forces lining up. His own volunteer unit and Patriots militia with the Brunist campers and Suggs’ money. Next, Smith and the Baxterites, lawless drifters for the most part, many of whom are armed — and a lot more of them around than there used to be. Then the town establishment: Romano and his city cops, the mayor, the city manager, all under the banker’s thumb. And now Vince Bonali’s tough-ass kid and his Knights of Columbus Defense Dogs, or whatever they’re called, together with all the rest of the Romanists. Mostly pissed-off, unemployed ex-miners who are apt to shoot at just about anybody as a remedy for unhappiness. And what next? State troopers, maybe National Guard, though so far Tub has fended off the governor. He has also heard rumors of the FBI getting involved, which means federal troops. Hot summer ahead.

Down the hall from Suggs’ room, Lem Filbert is bellowing out his curses. They’re aimed mainly at the West Condon fire chief, who is in a bed at the other end of the hall. Lem says he aims to fucking kill the fucker as soon as he’s able to fucking stagger down there, and because he probably means it, Romano has his fat Italian officer posted outside his room. What’s Lem going to do, strangle him with his IV tube? He says the fucking mayor is also in for it and everybody else at fucking city hall. He intends to fucking kill the whole crooked fucking lot. Tub does not hear himself mentioned but doubts he’d be excepted. When Whimple turned up at the fire station late last Sunday morning after being up all night hopelessly battling the oily blaze at Lem’s garage, Lem was waiting for him with a crowbar. Bernice said the first thing she did when she saw the fire, even before calling the fire department, was hide her brother-in-law’s guns, which was a good thing because the place burned to the ground and everything on his car lot caught fire as well, the biggest fire in these parts since the old Dance Barn went up, and Lem snapped. Apparently he’d gone storming down to the fire station looking for Georgie Lucci, who has been sacking out on a mattress there and against whom Lem has had a longtime grudge, but Georgie wasn’t in. Lying low. Or maybe passed out in a ditch somewhere on the other side of town, as he later claimed. So it was Whimple who ended up in the hospital. Romano and his boys ran over to try to calm Filbert down, but when Bosticker got within a yard of him, Lem laid into him with a crippling crowbar blow to his knees. When he fell, Lem took his gun off him, at which point Romano decided it was time to stop fooling around and he shot him. Aimed at his gun hand, hit his bony wrist, shattering it, the bullet ricocheting off into his gut, and then, when Lem grabbed the gun up from the street with his good hand and kept coming, Romano shot him again, this time in the arm, and then again in the leg, finally bringing him down. Still, Lem fought them all the way out here to the hospital, and he has never stopped yelling even though they’ve kept him heavily doped. At first the mayor tried to blame the fire on Lem’s own carelessness and his flaunting of fire regulations, but when they found the empty shells of Roman candles, he decided some drunken kids must have driven by and set it alight. His cops more or less confirmed that. An anonymous caller even phoned in to say he’d seen kids running away from there when it started to go up, but he couldn’t see who they were.

Tub has his own notions. It had been a particularly bad Saturday night in the county. Mischievous kids on the loose, the usual drunken wife-bashing, the arrest of the Edwards woman (she’s also here in the hospital somewhere; Suggs told him to forget about her, a lost cause), the weekly Patriots training session interrupted by the camp murders, a string of burglaries over in Randolph Junction, the trashing of the Blue Moon Motel, and before the night was over, he’d got called out to the camp a second time after some drunks intruded and set off some fireworks down near where the murders had happened earlier. They had caught one of them — that stupid jackass, Johnson — when he plowed into the beehives in the dark. Tub, his mood worsened by the onset of a toothache, kicked him around for a time, asking him questions, trying to find out who had been with him and thinking he might even try to pin the double murders on him, but the jerk was so badly bee-stung — must have been hundreds swarmed onto him — Tub didn’t have the heart to work him over as he might have done. His arm looked like it might be broken, so Tub shipped him off to the emergency room instead. Anyway, he knew who the others were, and if there were any sleepers, they’d be easy to spot by the bee stings. As for the fire, he figured Lem wasn’t that far off when he first went looking for someone to batter to death. Those fuckups had been causing trouble all night, setting off a wild brawl at the Blue Moon before their assault on the Brunist camp; after collecting the fireworks debris at the camp, Tub wasn’t surprised when more of it turned up later in the ruins of Lem’s garage. Given everything else that had happened, he’d decided against filing any report about the camp break-in by those drunks, not to draw more unwanted attention to that place. He certainly doesn’t want any state or federal forces moving in, taking over his job. But if Lem gets his sanity back, they’ll have a talk.

When Governor Kirkpatrick called him to say he was under a lot of pressure from people to send in the National Guard, Tub figured he was talking about the mayor and the town banker who had been badgering him too, and he told Kirkpatrick that Castle and Cavanaugh were alarmists, everything was under control, and if there should be any trouble, which he doesn’t expect, he could simply mobilize his volunteers, if the governor would authorize that, and the governor said that he would, that it seemed like the best solution. He’d even organize some sort of emergency budget for it if it turned out to be necessary, which is what Tub wanted to hear, saying that one thing he needed right now was more riot gear. The governor said he could do that. He was mainly concerned about some event the day after the Fourth, which Tub had heard about but without paying much attention. It seems the Brunists are organizing some sort of ceremony at the mine hill that day, Kirkpatrick said, and Cavanaugh is planning to spring a surprise on them that might backfire. The governor had stuck his neck out on this one and wanted to be sure the sheriff and his deputies would be out there that day, keeping an eye on things, and Tub said not to worry, they would be there. Tub has been explaining some of this to Suggs, choosing his words carefully, when he notices the old man is no longer focused on him, his eyes still open but without that fierce stare. Tuck’s widow, checking his pulse just to make sure, says Suggs often sleeps with his eyes open and that that’s what he’s doing now.

“Dave Osborne stayed on the phone until everyone he could reach below had been directed to safety, then joined the first rescue crew. We needed him down there. It was black as only you guys know it can be and thick with hot coaldust, and no one knew the Deepwater workings and could move through them blind like Dave Osborne.” It’s Barney Davis speaking, the Deepwater company supervisor at the time of the accident, now employed by the State Mining Board, having been shoehorned into the job by the company owners to protect their asses up in the capital. The Barn’s crew-cut hair is as white as it ever was, but he looks younger than he did five years ago; life in the capital suits him. Everybody else here in the church looks twenty years older, Tub included. He’s standing at the back, near the doors, rather hoping there might be an emergency call that will get him out of here. He is short on patience with this sort of memorializing sentimentality, and what little he has is being ground away by his nagging toothache. Should go to a dentist, keeps putting it off. He associates these places with the dead, funerals being the only times he turns up in them. Tub is not a churchgoer just like he’s not a flag waver. He is a patriot and a believer simply because this is the world he lives in and there is no reason not to be. He enforces the law around here, and it’s American law and Christian law, and if he started questioning too much how it got that way, he wouldn’t do a good job of it. He knows who he is, and that’s enough. The world will take care of itself and doesn’t need him for its ceremonies. But should he be wearing these guns on his hips in here? Probably not. Well, tough titty, as the saying goes in or out of a church. Without them he’d feel like he was not wearing pants. “We were anxious to find survivors and get them to the surface as quickly as we could, so we went below bareface with only wet rags against the dust and gases. What we found down there was a nightmare. Airlock doors blasted open, timbers the size of phone poles snapped like matchsticks, roofs down and piled on top of machinery and men, buggies crunched like sardine cans and blown up against the ribs, twisted rails looking like some kind of devil’s 3D handwriting. Dave Osborne guided us through all that with nothing but our cap lamps, aiming straight for the worst of it, sometimes on our hands and knees.” It was partly due to The Barn’s negligence that the mine blew up in the first place. Everybody knows that. In a just world the sonuvabitch would be doing time, but no one’s making a point of it. That’s not why the union invited him back. They know Davis is trying to get some mines reopened and they want him to keep doing that. Though the Osborne memorial service organized by the union is being hosted by the Lutherans, there are people here from most of the churches in town, including the RCs, all sitting together over at one side of the church like at the back of the bus, and even a few of those evangelicals from the church camp. There was a buzz when they showed up. Tub assured them he’d watch out for them, but they don’t really fit in here in this town anymore and they know it. They sit stiffly, looking like aliens wearing human masks, even more uncomfortable than the RCs. “Some of us started getting sick from the gas, so we turned back and brought up the first bodies we’d found. Dave didn’t want to quit and we had to drag him along with us back up to fresh air. He got himself fitted up with an oxygen tank and tools and went right back down on the next crew, working straight through until dawn. Dave Osborne was probably the first live person some of you out there saw that night. A hero. He was.”

Before the ceremonies, standing around outside having a smoke, Davis had to take some flak from miners, led by that gasbag Bonali, complaining about the sale of the mine to the holyrollers instead of reopening it and putting men to work again. The Barn reminded them, pushing his rimless specs up his thin beak, that he is no longer associated with that company, but it was his understanding the sale still had not gone through and so far it didn’t include mineral rights. That’s what he’d heard. Tub didn’t know that and he wondered if Suggs does. Tub can appreciate Davis’ situation now that he has been sheriff a while: the endless contrary demands, the petty criticisms, everybody trying to get your ear and bend it. He can imagine being sheriff for life — for one thing, it gets him free tailored shirts and pants — but he wouldn’t want anything up the ladder from that. As for Osborne, the truth is he was easy to get on with — no ambition, so stepped on nobody’s toes, good at what he did — but Tub knows he also let things happen down there in his good-guy way. The man knew about the shoddy inspections, the covering up of reports of faulty wiring, the lack of regular rockdusting and excessive coaldust on the haulage ways, the failure to seal off leaking marsh gas, and he grumbled about all these things like everyone else did, but he didn’t pipe up like he should have. Osborne was at his best telling jokes. Sure came up with a zinger at the end.

Most of the Christian Patriots are here. They each nodded silently at Tub when they arrived. A passel of disaster widows, some still wearing black, looking gloomy. Maybe they’re feeling guilty for not buying shoes from Osborne. The majority crammed into the pews, though, are miners who used to work with Tub down in Deepwater. Those with gumption have mostly moved on; these bums in here are the losers. Like Bert Martini, the one-armed grouser talking now. Martini was one of the guys carried out by Osborne and his rescue team, his arm sheared off when a shuttle buggy, knocked off the rails by the blast, rolled over it. He’s up front, praising Osborne and waving his stub around and sounding off about the criminal irresponsibility of the mine owners. “Took their money and shut down our workplace and left us to rot and die! It’s what’s killed Dave Osborne! There oughta be some justice!” “Amen, brother!” Buff Cooley, another rescued miner, shouts out and others agree more secularly. Reminds Tub of union meetings past. Why he avoided them when he could. “Go to now, ye rich men, weep’n howl for the miseries what’ll come upon ye! James 5:1!” That’s cowardly Bible spouter Willie Hall, one of the Brunists from the church camp. Let him get started and this thing will never end. The little chickenshit’s alive because, as he often did, he ducked the shift that night. Abner Baxter, Tub’s old faceboss, is here too, flanked by some of his oldtime rough boys, like Coates and Cox, and still looking beat up from the last time Chief Romano got his hands on him. There’s a five-year-old warrant out for that old gobpile orator’s arrest if he turns up inside city limits, which is what Romano held him on for his midnight thrashing, but no chance he’ll grab him again here in the church. Too bad. Tub would like to see the sonuvabitch get hammered and he doesn’t care who does it. Baxter has been a pain in the butt since he came back and it would be better if he got the idea it might be healthier to move on.

Tub’s deputy and old mine buddy Cal Smith is speaking now, telling everyone what a loyal and dependable guy Osborne was. “A man you had to respect.” Cal Smith’s own loyalty is coming up short. He and Cal worked together down in Deepwater for years — Tub the shot firer, Cal his driller and cutter, two of the dirtiest and most hazardous jobs in the mines. Tub took it on because it paid extra, and Smith probably did too. In the old days, when they first broke in, they had to use dynamite. Fused foot-long sticks poked into boreholes on the coalface. When they went off, they brought down a mass of wall for the loaders. A lot could go wrong, but he and Smith knew their job, and nothing ever did. Later, they started using compressed air. It was still dangerous, especially the flyrock, but not near so bad as the dynamite, and the pay stayed the same. Cal was as careful as Tub was; Tub always appreciated that. So when he got elected sheriff, also a dangerous job, he wanted Cal there beside him doing the drilling and cutting. Now, he knows, Cal has been going behind his back, protecting Baxter against orders, playing by his own set of rules. The morning after Tub arrested all those assholes who attacked the Brunist camp, the sonuvabitch went down to the jail and set them free. Tub’s going to have to find somebody else and has been looking over the audience for a possible replacement. The widows remind him that most of the good guys are dead, but maybe that’s also just misplaced sentiment. Buff Cooley’s up there now, into one of his union rants. A Patriot, comes to all the drills, tough as nails, but probably too inflammable. And he so hates the establishment, if he were a deputy sheriff, Buff would have to rail at himself. Even though Travers Dunlevy at the Brunist camp is not from around here, Tub had thought of recruiting him for the job — an active Patriot with an edge about him and a good eye with a weapon — but the chump apparently knocked off his wife and her lover out at the camp Saturday night, then skipped town. Dumbest reason in the world for getting yourself in trouble. Tub is getting a bit fed up with those clowns out there, truth to tell, but the money is still rolling into his account from Suggs’ mine, where he is listed as a technical consultant, so he does what he has to do. When he got dragged out to the camp the first time that night, to keep the heat off, he called what he’d found a probable lovers’ suicide, but it’s not likely he’ll get away with that. Already that sleazebag shyster Minicozzi down at city hall, throwing his puny weight around, has demanded from the city a public inquest and a second coroner’s report. Meanwhile Tub has put out an all-points alert for Dunlevy but doesn’t expect to find him and doesn’t particularly want to.

When the union bosses running the show discover that the old bearded guy at the back of the church is the famous country singer Ben Wosznik and ask him, overcoming the general town-wide bias against the Brunists, to come up and sing Woody Guthrie’s “The Dying Miner,” Tub figures he can only bear so much of this teary-eyed horseshit. He’ll let Smith watch over the campers; it’s time to cut out.

Sheriff Puller has played enough double-deck pinochle to know how to finesse a trick. In fact he is beginning to think of pinochle as a patriotic American game, and a Christian one, and that maybe they ought to use pinochle as part of their militia training program. Tub has led low, telling his deputy Smith that Suggs has asked him to negotiate a conclusion to the problems at the new campgrounds he’s been building out beyond the church camp so he can get on with its construction, and since Cal knows those people better than he does, he wants him to organize a meeting at the site for the two of them with all their leaders and see if they can’t resolve the issues. Forcing a crawl, as one might say at table, and here they are. He is disappointed that Abner Baxter does not appear, but most of the others do, including Red’s puffball son Young Abner, as well as Roy Coates and his boys and Jewell Cox and others from town. Most of the rest hang back, but as the talks proceed they come out of their tents and trucks and edge forward. Then he plays trumps. All his newly deputized officers from the Christian Patriots come roaring up in their cars, spitting gravel as they hit the brakes; they spring from their cars and surround the campsite, weapons in hand. Tub has been careful to deputize only those he could count on not to spill the beans to Smith or the Baxterites, and he can see by the flicker of surprise on Smith’s otherwise stony face that he has been successful. A couple of big yellow school buses roll in behind the deputies’ cars. Tub tells Smith not to worry, they’ve all been properly deputized on orders from the state governor. Then he puts a megaphone to his mouth and says: “I know you think of yourselves as religious people, but the truth is, you’re all criminals. You are breaking the law, and you do not stop breaking the law even when you are told that is what you are doing, so I have no choice but to put you all under arrest.” One of the men at the back makes a break for it, but two of the deputies fire shots over his head and he pulls up short. They lower their weapons and point them at his chest. He steps back with the others.

“Looks as how fatso has snookered us,” Roy Coates says with a sneer, and Tub stares back at him. If he were a man who ever smiled, he’d be smiling. But if Roy calls him fatso again, the fucker will end up in the bed next to the fire chief.

“My deputies are ready to fit you with some nice shiny bracelets and bus you to the county lock-up, if that’s your choice,” he says into the megaphone, “though the law don’t work so good around here and I don’t recommend it. Your other choice, which is a lot easier on everybody, is to permanently and for all time leave the area. If them’s your rathers, you got five minutes to pack up. Don’t try driving away on your own — you’re gonna be personally escorted outa here over into the next state. Anybody not got a vehicle and don’t wanta go to jail, we’ll be providing taxi service across the state line in them school buses over there. We’re all gonna proceed together in a nice neat line, just like a parade. Anybody peel off, they’ll get shot as fugitives from the law. You got little kids here. Let’s don’t let that happen. And if you try to come back in, you’ll just be giving my boys target practice. We’ll be patrolling all the highways and roads in the county, so don’t even think about it.”

“You cain’t take us in,” says Coates. “We live here.”

“Aiding and abetting,” he says.

“Bull.”

He lifts the megaphone. “All right, let’s get moving!” He’s waiting for Cal to cross him so he can break him, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, a snot-nosed brat dragging a dirty pink slipper on one foot comes over and pokes her finger in his belly. He swats at her but misses. “It’s real!” she shouts and other brats draw near with mischievous grins on their nasty little faces as if they all intend to have a poke.

“Luke, you come away from there and let the man be!” a woman calls out. “He’s just doing his job!” Big woman, near as big as he is, a squalling fat baby over her shoulder. She waddles out of the crowd toward him and gets a grip on the girl’s collar. “Sorry, Sheriff. We’re town folk. We just come out to bring some food and comfort to these poor people. I feel sorry for them and I think you should oughta too, but I suppose you got your orders. Us Christians is used to getting beat up by the law. We’ll be going now and leave you to it, but next time I see Jesus, I’m gonna tell him what you done.”

“Wait a minute—”

“I recognize them,” Smith says. “It’s okay. They’re living in the Chestnut Hills prefabs.”

“Squatters.”

“Maybe. But that’s Romano’s problem, not ours.”

It’s Suggs’ problem, too, he owning most of that property, but Tub knows this is not an argument that carries much weight with Smith. A lanky unkempt man with deep hollow eyes has come up beside the fat woman, toting a rifle and looking seriously deranged. Tub should probably tell him to hand over his weapon, but he has the notion it would not be a smart thing to do. The little girl in the pink slipper takes her thumb out of her mouth and asks: “Mom, can I have that silver star? Please, Mom!” and her mother tells her no, she can’t, it’s what makes the big man big, that without it he’d be a runt to a flea, and Coates’ sneer spreads through the crowd of faces like a kind of infection. Tub has somehow lost the thread of this game. “All you folks live in Chestnut Hills come with us now. This ain’t about us,” the woman says, and one or two follow her toward their cars, and then a few others, and then everyone. Now having Smith here is a bad thing. Tub might have shot a few of them, but with Smith as witness he has lost that option. All he can do is unholster his weapon and holler at them to stop in the name of the law and he does that. Some of his boys do fire warning shots over their heads, but the fat woman says: “Come along now! Don’t worry, they ain’t gonna shoot nobody. They ain’t very happy, but they ain’t crazy.”

“Doggone my soul, how I love them old songs! Put your hands t’gether there, folks, fer our sidekickin’ goddaddy, Will Henry! He has done so much fer us and he does pluck a mean box!” Tub Puller likes country music about as much as he likes any music (not much), so when he heard that tonight would be the last Duke L’Heureux and Patti Jo Rendine show at the Blue Moon, he decided it might be a smart idea to hang out for a couple of hours to prevent any repeat of the brawl and also to see what all the excitement is about, hoping only they weren’t singing songs like he’d heard them sing with the Brunists out on the mine hill, which he understood they were not. Needed a break from all that religious in-fighting. None of those nuts in here. He let Tess back at the station know he was going to be out of radio contact for an hour or two and if there was an emergency she should call him at the motel. He found the lot packed out, the stuttery “No Vacancy” neon sign lit, and the front door locked, and he had to bang loud with both fists to rouse anybody what with all the noise inside. When they finally showed up, they apologized, explaining they’d closed up because it was a complete sellout, no room for another body, though of course they’d let the sheriff in, which was, as he knew they were thinking, like letting in another half dozen. He asked them if there had been any trouble tonight and they said there had not and he moved on into the bar area. Not easy, even with the badge on his chest, to carve a grudging path. Never saw such a jam-up at the Moon, or anywhere else around here, for that matter. A lot of familiar faces but also a lot of strangers. The owner, watching things from the doorway, said they’d been rolling in all week for this show, every room booked double. But though he was glad to have seen this happen at the Moon, he said he was sad to see the act close down, and it was clear he’d had a few to console himself. Tub has sometimes stopped in here on dead midweek nights to have a whiskey or two on his own, so the bartender, when Tub finally got that far, simply greeted him with a nod and quietly poured him a glass of Coke spiked with a couple of shots of Kentucky bourbon, Tub hoping it might dull the pain in his tooth. After the holidays: the dentist, for sure.

A guitar is still slung around Duke’s stringy neck, but two of the fingers on his strumming hand are taped to a splint, so most of the guitar playing is being provided by his slack-britches partner and the local radio station announcer, Will Henry, playing backup on the night and adding his whine to the others. The woman doesn’t sing all that well but she’s got an earnestness about her that somehow makes her sound better than she is. So far it has mostly been twangy old standards like “I’m Movin’ On” and “Night Train to Memphis,” where they’re apparently headed tomorrow for a big Fourth of July stage show and a string of downriver venues after that, but he’s heard talk of some off-color songs and he hopes his uniform and the fact he knows them from the church camp isn’t putting them off. He’s had some rough weeks with more to come on this long beer-picnic weekend, and he doesn’t mean to make a fuss about song lyrics; he’s only in need of an easeful few minutes before the next call comes in. Of course they may not even have seen him, but that’s unlikely as his size always gets noticed, people turning to stare wherever he goes, and even now a lot of them are watching him, sitting there at the bar on a stool that feels more like the top end of a fire hydrant, drinking off his Coke and bourbon and accepting another.

Now, after a medley of moon songs—“Tennessee Moon,” “Blue Moon,” “Howlin’ at the Moon”—Duke announces that to mark the occasion tonight he has written a new number, “The Blue Moon Motel,” and that gets a wild cheer and some applause and foot-stomping. Will Henry does some preliminary strumming and Duke leans into the mike…

I was knockin’ about out on life’s highway,

All alone and livin’ in hell,

Feelin’ so bad I jist wanted to die,

Then I met my gal in the Blue Moon Motel!

And then the woman and Will Henry join in on the chorus…

It’s the oldest story I ever heerd tell

When boy meets gal at the Blue Moon Motel,

So listen up, darlin’, it ain’t never too soon

T’git your butt off to the ole Blue Moon…!

There’s a lot of hooting and hollering and loud whistling at that and then Duke calls the owner of the motel to come forward and he does, somewhat sheepishly and unsteadily, glass in hand, and he is cheered like you might cheer a ballplayer, and Duke puts his arm around him…

We sang us some songs and crooned us some tunes

’Bout huggin’ and kissin’ and life was jist swell,

We was makin’ real gold outa all our blue moons

And we owed it all to the Blue Moon Motel…

This time the woman, Patti Jo, steps up to the mike to sing the chorus on her own…

It’s the oldest story I ever heerd tell

When gal meets boy at the Blue Moon Motel…

So listen up, cowboy, it ain’t never too soon

T’git your rocks off at the ole Blue Moon…!

There’s a lot of loud whoopeeing and clapping and heehawing laughter, and though this is an uncommon scene for Tub Puller, he is beginning to melt somewhat into it and feel less uncomfortable on his bar stool, and he may even be grinning, though perhaps that’s not obvious to others. But then the woman from the motel front desk presses through the crowd to shout in his ear that he has a phone call from his office. He says to tell the woman he’ll call back on the car radio, it’s too noisy in here, and he slowly downs his drink, lingering for one more verse…

Well, we had a grand time and it hurts like hell

T’be singin’ farewell to the Blue Moon Motel…

But our hearts is still here and we’ll be back soon

Cuz we cain’t stay away from the ole Blue Moon!

The stringbean cowboy-hatted singer shouts out through the uproar for everybody to join in on the chorus, and they do, each singing their own preferred versions, and if Tub were the sort of person to do that he’d surely do the same, but instead he swivels heavily about and puts foot to floor and shoulders his way out. Back to the face…

It’s the oldest story I ever heerd tell

When boy/gal meets gal/boy at the Blue Moon Motel…

So listen up, darlin’/cowboy, it ain’t never too soon

T’git your butt/rocks off to/at the ole Blue Moon…!

When Tub Puller took over the rundown sheriff’s office from Dee Romano’s do-nothing cousin who treated the job as a family perk, he completely revitalized it. He repainted the office itself, hung blinds and detailed maps of the county, put down new linoleum, brought in furniture sturdy enough to take his bulk. His predecessor hardly ever ventured out of West Condon, not many people even knew he was there, but Tub has expanded his territory to include the entire county and has been developing a volunteer force prepared to respond to any emergency. He also added a new two-way car-radio system. It meant hiring operators on a tight budget, but there were any number of unemployed miners’ widows looking for a little extra grocery money and willing to put in long hours of light work for not much pay. He could not afford twenty-four hour coverage, so he set up two nine-hour shifts, keeping someone there from seven in the morning to an hour after midnight. After that, emergency calls are switched to his home phone. A lot more work, but sheriffing is about all he does or wants to do, and it beats coalmining.

Now it’s an accident on the back road to Tucker City. He’s not happy about having to leave the Moon, and his tooth still hurts, but routine is routine and he sticks by it as what he knows best. Tess said in her radio call that she had deflected a few nuisance calls, but this one seemed pretty bad and he should probably check it out. He asked her who called it in and she said it was Royboy Coates. She said his mother had called earlier to say he hadn’t come home for supper and she was worried about him, but she reminded Thelma that Royboy has had a way of getting in trouble of late and has been seen at all hours in unsavory places with unsavory people and that she and Roy should have a serious talk with him, and Thelma said no matter how many beatings Royboy takes from his father, it doesn’t seem to make a tittle of difference. Tess said Royboy told her on the phone that it was some young kid on a motor bike, a car or truck must have hit him, he wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead, but he’d wait there until the sheriff showed up, though he was scared so please come right away. He asked Tess if she knew where Cal Smith was and she didn’t. He asked her to try to reach him by phone and also one or two of the new deputies and to send them out there to join him in case he needs help. He’ll also need an ambulance if it’s as bad as Royboy says, so she should stay there until he calls back, but she reminded him tomorrow was a holiday and she was supposed to knock off early, so he told her to order the ambulance up now. She also reminded him about the Fourth of July parade tomorrow, which he’ll have to ride in, suggesting he might want to take the newlyweds along in the back seat, now that he’s hiring Franny in the office, and he reminded her he’s supposed to ride a goddamned horse and then he got on the road. He considered driving past the Brunist camp and picking up Hunk or Wayne, but it’s out of the way and they’re probably already in bed.

As he rises over a little hump in the road, he sees Royboy there all right, just where he said he’d be — he waves frantically when he spots the sheriff’s car coming — and there’s the cyclist on the side of the road, his overturned motorbike another twenty yards further up where momentum must have taken it. Tub pulls his car over onto the shoulder and sits there for a moment, his lights on Royboy and the fallen biker, looking the scene over. There’s a motorcycle parked beside Royboy. His own most likely. Royboy looks terrified, but then he probably hasn’t seen many dead bodies, if it is dead. Tub is thinking about that biker gang with the death’s-head and Brunist tattoos and patches who were here a couple of months ago. There are a lot of motorcycles in the county, it’s a cheap way to get around, but you don’t often see them out on the back roads this late at night. He hasn’t dealt with a motorcycle accident since the night he created one down the road from the Blue Moon. He remembers the Cavanaugh station wagon rolling past that night, thinking at the time that it was the Cavanaugh brat and a girlfriend. They had more urgent things to do, he figured, so he finished what he was doing. But then he learned the next day the car had been stolen and trashed, probably by the bikers. If so, they’d seen him. They might have come after him right then, but they didn’t. He supposed that they would and prepared for it, but it didn’t happen, and instead they left the area. Ever since then they have been somewhat on his mind. There’s a thick stand of trees over to the left beyond the ditch. Could be hiding someone. He turns his spotlight on it, leaves it and his brights on and the motor running, unsnaps his rifle from the overhead carrier, checks the ammo in the two pistols on his hips, dons his helmet, crawls out of the car cautiously, and looks around. Everything dead quiet. All he hears is crickets and the soft rumble of his car motor. Those assholes make a lot of noise; he’s pretty sure he’d know if they’d come back. He’s not wearing his steel-toed miner’s boots tonight, but he doesn’t expect to need them. Keeping his eye on the woods and the road in both directions, he approaches Royboy and the body, which looks twisted and lifeless. Royboy is so scared his teeth are chattering. “Why aren’t you at home, Royboy?” he asks to break the silence, but Royboy only shakes his head and tries awkwardly to laugh. It’s more like a sick whine. Tub pokes his toe at the body, then squats, asking himself if he’s ever seen Royboy on a motorcycle and where is the phone he called from, to look more closely at it. Feels a chill. The greasy duck’s ass haircut tells him all he needs to know. It’s the darkie who rode with them, the one they called Cubano. The shit opens his eyes and winks at him. The sheriff is down there on one knee when they rise up out of the ditch and he more or less expects to die that way. The odd thought that comes to him is that now he won’t have to go to the dentist. They strip him of his weapons and march him back to his car, where he can hear Tess on the radio signing off, telling him the ambulance will be out there in about fifteen minutes but she hasn’t been able to reach Smith or any of the others, and reminding him again about the parade tomorrow.

IV.2 Saturday 4 July

Tommy Cavanaugh’s hastily assembled, ragtag West Condon Fourth of July parade turns the corner out of Third, nearly two hours late, and heads up Main Street in the glittering sunlight toward the patient citizenry. Not much to do in this town. This is something to do. They can wait for it. Sally steps out of her “Four Freedoms” tee shop to watch it go by and wave a manikin limb at Tommy. Leading it is the West Condon mayor, riding in the back seat of Tommy’s bright red convertible, the expression on his face that of a man listening to a dirty joke. He is accompanied by a supporting convoy of other area bigwigs and followed by a marching band of high school kids — long on drums, short on horns — tootling away at what is probably supposed to be “Stars and Stripes Forever,” or maybe it’s the high school marching song or even “White Christmas.” Next comes the heaving and yawing “New Opportunities for West Condon” float with young girls in swimsuits hanging on for dear life, and behind it whooping police cars, ambulances, and fire engines, and finally all the marching groups Tommy has lined up, some with their own drum corps, from churches, unions, civic and social clubs, businesses, scout troops and sewing circles, including an armed mob carrying a CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS banner and some Italian neighborhood heavies led by Angie Bonali’s uniform-shirted brother Charlie, who busted Tommy’s nose and is supposed to be in jail but isn’t. They also have a banner: KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS VOLUNTEER DEFENSE FORCE, it says. Also armed. People with childish ideas and grown-up weapons out to ruin the world. Tommy told her he had talked the sheriff into riding a white horse in the parade, but apparently he chickened out. Or maybe the horse did after seeing the sheriff. She once read in a pop psych book that parades were scarcely disguised representations of thrusting penises, drum majorettes at the tip wearing high plumed hats like French ticklers and twirling their batons in cocky foreplay, but on this dead street that would amount to a kind of necrophilia.

The corpse, however, is well-dressed for the occasion, with tricolor litter bins, ribbons on the lampposts, flags hanging from shop fronts, and a red-white-and-blue stripe down the middle of the street. Even the potholes have been filled in, if only with loose gravel. Sally has helped clean up and paint the empty Main Street stores for this weekend of rent-free entrepreneurialism, mostly taken up for rummage and bake sales, so-called arts and craft shows, charity drives, and town boosterism displays, and she has claimed this old once-bustling women’s clothing store for her own showroom, celebrating freedom from pulpit, flag, marketplace, and FROM THE CULTURE OF WILLFUL IGNORANCE — which more or less includes everything else and is the theme of her current work-in-progress. This she has reshaped into “Living with the Cretins,” in which she describes the town and nation beyond as a vast terminally Christianized loony bin, entering it into the first annual West Condon Fourth of July essay contest. The only other entry, no doubt at Tommy’s urging, was by that dweeb Babs Wetherwax, “Why I Love My Country.” Ah yes, let me count the ways. Sally got second prize, which was more than she expected even with the limited submissions. Boobs will read her winning essay at the bank-sponsored Independence Day picnic this afternoon; Sally has not been invited to do so, but she may read her own anyway.

On the shop walls and in the front window, she has pinned up hand-printed poster-sized quotes from the Founding Fathers — Jefferson, Adams (THIS WOULD BE THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, IF THERE WERE NO RELIGION IN IT), Washington, Franklin, Madison — and such patriots as Tom Paine and Albert Einstein and Susan B. Anthony and Ambrose Bierce, all gathered for her Cretins essay, plus her own notebooked gems of wisdom (THE ENLIGHTENMENT: WHO HIT THE OFF-SWITCH?), even a few of her fiction fragments (literature! yay!). She put all her old unwashed T-shirts up for sale (once published, you don’t repeat yourself), spreading them out on tables made of planks on sawhorses, and inked up some new ones for the occasion, including variations on her Four Freedoms and ones bearing messages like Mark Twain’s SACRED COWS MAKE THE BEST HAMBURGER and H. L. Mencken’s DEEP WITHIN THE HEART OF EVERY EVANGELIST LIES THE WRECK OF A CAR SALESMAN. The clothing store used to have a bargain basement where her mom always shopped and down there in the murk she found some broken manikins — headless torsos, loose heads, scattered hands and feet — and she used them in the window to model her shirts. Filthy creatures and grotesquely battered, but perfect for the occasion. She put the heads on the floor of the window, chins propped by their feet and gazing up admiringly (or abashedly, who could tell?) at the headless bosoms in their amazing tees, and she twisted the waists on some of those that had them so that they wore their bottoms at the front, then inscribed upon the glossy cheeks her own parodies of religious and patriotic clichés. When Tommy saw it, he said: “You’re just trying to get people mad at you,” and she agreed with him.

After the parade has stumbled past, her friend Stacy Ryder comes in, showing off a white ceramic elephant with its trunk broken off that she says she found in a white elephant sale and couldn’t resist. “I mean, how often do you find just what you’re looking for?” She’s wearing shorts and a cut-off shirt that shows off her midriff. The sort of body that breaks hearts. “‘Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man,’” she says, reading one of the pinned-up placards. “Did Thomas Jefferson really say that?”

“Who knows what anyone said in the past? I can’t tell you what I said yesterday. But it’s in the history books, whatever history is. Jefferson was definitely no mindless Christian, though, nor were most of the founders. Different country then. Before the cults took over.”

“My Puritan forebears should have sunk off Plymouth.” She pauses in front of one of Sally’s story fragments taped to the wall. “‘A Place Called Suicide.’ I hope you’re not thinking of going there…?”

“No. A response to that shoe store guy.” When they offered up the empty Main Street stores for temporary occupation today, nobody wanted that one. “I’m only a tourist, taking pictures. That’s why I turned it into a place. So I could do that.” There is a place, not so much at the center of the city as inside the center of the city; it is a place children cannot discover, though adolescents sometimes stumble upon it in their anxious posturing. That’s the line Stacy is reading now. Maybe she shouldn’t have tacked it up. But publishing it on the wall like that led Sally to another line she’d scribbled at the bottom: True travelers do not even see the boundary notices, but are there before they realize they have set out. Which will lead to another, already formulating itself in her head. She could never go to such a place, it’s not in her nature, but the story can.

“When I was learning to ride a bicycle,” Stacy says, “my mother always insisted I ride on the left, facing the traffic, so I could see what was coming. The way she put it was, Stay off the suicide of the road.” Stacy smiles her smile, but a kind of sadness settles in. She doesn’t think Stacy is going to stay around much longer. She picks up a rose-colored shirt that reads SUPPORT ATHEISM: A NON-PROPHET ORGANIZATION and holds it up in front of her. “Hah,” she says, “it’s my lucky day. Perfect thing for the bank floor. How much?”

“Given the slogan, I could hardly charge you for that one.”

“I was thinking of it more like tithing.”

“How about community service? I promised to help clean up the street after the parade. Want to give me a hand?”

“Sure. Then I have to go serve wienies at the bank picnic. I understand things are about as wobbly out there as that sinking float.”

“Saw your boss pass by looking out of sorts. Is that what he was so agitated about?”

“My boss? No. Well, maybe. It was mainly about the sheriff, I think.”

“You mean, why he didn’t turn up?”

“Right. I think he’s dead. That’s what I heard.”

“Oh wow! But how—?”

“I don’t know. I heard people say his car might have caught on fire. Or got set on fire. And there was apparently some poor kid locked in the trunk.”

“Holy shit! That’s really scary! Who was the kid?”

“I didn’t hear.”

Later, at the bank picnic, Tommy tells her: Royboy Coates. Sheriff Puller was found in his burnt-out car, his wrists handcuffed to the steering wheel. The sheriff’s radio dispatcher said she’d tried to reach him before she shut down, but he didn’t answer and she figured he’d turned in for the night. She also said it was Royboy who apparently set the trap with a call about a highway motorcycle accident. “Roy-boy was just totally fucked,” Tommy says, breathing noisily around his bandaged reconstructed nose. “The only odd thing at the scene was a Dick Tracy comicbook on the ground near the front bumper. It was old and beat up, but showed no signs of having been out in the weather, so they may have dropped it there as a kind of taunt to the cops. Maybe they can get fingerprints.” For some reason that strikes Sally as funny in a sick way, but she doesn’t say so. Tommy is pretty rattled. His dad tried to contact the governor to ask for troops, as he’s been doing the last few weeks, but he was told the governor was out on a statewide tour of Fourth of July parades and couldn’t be reached until Tuesday, and his dad said Tuesday was too late. “He was yelling at whoever he had on the phone, telling him this was an emergency, that the governor had to cancel his fucking joyride and get on top of this, order up the National Guard, we need them now, and the jerk at the other end said something about there being little he could do, it was a national holiday weekend and the available troops were all deployed at one parade or another. Dad shouted, ‘Well, goddamn it then, redeploy them!’ and slammed the phone down. He’s mad as hell. He also called both senators, our congressman, and his pal at the FBI, yelling and swearing at all of them or whoever answered the phones. Answering service operators, mostly, who probably thought they were talking to a madman. And those armed Christian Patriots you saw today in the parade? They’ve all been deputized by the new sheriff.”

Onward, Christian Soldiers. The real battle hymn of the Republic. Things are not going well for Captain America and his young masked sidekick. “I saw Charlie Bonali in the parade, too. He seems to have got up a gang of his own.”

“The Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Mob, alias the Dagotown Devil Dogs. That vicious fucking asshole. Fleet said they turned up at his deli asking for money, pushed him around, threatened him, stole stuff. Romano tried to keep them out of the parade, and those fundamentalist Klan types, too, but couldn’t. When the chief said they couldn’t be in the parade if they were armed, they both said it was their constitutional right to bear arms and they’d just fall in behind the last lot and march anyway. Which would have meant they’d be marching together, and that seemed too dangerous. They were already eyeing each other like they couldn’t wait to get at it. So the chief let them in and kept them separated, his own squad car and other marching groups, between them. Man. The whole day has just turned to shit. Things are fucking out of control.”

“It’s the Fourth, Tommy. An American holy day. What did you expect? Killing is patriotic.”

“Killing cops isn’t.”

“Sure it is. Patriots are made by revolutions. Which are against cops and the guys who own the cops.” She means that as a general historical principle, but he’ll take it that she’s slamming his father again. She lights up a smoke and tells herself to ease up. “What about your dad’s resurrection circus tomorrow? Is that still on?”

“Dad’s completely shot, about as low as I’ve seen him. Something’s really got him down — Mom being so sick and all, maybe trouble at the bank, I don’t know. I know he advanced Lem Filbert a lot of money, and Osborne too, and all that’s down the tubes. And now what’s happened today. He has worked so hard to try to turn things around, and this is what he gets. But, yeah, as far as I know he’s going through with it. He figures none of this would be happening if those evangelical dingbats hadn’t come back, so if he can get them to wise up and move on, the other problems may take care of themselves.” Another Twain quote she found while composing her Cretins essay was “Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing.” Twain wasn’t talking to the diseased imaginations, they’re a lost cause, something the human horde has to live with; he was talking to the fool who thinks he can do anything about it.

The whole town is out here at the high school playing fields, the nearest thing it has to a park. They used to have one in the center, but now it’s a parking lot with a drive-in root beer stand on one corner. The townsfolk are lapping up the ice cream and free eats and soft drinks under the hot afternoon sun, and there’s a lot of beer being passed around from personal coolers, but the mood is more apprehensive than festive. When the word got around, a lot of people dashed out to the Deepwater No. 9 access road where the sheriff’s car was found to get a glimpse of his scorched body before it was taken away, and though they all thought they wanted to see it, after they saw it they knew that they didn’t. It was like a sickening echo of the mine disaster and has brought the nightmares back. Sally follows Tommy’s gaze and sees Stacy at one of the bank food stalls, where she’s cooking up hot-dogs and serving paper plates of potato salad and baked beans. Stacy waves and she waves back. She apparently lacked the nerve to wear the “non-prophet” shirt out here. Or maybe she didn’t want to hide what she’s got. Can’t compete with that. “She’s so cute,” Sally says, and Tommy turns away with a sad clownish grin under his swathed nose and says, “Yeah, but not very friendly.”

The fat lady’s family, the ones who cleared out the swimming pool, are all over there at Stacy’s stall, grabbing up whatever’s offered, pocketing what they don’t eat. The little girl in the pink slipper is wearing Sally’s stolen “sacred cow” tee backward, down to her ankles like a dress. It left her shop along with lots of other things while she and Stacy were cleaning up the street. That’s okay. Spread the evangel. A fifth freedom. From the private ownership of the world. The girl and her brothers have been running about, throwing firecrackers at the squirrels and butterflies, trying to stamp out all the grasshoppers, helping themselves to the sports day prizes, shooting water pistols.

Sally has put on her John Adams “holy lies and pious frauds” tee for her Independence Day meeting with Billy Don, but maybe she should change to something more suggestive for later. Something straightforward like “Why Not?” Or “Ripe Fruit.” Hanging by a thread from the Tree of Knowledge. My Cunt-Tree. ’Tis of thee. For thee. She drops her cigarette and grinds it out with her sneaker heel. Stupid. “I have to go, Tommy. I promised to meet that kid from the camp. But how about watching the fireworks together tonight? I’ll invite Mary Jane along for company. I’ve got what’s left of her stowed away somewhere in a dirty sock.”

Tommy gazes at her thoughtfully with his discolored eyes. He’s probably not seen a lot of action since he dropped Angela and had to get his busted nose repaired. It has been a hard week and he’s tired and it shows. “Sounds just about right,” he says. Her heart’s pounding. She hopes it isn’t making her tee bounce. Like in the cartoons. She feels like a cartoon. Goose Girl. Thump thump. She snaps a cigarette out of a rumpled pack and lights up again, trying to hang loose, as the boys say. “Dad has called an emergency meeting of the NOWC committee with the chief and the acting sheriff, and I still have to run the raffle and a couple of races, make sure the stage mikes are working, and play a game of ball on one of the teams Fleet has put together. But by the time they light up the sky, if we’re not all dead, I’ll be ready to cool out.”

They meet at a pull-in near the path to the old abandoned municipal cemetery. Sally has ducked out of the town picnic, hoping to miss all the patriotic bunkum, go back after it’s over with stash in her pockets and a better tee. Billy Don wants to show her the filled-in grave, the one that Darren holds to be an otherwise inexplicable signal that the Rapture, or something like it, has begun. Or maybe he only wants to get her alone in a dark place. Billy Don is alarmed when he sees the garden spade she has brought along and he stops in his tracks, so she shrugs, winks, and tosses it back in the car, gets out the sandwiches and sodas she has picked up at the picnic.

They haven’t seen each other since their interrupted midsummer swim at the lakes two weeks ago, so on their walk down the overgrown path through the woods to the buried graveyard, both of them in shorts and having to pick their way carefully past all the thorns and scratchy bushes and poison ivy, they fill each other in on the recent town and camp news. Billy Don tells her that he was one of those who found the sheriff. The guards on night duty last night said they saw a fire over near the mine from up on Inspiration Point, but it died down and they figured it was probably just a brush fire or kids getting off to an early start on the Fourth, and decided to wait until daylight to go over there, especially since they’d been hearing motorcycles again and were worried that that gang might be back. So after breakfast Billy Don and some of the other fellows armed themselves and drove over — and came driving right back again to call the deputy sheriff on the office phone. They didn’t open the trunk, only heard about that later. Billy Don says there’s a lot of anxiety at the camp because of the loss of their two most powerful protectors, first Mr. Suggs and now the sheriff, and because of the possible return of the bikers, though Darren thinks these are just further signs of the looming End Days. “You know, the horsemen. In the Bible. Those bikers. It was your aunt who saw the connection.” Billy Don tells her about Aunt Debra’s arrest, what Colin said in front of everybody. No wonder Aunt Debra seemed so shattered. Billy Don says Colin is “a mischievous liar.” Colin in turn now calls him Judas and screams accusations at Billy Don every time he leaves the camp. He is Darren’s little buddy, and Darren has moved over to Colin’s cabin. To take care of him, he says. Actually, that’s the best part. Darren has taken his worktable with him and Billy Don now has the cabin to himself. He is turning it into a proper church office, he says, so they can close the other one and finish the men’s restroom. After that, well, he doesn’t know… He casts a sideways wall-eyed glance her way.

Sally hands him the hotdogs and sodas so she can pause to light a cigarette (she notices the matchbook is from some motel out on the highway; she doesn’t remember where she picked it up but sees its ending up in her pocket as serendipitous) and recounts for him the story of the garage fire and Lem Filbert’s crazed assault on the fire chief, which she says, according to her father, had to do with some sort of racket at city hall that Filbert was resisting. “Really, it’s all pretty comical, in a dark torturous sort of way.” When she asks about the reported lovers’ suicides at the camp, Billy Don says it was actually a double murder, probably by the woman’s husband who has disappeared. That was what Ludie Belle said, though he didn’t see them himself. “It was, you know, that night…” He says they talked about burying them on the back side of the Mount of Redemption where the dog Rocky is buried, but there were objections that they had died in sin and it wouldn’t be right to have them lying right next to the new tabernacle temple, so the sheriff organized a burial over at Randolph Junction, alongside that old lady who died a couple of months ago.

“The one whose soul I snatched,” Sally says.

“Yeah. A lot of people still believe that.”

Later that night of the murders, Billy Don tells her, after he’d got back from the lakes, there was an assault on the camp by a gang of drunks, but they made the mistake of bowling over some beehives in the dark. Sally laughs and says, yes, she saw a couple of them the next day at Franny Baxter’s wedding, sick with hangovers, badly beat up, and covered head to toe with bee-stings — the groom included. “The best man apparently overslept and missed the wedding altogether. One of the guys, whose face was so puffy with bee-stings he was almost blind, had his skinny arm in a new white cast, on which others in the wedding party were posting lyrical obscenities. The writing bug can hit you anytime, anywhere. Then, during the ceremony, the groom threw up all over the bride’s gown and passed out and had to be laid out on the sofa. I was supposed to photograph all that! Franny and her sister-in-law just giggled through it all like it was the funniest thing that ever happened.” To keep the conversation lighthearted (they’ve reached the edge of the old burial ground with all its forgotten dead, and its shadowy melancholy is what they’re both feeling), she tells him about the Blue Moon Motel singers who were there to sing hayseed love songs and who entertained everyone with a funny parody of “Frankie and Johnnie” that they made up on the spot, with lines about the bees and the Blue Moon brawl, and he asks if she knows what has happened to them, because they were Brunist Followers and always sang at their prayer meetings, but they seem to have left town. She doesn’t.

When Billy Don leads her to the grave in question, it is more or less as she first saw it: open, empty, overgrown. But now there’s a pile of fresh dirt nearby. Billy Don seems genuinely spooked, his mouth agape beneath his droopy handlebars, his eyes behind their dark lenses even less focused than usual. “I saw it! It wasn’t like that!” he whispers, and she nods. “It was completely full, like there was a body in it!” She drops her smoke between her feet and steps on it, thinking about this. “Must be Darren,” she says. “He’s playing games with your head.”

One’s destiny in smalltown middle America: Death by submersion in a pot of boiling clichés. This great nation, under God… Is this what Jefferson and his coauthors had in mind? Sally has returned too early to escape the last of the Fourth of July oratory. All these self-styled, high-minded, sober, hardworking, patriotic, decent Christian swindlers. Billy Don told her that some of the Brunists believe that America is literally the New Jerusalem, and after they’re raptured they’ll all celebrate the Fourth of July there with God and His angels. “Nobody has never handed nothing to this town. We don’t have mountains or oceans or famous buildings like a Awful Tower. I guess all we got is the corner bus station. But what we have got is quality of life. We got heart!” Hizzoner has the heart of a weasel. And the brain of a lizard. “If we got problems we can put ’em right on accounta this is America! People all over the world envy us what we got here! Right here in West Condon!” Much as they might want to believe it, people would have long since walked away from the mayor’s horseshit, but Tommy has scheduled the raffle draw at the end of it all so as to keep them hanging in, clutching their little ticket stubs.

Her mother and Emily Wetherwax are sitting on folding chairs far enough from the speakers not to have to pay them much attention, having a smoke together, apparently having made up after what happened out at the lakes. A quiet moment of ciggyboo time, as they have called it ever since high school. Which her mother has never left. She’s still that popular, carefree ball of fire called Frisky. Her own personal dreamtime. Which she revisits at every opportunity. Her dad’s tanked as usual, but still staggering along, grinning idiotically and raising his hip flask to all he meets, mugging emotions. The Court Jester. He’s especially good at stupefaction. Mothers and fathers, though lovable, are only useful up to a point. After that, they can go. She made the mistake of saying that to Tommy one day while they were cleaning out the vacated downtown shops together, still trying to rescue him from the plot he’s been written into, and he called her a heartless bitch and said his mom and dad were the two most important people in his life and always would be. Wherein, alack, lies his eventual ruin. She was about to entertain him with the story of her parents and the Wetherwaxes getting drunk at their midsummer picnic and swapping partners, and all the funny anguished things she heard her mom saying on the phone to Emily Wetherwax the next day, but decided not to. In her effort to score with him, she has told him too many things. They wouldn’t be springing Giovanni Bruno on the cultists tomorrow, for example, if she hadn’t let him know about Darren’s symbolic burial plans. Of course that’s why Tommy has taken such a patient interest in what she has to say. He has been pumping her for information to pass along to his dad, using her much as she has been using Billy Don, and what’s worse, she has been aware of it all along. Feeling guilty, and a bit pissed off, she told Billy Don about Operation Resurrection this afternoon while they were back at their cars having their afternoon snack, Billy Don being too shaken by the reopened grave to stay in there for their picnic. “What? Bruno? He’s alive?” “Keep it to yourself,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t. It’s like writing “to be continued” at the end of a story that’s already over.

On the way out of the cemetery, Billy Don asked her a lot of earnest questions about life and death and how she manages it all without religion. She answered him the only way she knew how, but she was aware that what had begun as a kind of larky soda fountain game was becoming more like a responsibility, and she wasn’t sure she wanted that. Who is she to unlock the mysteries of the universe? Strip an innocent kid of his fantasy consolations? “Well, you know,” she said finally with a little shrug. “The truth, Billy D. Nobody has it all. My ears are open.” But because she couldn’t help herself, she went on to say he should leave the camp, that he was never going to figure things out in there. And without knowing exactly why, she suddenly feared for him. Maybe it was the bikers coming back, or Darren’s craziness, or all the weird frightening things that have been happening, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and pressed it on him. “Billy Don, I want you to do me a big favor. I’ve only got this twenty, but I want you to take it and go fill up your car and go back home, or go find those kids in Florida, whatever, wherever, but as far away from here as possible. Right now.” He turned pale and gave her a look through his shades — two looks if you count both eyes — that could mean only one thing and shook his head and said thanks, but, well, she probably wouldn’t understand, but he had to stay.

Nobody’s innocent, she least of all. Remember that.

She sees Tommy over by the popcorn machine, leaning over Babs Wetherwax, peering rakishly past his plaster nose cast down the kid’s cleavage. Sally has stopped by the house to put on a fresh tee (one of the free NOWC shirts, the C inked into a circle with a smiley face and an exclamation mark after) and one of her dad’s throwaway white shirts, for its protective sleeves, open and tails out. She grabbed up some blankets, all the money she could find, and the last of her stash, saved for just this occasion; she even remembered the insect repellant and the cameras she borrowed. She has picked out a good place over on the slope to watch the fireworks, private enough to allow for the joints but with an open view of the sky, but she may lose the night after all. Some time ago, in a biology course she took for her science requirement, she came across the word “neoteny” and she wrote it down in her notebook. Adults of a species looking like juveniles and though retarded (as one might say) thought of as cute, and therefore more likely to get fucked. The way a lot of dogs get bred. The way American guys like their girls. Small, soft, fuzzy, dimpled, helpless, confused, naïve. Big eyes. Little noses. White baby teeth. Plucked pubes. A little tongue to tickle you with. Neotenic. At the same time, they like big motherly tits. The Hollywood starlet image. Boobs Wetherwax.

Why does it matter? Because Sally loves Tommy. Something she used to write in her high school notebooks then tear out in embarrassment, only to write it again. Not knowing what she meant by it. Not knowing now. Something to do with that last night at the ice plant. Meaning has to do with language. That didn’t. No brain at all then, just body. Bare and burning. Her heart’s in her mouth and her clothes are shorn. Says Boy Blue to Peep, come blow my horn. She was so scared, she started praying. The way she was then. Scared but desiring him — or desiring something — so much it hurt. Nothing like it since, really. In her masturbation fantasies, it’s always Tommy, and more or less as he looked to her that night in the back of his father’s car. Just a boy. Boy Blue. Pale, lean, luminous. In his fever, so enraptured by what he saw, enrapturing her; no one has ever looked at her — even if he only was looking at it, not her — like that before or since. His erection a shared magic between them. Right in front of her nose. First real one she’d ever seen up close. He seemed to want her to do something with it, but she didn’t know what. Sniff it? At his urging she took hold of it, surprised at how cool it was. Well, and then more. But not quite enough more. She lights up another cigarette, cursing herself.

…but then he leaves her alone and she goes home, dragging her tail behind her.

Blue never calls Bo Peep again, though he knows where to find her…

And so the rest of the day goes, a catalogue of familiar disappointments, the author retreating after each into her notebook. Dog with her bone. She doesn’t win the raffle and has no luck at bingo. Her best chance is the sack race, but she would have been the only contestant over four feet tall, so instead she referees it and gets everybody mad at her while Tommy puts the make not just on Boobs but a whole flock of bleating neotenics, some of whose bells, she knows, he has already rung, to speak in the classical tongue. Love is a sack race, she writes, in which not all sacks are equal. Tortoise truth: the hare always wins.

She needs a friend, goes looking for Stacy, but with the food gone, she’s gone, too. Smart. Smarter than Sally, who could leave but can’t.

The ballgame starts late and lasts less than an inning, ends badly. Baseball on the Fourth: as emblematic as hotdogs, beer, and car crashes. She sits on the grass with Monica Piccolotti and her baby, figuring that it gives her her best shot at crossing paths with Tommy, close as he is to Pete, and has to listen to the entire catalogue of the joys of marriage and motherhood while Monica feeds, burps, changes (turns out it’s a boy), powders, nuzzles, bounces the kid. Also about how cruel Tommy has been to poor faithful Angela, especially after what he’s just done to her. Sally doesn’t know what that is, but she can guess. Did Tommy have Biblical knowledge of cute little Monica Sabatini? Probably. They used to call her Teeny — Teeny Sabatini — but no longer; Lotta Piccolotti’s closer to it. The worst thing is what has happened to her complexion. Love’s production line: high-maintenance baby-machines and the redesigning of mothers. Helplessly desiring what you can’t possibly want. Evolution, not as fact, but as faith. That it’s going somewhere. A promise forever withheld through the ceaseless tumble of new generations. In the first inning, two of the first three batters get on base, mostly due to bad fielding, and Tommy, swinging one-handed as the big guys agree to do, hits a home run. Using his golf stroke. Is that fair? The fielder is actually back far enough, but she drops it and then can’t find the ball in the high grass. Tommy walks around the bases, encouraging the girl, but the throw never even reaches the infield. Tommy’s team scores two more before the little kids at the bottom of the lineup strike out. Tommy, pitching underhand in the bottom of the inning, gets the first two out on balls hit back to him. But her dealer, Moron Moroni, swinging with both hands, smacks a ball that bounces between the little third baseman’s legs and would have hurt if it had hit him. Moron slides into second, feet high, bowling over the beer-bellied Cox kid, standing there picking his nose and waiting for the ball to be thrown to him, and a fistfight breaks out. This is of more interest to the watching crowd, some of whom move toward the field to join in with cold grins on their faces. Another popular Fourth of July tradition. It frightens her, and that’s another disappointment. It’s the human comedy, so why isn’t she laughing?

Tommy and Pete hurriedly exit the playing field, pulling some of the little ones out with them, Tommy remarking as he strides by that he needs a fucking beer, Pete offering him one from the cooler in the trunk of his car over at the parking lot. Monica throws her kid over her shoulder and apologizes, saying she’d better go keep an eye on the boys that they don’t get into trouble, and leaves her. Down on the field, the fight ends when Angela’s brother steps into it, slugs a few, and leads his troops out before the cops turn up. Should she wander over to the parking lot and invite herself to a beer? She shouldn’t.

Consider, she writes in her notebook: the whole of the human environment as a pedagogic instrument, art as a particular technique for focusing attention, for teaching skills of close regard. Why you have to mix it up, keep people on their toes. See everything.

She thumbs through the notebook and her current mood of disappointment extends to what she has written. The sophomoric silliness of so much of it. The pretension. The self-pity. Those lines she has set down about Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue, for example. She crosses them out in disgust. Then regrets it. Leave it. It is what it is, she is who she is, even in her stupid infantile doodlings. The doodle as a form of meditation. Meditation as process, not product. Books, too. When they become product, they’re dead. Writing is it, not the written. For all her disappointment, she still believes. Language makes and unmakes reality. There’s an unfathomable gap between nature and culture, the infinite and the finite. Only the imagination can even try to bridge it. Its failures are what beauty is. And so on. The litany of Saint Sal.

As the sky darkens toward showtime, Sally spreads her blanket on the little slope she picked out, though out of the private spot and onto a more public one so Tommy can at least see her should he chance by. She lights up the joint she has rolled and stretches out to watch the stars appear. Tommy vanished from sight some time ago. Probably gone off with one or more of his groupies. Sprawled in his convertible somewhere with a view of the upcoming fireworks. Where they can time their orgasms with the bursts in the sky. In the beginning, she thinks, staring up into that sky (the sheer volume of it!): the fundamental error of giving form to the formless, thus creating time and the perception of space. God’s famous parlor trick. But the notion that light — creation — is “good” will not stand the test of inquiry. Something like that. She’d write it down, but it’s getting dark and she’s tired of writing things down. She has worked at holding the earth together long enough for one day. Time to mellow. Beautiful summer night. New crescent moon like a glossy fingernail, brightening as the dark deepens, becoming a tiny rip in the sky, illumined from behind. On the horizon, the flicker of heat lightning. The birds are still into their nightfall bragging and seduction racket. The crickets and katydids. Crazy about love. Mosquitoes with grosser appetites. She sits up, already feeling the impact of the weed (whoo, nice), spreads repellant on her wrists, arms, forehead, and the back of her neck, buttons the shirt sleeves and covers her bare legs with the second blanket. She was wondering what would linger long after she left this place. This might be it, not a visual image at all, just the feel of summer. Before lying back again, she rolls a few more joints, her fresh supply courtesy of Moron. Feeling sad. But okay. How she wants it, really. Independence, it’s the day for it, isn’t it? Maybe she’ll just smoke the entire lot and crash out here for the rest of the summer. Dream a little dream of you.

She has been recording her dreams since she came home from college, cataloguing their peculiarities. Take-home coursework of a sort. Dreamtime 101. Once she’d done it for a while, she found she could make them up, or at least imitate the form. At first she thought it was leading her into something disruptively new, a break from the conventional well-told tales of the day, but in the end it revealed itself as a definable and familiar form of its own with its own set of rules and limitations. Vivid imagery, and just about nothing but. Actions, not language, until trying to describe them. Then, simple declarative sentences, like movie scripts. But little or no continuity, things happening and then not happening. Like the fireworks beginning to explode in the sky above. Pop! this and then pop! that. Linked by as little as trailing color. Sensations of flow, flight, fall, heavy-limbed slowness, mazy disrupted travels. Odd lines of dialogue with hidden meanings. Or not. Lots of family stuff. Abrupt transitions and bizarre juxtapositions. Unstable settings. Sudden breaks and gaps of time and space, casual violence, fleshy landscapes, public nakedness, absurdist reasoning. Spectacularly illogical events that seem completely normal. Strangers you know but don’t know. The threat of the Other. Feelings of powerlessness, vulnerability, masked by illusions of superhuman power, etc. In short, an awful lot like all those creation myths she read back in college, the main difference being that, while dreams are private, myths have been honed for the public marketplace. Invested with intentionality while hiding the original nonsensical flow. Just as the dreams she makes up with words are never as weird as the ones she actually dreams, which often defy inscription. Images in them she could never think up awake, and no idea where they come from or how they get into her dreams. Easy to see, then, how primitive minds would think of them as coming from outside themselves like visions from the beyond. Get doped up and let it flow in. Hello? God talking. First storytellers. Crazy zonked-out dream weavers. Establishing the fatal fetal patterns.

The dream she is having right now is of a drunk and/or stoned Tommy Cavanaugh sitting beside her, asking if she has smoked up all the grass. She doesn’t reply, just passes him her roach, lights another. They do the cabbages and kings thing, Tommy explaining that his dad left him in charge of everything to go track down the governor personally to try to get troops here by tomorrow, and he’s had to do everything from fending off the news guys asking about the sheriff’s murder, to dismantling the stage and food stalls and getting the kids out from under foot so they could begin the fireworks display, she pointing out for him meanwhile the Andromeda constellation backgrounding the light show up there, because the story of a hero’s last-minute rescue of a maiden chained to a rock seems to fit the dream narrative underway. He thanks her for all the help she’s been over the past weeks, and she says, Sure, boss, any time. By this time, they’re lying side by side on one blanket and under another, hand in each other’s pants, passing a joint back and forth with the free one while the flying sprays of color burst overhead, and she’s not quite sure how this has happened, but now that his hand’s there, digging deeper, it feels just right. She slides the blanket away and unzips his fly to bring his erection out into the open so that she can — what? not sure, let’s just see what happens — when Jesus turns up with a lady friend. Seems okay. Jesus has seen it all, what can he care? Tommy flinches, so she grips him all the tighter. Jesus is walking with a picturesque shepherd’s crook, which appears to be an old man’s cane with a taped-on extension made from a mop handle. There are a bunch of kids trailing along, too, but their eyes are on the sky, which is full of the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air. Jesus makes a sign that could be a blessing or it might just be waving off what he sees or he might want a drag. She passes the joint up to him, and that’s exactly what he wanted, yes. He sucks deeply, as if seeking ascension, and passes it to his friend for a toke, but she hands it back with a sad smile, patting her tum. She is wearing the tails of her blouse out over her slacks. There is a little bulge there. Jesus has been busy. Sally is thinking about Jesus’ forgotten wife, poor red-eyed Aunt Debra, whom she visited in hospital before she was sent elsewhere, where they could supposedly deal with deep depression: when you’re chained to a rock, the hero doesn’t always come along. Aunt Debra had gone silent, except for a simple mantra repeated over and over: I’ll be there. I’ll be there. She leaned in to kiss her and Aunt Debra didn’t move or kiss back, just said flatly, I’ll be there. “Bless you, my children, and be of good cheer,” Jesus says now, the smoke curling out of his mouth like cartoon balloons of speech. “God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part: lo (cough!), it is given unto your hands.”

“This is kind of public,” Tommy says with a laugh when Jesus and his friends have moved on. “Maybe we should go somewhere.”

“It’s already booked,” she says.

She yelps with pain. Tommy recoils, but she claps him to her. “No, stay where you are, don’t move. It just hurt more than I thought it would.” She’s gasping, as if she’s run a mile. She doesn’t know if the pot has served as a partial anesthetic or has intensified her sensory apparatus. “Give me a minute.”

“What hurt?” he asks in palpable confusion. “Wait a minute! Why are you so wet? Omigod, Sal!”

“It’s all right, Tommy. It really is. Just hug me for a minute.”

“But I always assumed — I wouldn’t have — fuck! You should have told me!”

“Ssshh!”

To be naked with him. Holding him. Such a sweet thing. But awkward at first. She felt self-conscious, offering up all she had and fearful he might not want it. Thankfully he left his T-shirt on, so then she did too, and that seemed to help. When their pants came down, it all felt completely natural. Almost too natural, like when they were little kids jumping about under the garden hose. But this time he had a hard-on. She was so grateful for that hard-on. It meant he wanted her. Even if he was too stoned to be sure just who she was. It meant everything would really happen. She wanted to kiss him but was afraid to. She wasn’t used to it, might do something stupid, and didn’t think he’d want to, kissing being more intimate than mere sex. But no need to fear. He’s an experienced lover. Did all the right things, made her feel desirable, desired. He was the one to turn the lights out. To put her at ease, she thought. He was so pleased about the room. Before switching off the lights, he thanked her for choosing a place with air conditioning, but he was looking out the window onto the highway and she knew he had been afraid she might be taking him to the Blue Moon Motel. She was staring at his bare backside as he stood there at the window. It was heart-breakingly beautiful. She wanted to nuzzle it. Wipe her tears on it. Bite it. Chew it. With the least encouragement, she would have done so. She was high as a kite. The cliché seemed right. All clichés did. Everything happening was a most wonderful cliché. When he did kiss her, his long-fingered ball-playing hands stroked her gently, lovingly, passed down her back, over her buttocks, between her thighs. Also a cliché. A creamy one. She was already coming before he lowered her to the bed.

Now he’s moving in her again. This is okay, she thinks. This is really okay. Bring on the clowns. Even the pain’s okay. Mostly gone now and overtaken by all the other physical stuff happening. Worth cataloguing, but not now. All the way to her throat she feels it. Her eyes, the roots of her hair. On her own, it was never like this. She clutches his undulating buttocks, her hands grasping what her eyes ate up, and as he drives harder and harder, she knows just how to respond, as though she has been doing this all her life, her hips rising to meet his thrusts, her thighs clamping him. She even — how did she know to do this? maybe she read it somewhere — while gripping his neck with one hand, fingers his anus with the other, then searches for the base of his testicles, some special spot there, pulling him deeper into her. At the last minute (for her, it’s not the last minute, just another one, it’s great, don’t stop, her whole body an infinitely expanding orgasm), he grunts, jerks out of her, spills his seed on her belly, both hands cupping her buttocks, pulling her to him, whimpering softly, his body still pumping furiously, and then with a deep sigh he collapses gently on her. The right thing to do. But, oh, how she ached to have him stay where he was, explode inside her. What an ecstasy — even as chubby Monica with the bad complexion comes to mind — that must be! So much yet to experience, to try, to learn. He kisses her under the ear, his nose guard massaging her scalp. A kiss of appreciation. Not once but twice; leaves his lips there. She feels so rewarded.

They lie there a while like that, she holding him in place, caught in the parentheses of her thighs like a delicious thought to be squeezed of nuance. Like hugging a heavy pillow. The darkness is not so dark now. She can see his shoulders, faintly blue from the light outside, can hear beyond the hum of the air conditioner more fireworks going off, the distant drone tone of motors out on the highway, the world returning but not the familiar one she knew before. She’s never been in a room like this, for example. Out by a highway. In a houseful of adventurous transients. Fondling a boy’s testicles. He will ask her why she did this, and does. The answers she has rehearsed won’t do. This is no time for her usual wiseass comebacks. No mention of that night at the ice plant, please. She tells him simply she had always wanted it to be him, even before she knew what “it” exactly was, and she has waited all this time until it could happen and she thanks him for it. No obligations, she says, but only to herself, happy when he hugs her tenderly in response.

And then finally he does slide off and stand up and turn on the light. “Oh man. They’ll think there’s been a murder. Why didn’t you put something under you?”

“I always sign my work,” she says, hearing her old self again, but proud of the body that his paired shiners are staring down at: it did everything it was supposed to do and it did it well, never mind what he might think of it as an aesthetic object.

“Just look at my dick,” he laughs, holding the bloody thing up with his fingertips. She’s afraid he might be angry or disgusted, but he grins and takes her hand and pulls her to her feet and says, “C’mon, let’s get cleaned up.”

And so they do that, and the shirts come off and there’s all the fun with the soap, and more sex standing up and kissing under the shower, and then toweling each other off and back to bed — it’s a big room with two beds, so they have clean sheets to crawl into — and one last joint to share (thank you, Moron, you dear little horse’s ass). It’s all very tender and loving and completely naked now, better than she could ever have imagined it, using their mouths as well as everything else, he punching her here and there with his funny nose, one position not unlike that dogleg at the fourth tee. My God what has she been missing? She even gets to realize that little fantasy of a while ago of nipping his bottom in her teeth. But also a certain melancholy is stealing in because she knows it can’t last — he doesn’t love her and her feelings, well, they’re mixed at best. Much as this is, it may be all of it. Tomorrow it will already be a memory, a dream dreamt like all memories and fading as dreams do, and she’ll be overtaken by a longing quite different from the sort felt until now. Humans. They think too much. “Are you hungry?” she asks. “I’ve only had a hotdog all day.”

“Sure. But it’s late.”

“I checked. The bar has snack food and is open until one. You’ll have to buy. I spent my last dime on the room.”

“No problem. I’ve got plenty. We can shoot the moon.”

So they start to get dressed and he pushes his hand between her legs while she’s pulling her panties up and there’s another delay, he taking her from behind this time. They’re both still pretty high and it seems better than ever, like they’ve got dangling nerve ends in all the right places, their bodies are just having the best time in the world, and then they start the dressing again, finishing this time, even though there’s a moment when she opens his fly and gives his penis a final kiss, his hands tangled in her wet snarls, before they head for the bar.

“Look,” Tommy says, pointing toward an opening door down the corridor, “it’s that cute chick from the bank!” He starts to call out, but then the guy she’s with steps out behind her, and Sally understands that the night has just suddenly ended.

IV.3 Sunday 5 July

“Mom! Come and see!” It’s the little Blaurock boy at the top of the hill. His mother lifts her mass up the slope. Her stretched tunic is split; it tears more as she climbs. Even before she turns with the news, Darren knows what it will be. He has been to the old cemetery this morning before church with Billy Don, has seen the vacated grave. “It’s Rocky!” Dot Blaurock cries out. “He’s been raptured!” Darren nods when others turn toward him. “I know,” he says quietly, yet most hear. He watches them rush to the top of the hill to see for themselves. He didn’t exactly know, but it fits. It’s happening. Anything can be expected. These are the End Times. Just as he has foreseen.

He is calmer now, but when he first saw the empty grave at the old municipal cemetery he was frightened. Billy Don was watching him closely when he led him to it. To see if he was only acting, as Billy Don later confessed. He was not. His alarm, fear, awe would have been obvious to anyone. But why just this one? Billy Don asked. Why not all the others? Because it’s a message, he whispered. A message especially for him. God’s reader of signs. In the words of their Prophet: The tomb is its message. One talks about these things, imagines them, prepares for them, but always as somewhat abstract notions somewhere in the future, inevitable but not quite real. Like death. Then suddenly here it is. This ceremony today on the Mount of Redemption is taking on new meaning, one he can only partially intuit and hope he is prepared for. That feeling again of a cold wind. He knelt there in the long early morning shadows amid the forgotten dead to pray for guidance. To himself, silently, eyes closed; this was not for Billy Don.

Billy Don also told him about the city’s plans to bring a person here to the Mount this afternoon whom they will allege to be the Prophet. Such tactics do not surprise him. False messiahs abound in scriptural depictions of the Latter Days; they are in effect further evidence that those days have arrived. “And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.” How did Billy Don find out about all this? For that matter, how did the authorities know about today’s unannounced ceremony? That evil girl. If she even is a girl and not a living manifestation of Satan himself — or herself. Everyone knows that the Devil, as a fallen angel, is sexless and can appear in any form. Billy Don’s treason runs deep. It is far worse than mere apostasy. He has been warned and has ignored the warning. “What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?” It is such a tragedy, such a failure of understanding, with consequences to be suffered through all eternity. Darren has confided so much in Billy Don, ever since they were in Bible college together. He had such hopes. Now he realizes how wrong he was to do so. In the worldly realm of the body, of the senses, Darren has made some mistakes. The Devil has sometimes used Billy Don to tempt him away from divine things toward the worldly. He believed for a while — or chose to believe — that no man sins, for God does all things in him: “Nothing in a man’s works is his own.” An excuse for iniquity and folly. Such moral lapses are difficult to avoid here on this confused and sinful earth, but they are moral lapses just the same and he repents of them. Now they are entering upon a new stage of the human drama, and all that is in the past. In history, which is ending. Perilous times are come. He feels in his heart a great universal love, but he knows that Billy Don’s besotted and corrupted soul cannot be saved.

Colin comes running down the hill in his tunic, scrambling over the trench marking out the floor plan of the tabernacle church, to tell him what he has seen. He is at the edge of hysteria again. Rarely is he not. “It’s all right, Colin,” Darren says. “It’s good.” Colin gazes at him through his wispy hair, looks back up the hill, looks at Darren again, perplexed but trusting. He is utterly faithful to Darren and will do whatever he asks, but he is also difficult, demanding, and so fragile. There is always the risk of sudden, erratic, even dangerous behavior. Colin had a similar relationship with Sister Debra and see what came of that. Still, this troubled orphan’s spectacularly original visions provide a window onto things unseen by others — unseeable, really — even if they are not always easy to interpret. One night Colin told him that he dreamed he was in the Garden of Eden, lying in a soft pillowy place that was the giant body of the First Mother. Adam and Cain had already killed her. Her head was not there and something was flowing from her neck; not blood exactly, more like milk. It was causing wild vegetation to grow up around them, protecting him from Adam and Cain, but also giving them places where they could hide. Though the First Mother was dead, she wrapped him in her giant hands and he peeked out at the jungly garden through her fingers and saw atrocious things happening there, but believed they would not happen to him. Unless she let go. He awoke screaming because he thought she was letting go, and he came leaping into Darren’s bed to tell him, trembling violently, what he’d been dreaming. Darren was not sure quite what to make of such a vision, beyond its obvious appeal for protection, but Colin later said it might only have been the First Mother crying, but everything was shaking. That made Darren think of the coalmine disaster and the feeling he sometimes had on the Mount of Redemption that the ground was quivering underfoot. Eerie. The local vulgar name for this hill, he knows, is C — t Hill. He was coming to understand it might be a strange local vision of the Last Judgment, and — the end is always in the beginning — has incorporated Eden and the First Parents into his own interpretations of the End Times. He feels that, thanks to his disciplined pursuit of the truth, the world is gradually revealing itself to him as an open book.

His relationship to Jesus has also been evolving. It was as a boy genius and courageous young man that Jesus won his heart, and he was moved then by Jesus’ goodness, his love, his wisdom, the sufferings he endured for the sake of the truth he bore. As Darren grew older, Jesus’ human life lost its importance, becoming merely an anecdotal preface to his eternal role as Lord and Redeemer, his image of the Savior moving as if from one plane to another, the human story remaining behind in the world to guide and solace the ordinary believer, but only as an insubstantial shadow of the timeless one, which exists in a dimension-less space, where all is One, and where even the very image of Jesus is absorbed and vanishes. But now the human Jesus has reemerged in Darren’s thoughts, not so much as preacher, miracle worker, messiah, or martyr, but as prophet, for Darren, like the historical Jesus, is also living inside human time, experiencing the same hopes, fears, uncertainties as he did, struggling desperately to understand the enigmatic Father, and to help others to understand Him in time for their souls to be saved, and so feeling like a brother to him. His other self. They are stepping through history — it is the same history! — hand in hand.

At Darren’s personal invitation, Abner Baxter and his followers have arrived, several wearing Brunist tunics. They are clustered together over by the mine buildings, reluctant to intrude upon the gathering on the Mount, although there are many more of them than are here on the hill, even with the addition of the new Defenders. Clara’s presence, probably. She showed her clear disapproval upon noticing them. Abner feels a grave responsibility for much that has happened of late, most recently the horrific death Friday night of the son of one of his most loyal friends, almost certainly at the hands of his own wayward boys, so shockingly back among them. That friend is not here today. Most are appalled by these savage events; Darren is, but he is solaced by their fulfillment of ancient Latter Days prophecies. The dark angels have returned. The final tribulations have begun. He must be brave. It won’t be easy. The Bible says so.

Clara was not happy about today’s ceremonies — whose idea was it to dig an empty grave for Giovanni Bruno? — but she did not oppose them. After all, her deceased first husband is being honored and she admitted she could see the value of consecrating a future resting place for their martyred Prophet’s remains before the temple’s construction makes such decisions difficult. It was only that the ceremony seemed premature. She was even less happy about people arriving last night who said they were Brunist Defenders, answering her call and pledging their loyalty to her. She called Darren into the office, demanding to see the letter that went out over her name, and he showed it to her, reminding her that with Sister Debra’s interpretive help, he had foreseen with such awful certainty the imminent return of the motorcycle gang, and in greater numbers than before. He had spoken about this at prayer meeting weeks ago and he was worried about Elaine, and he is right to have been. Clara was at the hospital all the time then; he felt he had to do something that she would do. Now, with the murder of the sheriff, their bulwark against a hostile world, they desperately need more help. Surely she can see that. They are in terrible danger. And these people are here to serve her and protect her. They will be able to double the guards at the camp now and they can help complete the periphery fence. Darren did not believe this would be done — there was no time left for it — but it pacified Clara. He was quite calm. He knew what was about to happen, even if she did not. She only nodded and went out to help organize cots for the newcomers to use in the Meeting Hall overnight. Many have been saying someone should tell her husband about the rapturing of his dog, but he is nowhere to be found, even though he promised to introduce his new song, “The Tabernacle of Light.” Clara, Darren knows, is worried about him, too — so warm and reliable a man suddenly become so distant, so moody — so she is generally willing to let Darren have his way. Nevertheless, Darren now thinks of her as something of an obstacle.

At today’s ceremony, it has been Darren’s plan to place in the Prophet’s empty grave several symbolic objects — a tunic, a miner’s helmet and the mine pick on which he leans now as on the cross itself, the Prophet’s seven “Words” as scored by children of the Eastern churches onto a wooden tablet with a woodburning kit, a Bible opened to the Book of Revelation, all wrapped in oilcloth — while reading a selection of Biblical texts from both Testaments as elaborations on the Prophet’s wisdom. Now that he has received the message of the emptied tomb and learned of the city’s intentions, Darren will change slightly his scriptural selections, placing more urgent emphasis on the fearsome horrors ahead — the earth reeling to and fro like a drunkard (it does seem to be reeling), the stars plummeting from Heaven, the sun quenched and the moon turned into blood, the tortures of the damned — and adding in more about deception and false prophets. He intended to put in place today the headstone from Ely Collins’ grave, picked up some weeks ago by Mr. Suggs, but it seems to have vanished. Bernice Filbert has asked Mr. Suggs what happened to it. He cannot remember. He tries so hard, she said, but some things just aren’t there anymore.

Little by little, Abner Baxter and his followers have come drifting toward the Mount. Clara sends Wayne, Hunk, and Billy Don, along with three of the new Defenders to remind them they are not welcome, but her emissaries are met halfway by the acting sheriff, Calvin Smith. After a brief discussion (Wayne and Billy Don scowl up at Darren; he gazes back at them without expression), a compromise is reached, allowing the Baxterites to collect within earshot some forty or fifty yards below the tabernacle floor plan where the service is to be held. Down where a blackened patch marks the place where Sheriff Puller’s car burned and not far from where Darren captured “the voice in the ditch.” Perhaps the voice is there still. Or will now return. The acting sheriff, Darren has been told, has purged the newly deputized Christian Patriots of those alleged to have been involved in attacks on Abner and his people, and has added several new volunteers of his own choosing, mostly from among Abner’s followers. Darren wonders if the death of Sheriff Puller, which has allowed this to happen, was somehow God’s doing? Of course it was. Everything is.

No sign of the city authorities with their surprise visitor. Maybe they aren’t coming, having realized how futile it would be. Or maybe the tip, given its unreliable source, was a trick, a way to unsettle him, deflect him from what it is he has to say. Hovis comes over to say he thinks he just heard a motorbike over Tucker City way. Not that far away. Hovis pulls out his old gold pocket watch and stares at it. Off on the horizon, a summer storm is boiling up, coming in from the west off the back of the hill, the blackening sky setting the two yellow backhoes off in bright relief. All the more reason to get on with it and back to the safety of the camp. Darren points at the storm clouds and calls out: “Let’s get started! Trouble’s brewing!” And, as if by his conjuring, a group of people appear there at the top of the hill in front of his pointing finger.

It is their tormentor, the town banker, flanked by armed police, city authorities, the old priest in his sinister black robes, others who are probably preachers and town leaders, standing above them on the crest in their ominous dark glasses like tyrants and judges. The powers of darkness. They have come up the backside of the hill, no doubt hoping to surprise them. Darren is not afraid of them. The banker raises a megaphone to his mouth and calls out, “My fellow Christians!” The Followers have gathered around Clara inside the outline of the tabernacle church, as if seeking sanctuary in a holy place. Well, they are right. It is a holy place. Darren, near the open grave intended for the Prophet’s ceremonial burial, steps across the chalky trench to stand inside with the others and leans there on the mine pick, Colin quivering behind him. “We come to you in peace on this holy Sabbath, praying only that we might reach some understanding beneficial to us all. No matter which church we belong to, everyone here believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, and in the Father and in the Holy Ghost, and that’s the main thing.” The banker is grinding his jaws in suppressed anger, even as he tries to appear conciliatory. Most of those with him look uncomfortable, bullied into being somewhere they don’t want to be. “If we have our differences, they are minor compared to all that we have in common. Not only our Christianity, but this great country, too.”

Clara’s people accept this hypocrisy in silence, except for Willie Hall who lifts his Bible in the air and calls out: “These yere rich men is fulla violence, these inhabitants hereof is a-speakin’ lies, and their tongues is deceitful in their mouth! Micah 6:12!” And that stirs some of Abner Baxter’s people, slowly creeping up the hill below, to shout Biblical epithets and heap scorn of their own, though Abner himself remains silent. “God’s agonna mizzerbly destroy these wicked men, deceivin’ and bein’ deceived!”

“No, no,” says the banker with a forced smile. “It is precisely the truth that we seek and freedom from deceitful—”

“Please, please,” says Darren, raising his hand and waving away this meaningless preamble. “I have the impression, Mr. Cavanaugh,” he says, hearing his own voice crisp and clear in the midday quiet, “that, although he is hidden from us, you have brought someone to show to us.”

That catches the banker off-guard, indeed everyone on the Mount, except maybe Billy Don. Who is probably frowning, poor boy. The banker draws back and studies Darren soberly. “Yes, it’s true, young man,” he says. “That empty grave you’re standing beside is intended, I understand, for the remains of your founder, the lapsed Catholic Giovanni Bruno, whom you believe is dead. But he is not. You have been misled. He has been professionally cared for these past five years in the mental institution, where he was sent after the criminal outrages on this hill. Here he is. Mr. Giovanni Bruno.”

The pathetic creature in hospital pajamas who appears at the top of the hill, held up between two burly white-coated male nurses, is shaved, nearly bald, pale as paper, thin and stooped, glassy-eyed. Clearly, he has been heavily drugged. His jaw hangs slackly, his naked big-eared head tips toward one shoulder, his knees sag. A poor bewildered man, whoever he is, being used cynically by corrupt authorities. An empty shell. Even if it is Bruno, it is not Bruno. People shake their fists and there are shouts of “Impostor!” and “Fake!” Colin runs hysterically at them—“That’s not him! I saw him die!”—then runs away, runs at them again, runs away, in a wild shrieking toing and froing. Several of those on the hilltop above them duck in alarm, but the banker solemnly holds his ground, watching Colin as if watching an animal in the zoo. Darren catches Colin as he staggers breathlessly by, pulls him under his arm. He is all a-tremble, as after his nightmares. There is a distant murmur of thunder. “Easy, Colin. It’s all right. We’ll make them go away now.”

“I can show you proof,” the banker says.

“Why don’t you people leave us alone?” Clara asks plaintively.

“That’s like asking the body to pay no attention to its cancers,” the banker replies, and there are angry mutterings from both groups of Brunist Followers.

Darren hands the mine pick to Colin—“Hold this for me, Colin. Careful! Don’t let it fall!”—and walks over to ask Clara’s permission to approach the visitors. She nods and he climbs the hill toward them, clutching her dodecagonal medallion concealed under his tunic, feeling no fear but uncertain as to what he might do next. Each side of Clara’s medallion stands for something, as defined by the First Followers — like ascent and descent, the disaster and rescue, etc. — with three sides representing illumination, mystic fusion, and transformation, which Darren has come to think of as the three final stages of the Rapture, something Clara is incapable of understanding, justifying his appropriation. Illumination is what he is seeking now, and he rubs that edge of the medallion, and as he does so, the old hill seems to wobble and darken and black bits in its soil sparkle as if to illuminate his path up the slope. Clouds have rolled in overhead; more distinct rumbles of thunder can be heard in the near distance. The banker has removed his sunglasses to glance up at the sky before gazing imperiously down upon Darren. A big man made bigger by the hilltop he commands. Darren returns the gaze calmly, finding power in those unblinking gray-blue eyes, but also a vast, soulless emptiness. Beyond redemption. Aware of it, and therefore disillusioned and embittered. “I only wish to speak to your prisoner,” Darren says.

“He is not a prisoner.” He nods at the two nurses and they bring him forward.

Darren senses a ghostly presence; the man exudes a chill. The sores on his arms could be signs of decomposition. A resurrected dead man? He thinks of that open grave at the old cemetery. The man’s eyes flicker over Darren’s tunic, the first signs of some kind of life, then over Darren’s shoulder at the hill and the others on it. Perhaps in recognition: if it is he, he has been here before. Watching him closely, Darren realizes that though he will not say so to the others, almost certainly this is indeed Giovanni Bruno. Or was. A kind of ghostly shadow. He is expressionless on the surface, but something is stirring underneath. There is another rumble of thunder. Louder. Closer. The man looks up as though in anticipation. Or terror. They all look up. When they look down again, the man’s eyes are closed and he is struggling to speak. “Dark…” he says. He sounds like he is strangling. He opens his eyes, his gaze fixed upon Darren. Darren feels momentarily pinned in space. “Light,” he says in that same strangled croak, and Darren knows he has been privileged. Dark…light. A false vision? A paradoxical one? Or a true vision that is itself dark and fearsome? Blinding. Darren, his back to Clara, risks reaching into his tunic and pulling out the medallion. He shows it to the man. The nurses are unable to stop the man from crossing himself in the Catholic way and falling to his knees, his hands pressed together in worship. It is precisely the effect Darren was hoping for. Or, rather, that he supposed God would grant. Then the man’s eyes roll back showing their whites, a kind of unearthly wail emerges, and frothy bubbles appear on his lips; he is trembling all over like a rag being shaken. Darren tucks the medallion back.

The nurses, cursing, their needles out, give Darren a hard shove, sending him staggering backwards, whereupon, with an angry shout, his friends from the camp charge the nurses and something of a scuffle breaks out. The banker imposes himself, threatening arrests in a bellowing voice. The police draw their weapons, and it is all over as soon as it has begun. The one they say is the Prophet Bruno is carried away, now completely lifeless. Is he even breathing? Was he before? As they turn to leave, the banker announces through the megaphone, his jaws clenched: “As a result of the barbaric murder of the county sheriff and the arrival in the area of dangerous elements known to be associated with your unlawful cult, let me advise you, the National Guard is being flown in tomorrow and state troopers are on their way. This hill will be off limits.”

An open challenge, compelling response. But before one can be made, there is a powerful explosion. “The camp!” someone cries. “They’re attacking the camp!” People break for their cars, clambering down the hillside, tunic hems lifted. Colin drops the pick and runs after them. Somewhere, a second blast can be heard. The police run too. Motors are turning over, wheels are spinning. There are shouts. The sirens start.

“Dark,” Darren thinks, left alone under the turbulent sky, feet planted apart to stay the earth in its violent turning. It is beginning to sprinkle. “Light.”

IV.4 Sunday 5 July

Spider says the chawing noises are making him sick, and the rest more or less share the ink artist’s disgust. Not Nat’s favorite grub, but he accepts what Deacon offers him. You have to learn to eat what’s set in front of you, as his evil old man used to say, belting him one if he didn’t. Deacon, stripped to his vast hairy pelt while his clothes dry near the fire, has danced around naked in the storm, netting a dozen or so small birds, sparrows and wrens mostly, huddling in the bushes. He has skewered them live and held them over the fire to burn their feathers off, then dipped them in and out of a barbecue sauce made of molasses and hot spices, cooking them crisp in several passes over the fire. He and Nat are eating them whole, crunchy heads and feet and all. Better than the grasshoppers Deacon fried up in the same sauce earlier, calling them crispies. Some of the others have gone off in the squally rain, looking for small game like coons, possums, chipmunks, squirrels — what Brainerd calls mountain boomers — which in truth don’t taste any better or even as good and can be tough as old shoes, the best being the occasional family pet dumped in the park by their owners. Last night it was a pair of half-grown cocker spaniel pups down by the entrance, just squatting there waiting for them, their tails wagging. Let’s give them a good home, Deacon said, lifting them tenderly by their napes.

The Wrath of God are bivouacking in a state park known for its giant rock formations, upheaval of another time, regrouping here after the bad hit they took, tending to their wounded, some grieving. Old Houndawg, for example. Alone, silent, his damaged leg wrapped with a bloody shirt, Paulie’s head in his lap, still wearing its black eyepatch. Nat watches him and wonders at the hurt Houndawg is showing. Nat doesn’t share Houndawg’s grief, though maybe he should. The sheriff’s murder of Littleface brought an end to that feeling — unless rage is a form of it, in which case he is grieving most of the time. People: they come and go in their garbagey way, always more following on. But when the End comes, this sick recycling of flesh stops. Nat plans to be in on that. The Big One put that nitro in his hands for a reason. He will do his part. The only real grief Nat feels is for the loss of his bike, Midnight. An impulsive decision, pushed into it by Deacon and Houndawg. But probably the right one. He’ll get over it. Too much at stake for sentimental brooding. He has ridden hard over the past two months, dragging himself and his pals through tough and dangerous times, assembling the Wrath for a holy battle worthy of superheroes. Half of whom are either dead or have now abandoned him. He’s angry about those who have ducked out, but there are still plenty for getting the job done. Fewer for the enemy to shoot at. The enemy is worldly power itself, he reminds himself, munching a bird; it’s no pushover, you have to expect to take some losses. Sometimes you have to pull back, take off your cape, shake off the krypton factor, get your strength back. Something Face might have said. Might say: he still feels his presence. Hears him talking to him sometimes. Littleface had the idea that when you die you come back as someone else, like a comic superhero, or villain. Nat doesn’t quite believe that, but he watches out for him just the same. He thought he saw something of Littleface in one of the Crusadeers. Wrong.

Together with the Crusadeer pals of Juice and Face and others they’d picked up, they rolled in Friday evening. Quietly: the detachable baffles Houndawg has fashioned for the pipes that work something like gun silencers mean they can now prowl like cats or roar like wild bears. Cool. They had numbers now. Power. Their first order of business that night was to avenge Littleface, but on the way in they picked up some of the stolen boxes of dynamite they’d buried. Before pulling out of the area two months ago, they’d divided the boxes into smaller parcels and scattered them about in different locations, figuring the cops might find some but not all of it. One of their pick-up stops was at the old cemetery, where Nat used to take Paulie and Amanda to play the Lazarus game because nobody ever came there. The hole they’d dug for their game was still there and they’d used it. Amanda was the one who usually got buried. Once he had her in the hole and unable to move with just her face peeking out, he’d scare her with stories about dead people coming after her, or pretend to be one himself, sitting on the grave so she couldn’t get out, making horror faces and noises, brushing dirt toward her mouth whenever she tried to scream or bawl. Why did she keep going back for more? Because she was dumb. When she came home dirty, their old man would pull down her pants and spank her, and she never complained, but he never laid the strap on her the way he and Paulie got it. He always babied Amanda. The old derelict graveyard spooked Cubano, who refused to go in. Nat laughed and told Paulie to show Cubano how to be a man, but Paulie had a fit, the first since he got his head stove in. That crazy lady actually left a big dent in his skull. Blinded him in one eye, too. Popped his eyeball right out and they had to push it back in, though it didn’t work after that. Did seem to cure his fits, at least until Friday night, but left him stupider than ever. That night, after they’d executed the sheriff, they holed out in the old man’s abandoned farm shack, stowed what they’d picked up so far under the floorboards there. They peered in on the squibs they’d hidden behind small logs in the old wood-burning stove two months ago and everything seemed all right so they left them. Maybe everything wasn’t all right.

Earlier that night they’d grabbed the Coates kid, out wandering around drunk, and before using him to set the trap for the sheriff, they pumped him for information, learning about the parade the next day and the Brunist ceremony on the Mount planned for Sunday, which Royboy said his family wasn’t invited to but were going to anyway. Meaning the town would be busy with the Fourth on Saturday, giving the Wrath a certain freedom of movement out at the edges, and then the camp would be vacated for a while on Sunday, allowing them to pick up the big chunk buried in the wild part down there, a little known corner of the camp discovered by Nat shortly after his family first arrived back. Which his fatass brother and the Collins whore also evidently discovered for their sick games. Or God led them there to get what was coming to them. The O.T. God. Nat’s God. The Big One. The one at war with the N.T. wimp. Nat’s theology. Though he has come to appreciate Jesus as a man of wrath. A comicbook in Nat’s saddlebag shows how he was betrayed and rewritten, softened up to be sold to the crowd. They also learned from Royboy that Nat’s old man had got kicked out of the camp after what they did to the Collins girl (Royboy was giggling nervously at this point) and that Junior had later led an attack on the camp in which Royboy’s brother Aaron got a butt full of buckshot and everybody got arrested and Nat’s old man got beaten up in jail by some wop cops. Didn’t sound like Junior, but you never know what a little healthy scarring will do for you. Royboy also told them that the Collins girl was very sick and maybe possessed by the Devil, that old man Suggs had had a stroke and was in hospital, that some people had suicided themselves — one guy right in his shop window at high noon — and that there was a big fire one night at the used-car garage at the edge of town that didn’t happen by itself but which was better than the Fourth of July. Deacon had grinned in his beard and said: “Whoa! I love this place!”

There were a lot of sirens on Saturday morning after they found the sheriff, so the Wrath kept their distance, using the day to gather up more of the nitro, case the area, deal with the defections. In spite of the blood oaths they’d taken, most of the Crusadeers who had joined them had split overnight, including Jesse Colt. Said they came to avenge their buddy Littleface, did that, they’re moving on. They don’t know dynamite and armageddons. So the Wrath is smaller, only a dozen or so, but it’s hardcore. Nat’s disappointed about Jesse. Dug his name, his style, thought of him as another Face. But he wasn’t. When they’re done here, they’ll hunt those deserters down, take retribution. After the sheriff’s car was hauled away, the mine hill was unoccupied for a time, so Nat, Juice, and Cubano took the occasion to roll in the back way and pick up the boxes buried under the tipple, but they discovered that the dog’s grave had been cleaned out and refilled with dirt. Just a single putrefied leg bone in there, like they were being taunted. Which meant someone was onto them, at least partly. After sundown, they withdrew into this state park. Stored their assets. Laid plans.

Then today, once they’d made sure the Brunists were all over on the mine hill, they slipped into the camp quickly the back way they’d come before. There was a barbed-wire fence up, but they’d passed by and seen that and were ready with bolt cutters. Nat wanted them in and out of there in ten minutes. He led them to the place near the tagged tree where they buried the stuff, but it wasn’t there. Didn’t look like anything ever had been. Had he got the right place? Had the tag been moved? It was dark when they buried it; maybe things looked different. While he was puzzling this out, the old man turned up. Back in the woods some ways, half behind a tree. Cradling a rifle. “Over here, boys,” he said. “You’re looking for that nitro.” The Wrath’s guns were out, but Nat said, “Don’t shoot!” “That’s right. It ain’t my aim to shoot nobody less I have to,” the old man said. “I wanta make a deal. I don’t figure this is all of it, nor not alla you neither, so I don’t reckon I can stop whatever meanness you’re up to. All I want, Nat Baxter, is for you to promise not to come back here to the camp again and not to bother the people here.” “I can do that, old man.” No problem. Nat doesn’t want the camp. He wants the town. The world. “Awright. You’re a mean young hellion, Nat Baxter, but I trust you when you give your word. It’s back over here. I’ll show you, but no funny business. Don’t need your whole passel, just you and a coupla others. Maybe that one there in the fancy red boots and that older feller in the braid who looks sensible enough not to start up no trouble.” Nat started forward with Juice and Paulie, who always jumped into everything, wanted or not, Deacon’s pal Toad Rivers and old Buckwheat joining in as protection or just out of curiosity, but Houndawg hesitating, maybe because he’d been singled out, then Nat, too. “Wait a minute,” he said, feeling one of his headaches coming on. Like somebody saying no. Something was wrong. What was it? He was squeezing his eyes shut against the sudden pain needling his head like black lightning and it was like Littleface was there with a lock on him — he reached for Paulie’s shirt—“No, stop!” he shouted, and Houndawg’s gun came up, aimed at the old man, and just as he fired, the whole world seemed to heave up and hit him in the face.

He couldn’t hear anything for a moment, couldn’t see, couldn’t even breathe. Thought he might be dead. But then he saw Houndawg, his leg half blown away, limp over to where the old man was. He’d set his gun down, was praying. Houndawg was carrying the high-powered rifle they’d appropriated from the sheriff and he pumped bullets from it into the old man’s head until he ran out, the head bouncing off the ground with each shot like a puppet. He started to load up again, but Deacon said, “C’mon, Dawg, you can’t kill him more’n you already killed him. We gotta tear ass, man!” Nat had a headache still, but it was a different kind. In fact he hurt all over, like he’d just had a forty-foot fall. He was bleeding, he knew, just like those warriors in the comicbooks, but he was on his feet, ready for whatever. Buckwheat, Juice, and Paulie were just a splatter of torn-up meat lying there in the cratered earth and Deacon’s tough old pal Toad was in bad shape, too, a big gaping hole in his middle parts. “I ain’t gonna make it,” he grunted. Blood was splashing out of him like from a broken hydrant. “Somebody fucken shoot me!” “He’s your bud, Deac, whaddaya think?” Baptiste said. Deacon looked over at Hacker and the doc shook his head and Deacon shot him. “Grab up the guns!” he said. There wasn’t much of Paulie left below the head; Houndawg sliced off whatever was dangling from it and took it with him. 666 wanted Juice’s red boots and Deacon, who’d been rifling Toad’s pockets, said, “You’ll have to take them with the feet still in, Sick. Hear them whoops out on the highway? Here comes the man!” And then they were running. When they reached the bikes, Deacon pushed him toward Toad’s new silver-and-blue-pearl ironhead with ape-hangers, like those on Houndawg’s bike, shoved keys in his hands, and said, “Time for a new sled, kid. Your burnt-out old warhorse is ready for the boneyard. This one’s bigger, faster, and it’s legal.” He only had a half-second to think. Glanced at Houndawg who was holding Paulie’s head and dangling bits by the hair. Houndawg nodded. “I’ll give ’em sumthin to chase,” Baptiste said and he snapped off his silencer and went roaring off, hammer down, in the opposite direction from where they were headed. “You got any ident, kid, leave it with your bike,” Deacon said, heaving his bulk into the saddle. “Toad is giving you his.”

Goateed Hacker, his head capped by his goggles, comes by with some painkillers, stuff they lifted in a drugstore robbery a couple of states over. Nat waves him away. The wounds have been sterilized, bandaged, that’s enough. He hurts, but he doesn’t mind the hurt. Wants it while he thinks about what comes next. They’ve got some serious avenging to do. He refuses the whiskey getting passed around, too. Doesn’t like it, never will. Houndawg does likewise, but takes the painkillers and also some penicillin. His leg is torn up pretty badly. Hacker says it probably ought to come off, but he doesn’t know how to do that and won’t do it, and Houndawg says that’s just as well because he’d shoot him if he tried. Hacker’s not a real doctor, but he has picked up skills on the road, needing them from time to time since mostly when you get in trouble, you can’t use hospitals. Things like applying tourniquets, digging bullets out, stealing the right medicines. One thing he does is give Nat injections against his migraines. They help but can leave him feeling wasted until they wear off. Drinking the blood of sacrificed animals works better. Not much Hacker could do today about the wounded except clean and bandage a few cuts and hand out painkillers. Brainerd had been holding the front door of the old man’s farm shack when it blew off and it broke some fingers, and Hacker, peering closely through his thick lenses, virtually touching the fingers with his nose, fitted the bones together and rigged a splint with whittled sticks and tape, Brainerd grinding a jawful of chaw and cursing softly all the while; that was Hacker’s big job of the day. Luckily it’s Brainerd’s right hand, not the one he shoots with.

Teresita wants a second hole pierced in her right ear, and Hacker is able to do that. When Nat and the others raced away from the camp after the ambush, they made straight for the shack to warn Cubano’s team, but they were too late. They met Teresita and Brainerd and the others on the road, Teresita alone on Cubano’s bike. Got the bad news. They’d gathered up the dynamite they’d buried a couple of nights ago under the shack floorboards but forgot about the old stack in the woodstove. Cubano went back in to get it. “Musta been boo-bied,” she said. “That choza ain’ no more. Pile a fucken sticks.” She saw the bike Nat was riding, the blood on his face, and asked about Toad, and they told her about the four guys who’d got killed back at the church camp. She was upset about it, especially about Runt, even though Paulie had been an aggravation to her with his sexual craziness. Houndawg showed her Paulie’s head and she shook her head sorrowfully and crossed herself, though she’s not much of a Catholic and is even said to have killed a nun when she was younger. With her bare hands. She had also pocketed a body part: Cubano’s right ear, with the upside down cross in it. Now she’s going to wear two in the same ear as a kind of memorial to him. She started to throw the ear away when she cut the cross out of it, but Chepe Pacheco asked for it as bait for a trap. “Catch me a coyote. Como Cubano.” When Thaxton, trying to cheer her up, says she shouldn’t let it get her down — Cubano is probably up in Heaven trying to get into the Virgin Mary’s pants by now — Teresita says no way. “Cubano was a bad man. Beautiful, but bad. He gotta hope there ain’ no afterlife.” Teresita is a big-busted woman who wears tight sleeveless tees with pictures of a fierce Christ printed on them. She insists Jesus was a tough dude, a man of wrath who got turned into a creampuff by European faggots. That fits what Nat knows now. Littleface called Jesus the Joker, had a picture on his bike of the Joker with a halo over his head. When Cubano first brought Teresita around, Juice objected, saying he didn’t “want no fender fluff in the gang.” Juice was drunk, as he often was, and making jokes about fresh meat and back warmers and ground cover, thinking he was being funny, but he wasn’t. It was only insults. Cubano said, “I suggest you don’ fuck round with her, man.” “Yeah? Whaddaya gonna do about it, spic-shit?” “Me? I ain’ gonna do nothin’.” Juice made a move in his direction and the next thing he knew Teresita had him and he was up in the air and sailing. He rose up shaken but angry and charged her and up in the air he went again, coming down hard. He was really mad now and pulled a knife and Teresita smiled and said, “Ven, hijo de puta. Gimme that puñal. I use it. I have your machitos for supper.” Everybody was laughing by then and Juice was finally grinning too. “Praise Jesus, lady,” he said and put the knife away, raised his arms in surrender. “I believe!”

Nat came to this park some years ago on a school trip. He remembered thinking at the time it was a great place to hide out, so he brought the Wrath here last night, figuring that going back to the old man’s farm shack, where they’d stayed the first night, was too risky. The park is outside the county, and easier to defend, too. Guerrilla turf. The massive rock formations form above-ground caves of a sort, offering up places to hide and stay more or less dry. As a kid, he thought, if the Rapture comes, they won’t find me here. He knows better now. As he should have known better about that old man. Some big mistakes today. Got sucked in. How many people would dig up a dead dog, looking for dynamite? He didn’t ask that question, but should have. He would have answered that the cops might, but that was about it. But why would they refill the hole? Probably they wouldn’t. So someone else was involved. They’d show it to the old man whose dog it was, ask him questions. They might have suspected him of stealing the stuff, hiding it there. But they’d see how straight he was, wouldn’t do such a thing and wouldn’t disturb his dog’s grave if he did. Besides, everyone knew who’d broken into the mine buildings. So then let’s say the old guy finds the pile buried at the camp. His stepdaughter got banged down there, he’d be snooping around. He puts two and two together. That’s the second lot, he figures, and there’s probably more. There’s some kind of strategy here, he thinks. Meaning they’ll be back. So he sets a trap. Still not clear why he refilled the dog’s grave, but maybe just respect for his dog. Or because he didn’t want anyone else to know about the ambush he was setting. Probably. If the cops knew, they would have stopped him, wouldn’t they? And it wasn’t exactly a turn-the-other-cheek sort of operation, so he couldn’t tell the other campers. If Nat had thought all this through, they might have avoided what happened. Or even turned the ambush back on the old man. Just didn’t think. That’s why all those guys left. Baptiste, too, who should have been back by now, his distraction maneuver just an excuse. They saw Nat as someone who walks his people into death traps. Out of carelessness and stupidity. Can’t let that happen again.

Have to stay hard, too. Keep the purity. He had a soft spot for that old man. Thought they had an understanding of a kind. Made him too easy to con today. The old guy was trying to kill him and he couldn’t see that. Couldn’t see until it was too late how he was aiming straight at the old Warrior Apostles, who were down there in that field with Junior and the Collins bitch that day they did her. Four guys got killed because of that soft spot. Five. The old man got another of the Apostles at his old farmhouse, but he never knew it. Nat thought he knew that old man and what he was capable of and what not. Wrong again. Came close to making the same mistake with Royboy the night they brought the wrath down upon the sheriff. He didn’t have much choice, but Royboy did everything they asked him to do and more. He said he wanted to join their gang; he hated his old man and wanted to get out of this dump. He didn’t have a bike, but he’d steal some money and get one. Nat was tempted. He had known Royboy since grade school. They were in the same church. Their fathers were close and he knew what Royboy meant about hating his hardass old man and believed him. But he’d played slingshot war games in the street with Royboy, and because of that he knew him to be a bit slithery, and a coward when it came to a showdown. And now a loose-mouthed drunk. They were into something deadly serious here and they couldn’t risk a betrayal. “Do we let him go?” Toad asked. “No,” Nat said. “He’s just going to shoot at us or turn us in.” He was looking straight into Royboy’s eyes as Sick brained him from behind; together, they stuffed him in the trunk.

And then last night he nearly went soft on those young kids. The Wrath surprised them when they turned up at the state park. They were still frantically trying to get back into their clothes. Everyone had a good laugh about it and made remarks about the girl’s body, which was less than perfect. The two of them apologized sheepishly and hurried away, heading for the parking lot, obviously scared. Big Deacon watched them go and said, “We better not let them leave the park.” “We can’t kill everybody,” Nat said. Deacon smiled his beardy smile. “Yes, we can.” Probably he saw the hesitation on Nat’s face. “I mean, it’s Last Judgment time, right? Timer’s running down. We’re just only giving these nice kids a head start to glory. And if we don’t, we gotta leave here now.” Nat didn’t say anything, so Deac nodded at Rupert and Sick and they drifted off together. Everything is God’s will, Deacon likes to say. Even when that everything is something Deac has done or is doing. Great is the wrath of the Lord, he says with his Santa Claus grin, bringing the hammer down.

Rupert acts like a crazed rich man, talks like one, and maybe he is or was a rich man. He was riding with the Crusadeers, but he’s a pal of no one. The legend that trails after him is that he murdered his parents and burned their house down. He wears carefully knotted ties over colored T-shirts, shaves and trims his moustache and sideburns every day, files his fingernails, has swastikas tattooed on his biceps — which Houndawg, who considers himself a patriot, complained about. Religious exercises for Rupe are like doing calisthenics. Like Nat, he is a believer in the War of the Gods, says it’s why he stayed when the others left, but they don’t seem to be gods out of the Bible. “Nothing in this universe lasts or is meant to last,” he says in his precise tight assed way. “We are the gods’ agents, fulfilling the destinies they have assigned us.” Sick’s real name, the only one they know, is just the number he wears on both bony shoulders: 666. The number of the Beast. They took to calling him Sick for short, partly because he’s even more psycho than Juice, and it stuck. A glazy look and a fixed grin with clenched teeth, not so chummy as Deacon’s. Topknot wagging on top of his shaved head like a clownish hat. He and his pal X were survivors of a destroyed gang looking for a new connection, when the Wrath picked them up. Their old gang called themselves Avengers or Avenging Angels. Not clear what happened to the rest of them, Sick being too spaced out to be intelligible, X never speaking, just making guttural noises, an unshaven black-browed guy in raggedy black clothes, his staring eyes set wide on his cheekbones like they belonged to two different heads. What does X stand for? “It stands for I never learnt his name,” Sick said, “and he’s not talkin’.” Some of the mystery was cleared up when Hacker told them X’s tongue had been cut out. Sick said he didn’t know how that happened. By the time they first ran into Sick and X, Nat had already changed the name of the gang and they had fashioned new patches, and Sick said he admired the name and it suited his religion. It was Deacon who had suggested the change, just after he joined them. He said Warrior Apostles was too much like kid stuff and Nat agreed. They were already wearing tats like “The Burning Wrath” and “Rod of His Wrath,” and they were into something bigger and deeper. Something final. A great slaughter, like the Bible says. The sort vividly illustrated in the Eternal Forces comic. So Nat proposed The Wrath of God and nobody was against it. Deacon was especially pleased and from then on made sure whatever Nat wanted, he got. Their patch, which still has a mine-pick cross in a circle, also now has a fist with a bolt of lightning in it. When they added Spider to the gang, everybody got a fist and lightning bolt on their skin. Took to wearing upside-down crosses in the right ear. Rewrote their jacket studs. Swore fresh blood oaths.

The damp’s bad in here under the giant rocks, but the fire feels good, for the sudden rain which caught them on their way here has brought a chill to the day, more felt in wet clothes. There’s a nice smell, too. Chepe Pacheco in his blue-red-and-yellow headband and embroidered Mexican shirt is frying up green bananas. No idea where or when he picked them up, but they’ve all learned to like them. Nat is not completely stripped down like Deacon, who is still strutting around naked, reciting apocalyptic lines from the Bible (he claims to have once been a preacher, also an actor, a politician, a university professor, a lawyer, an auctioneer, a faith healer, a carny barker, and he may actually have been some of those things), but he has hung his dripping high-collared leather jacket from a jutting rock and his shirt is off and near the fire next to Deacon’s, drying out. Red hair is sprouting on his chest now, as if having been shaved off his head it had to find someplace else to grow. His old man has chest hair like that, going gray now. The only guy in the gang carrying a clean dry change is Rupert, who has a bagful of colored T-shirts and loud ties to go with the satin-striped black pants he always wears. Right now it’s a canary yellow shirt under a green and lilac tie. During house burglaries, Rupe likes to find an iron and press these things, then leave the hot iron plugged in and face down on the ironing board. His style is the very opposite of his pal Brainerd, who hasn’t changed clothes or shaved or washed since the day he joined up. He says he doesn’t think he has any socks left below the ankle, that they’ve just rotted away in there, but he hasn’t taken his old muddy farm brogans off to check. City dude and mountain man. Hard to say which is meaner, though. Brainerd claims to know about a Colorado ghost town they could all go to after this is over. If he can be believed. He’s a folksy bullshitter, now into a tall tale, thumbs in his suspenders, about a wild man of the woods who thought he was a bear and in most ways became a bear, and who was finally tracked down by his scat, which wasn’t bearlike, and was caught in a net and used in a circus sideshow until one day he clawed himself to death.

Sick, wearing Juice’s boots, which weren’t his originally either (maybe that’s how the old man picked Juice out; yeah, sure it was), says, “Y’know what? When I peeled Juice’s feet outa these boots, I found out he only had two toes on the left foot and they wasn’t next to each other.” “Probably shot them off or else stobbed them fooling around on his bike,” Thaxton says, and Nat adds: “Or got them caught in a paper cutter.” Everybody laughs at that, thinking he’s making a joke. But one day he did chop off part of a kid’s finger with a paper cutter, and Juice’s missing toes made him think of it. It was when his dad was the preacher at the Church of the Nazarene, and there was one in the office for trimming mimeographed church programs. The kid was a sissy-type piano player who sang in the choir and always made good grades, so you might say he deserved it. First it was just a threat, but then, almost not realizing he was doing it, Nat brought the blade down. Zop! End of piano lessons. Considerable trouble after that, but Nat threatened the kid with a lot worse (“If you rat on us, buddy, next time it’s your weenie!”) and the kid told everyone it was an accident, though later, when Nat’s family was getting kicked out of West Condon, the story came up again and earned him another licking. Sick found the word “Apache” inked into the red boots on the inside, and has been collecting feathers from the birds they’ve killed and eaten, including bright-colored bluebirds, orioles, and cardinals, to fashion a waistband and necklace for himself, turning himself into a warrior brave.

Nat steps out onto the ledge at the mouth of the rock pile. There’s a break in the rain, though it won’t last long — hot and muggy and more thunder and lightning off to the west. Houndawg has left with Paulie’s head and a mine pick. Nat can see him now limping into a marked trail in the woods. He needs Houndawg and wants him to get over whatever weirdness he’s going through. Toad’s bike, silvery, luminous in the cloudy light like the ghost of a bike, is parked just below him with all the others. It’s a good moment to take it for a spin, get to know it, and at the same time make sure they’re alone here in the park. While he’s checking out the power plant (the kickstart ignition nearly took his leg off the first time, he’ll have to get used to that), Deacon comes out with some of the stuff he took from Toad’s pockets. The ugly photo on the license could be anybody; could be him. Toad’s last name was Rivers and Deacon says they used to call him that before he got so big, and then he became Toad. “But you’re still a kid.” Deacon pauses to think about that. “That seems right. Kid Rivers.” He grins. “Already a legend.” He pats the rear fender of the bike tenderly as if it were a girl. “A pale horse,” he says, and grins his whiskery grin. “Give her a run, Kid. See what she’ll do.”

He does, and after trolling the park’s paved roads, he takes it up a hiking trail and back. It’s not as heavy as Midnight, but it’s longer and he’s not used to the hanger bars; he takes a spill on a tight narrow turn. But no harm done. Beginning to feel good. It’s powerful and easy to handle with its springer front end, and its popping growl gives him a thrill. And Houndawg will help make it even sleeker and faster, chopping it to fit him, making it his. The Phantom. One of Face’s favorite strips. He’ll find a Phantom comic, ask Spider to paint the character on the gas tank. Gray on gray. When he comes down out of the trail, Houndawg is waiting for him, leaning on his good leg. Carrying the pick but without the head. That’s over. He pulls up and offers the bike to Houndawg for a test ride, and when he gets back — Houndawg, even driving it one-legged, shows why it’s a great racer bike — they sit there on a bench and have a talk. About the bike, things they can do to it, but also about what happens when the rain stops.

When he gets back to the hideout, carrying Houndawg through the sudden violent return of the storm, he finds Deacon stretched out on his belly, getting his big butt tattooed by Spider by light from the fire and the lamp of one of the mining helmets they stole. Sick is stripped to a loin cloth and feathers and is doing an Indian dance around the fire, his topknot wagging. “Hey, it’s Kid Rivers,” Deacon says, grunting from the needle’s pain. Others call him Kid in greeting. They’re making fun but they’re not making fun. Deacon has been preparing them. Nat Baxter is dead. It’s how he likes it. Like a superhero emerging from his weakling disguise. The Kid. Juice’s abandoned jazzed-up bike — what Houndawg called a garbage wagon and Face used to call “Juice’s Jukebox”—had a sticker on its back fender that said “Watch your ass! Jesus is coming and He is mad as hell!” Deacon admired that and it’s what he’s having tattooed on his own backside. He says it’s a kind of tribute to crazy Juice. Spider is even adding a small motorbike speeding across the top of the letters, the cyclist longhaired with a blue headband. Spider calls the body just a big web for catching things, especially things that matter to the body’s owner and to nobody else, and he prefers original designs over the classic ones, often linking them up with thin threadlike lines. His own body is tracked by those crisscrossing lines. Maybe it’s how he got his name, or maybe his name gave him the idea. When Chepe Pacheco joined the gang, he had only two tattoos: one a traditional rose with the word “Mamacita” under it, the other the badge of a previous gang with skulls and daggers and something written in Spanish. He accepted the Wrath of God tattoo somewhat reluctantly, but then liked Spider’s work so much he began drawing pictures for him of things he remembered from his home country — which is a hot wet place somewhere south of what Cubano called May-hee-ko — for Spider to use as the basis for new designs, adding a new tattoo in and around the needle tracks every week or so. Spider likes to show off Chepe to strangers like a sort of walking gallery. Chepe thinks of it as a kind of personal photo album and checks the pictures out from time to time with his side mirrors. Too fancy for Nat, whose skin, bike, and jacket are kept relatively unmarked, except for the identifying emblems of the Wrath. And he has no time for the past.

Thaxton has come back from hunting with the prize quarry of the day: a wild turkey. Thax is a mean dude, has known a lot of trouble, done prison time, digs the holy war concept. He’s not a comicbook reader, but he has that style, knows all the grisly ways the saints died, shares the Wrath’s hatreds. Came with the Crusadeers, but Juice didn’t know him, didn’t think the others did either. They’ll have the turkey for supper. Deacon offers to prepare it. He lets them know he was once a chef in a fancy New Orleans restaurant. They don’t have an oven, but that’s all right — he’ll cook it over the fire in a whiskey sauce. Rupert asks for the feathers. To make a pillow, he says, which makes everyone laugh. Rupe can have them, Teresita says, if he’ll pluck the bird. The Wrath are in a lot of trouble, but they’re safe in here, the park empty, rain pouring down, thunder cracking; the Big One concealing them, preparing them. But there’s also a lot of restlessness. When they were holed up in the shack, they called it cabin fever. What would it be called now? The storm has blackened the skies, turning the sun into darkness, like it says in the Bible; but for the miner’s lamp setting Deacon’s butt aglow, their rocky hideout is lit only by the wood fire and the occasional flash of lightning. Faces a spooky ripple of light and shadows. Nobody’s saying anything. They’re waiting for him to tell them what happens next. They have to wait for the rain to stop — can’t light fuses in the rain — but it will stop. Maybe tonight.

“So, what’s exercising you, Kid?” Deacon asks, sitting up. “Say the magic word.”

Nat doesn’t preach. He hates preaching. Anything that stinks of church services. He doesn’t pray either, not in public, just shouts sometimes at the Big One. “I think we got some killings to avenge,” he says now. “They gotta feel our anger.” That’s his way of explaining it to the others. In his mind, those killings have just been part of what’s really happening. The war of the gods. What happens next was always going to happen, with or without the killings. He has his shirt and jacket back on now. He feels older in them. His head is clearer. Vengeance is part of it, of course. The Big One’s way of motivating. He used to imagine being Robin after the brutal torture, disfigurement, and murder of Batman. The rage that would consume him purely put him above the law. That’s what he has been feeling since the murder of Littleface during these long weeks on the road. The wrath. He has a detailed battle plan — who goes where and when, what to do if things go wrong — that he’s plotted out with Houndawg. They’ll start with the power plant and phone exchange. The radio station. Then the power centers, beginning with the schools and churches, followed by city hall, the police, jail, fire station, bank, and businesses. All carefully timed. He has hand-drawn maps with everything marked. Systematically destroy it all. Bring the sick town to its knees, like Deacon says. By his cruelty he will instill fear into the peoples. The dwelling place of the wicked shall come to nought. He had not planned to include the church camp, but after what happened today: it’s another target. It will have to be annihilated. A word he learned only a year or so ago. His old man used it in a sermon. Hated the sermon. Digs the word. A great battle, and he will call upon the dead Warriors to be with them. He gets the maps out of his backpack, spreads them on the dirt floor. He also has marked the overland escape routes via the rail beds the Apostles discovered when they were here last time. But things still aren’t just right. He’s looking for a phrase, or for something to happen. Something does. Baptiste returns. “They chased me. Lots of ’em. And they was roadblocks.” He is excited. They’re excited. “But the weather was bad. They couldn’t send up choppers, and the bike could go fuckin’ anywhere, through any kinda shit. Finally I shucked ’em, left ’em off in the next state somewheres chasing their assholes. If we stay outa sight, they’ll figger we’re long gone.” Flickering grins now on the faces around the fire. They’re a unit. Everything’s cool. “All right,” Kid Rivers says quietly, moving toward the flames, gunbelt over his shoulder. “Here’s the plan…”

This is war. They’re ready for it.

IV.5 Monday 6 July

The rain drums oppressively on the Halls’ little caravan roof. It has hardly stopped since yesterday afternoon. Willie came in wearing his visored cap down over his ears and declared, “That selfsame day was all the founts a the deep broke up and the windas a Heaven was opent and the rain was ’pon the earth forty days’n forty nights! Genesis 7:11–12!” And then he went back to his room again. He is terrified by what has happened and will not leave the caravan, rarely leaves his room. Mabel is frightened, too; they are all frightened. Nothing has prepared them for what they saw when they came running back from the Mount of Redemption yesterday. A scene of such horror as to make one’s knees fold. They could not even be sure how many bodies there were, so ruined were they. Poor dear Ben was there, his head shot up so bad he could hardly be recognized. Clara collapsed with a terrible cry when she saw him. Billy Don raced back to the sickbay cabin to get the stretcher and he and Uriah carried her through the sudden storm to her house trailer. At first they thought there were only three bodies other than Ben’s because there were only three heads and six feet to go with the three motorbikes parked by the back road, but there were enough other parts that what was left did not fit into just three bodies. Maybe, someone said, the ones who got away are cannibals. With what they have seen so far, one can expect just about anything, no matter how ghastly.

They have all been over to see Clara, one at a time, keeping a vigil. She is much changed, a frail and shriveled shell of herself. Ludie Belle said she looked to be a “pore thing on the down-go,” reckoning her condition to be more problematical than just her present dismay. Bernice is back and has brought along a nurse friend from the hospital to help out, and the nurse said the same and said she must see a doctor. While she was visiting Clara, Mabel looked in on Elaine. The poor child is nothing but a skeleton. The startled look in her big eyes startled Mabel. If she is carrying a baby and not a devil, that baby is not getting nourished. Of course, if it is a devil, starving it might be the right thing. She didn’t know what to say — to Elaine or to Clara, or to Bernice or the nurse either, who said that if the girl really wanted to go, they probably couldn’t stop her. Mabel tried to be cheerful, but she only broke into tears. And prayer. They have all wept and prayed. Since yesterday they have not stopped praying and weeping, for they feel the hovering presence of death and the end of things, and praying is the only thing they can do. As for the weeping, they can’t help it. Mabel’s cards have been foretelling as much, but no one has wanted to believe it. Mabel has not wanted to believe it and has not always told them what the cards were really saying. The acting sheriff, Calvin Smith, was there where it happened because he’d been with them on the Mount and had run back when they did. He said it looked to him like the motorcycle gang intended to blow up the camp but Ben stopped them and it cost him his life. Ben was a hero. A hero and a saint. They have always known that. He apparently shot one of the bikers; the rest were killed in the explosion. Their gang leader died, that devilish middle son of Abner Baxter, the one responsible for what happened to little Elaine. His body was the one without a head, but his motorcycle got left behind when the others ran away. Calvin said that this was the dynamite stolen from the mine. It was a big blast, so he hoped it was all of it.

There are only five of the old regulars here in Mabel’s sitting room this rainy Monday afternoon, all that’s left — plus Bernice, who comes and goes from Clara’s house trailer across the way, and Lucy Smith, who can stay because Calvin is investigating the explosion. They say a second explosion happened at Ben’s old abandoned farm house. A dark fellow thought to be one of the motorcycle gang was killed. Maybe they had been camping out over there. Calvin says there were three or four dozen of them around here yesterday, but they have been scattering and leaving the area. He has been in touch with all the neighboring sheriffs. Two of the bikers had been detained for speeding, but they had paid their fines and, not knowing about what had just happened, the officers had let them go. That won’t happen again. These are things that Lucy tells them. She is paler than usual today and her eyes are red and her hands can’t stop fidgeting. “Calvin’s very brave,” she says softly, beginning to tear up. “But I’m not.”

The thunder and lightning have eased, but the rain keeps pounding down, and sometimes the thunder comes back, too. Unexpectedly, like a blow to the heart, scaring everyone. Rain like this makes Willie’s rheumatism worse and Mabel always gets a bad feeling in her sinuses and bowels. The camp is getting soggy, everything feels damp and sticky, puddles wherever you look. Everything on the other side of the creek is now an official crime scene and no one can go there. They have stretched a tent over the place where it happened. There’s a big hole there, like a bomb has fallen. State troopers have arrived, their sirens howling all night long, and the newspaper reporters and TV cameramen are back, swarming around the tent and the black charred place in the mine road where the sheriff’s car was found. The reporters are almost as frightening as the motorcycle gang, and for all who were here, they bring back the nightmare of five years ago. When it was also storming, as though this were God’s way of decorating His catastrophes. Lucy’s husband and his deputies — mostly Christian Patriots who have been protecting the camp all along, plus these new Defender people — have so far managed to keep these outside forces out of the rest of the camp, but they are also letting some of Abner Baxter’s people in. They are at great risk, Calvin says, and must be protected. It’s the Christian thing to do. He is the sheriff now, what can you say? Most of them are camping out in the lodge or the parking lot, though tents have also begun appearing throughout the camp, especially down by the creek. A lot of them have guns. Abner isn’t here yet, but they say he’s waiting at the edge of the camp for the right time to enter. When Billy Don ran back to get the stretcher, he left the sickbay door unlocked and the Blaurocks have moved in there with their pesky children. “It’s like they’ve walked in right over Ben’s dead body,” Ludie Belle says. They have to be quiet about these gatherings in case the Blaurock woman gets wind of them and barges in uninvited, for that’s the kind of person she is. She claims to have seen Jesus walking around and to have talked with him. That’s almost impossible to believe, but Darren says it might be so. One should not expect human logic in divine actions.

“I remember when Ben first come,” Wanda Cravens says in her thin nasal wail. “There in that Eye-talian house. He was like a kinda miracle. He sung Amazing Grace.’ Him and Betty Wilson. It made me cry.” Wanda hardly ever shows any emotion. Things just happen to her and she lets them and doesn’t seem to care. But she’s crying now, just a little. Mabel was also there that night when Ben and Betty sang. Ben said he had read about them in the newspaper. Things were not going well, everybody was feeling depressed, but his comforting presence lifted spirits and his singing touched them all. It was very beautiful and Betty’s voice had never been prettier. He was like a gift. They knew everything would be all right after that. A song sung well can do that. Through the years, Ben anchored them with his singing. When the Cleggs were back visiting in April, Mabel noticed that Betty was still carrying the torch. She will be much affected when she learns what has happened. Betty is out on bail now, but both she and Hiram are facing trial for stealing that McCardle woman’s money — mostly for the church, though maybe not all. She called Clara long distance to tell her that it was all just an honest mistake and everything would be put right, but they needed some help to pay for lawyers because their accounts were frozen. Clara said the church would do what it could, though she made it clear to Mabel later that she was not happy with what the Cleggs had done and felt let down by them. But she also asked everyone to pray for them, because that’s Clara’s way. She is a woman of charity and peace and of deep abiding faith, sincere and giving. She is the best person Mabel has ever known. It hardly seems possible all this could be happening to her. And she drew to her side two of the best men the whole world has known. Both victims of horrible deaths. Her son, too, in the war. There is talk now about burying Ben in the grave opened up for Giovanni Bruno’s symbolic burial across from Ely. Both men side by side on the Mount of Redemption, flanking the entrance to the new temple. But Clara isn’t interested. She doesn’t want to talk about the tabernacle temple.

At least Clara is talking to Ely again. Or Ely to her — he has been absent for a time, as Clara has confessed to her. Mabel believes this talking is real and is a good thing, and she hopes that Ben will be able to get in touch with Clara now, too. He and Ely will be good friends and together they can help poor Clara whom Mabel loves more than her own self. Ben has been distant for a while, just like Ely, and Mabel knows Clara has felt this and has worried about it. He seemed to lose interest in the camp of late, all the building they had been doing, even the day-to-day like taking the garbage to the dump. Something preys on him, Clara said to her one day. They realize now how much they have relied on him and how sorely he will be missed. Ludie Belle says that her husband Wayne is lost without him. He just mopes and shakes his head and “keeps a-backin’ and a-forthin’.” Bernice, who has popped in under her head scarf and umbrella from across the lot where she has been caring for Clara and Elaine, says she thinks Ben stopped taking care of things because he somehow knew he was going to die. “He had that way of peering in instead of out.” Others agree that a certain gravity had overtaken him and that maybe he had some foreknowledge of his fate. His newest song used one of Ely Collins’ famous lines. It was almost like he was preparing to join up with him. “Ben has gone to be with his dog in Heaven,” Linda Catter says with a wistful sigh, referring to the discovery yesterday of Rocky’s empty grave over at the Mount of Redemption, but Corinne Appleby notes there was a dog’s bone left behind—“You wouldn’t rapture a dog and not take his leg bone along, would you?” Glenda Oakes says she rather hopes you get a change of bones when you get raptured. She doesn’t want to suffer her arthritis all through eternity.

Mabel did not witness the dog’s empty grave. It was strange, but not the strangest thing. The strangest thing was the man they brought to the Mount. Was he really Giovanni Bruno? Nobody thinks so; he didn’t look like him at all. Mabel knew the Prophet well, right from the beginning. He didn’t say or do much, but he had a quiet stately way about him. This one was all jittery. Whoever or whatever he was, though, he certainly looked ready for a grave. If he hadn’t been dug up from one. The powers of darkness are capable of tricks like that, as Bernice always says. If what it looked like happened had really happened, he’s certainly in a grave by now, or back in the one where they found him.

There are mixed feelings about young Darren, too, but it’s hard to deny his special powers. The way he prophesied the return of the motorcycle gang and more disturbing events for yesterday, the way he foresaw the rapturing of Rocky, the way he pointed to the barren empty hilltop and seemed to make all those people appear out of nowhere, the way he announced the appearance of the false Bruno when he was still not visible, the way he approached the strange man and made him fall to his knees just by his presence. The man seemed to shrivel and die at Darren’s feet, or return to death. Like vampires do in the movies when you stake their hearts in the sun. Or in real life, too, probably, though to the best of her knowledge, Mabel has never known a vampire, and certainly has never seen one die. Then, as soon as the man fell down, there was the explosion at the camp. As if the dark powers, losing one battle, were determined to win another in a different place. Only Darren remained calm. It was like he knew all along what was going to happen.

Glenda Oakes has talked with Darren and she says he believes that, for a moment anyway, the spirit of Giovanni Bruno did inhabit that wretched creature and revealed to him a new eighth prophecy: Dark Light. This was just before he fell down. Like all of the Prophet’s pronouncements, its meaning is somewhat obscure, but that’s in the nature of all prophecy, as Mabel, a fellow practitioner in her modest way, knows well. Her cards predicted the disaster yesterday, for example, even the exact number of deaths down in the wild place where poor Elaine was so calamitously abused. Looking back she could see that, but she failed to interpret rightly. Darren says if Ely had lived it would all be much clearer, but the messages have had to reach them through a damaged medium, like through a thick curtain. Glenda says that Darren believes God chose these means on purpose, making His message unavailable to any except true believers with the will to seek understanding. And the gift to achieve it. She says this with a certain sadness because she doubts she herself has the gift. Of course, Glenda says everything with a certain sadness. Since the shooting deaths of her husband and Hazel Dunlevy, Glenda has lost the power to interpret dreams, but she is becoming a palm reader. She doesn’t know how this is happening, but it is.

Ludie Belle is closer to the other boy in the office, Billy Don, and has a less admiring view of Darren. “I don’t over-confidence that finicky young feller,” is how she puts it. “He’s swoll up with hisself and kindly snaky in his prophesyin’ ways, bushin’ up what’s inconvenient to his hypostulations.” True, Ludie Belle admits, Darren is the only one who seems able to handle “that fittified boy” now that Sister Debra’s gone, but she is not certain in her mind if how he’s doing that is “as healthsome as it should oughta be.” She doesn’t explain what she means, but the others can imagine what’s on her mind; Ludie Belle has never quite left her scarlet past behind. Darren sending out a pamphlet over Clara’s name when she wasn’t looking was a sign of how pushy he’s become, and Ludie Belle is pretty sure he’s wearing Clara’s missing medallion under his tunic, a kind of thieving of a spiritual sort. She considers him something of a Judas for turning away from Clara and toward Abner Baxter, with his fire baptisms and his violent sons and followers, and frets that it might have been Darren who set Colin against Sister Debra and so broke the mind and spirit of that poor honest woman. Bernice, who still goes out to the West Condon municipal hospital every day to help with Mr. Suggs, has told them Mrs. Edwards has become strange in her ways and has been transferred to a hospital for people with mental problems. Were the things Colin accused her of true? Is anything that crazy boy ever says true? Ludie Belle wanted to know. Their vegetable garden is mostly untended and overgrown now. Colin won’t go back because he believes she’s still down there somewhere. Hiding in the bean rows. When those men crashed into the Appleby beehives the night that Welford and Hazel died and the fireworks went off, Colin started screaming that it was Debra who was doing that. When they tried to calm him down, reminding him that she’d been taken away to jail, he cried: “She’s a witch! She flew out! She came back!” Yes, it’s true, they all heard this. “And now Darren cossetin’ him like he’s some kinder reborned Patmos John…”

So the chatter persists. Like the rain. Mabel’s neatly stacked deck of cards sits on the table, awaiting its final shuffle. But she is not ready. Nor are they. They all want to know, but they are afraid to know. Even “innocent” cards on such a day as this will have their darker side. They talk instead about the grieving Coates family (poor Thelma!), the horror of the burned car, that man and boy burned alive. Lucy says Calvin says Roy is ready to kill and he doesn’t seem to care who, and his friends are with him. Roy doesn’t blame Abner, but he doesn’t not blame him, either. There’s some unease between them, and that has Calvin worried. “I’m so scared,” Lucy says. Linda tells them that she always leaves the radio playing in her beauty shop and the other day she heard Patti Jo and Duke singing one of their songs. It seemed quite sinful to her, and as she had a client, she turned it off, but she understood from the introduction that they are quite famous now and Will Henry from the radio station is playing with them, which is why that station is off the air and their Brunist songs aren’t being played around here anymore. They all admit to missing Patti Jo and her conversations with the dead Marcella. Patti Jo was a good storyteller and she was so plain and direct about the things that were happening to her. “It’s like the bright has wore off out here without her,” Ludie Belle says.

Mabel picks up her tarot deck and studies it, sets it down again. They all watch her, trying not to. Ludie Belle says, “We all know it’s time t’go. We also know we cain’t go on accounta we cain’t forsake Clara. We’re like soldier boys in the trenches. Stay’n get killt. Go’n get killt.” “Well,” says Linda, “we live here. It’s not the same for us.” “And anyway,” says Glenda, “isn’t this it? The end, I mean? Isn’t it all just near over?” At this awkward moment, which seems like halfway between time and the end of time, Wanda Cravens begins to sing “Amazing Grace.” She has a thin nasal voice, but there is something painfully compelling about it. Lucy and Corinne join in. And then they all do.

IV.6 Tuesday 7 July

At breakfast time in the Brunist Wilderness Camp Main Hall this wet Tuesday morning, kitchen manager Ludie Belle Shawcross is faced with what she calls a “rumbustious tear-out,” as three or four hundred fractious people, most of them armed, try to get out of the rain and “scrooge in” to a hall that can stand only half that number. They finish off all the coffee, bread, and eggs in about five minutes and crowd into her cook-room, helping themselves to whatever they can grab and raising a clamorous ruckus. Ludie Belle takes off her apron and tells Corinne Appleby there’s nothing more for them to do here, they’d better get down to the trailer park to defend their goods—“Them ramptious peckerwoods has a appetite up and is apt to plunder round our own kitchens if we don’t take cautions!” She waves at Wayne and Cecil caught up in the packed crowds in the next room, and also Uriah, Hovis, and Billy Don when she manages to catch their eyes, and she and Corinne hurry out of there. Mabel and Willie aren’t up at the Main Hall yet, nor are Hunk or Wanda, and Glenda, she knows, is down below overwatching her regiment of little ones.

Mabel is not surprised to hear Ludie Belle hammering on her caravan door and telling her to pack up—“We ain’t stayin’ more, Mabel, it’s time to red up’n cut mud!”—for she herself has arrived, after her reading this morning of the cards, at the same conclusion and has already done the packing and secured the dishware and other loose objects for road travel. Knowing Mabel rises early, Glenda dropped over right after waking up from the two-camper complex she inherited with her widowhood to tell her about the dream she’d had in which she and Hazel Dunlevy were driving through mountains somewhere and Hazel was telling her what it felt like to be shot. The way she described it, it sounded more like what she was doing with Welford in the garden shed, but when Glenda said so in a mostly friendly way, Hazel, who was never famous for her sense of humor, took offense and said that Glenda didn’t understand anything and that was the whole problem. Glenda said that made her feel guilty, like maybe she really was responsible for everything that happened, and she tried to say how sorry she was, but it wasn’t Hazel anymore, it was Ben, just like they saw him Sunday with his eyes staring and his face all full of holes, and she wasn’t driving, he was, or maybe nobody was, and she knew they were going to crash. Glenda, who has lost the power of interpreting dreams, asked Mabel if she had any idea what it meant and Mabel said she thought it signified the end of something, but it wasn’t at all clear what was starting up in its place; it didn’t seem promising, but on the other hand, it might foretoken the Rapture, which is often associated with car wrecks. She asked if there were any children in the dream and Glenda said she thought they were in the back seat, but they were being very quiet, which was unusual and in fact a little frightening, and she wished Mabel hadn’t asked. When Glenda left, Mabel decided to read the cards for herself and when she turned up the Tower, signal of calamity, next to the Chariot and the three of spades, she knew it was time to go. She called Willie, who has rarely left his room since what happened to Ben, and told him to get the caravan ready for the road. Which, quoting from the perilous travels of the Apostle Paul (“What presecutions, sufferin’s and afflictions I have indured, like as what come smack onto me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra!”), he has done, removing the blocks, checking the tires, filling the tank from their spare canisters, then retreating to his room once more. They had planned to stay at least until Ben’s burial, but they might all end up getting laid out beside him if they don’t go now. She does not want to leave Clara behind, but she feels that God — who has guided her in her reading of the cards, which she accepts always as divine instruction (unless there is interference) — will somehow provide.

The trailer park is crammed with other vehicles that block their way out, but Ludie Belle says those folks will all be driving off to the Mount soon to try to take it by force, those being Darren’s presumptions, and they can hightail it out of here then. The others turn up at Ludie Belle’s calling, and while they all wait in out of the rain around Ludie Belle’s kitchenette table, they talk about the routes they’ll take, where they’ll meet up if they get separated, and what to do about Clara. Wanda says Hunk won’t be going; he’s staying to tend his chickens, and she’s too tired out to get on the road again and is probably having another baby, so they could leave Clara and Elaine in their hands. But the others fear for Clara here without Ben, and she and her daughter should anyway be out east where Brunist Followers who love them can take proper care of them. Glenda says you don’t have to be a fortune teller to know that Clara needs a doctor, “she’s so badly drawed up.” Clara won’t want to go, so Ludie Belle proposes they tell her a white lie that the police want to question Elaine about a possible illegal medical procedure, namely that of that back-roomer disguised as an exorcist who Bernice dug up somewhere, because even though Clara chased the old quacksalver off before damage was done, she won’t want questions being asked. One look at Elaine and they may take her away, as this society cannot tolerate the irregular. Then Wayne can drive Ben’s old truck and pull Clara’s trailer while Ludie Belle hauls theirs. Billy Don offers to trade off shifts with her if she doesn’t mind slumming in his old rusted-out Chevy, though first he has an errand to run and he’ll join up later. The Applebys take careful note of routes and meeting-up places, because once they can leave the lot they’ll have to hurry round the back way by the creek to load up their hives, and that can take a time as bees can turn exceptious if you rush them.

Homesick Uriah agrees to go with them, but his buddy Hovis has not turned up in the trailer park — he’s a bit slow, probably he didn’t understand what was happening — so Uriah goes trudging back up through the sticky brown mud in his old rain slicker and soft-billed cap to search for him. Outside the Meeting Hall, he finds big television trucks and tents and camera equipment and cars parked everywhere, even on the grass and in the flower beds, and crowds grown so thick he cannot squeeze into the hall, but he has a key to the kitchen service entrance off the back parking lot and he lets himself in that way. The kitchen is jammed up with people, too (his heart sinks a little, thinking about the hard labor they’ve put into this building, and how little these folks respect it), but over their heads he can see young Darren in the main hall addressing the gathered faithful, spelling out the peculiar signs that have marked this time and place for momentous events soon to happen and indeed already happening, as Uriah has often heard him do, though never so sure of himself as now. He speaks of the voice in the ditch and the headless biker and the double sevens and the emptied graves and the sightings of Christ Jesus, and along with everything else, he tells them what that sick man who was supposed to be the Prophet Bruno said last Sunday before the terrible explosion in the camp: “Dark… Light.” He says it has many meanings but it was partly an astonishing prophecy of that blast itself just minutes before it happened, and this is because of what Uriah and Hovis told him later about dynamite used in the mines sometimes being called “black lightning.” Darren was amazed. “Why, that just fits!” he said, and Uriah and Hovis felt proud, but of what they weren’t sure. Darren, who has grown up some since his early days here as Clara’s office boy, is wearing his belted white tunic with a golden medallion on a chain around his neck and carrying a mine pick like a kind of staff, just like the Prophet in the picture, the very image of a young holy man, his bright blond curls standing out around his ears like a halo. The boy has a quiet, spellbinding way of speaking, giving the impression he knows what he’s talking about, even if there is some question about that among most of Clara’s people who have known him longer. But these are not Clara’s people. These are the Followers who have been traipsing around in the fields after Abner Baxter, a whole army of them, brazen and hungry, wet, raggedy, and ready for whatever, including the Rapture and the violent upheavals of the Apocalypse, if that’s what’s next. Uriah supposes that if so many of his people are here, Abner cannot be far behind, and, sure enough, there’s a parting of the masses at the main door like the folding back of the Red Sea, and to loud applause and cheers and “Bru-no! Bru-no!” chants, in strides the Brunist bishop of West Condon with all the fiery purpose of a short red-headed Moses, thick jaw a-jut, a few cameramen and photographers sliding in in his wake as though he were towing them, and in his booming voice he calls everyone to prayer. You could hear him all the way over on the Mount of Redemption. That man can squench thunder, as they say where Uriah hails from. Darren sometimes talks over Uriah’s head in his college-boy way, but he can certainly follow Abner, who is more like those hellfire preachers and union organizers Uriah and Hovis had known and followed all their lives back home. Where now, though the weather’s no better there than it is here, Uriah longs to be. If he’s going to have to slop around in mud while waiting to get raptured, he’d rather it was West Virginia mud. He tries to remember why he came up here. He pulls out his fob watch to study it, but as usual forgets what time it is as soon as he pockets it again.

“Are ye ready for the Glorious Appearing? Are ye ready for Christ to return?” the Reverend Abner Baxter asks with his freckled fist in the air, his flushed face wet from the rain, and he is met with an affirmative roar. Abner’s bitter years in the wilderness have come to an end. There were times when he would speak and no one would listen, times when his embraces would be met with blows. Times when, as Paul said, “no man stood with me, but all men forsook me.” He has been hounded cruelly from town to town, has been shot at and pelted with stones and even with cow dung, attacked by night riders, betrayed, cursed, imprisoned, beaten, and deserted by family and fellow believers alike. About the only hardship he has not shared with the Apostle is shipwreck. On the other hand, Paul had no sons to lose or turn against him. In his intransigent faithfulness to the awesome and punishing Word of God, Abner has suffered the abomination of desolation as spoken of by Daniel the prophet and has been brought close to utter despair, but now, tempered by adversity, his faith annealed, it is he who will lead the holy remnant to glory. It is a word that fills his throat: Glory! “There must be a Day of Wrath,” he declares in a voice trembling with urgency, “when sun and moon and stars is darkened, and the Heavens is rolled together and the earth is shook!” As he looks back on his years of tribulation, he understands the tender generosity of the Lord’s wrath, the ferocity of His love. He can, like the Apostle Paul, now speak of these things with an eloquence born of terrible suffering and unyielding faith, and he does so here in the crowded Meeting Hall. “Bru-no! Bru-no! Bru-no!” the Followers chant. He recounts for them the horrors (another word that fills his throat) of the Final Days, many of which they have already suffered, and the blessings of the Heavenly kingdom that awaits them on the other side of their ordeals, which is not unlike the workers’ paradise he once imagined before his conversion to the true faith. “All things are cleansed with blood,” he cries, “and apart from the shedding of blood there is no remission! These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass!” The Followers are shouting his words back to him, calling for divine judgment, and some commence to speak in tongues. The earthly kingdom of Christ is imminent; the assembled believers can feel it, they have only to go out and pledge their eternities to it.

“He will come in power and great glory and I tell ye, the time is now! The Millennial Kingdom as announced by the Prophet Bruno is at hand!” thunders Reverend Baxter and Dot Blaurock bellows back: “Amen, brother! I seen Him! He’s walking around out there right now! Hallelujah!” Her kids all shout out high-pitched amens and hallelujahs, too, all except little Johnny who passes a bit of wind in his sousaphone way, young zealot that he is, and then begins to howl, his howls drowned out, however, by echoing hosannas and amens at full throat from all those around her, God bless them. Abner raises his fist and shakes it. “But the blessed Mount of Redemption, which is rightfully and needfully ours, has been sealed off from us! The Antichrist is usurping God’s rightful place of worship and is desecrating the Temple!” There are shouts of outrage and dismay, and Dot joins in, even though the temple that is being desecrated is really only the idea of one. She has joined up with a lot of these revelational groups over the years and this is the best it has ever got. Young Darren now coolly lays out the plan of action: They’ll leave here and form up at the base of the hill, where the mine road turns off from the main road. “Give others a ride if you can! But we’ll wait for those coming on foot!” Then, with the Brunist Defenders serving as marshals (Dot has volunteered herself as a Defender, but they have not yet taken up her offer; well, they’re busy, she’ll just be one anyway), they will all march peacefully up to the tabernacle as outlined on the hillside, where they will hold a church service in memory of their fallen friend and saintly Brunist Founder, Ben Wosznik, so horribly murdered while heroically defending their Wilderness Camp home. And, yes, they can take their guns with them — this is America, it’s their right. “We won’t use them except in extreme self-defense, but we won’t be intimidated either.” Darren says they have spoken with the new sheriff and he will do what he can to ease their way, but if there is trouble they should follow the leadership of Reverend Baxter. Who — fist raised again, shouting out “Glory!”—bulls forward. With that, the crowd turns and follows him noisily out the front door. “Glory!” they shout. Maybe the television crews weren’t expecting this, for some of them fail to get out of the way in time and are fairly trampled by the sudden brass-footed rush to the exit. Dot herself feels chunks of camera gear crunching under her boots as she clambers out of the hall, Johnny in her arms, Matthew, Mark and Luke following at her heels. “Christ Jesus, here we come!” she shouts, but then she has to pause for Markie to take a wee-wee in a rain puddle. Even with all eternity to go jump into, the boy can’t wait.

The camp is suddenly aswarm with people piling into their vehicles and pulling out, wheels spinning in the mud and horns blaring. Down at the emptying trailer park, Ludie Belle looks out her trailer window and says, “There they go! The weather’s still ketchy, but it’s fairin’ up. Looks like it’s time to shuckle outa here.” Cecil and Corinne step out through the dying drizzle, start up their camper truck, and squeeze out through the congestion, waving at everybody. Hovis has turned up finally, but Uriah who went looking for him has not come back. Hovis remarks that Uriah is a mite slow and easily confused and may have got caught up in the general movement toward the hill, he’ll go find him. He asks again where they are meeting up and he says he thinks he can remember that. Billy Don says he’ll go along with him because he wants to use the office phone. Wayne and Ludie Belle take Mabel along to Clara’s trailer to explain why they have to leave the camp, but when they get there, they discover that Elaine is gone. “She cain’ta got far,” Wayne says and he goes looking for her. “Whatever passes,” Ludie Belle calls after him, “you be back here in ten minutes, hear?”

When word gets back to town that the Brunists are on the move toward the mine hill, Police Chief Dee Romano informs the mayor’s office, then calls Ted Cavanaugh at the bank to let him know, and he and Louie head out there, leaving Monk to mind the shop, lamed-up Bo Bosticker having gone home to get some shut-eye after his night duty. The mine hill is not really in Dee’s jurisdiction, though it is no longer in the county sheriff’s either — it belongs now to the state troopers who took it over Sunday night after the dynamite blast at the camp — but Cavanaugh expects it of him. He asked Dee to tell the troopers on duty there to hold their ground until he gets there, and to let them know the governor and National Guard units were on the way. Dee radioed ahead to be sure some troopers would actually be there when he arrived. As he’d anticipated, they were all over at the scene of the explosion, having coffee under the tent. They said they didn’t understand what the connection was between the blast at the camp and the empty mine hill. Dee doesn’t exactly understand it either but said he’d explain it to them when he got there, and meanwhile these were the official orders from the governor. There are a lot of cars on the road out to the mine, so he turns on the sirens and roars past them, thinking that if he were not a Romano and all that ties him to, he’d just keep on going.

The banker has arrived early after the long holiday weekend, while the tellers are still setting out their stalls. He’d planned to confront the backlog he had been avoiding, but now, after Romano’s call, he’ll have to holster up and get out to the mine. It has not been a good weekend. He has lost his intern (he is hurting, he’ll get over it), his son is not speaking to him, his embittered wife is increasingly caustic and befuddled by drugs and religious confusions, private armies have been forming up, stirring old local ethnic animosities, his Fourth of July celebrations were something of a shambles, underscored by the brutal murder of the sheriff, and his attempt to reason with the cult fanatics was a fiasco. He has to hope that Bruno recovers from his seizure, or he’ll have more problems on his hands. On top of all that, his fraternity brother in the FBI has confirmed Nick Minicozzi’s underworld connections (knew that, damn it; ignored it); the goddamned news media are back in numbers, determined to make everybody look like idiots, lunatics and criminals; and his own weak policies and lack of personal oversight have damaged the bank’s fiscal stability. Meanwhile, the violence is escalating and the various police units are incompetent in dealing with it, if not obstructive in some cases. The town has been overrun by a gang of vicious killers associated with the cult, and except for those who blew themselves up at the church camp and that abandoned farmhouse, they all got away without one of them being caught. Maybe they’re being hidden at the camp by the cultists. As soon as Ted has that thought, he knows it to be true. Meaning they may have more dynamite over there. He’ll demand a complete search and a shutdown of the camp, which is now a crime scene. National Guard units are at last on their way to support the state and local police, but they should have been here weeks ago; it took the murder of a lawman for Governor Kirkpatrick to take Ted’s warnings seriously. The pompous ass is driving in sometime this morning with his political entourage; Ted intends to meet it. He sees by his desk calendar that the new Presbyterian minister is also due today. Can’t deal with that. He calls Jim Elliott and tells him to meet the man at the bus station, take him to the church, show him the manse, get him settled in. Name’s Jenkins. Make him feel at home. Stay off the gin until you get the job done. He signs four foreclosure documents, approves the drafting of eight others, freezes all accounts with overdrafts, hauls on his shoulder holster, and calls Maury Castle at the mayor’s office, telling him to arm himself and meet him out at the mine hill. Immediately.

Sally Elliott is also headed to the mine. By way of Tucker City. Billy Don has called from the church camp to say he’s finally taking her advice and leaving, but he wants to see her before he goes. That’s really great news, she’d said, and they agreed to meet in forty-five minutes, the time it will take her to bicycle to the Tucker City drugstore. He’d told her that the Brunists are now led by Reverend Baxter with Darren at his side, and they had just left the camp to march over to the Mount of Redemption and challenge the state police there. Billy Don and the others were taking Mrs. Collins and her daughter with them when they leave, only hoping (he said with a nervous laugh) they’re making the right decision and the Rapture isn’t really coming. She said, “Don’t worry, Billy D — it’s the right decision.” Since the Saturday night downer when Tommy abandoned her to a night alone on bloody sheets, penniless and carless, blaming her for taking him to that hotel on purpose, cursing her loudly in front of all those opened doors as he stormed away, she hasn’t felt like writing, has been drawing instead. Smoking till her lungs hurt and drawing. Hands and ears. Eyes, mostly angry. The kitchen coffee pot, her shirt hanging over a chair back, the family cat. She sat for an hour in front of a mirror and tried to draw her vagina, but it was too depressing and she tore the page out and burned it. Then, using the Polaroid shot she had taken of the bloody hotel bedsheet, she recreated the design with colored inks, looking for some larger scene to arise from it in the way that Vasari described the painting of epic battle scenes from studying the pattern of spittle on a wall. This led her nowhere. Spittle was apparently more inspiring. When Billy Don called, she had been thinking about hopping on her bike and doing some sketching around town — the corner drugstore, abandoned train depot, backside of the derelict hotel — and his call brought to mind the old Deepwater No. 9 tipple and water tower, and that has become her project of the day. She scratches about for all the money she can find to give Billy Don, stuffs Tommy’s camera and some pencils and charcoals in her backpack, and gets on the road to Tucker City.

Charlie Bonali, founder and boss of the Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force, is not privy to events out at the mine hill, he’s only guessing, but with the area sealed off by the state coppers after the nitro blast, he supposes the Brunist crazies will have to contest that and they’ll be protected by Smith and his white supremacist militia, who are Charlie’s real targets. He calls young Naz Moroni and tells him to arm the Devil Dogs and get them out there for the party. Moron says his nonno died overnight, the old guy he was named after, and he’ll probably get dragged into family stuff, but he should be free until something like suppertime. Before going out, Charlie will drop by St. Stephen’s to have a word with old Father Bags. Charlie is not religious, but he understands the Church’s power politics and identifies with it. From the Godfather Pope down, it’s like the syndicate. He’ll let Baglione know that the Brunists are on the warpath again and tell him about the K of C Defense Force in case the church might want to hire a couple of professional guards. He’ll also offer to restart and manage Bingo nights at St. Stephen’s and provide protection for it. Charlie’s old man is already out on the front porch, watching the rain fall and jawing with Sal Ferrero, a fellow member of the losers’ club, who nevertheless has brought breakfast by for them all, gift of his hens. They’ve been talking about the death of old Nonno, who was their dead pal Angelo’s old man, but now the subject of the pending foreclosure comes up, as it always does with these two whiners. It’s also a problem for Charlie. The money from the city has dried up, the rumor reaching him that they’re pissed about his busting the banker brat’s nose without first taking his badge off, and he’s not sure where he can park his bod if his old man loses the house. As for his whore of a sister, sprawled half-naked at the phone in her nightshirt, she does indeed seem to be filling out a bit in the belly, so maybe there’s some hush money to be made there.

Angela is on the phone to her friend Ramona, who has upset her by letting her know that Tommy was seen leaving the Fourth of July picnic Saturday night with Sally Elliott. She can’t believe it, but Ramona says everyone saw them. “She’s just an ugly smartalecky slut,” Ramona says. “It only shows how desperate he is.” Is that supposed to make her feel better? Ramona says her dad has had to go to the mine hill this morning because something is happening again. There was a big explosion at the mine on Sunday when some of them blew themselves up and now a lot of people are hurrying out there because they think it might be like five years ago. “You know, like, wild?” Well, not Angela. It was nice of Mr. Ferrero to bring them eggs for breakfast, but she doesn’t really like eggs, and she’s starving. Now that the rain’s nearly over, she’ll take a bath, put on makeup, and go to town for something more filling. Maybe Stacy will be in Doc Foley’s drugstore and she can ask her a private question about what a miscarriage is really like in case she has to try to describe one. Well, not in case. That’s what she’s going to have to say, or something like it. White lies: her days now seem full of them. She’s running out of money but feels certain she’ll soon get her job back when Mr. Cavanaugh realizes how unfair he has been and how much he needs her. She tells Ramona she has to go, that she has an appointment at the bank and needs to get ready for it.

White lies. It’s how Bernice Filbert thinks of the stories she tells the bedridden Mr. John P. Suggs. They began with the best of intentions. She didn’t want to tell him that his friend Sheriff Puller had been murdered and in such a gruesome way, fearing it might give him another brain attack. This morning he asked why the sheriff has not come by, and she said, “He did. But you was…sleeping.” So she also hasn’t told him about the motorbikers and Ben Wosznik getting blown up either because it’s all part of the same story. And she certainly hasn’t let him know about the changes at the camp since Ben died, because she knows that would really upset him and he might stop giving them money. So Ben is still at the camp and everything is as it always was, except for the hosts assembled by Abner Baxter at the outskirts, which oppress them daily. Ben hasn’t come to visit because he needs to stay to protect the camp and also because he has a bad summer cold he doesn’t want Mr. Suggs to catch. She hasn’t said what day it is. Maybe it’s still the Fourth of July. She can revise the story of the Fourth a little and then tell it like it’s a new one, just happening; he won’t know the difference. As for Sheriff Puller, maybe he had to resign and move somewhere else. Or maybe he also had a stroke, or soon will have. Eventually he could also die heroically saving the camp from the Baxterites. It depends on what happens next. There’s no one left to tell Mr. Suggs otherwise, except that unpleasant McDaniel fellow, his mine manager, and she can have Mr. Suggs fire him for siding with Abner’s people and send him away. She has a cousin who could do that man’s job at the mine, and without scowling all the time. When that fat city lawyer with the yellow slicked-down hair comes back, the one who is being so helpful, they’ll have a chat about it. She hopes he will admire her strategy.

Now that her foul-mouthed brother-in-law has been jailed, there’s a bedroom free to rent at their house; the hospital is expensive so home care might be the right thing. The hospital could loan her all the things she needs like blood pressure monitors and specimen bottles and bedpans, and the theropests could come by her house to exercise him. At the hospital, they sit him up and walk him around, but nothing’s working, his feet just bend back and drag along on his toes. If she can find someone to help lift him, they could hire her extra for that task. At least he is swallowing his own food now if it’s mashed up, and the hospital has a home catering service that Mr. Suggs can afford. That would cut her own food bills down, too, because he doesn’t eat much. He is alert a couple of hours each day, but otherwise, he appears confused and strange grunting and whining noises come out of him, as if he were speaking in tongues, and maybe he is, or else he sleeps. In his alert moment this morning, after inquiring about Mr. Puller, Mr. Suggs asked her in his laborious eye-blinking way to tell the sheriff that he should put some pressure on those drunks who invaded the camp by telling them they were under suspicion for the murder of those two fools in the garden shed, which happened that same night, and get them to implicate Baxter and his followers in everything that happened. All this thinking and blinking tired him out pretty fast. Leaving the hospital on her way out to the camp to check on Elaine, Bernice bumps into her friend Maudie, the head nurse, and tells her about the Hungarian exorcist turning out to be an abortionist and getting chased off by Clara. Maudie shrugs and says, well, it’s a kind of exorcism and it would probably have been a healing thing to do.

Wayne returns with dire news. The police have Elaine. “They said she was a-slickerin’ herself with a belt down in the rough nigh to where all the bodies was found, and they’re arrestin’ her for indecent exposure and takin’ her in for a medical.” Wanda Cravens and Hunk Rumpel have come to say goodbye. Without a word, Hunk walks away toward the creek and a few minutes later he returns, carrying Elaine, looking like an unstrung puppet made out of sticks, her eyes starting like an animal caught in a trap, her skinny little tummy bumping out under the soaked tunic pasted to it like she swallowed a mushmelon. Hunk doesn’t say how he got her, but they suppose they’d better get out of here fast. They can already hear the choppy crackle of helicopters somewhere in the sky. More troops will be coming in. Everything will get closed off. Glenda says not to wait for her at the meeting place, that she may have to stay. So many children to care for, it might be easier here, and she’d have to leave one of her two campers behind unless Uriah or Hovis returned to drive it for her. Those two West Virginia fellows aren’t back, nor Billy Don either, but the rest can’t wait, they’ll have to join up later. Mabel agrees to ride in Clara’s trailer to keep an eye on Elaine. Wayne says he hopes it’s not really the Rapture and they’re not dragging Clara and Elaine away from their own salvation, but Ludie Belle says, “God ain’t stupid. He’ll know where to find us.”

Which is how it is that Billy Don returns from his call to Sally Elliott to find everyone gone. No matter. Tucker City is in a different direction; it would only have confused them to see him turning off. He doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say to Sally, but something like he’s never known anyone like her before, meeting her has been the most important thing that’s ever happened to him, and he doesn’t want their friendship to end. He has her phone number but not her address, which he plans to ask for and also for her permission to call her from time to time. He may tell her he loves her, but he hopes he won’t blurt that out because he doesn’t think it’s something she wants to hear. But he does love her. He knows that, has known it for a long time, and his chest is tight with the thought of leaving, even if only for a short time. His immediate plan is to drive up to his cabin now that everyone has pulled out and throw a few things in the car before taking off, but the car won’t start. Seems completely dead. He’s about to step out to see what the matter might be when Darren appears at the window. “What are you doing here? I thought you were headed over to the Mount.”

“I am. Some people are walking. I have time. But I can’t let you leave, Billy Don.”

“What do you mean, you can’t let me?” Billy Don pumps the gas pedal again, turns the key. Nothing.

“It won’t work. I disconnected a few things.”

Billy Don slumps back against the car seat in exasperation. “You’re crazy, Darren. You’re really crazy.”

“I love you, Billy Don,” Darren says, and he starts to cry. Then he takes something from inside his tunic and points it at him.

Though it’s drizzly still, the sky is finally brightening, casting a pale but mostly cheering glow on the wet black streets and brick fronts of quiet downtown West Condon. What businesses remain are opening and city hall is filling up, as are the pool hall, the post office, and the drugstore booths and soda fountain. The pawn shop has its customary “Sales Only” sign on the front door and may or may not be open. Most of the temporary Fourth of July weekend shops on Main Street have been emptied out or abandoned, but a few first-time entrepreneurs, having faint hopes and little else to do, have decided to linger with their “antiques” and knitted goods and homemade jams, so long as no rent is charged. Faint hopes: the town’s weak but stubborn motor. Gus Baird, the president of the West Condon Rotary Club, having had no new travel or insurance business for over five months now, spends the morning in his office, planning tomorrow’s club luncheon meeting, hoping to run into someone there who wants to get away for a week or two before the summer ends. At the liquor store they restock the shelves and bins after the usual Fourth of July run on beer and cheap booze; drier times ahead, though it beats owning a grocery or a clothing store. Down the street, Linda Catter’s first beauty shop customer is due in thirty minutes and Linda tidies up the premises for her. One of her blue-hair trade. Not really blue. An old Italian widow who likes orange hair, and gossips endlessly about people Linda doesn’t know. Bernice calls Linda from the Brunist Wilderness Camp office to say most everybody has cleared out. They seem to have gone over to the Mount, as if something was about to happen. She’s going over to take a look. Linda hopes that if it’s the Rapture, they don’t forget her stuck here in her beauty shop. Certainly, the graves seem to be emptying out, just like it says in the Bible. After work, if today lasts that long, she should go check where her husband Tommy has been laid to rest. Maybe he has stopped resting. Not far away, Enos Beeker, haunted still by the shoe store owner’s public suicide, uses the slow day to take unseasonal inventory at his hardware store. Thanks in large part to the new cut-price D.I.Y. store out at the highway shopping center, not much will have changed since the last one. He is grateful that most of his aging stock is at least not susceptible to rot, a daily problem for young Pete Piccolotti, manager of the family grocery store, especially after the long weekend. Pete bags up the refuse that only days ago represented vendible goods and sets out the fresh breads and sausages his parents have made. His role in life. Mind the shop. He and Monica have had another row this morning. He’s not ready for the second kid. He shouldn’t have said what he said, but he’s getting sick of the dead-end life he lives. Not much in the till. Have to send Monica waddling over to the bank for some rolls of change, hoping (faintly) for the occasional cash-paying customer. Over there, one of the first customers this morning (along with Gabriela Ferrero, who is trying to organize a small loan to cover the funeral of her father, who died last night in hospital) is Pete’s pal Kit Cavanaugh, the banker’s son, who is emptying out his account, taking the bulk of it in travelers’ checks. He tells them, when they ask, that he’s going to Paris. “Oo la la!” one of the girls says, and everyone giggles. They tease him about his papier-mâché nose. He looks off in the direction of his dad’s office and is told his father got an emergency call and has gone out to the mine hill.

Faint hopes. Giorgio Lucci wears the town signature pasted on his mug. A goofy loose-jawed grin that won’t go away whatever the circumstances. It used to infuriate the old man when he was beating him. He’d keep yelling at him to wipe it off while he pounded him, trying to wipe it off himself with slaps to the face, but he would have had to break his jaw, and even then that might have just wired it in place. When Georgie meets other people, they grin back. Raising always: faint hopes. This morning, waking on the Legion Hall sofa, sickeningly hungover from cheap skull-crushing hootch, he can hardly lift his head and his bloodshot eyes won’t focus. But he’s still grinning. He had to sleep on the broken springs. The high life. He kicked semicomatose Cheese Johnson off the sofa, but then had to let Cheese have the cushions. That’s okay. He couldn’t stand their stink, inflated over the years with a million drunken farts. Not sure who got the best deal. Pointless anyway, because Cheese has rolled off them and is sleeping amid the butts on the wooden floor, his broken arm across his chest, hand of the other clutching his filthy crotch. Another grinner, Cheese. But with fewer teeth. More malice to it. Not everyone grins back. His cast is so begrimed with obscenities, inscribed there during bolts of inspiration by his pals, that it looks like he must have spent the last few weeks down cleaning out the pits with it. Should be fumigated when it comes off and donated to the Smithsonian. Georgie steps over him and staggers off to take a somewhat painful leak. He has avoided Mick’s Bar & Grill since Mort Whimple left hospital — the fire chief hangs out at Mick’s and is mad enough at Georgie to kill him, blaming him for the blaze at Lem’s garage and all that happened to him afterwards, despite Georgie’s protestations of complete innocence — but today has to be an exception. He has a desperate need for coffee and he hopes (always hopeful) Mick will give it to him on credit, or for free, just because he likes his grin.

He has awakened from a dream that was partly about Marcella Bruno. They were back in high school and she was leaning over the water fountain, her pleated skirt falling over her hips, between her legs. Georgie stepped up behind her, and though he’d never even said hello to her before, ran his thumb up the crack of her ass, just for fun, because he was always known as an easygoing misbehaving wiseacre with quick wrists, no reason to take offense, and she turned around to see who was doing that. To chew him out, he supposed. But her face was the face of a person long dead, with exposed bone and teeth and tatters of decomposing flesh and bulging eyeballs. All he could think to say was: Whoa. Not feeling well? He was grinning and she was grinning, but it was not the kind of grin you like to see. He had the idea, in the dream, that this grim apparition had something to do with his sick hangover, like so many of the confusing and headachy scenes that had gone before in a night that was not sleepless but that had no sleep in it. The thought worked because then she was normal, not dead, or at least not showing it, and they were walking through the old neighborhood. Heaven’s not a place, you know, she said. It’s just wishing. He thought that might be a come-on, all he had to do was pop back with the right line, something about angels maybe (she’s one!), but they were in front of St. Stephen’s and she said she had to go in. And then she was gone. They were holding a funeral inside. Hers? Couldn’t be sure. Didn’t want to know. He left there, and next thing he was on a baseball field. It was his turn to bat. But the bats were all too heavy. He knew if he could find one he could lift he’d get a hit and win the game. He told himself: Don’t forget to wish. Heard his old lady echo before sending him off to school: Don’t forget to wash. And woke up. And washed. Wished.

Down on the drizzly street, Burt Robbins, owner of the dimestore situated below the Legion Hall, is standing under the overhang at the front door having a smoke with the mayor Maury Castle. They don’t seem happy to see Georgie and they don’t seem unhappy, so he pauses to exchange deep thoughts about the weather. Which is showing signs of improving. They grin back at him because they can’t help it, though Robbins’ grin is more like a sneer. Maybe one of them will buy him a coffee. He mentions hopefully that he’s heading over to Mick’s. They’re talking about the Brunists, who are apparently back on Cunt Hill this morning doing a repeat performance of their famous dance-in-the-mud end-of-the-world thing. People are headed out there. A helicopter clatters overhead, punctuating this news. Might be fun. After coffee. If the weather clears. If his bruised brain heals. If someone will give him a ride. Robbins says they ought to get up another carnival out there, and the mayor lets fly with his sour booming laughter (it makes Georgie’s head hurt) and says that after what happened last time, he couldn’t afford the insurance. The mayor asks Georgie if he knows Charlie Bonali. Sure. Tough prick. Heard he might have been a hired gun up in the big town. Right, says the mayor. The sonuvabitch should be in jail, but he’s being protected. He’s got up a gang now. Bunch of young hardass RC thugs. Making trouble. We might need someone on the inside. The mayor hands him a bill. Say hello to Mick. After you’ve had a bite, why don’t you drop by the Fort and see me?

Out on the rain-soaked mine hill, Ted Cavanaugh asks his police chief to radio Monk at the station and have him call the Fort, try to find out where the hell the mayor is. “All these TV trucks and cameras, not like Castle to miss a grandstanding opportunity,” he says. Doesn’t ask the chief, orders him. Like the old army officer he once was. That’s all right. Captain Romano has served worse. He sees the banker as a kind of wounded general trying to rally nonexistent troops. Only four state troopers have turned up here at the hill this morning, and they don’t seem to have any clear orders beyond securing the site of the dynamite blast over at the camp. Dee saw it. Sickening. There are a couple more troopers over there still, but that’s the whole army. Cavanaugh is someone they listen to, though, and when he tells them to block off the hill, they block off the hill. Instead of helping them, the new sheriff and his hayseed militia are shepherding Red Baxter and the crazies from the camp, a lot of drifters and riffraff among them. They are massing up in the mud down below by the scores, singing like their feet are hurting. Not far from the blackened spot on the road where Tub Puller’s car burned with him in it. At least the rain has stopped and the clouds are breaking up in the west, though everyone’s wet and feeling crabby. An unmarked helicopter has been coming and going. Might be army. Or police. Most likely newshounds. Dee has not been informed. Red Baxter is blowing off as usual, punching the air with his fist, the others hooting and hollering in their wild-eyed praise-Jesus way, cheering him on. The blond curly-headed boy who caused them so much trouble out here Sunday is among them with a look on his face like he’s already half-transported, that crazy stringbean son of the woman they arrested clinging to him as though terrified by something. His own wild imaginings, probably. “Ain’t that one a them old picks stole from the mine?” Louie Testatonda asks, pointing at the blond boy. Cavanaugh nods. “Obviously there’s a link.” Locals are also gathering at the edges, not all as idle spectators. Too many guns among them. That cheap hood Charlie Bonali is down there with some of his buddies, nasty grins on their punk faces. The police chief sees this thing playing out in several ways, almost all of them shitty. He has contacted other police forces in the area to let them know they may be needed. Also ambulance services and fire departments, taking no chances. When Wallace radios back, he says as far as they know at city hall the mayor is out at the mine hill. Left some time ago. Monk says he wasn’t sure who told him that. Didn’t sound like Dee’s cousin Gina. More like a squeaky old lady. Probably the mayor himself. Hard to hide that carny barker voice. Dee passes the first part on to the banker, not the second. Cavanaugh, angrily flicking his cigarette several yards away, calls the mayor a loudmouth, yellow-bellied tinhorn, or swearwords to that effect. He is also ticked off at the governor, supposedly on his way here but taking his sweet time about it. Some National Guard units are being trucked in as well, so they say, as yet unseen and unheard from.

And what about the bikers? Smith said he chased them into the next state and only lost them at the state line, then alerted the forces over there. “They’ll catch them,” the wannabe sheriff said. Dee’s not so sure. About them being caught, about them being chased out in the first place. Though the leader of that pack was the Baxter brat, and with him killed they might scatter. Unless, like a thorn in a bear’s ass, it’s just got them madder. Old Wosznik’s achievement, but at a heavy price. Dee liked Wosznik in spite of his dumb beliefs. Honest straightforward man you could trust, uncommon species in this depraved sinkhole. Brave, too, as it turns out. Or maybe just stupid. Never know.

When Dee and Louie first arrived out here this morning, access to the mine road was already blocked by the cultists down at the crossroads. Dee told Smith he should clear the road, and he did. Still playing man of the law. There were only two state troopers on duty at the hill, though they said two others were on their way over from the camp. The senior officer was a Catholic, so he and Dee and Louie had some common ground. Dee explained that, directly or indirectly, those religious lunatics were responsible for the Sunday blast and other crimes in the area, including the murder of Sheriff Puller, immolating the poor bastard in his own squad car, and he pointed at the black spot in the road where it happened. Cop killers. They were also the same people responsible for wrecking their church, especially that big mouth preacher down there making all the racket. Used mine picks on it, stole stuff. White-lying, Dee added that this hill was private property and those people would be trespassing if they tried to march up it without permission. They agreed, though, that if the vangies, as the trooper called them, decided to do that, there wouldn’t be much they could do about it, short of shooting them all. And that might not work because they’re all carrying weapons and could shoot back and outnumbered them at least fifty to one.

By the time Cavanaugh arrived, two more troopers had turned up, a lot of TV and newspaper people had rolled in, and the Brunist mob, still growing and increasingly unruly, had moved up to the foot of the hill. Cavanaugh carried a rifle and wore, Dee noted, a shoulder holster under his rain poncho. He stormed right through the mob, grinning steely-jawed at their verbal abuse, daring them to do worse. Dee and the others were impressed. He introduced himself to the troopers, briefed them all on the situation, listed the crimes they were dealing with, said that there was to be no shooting unless shot at, and that, if need be, they’d let the cultists up here, but meanwhile they’d try to stall until the National Guard arrived. The key, he said, was the acting sheriff. Whether or not he’d play by the rules.

So, when Smith starts up the hill with the cultists, Cavanaugh and the state cops meet them and tell them the state is now occupying the hill, it’s closed off and no longer under the sheriff’s authority. The cameras are pinned on them and rolling. The reporters have their pads out and are pushing mikes in people’s faces. The copter circles back overhead. Smith says he isn’t sure about the jurisdiction issue, but he’s only trying to reduce tensions. “These people wish to express their grief over the loss of one of their most beloved leaders, and they should be allowed to do that.” Presumably, the Brunists want to hold their memorial service for Wosznik up in that cross-shaped space where they have floor-planned the church they want to build. An outline of trenches lined with chalk that looks like a gameboard layout for a war game. Which it is. Dee asks, if the service is for Wosznik, why aren’t his widow and daughter here? Smith says he doesn’t know, maybe they just didn’t feel up to it. “Mrs. Collins is in shock, the girl is in fragile health.” One of the troopers says he thinks they saw that girl this morning. They took her into protective custody. She was doing herself harm over at the crime scene, but one of the camp thugs kidnapped her and carried her off. Big bruiser. The sheriff wants to know what the town cops are doing out here where they also have no authority. “Just getting out of the big city for a little country air,” Dee says. Cavanaugh makes a mistake then and feeds Smith a straight line. “I don’t know who’s bought you, Smith,” he says, “but—” and Smith interrupts him. “God’s bought me, Mr. Cavanaugh.” It will probably make all the evening newscasts. “All right,” the banker says finally. “We’ll let the governor adjudicate it when he gets here. He’s due any minute. Meanwhile, you’re here to protect law and order, Sheriff, and I want to know what measures you have taken in case things get out of hand.” “Things aren’t going to get out of hand,” Smith replied. “If they do, Mr. Smith,” Cavanaugh said, “it’ll be on your head.”

Dee has to admit Cal Smith holds his own as a novice lawman, but ultimately he’s out of his depth. He’s no Tub Puller. And, in Red Baxter, he’s backing an overheated rage machine guaranteed to cause stupid problems. Out of the cult’s hearing, Dee tells Cavanaugh that it looks to him like there has been some kind of takeover at the camp. These aren’t the Brunists he knew from his visits there. And just a month ago, some of these same people got arrested for attacking the camp. Cavanaugh, offering cigarettes around and lighting up again, nods and says he’s demanding a thorough search of the site, but they don’t have the forces here to do that yet. When they do, they’ll get the whole story. “But you’re right, Dee,” he says, “something’s wrong.” He thinks they could be hiding the bikers over there, too. Dee doesn’t say so, but he doubts that. He also doubts Cavanaugh’s belief in an operational link between the cult and the gang, even though the bikers do wear Brunist symbols on their skin and leathers. There’s a distance he’s not reading. Same reality, different interpretations. Like religion. But only one is true.

The bees, subdued by the wet weather, have been cooperative. They seem ready to leave this place. The Applebys, too, are ready. Corinne and Cecil have loaded the hives into the truck and secured everything and are set to get on the road. Earlier, just as they were getting started, they caught a glimpse through the dripping trees of Billy Don Tebbett’s car over on the county road, going the wrong way. Darren Rector was driving it. Alone. While they loaded the hives, they talked about what that might mean. They decided that Darren might be trying to stop Billy Don from leaving by stealing his car. Now, as he gets behind the wheel, Cecil asks: “Reckon we should stop by the trailer lot?” “Billy Don won’t be there and we won’t know where to start looking,” Corinne says. “But he could be on the road hitching, knowing we might be coming along. We can keep an eye out for him.” On the narrow two-track road out of the camp, Cecil spots something down in the trees and asks Corinne to stop. It’s a large bunch of ten-gallon gas cans all lined up. At least a dozen of them. “Somebody must’ve dumped them here, but they feel like they’re full,” Cecil says. “Don’t reckon they’ll mind if we borrow one of them for the road.” “Gift of God,” says Corinne.

Georgie Lucci’s dream, whatever it was, is coming true. Mick is heating the grill to fry him up a plate of scrambled eggs and Piccolotti salomeats. A handful of aspirins, washed down with a beer bought him by the drunk at the bar, has eased the apocalyptic chaos in his head and the coffee, with its sweet healing aroma, is just beginning to perk in sympathy with his awakening brain. The town lush is already tanking up for the day. He’s drinking vodka on the rocks, the cheap domestic brand. He calls it wodka. “The boss said to stay off the gin,” he announces agreeably in explanation, lifting his glass, then he bangs it against Georgie’s and tosses it back.

Georgie helped ruin a few bottles of that brain-acid last night, spending up the last of Steve Lawson’s money. Apparently Stevie is already on the way to fatherhood, and they celebrated that, but if his dick had dropped off, they would have celebrated that, too. A kind of stag party replay without the insane adventures, though someone did suggest that they go out to the church camp and salt the beehives in revenge for the stings the little suckers laid on them last time; but they couldn’t decide who’d do the salting and the camp is said to be sealed off after the explosion out there, anyway. Rumor is they found five bodies after the blast but only four heads. Weird. Religion is. The world is. All the people in it. They all agreed on that and drank to it. Weirdness. Yay. They considered a scavenger hunt for the missing head but didn’t know what they’d do with it if they found it. Georgie suggested they could leave it in Father Bags’ confession booth, see how many Hail Marys he’d assign the head for going around shamelessly without its body on. Cheese didn’t know who Father Bags was. Guido Mello, who has a lot of free time on his hands since the garage burned down but seems to be spending little of it at home, called Cheese a fucking heathen, and Cheese, grinning his gap-tooth grin, said he didn’t know what that was either but he assumed it was a compliment, and Guido said it was.

As his head and the weather clear as if each were bringing about the other, Georgie begins to have doubts about the mayor’s project. How tough, really, he asks himself, is Charlie Bonali? Very tough, he decides. Just getting smiled at by him is like getting shot. Bonali approached him about joining his Dagotown Devil Dogs, and Georgie, grinning his hapless grin, said, sure, he probably would. Since then he has stayed out of sight. Good reason not to go out and rag the Brunists at Cunt Hill, where Bonali probably lurks with more lethal notions.

He’s trying to think of a way of eating the mayor’s breakfast and without guilt (should be easy, so rarely is he struck down by that grim disease) turning his offer down afterwards, when the scumbag dimestore owner comes in with a couple of other sad sacks off Main Street. The guy who owns the last downtown clothing store says people are trying to return things they bought six months ago, and the old fart who runs the hardware store says the only things he sold all last week were six screws and a nail. And that was on credit. Tee-heeing, Mick dribbles a bit of oil onto the grill and cracks the eggs into a bowl, whips them with a fork and spills them onto the grill and the lights go out. The coffee stops perking and the eggs fail to sizzle. “You should pay your fucking bills, Mick,” Robbins grumbles. “I can’t be more than a month behind,” Mick says in his squeaky voice. “They always send you a notice.” Everyone laughs at that. “Well, you don’t have to cook the wodka,” the drunk says, already having difficulty keeping his seat on the bar stool. He pulls an imaginary Stetson down over his nose. “Hit me again, podnuh! I’ll suck it up raw!” Georgie waits a few minutes to see if the power comes back on. It doesn’t. In this town, a power outage can last weeks. And Whimple may be on his way over by now. Carrying a fireman’s axe, if he has an inkling Georgie is here. Georgie wolfs down a gelatinous slab of week-old green apple pie, pockets the change for later, and steps out the back door on his way to the Fort.

Over on Treasure Mountain, repository of the Kingdom’s stash of black diamonds, the King and a handful of Knights stand alone against the vast formation of Cretin Wizards and their enchanted puppets at the foot. The Cretins raise their tinny battle cry: Oh, come and march with us to glory! Though they are not marching. Not yet. Just getting up the nerve. For the end of time has come! It’s a kind of rope-skipping song. Why is the King denying the Cretins? Because it’s a Holy Mountain and cannot be desecrated by lunatic fake magicians? No, because he is a King and it’s his mountain and this is what you do. It’s fun.

Sally can still think in the metaphorical way, though her heart’s not in it and her pen’s in her pocket. The end of once-upon-a-time has come. Goose Girl, looking for an ending to an old story of love un-consummated, kissed the Sleeping Prince’s dick (dicks) and woke him up, and now she’s sorry. Go back to sleep. I didn’t mean it. It was an accident. The important thing about stories is not to begin them. I’m never going to be happy, she thinks. Not really happy. Satisfied maybe. Sometimes. Not often.

At least Billy D is not among the belligerents. Nor are Mrs. Collins and her daughter, as Billy Don foretold her. Franny Baxter’s father is making noise over there with Billy Don’s wonky ex-roomie Darren standing beside him, posing as a saint with golden locks and a mad beatific smile on his face, his granny glasses glittering in the emerging sunlight like golden coins, Auntie Debra’s failed orphan rehab project pasted against his side. Billy Don didn’t turn up at the Tucker City drugstore either. Probably, once he got away, he decided to just keep going and not look back. She’ll miss him. He has been good company this long strange summer. He has her phone number; maybe he’ll call.

While waiting for him at the drugstore, she picked up some more film for Tommy’s cameras, and she has been whiling away the time here at the mine, in and around her desultory sketching (a lot of thick black lines), photographing the mine tipple, hoist wheel, and abandoned equipment, rusting freight cars, signs and graffiti, the limp tattered windsock over the grimy brick office building, the bloated water tower. She has also taken a shot or two of the confrontation over on the hill and of the tent at the edge of the camp where the dynamite blast happened, but mostly she has stayed discreetly out of sight, not wanting to draw attention to herself. A.k.a. the Antichrist. They are crazy, and they have guns. Anyway, now that she is no longer Professor Cavanaugh’s research assistant, her interest in all that weirdness is fading. Christianity is quite simply a shamanistic cult of monumental stupidity, chicanery, and willful self-delusion. A legacy of the infantile origin of the species. She should stop worrying her head about it. Let it swallow its own tail.

The old coal tipple, rising high into the brightening sky above her, is more appealing, a giant contraption of scaffolding and pulleys and ramps and what looks like a seedy, quirkily designed hotel squatting like an old dame with lifted skirts over three parallel railroad tracks. How did this thing work? The mined coal went onto a conveyor belt and was lifted up into those shed-like buildings, where the rocks and rubbish were separated out and the coal screened for at least three different sizes, finding its way down chutes into the train cars below, the obvious corresponding anatomical appurtenance functioning, as it were, in triplicate. From loose to constipated. Thus, the anthropomorphizing of the world, both in the way we read it and the things we make for it, the stories we tell about it. Mother Earth and Father Sky. She has learned that the Mount of Redemption, long before it was called that by the Brunists, was known by the miners as Cunt Hill because of its cleft ravine under the rounded belly of its summit. If this is an obscenity, so were the primitive Mother Earth folktales she read in college. And, well, they were, of course. Dirty jokes that have evolved into our world religions.

Over on that exposed lady’s tum, now catching a sunbeam or two, things are becoming more agitated. The aroused cultists, inheritors of those elaborated dirty jokes, have crept forward and stand face to face now with the policemen and Tommy’s father. They still sing their Christian soldier songs, marching in with the saints now (oh, when the moon turns red with blood, they’re singing cheerfully, I want to be in that number…), though from here it’s just a thin cacophony, more like children yipping on a playground. A phalanx of armed men in farm boots and suspenders encircles them, either for protection or to arrest them. All of this is apparently on live TV, with helicopters hovering overhead. Some of the cultists watch the helicopters apprehensively. What are they thinking? That they might be agents of the Rapture? Or of the Antichrist? Their famous Great Speckled Birds? Is this funny? Only if madness is. She takes another picture of the people on the hill, framing it between tipple support posts to shrink it to its rightful dimensions. Two yellow backhoes sit off to one side like grazing dinosaurs. Tommy’s father is having a fierce argument with the sheriff, pointing his finger at him. He is an unhappy man, Sally supposes, and in a mood to take no shit. Stacy called Sally on Sunday to say goodbye and to apologize for what happened. She sounded like she’d been crying. Maybe she hadn’t stopped since the night before. Both she and Tommy’s father had tearful faces when they stepped out of the motel room, looking stricken and washed out under those awful corridor lights. She said she never finished that French novel Sally loaned her but she knows it must have ended badly. She’s leaving it for her at her rooming house. Stacy had talked about going away during their drive over to the river town a couple of weeks ago. It’s the sadness, she said then. Staying or leaving, the sadness is the same. Sally didn’t understand it then. Now it’s her own metaphysic.

So what now? Well, she could go back to college and get her degree. Or at least, now that the door’s open, get laid. God expels Adam, takes a rib out of Eve: new playmate, better design. Adam left to play with himself. She has a writing prof at college who has a lot of faith in her, he says. Is he on the make? Probably. Writers are like that. She can get an education, learn a few tricks. He’s married, but so much the better. He’ll be careful, and there’ll be no residue. She has rather hoped that the sort of love the Lutheran preacher called a “dying to oneself” might happen to her, at least once, in her earthly transit — not mere orgasm, but the legendary madness of love — but too late, she knows now. Back at the ice plant in Tommy’s car, in that moment of frightened adoration (of what? doesn’t matter), it might have been possible, but now irony has gotten in the way. Call it irony. It’s what she has really lost. If her prof starts talking about the future, she’ll find somebody else.

The singing stops, the bombast and bluster. They’re all turning toward the mine road, where what looks like a funeral cortege is arriving. Will the raising of the dead require the mortician’s art to undo what’s been done? For some reason, by morbid association probably, Sally is reminded of that old lady over there last spring who blessed her with a wink and died. She has thought of her as a kind of tutelary spirit ever since. Nothing spooky, just something she has internalized. The old lady’s faith in her. She seems to hear her admonish her now in her elegant, straight-backed way to stop feeling sorry for herself. Grandma Friskin behind her shoulder, nodding her approval. No pains without gains, child. Use them. Sally finds a sunny perch on a step at the backside of the tipple, turns her back on the Cretins, pulls off her tee (feels good; maybe she should take her shorts off, too), lights a cigarette, opens her notebook, blows away the cobwebs, and (and on the third day…) writes: Because you are a writer and this is what you do. It’s fun.

The march to glory has been suspended. All eyes are on the arrival of the governor in his shiny black limousine, other cars and media trucks trailing behind in a procession rolling quickly down the mine road. Limousines are not a common sight in this county. It’s like having an elephant gallop into view, dust and gravel flying. The limousine skids to a stop on top of the charred place in the road and an aide hops out and unfurls an umbrella over the rear door as he opens it, although it is no longer raining. The governor grandly brushes it aside. He can presumably see the banker halfway up the hill, but he strides straight through the mud to Sheriff Smith. The governor has his own television crew following him, security people, his political team. The governor is in neither party nor statehouse mode. He is in his campaign costume: hatless, white shirt with sleeves rolled up, bootlace tie at half mast, open black vest. Boots that servants will clean for him later. Wherever he goes there’s a bright unnatural light on him. Under that light, he calls a couple of his state troopers over to be in the picture, and narrowing his eyes in the heroic manner, his shock of white hair stirring in the light breeze, converses intently with the sheriff and with selected members of the religious group. The impression (for the cameras) is that of a man on the front line, firm-jawed, crisp of manner, in charge of things. Mr. Dynamic.

The banker drops his smoke under his toe and steps down the hill to enter the governor’s movie. The West Condon police chief has come to feel like the banker’s personal bodyguard and he follows at a short distance with his first officer, who moves his bulk slowly but with a certain authority. The chief has received a radio call from Monk Wallace back at the station that, one, the National Guard troops have arrived out at the high school and, two, the power seems to be off all over town. The station and city hall are now running on their standby coal-fired generator. Romano asked him what the hell the soldiers were doing at the high school, they were supposed to be out here, and Wallace said that’s what he told them and they said they’d be there as soon as they unloaded their gear and set up their bivouac area. The chief said he’d better get Bo in to help, but Monk reminded him that when Bo drops off it’s like off a cliff. You only know he’s alive by his snore. He couldn’t hear a train going through his bedroom, much less a phone. As for the power outage, the chief said the storm probably knocked something out, but Monk should call the plant to check. Wallace said he did that, but no one answers. He’ll keep trying. As the banker steps into camera range, the governor looks up with a warm smile of greeting, as if discovering him there for the first time, what a surprise, then switches to an expression of deep concern. The chief could never do that. Why he’ll always be nothing more than a poor cop. “Ted Cavanaugh! I’m so glad you could come, my friend! We’re trying to find a solution to the problem here. Perhaps you can help.”

“I’m afraid the problem you’re trying to resolve, Governor, is your own, not ours,” the banker says drily. “You’re trying to figure out how to conceal your spineless failure in the face of this crisis. You are so concerned with your own image, you can’t recognize a real problem when it’s right in front of your nose — it’s only something that’s blocking your view of yourself in the mirror.”

The governor staggers back an unscripted step. “Are you mad? You have let things get totally out of control here and now you’re trying to blame us for your own incompetence? Even now, while you’ve been doing nothing, I’ve been organizing a law-and-order team here—”

“With these people? That’s great. A local rightwing fanatic with the sheriff in his back pocket assembles an unlawful white supremacist militia and you come along in your ignorance and sanction it.”

“Hold on! That’s not fair!” The governor has to speak up over the outraged religionists and the slap-slap-slap of the helicopters hovering overhead. The new sheriff is doing what he can to mute the protests of the Brunist Followers, assuring them that now that the governor is here, things will work out, and the young kid with the long blond curls raises his hand magisterially, and then Reverend Baxter nods and crosses his arms and they lower the volume. “I have also sent state police to the area and ordered up National Guard troops—!”

“Too late, Governor. And too little. Since last April our community has been begging you for help in the face of this extremist cult’s illegal occupation of the mine property and the first assault by the murderous motorcycle gang they brought with them, and you laughed us off, said we were overreacting—”

“I say you’re still overreacting, Ted. We’re here to keep the peace, not stir things up. These people, I’m told, only wish to hold a memorial service on top of this hill, which they consider sacred, for a deceased member of their faith. I do not see why they cannot be allowed to do so. Freedom of religion is a Constitutional right. I have spoken with their leaders—”

“But they are not the leaders, or weren’t before today. The true leaders are not here and we don’t know where they are. There have been several murders already. We’re afraid something may have happened to them. Nor do we know what happened to their motorcycle death squad. Are they hiding out over there? We need to search the campsite immediately.”

“Murders? Over where? What are you talking about? If you want us to inspect an area, I’m sure we can discuss—”

“There’s no time for more talk, Governor. We need action, but that’s apparently not within your competence.” The governor’s media team have stopped filming, but the news cameras still roll. “You have been informed over the past three months of the continued criminality of the cult, the massive influx of armed drifters, the rise in burglaries and robberies, the violence taking place over there at their campsite, the break-in at the closed mine and the theft of dynamite and other weapons, and last Friday the horrific murder out here of the county sheriff and an innocent young man by burning them alive, but when we tried to reach you, we were told you were out politicking and couldn’t be bothered. Those killers are still on the loose. Anything could happen. But you’re still politicking.”

“Obviously, you are not in a reasonable state of mind to discuss these issues,” the governor says. “It is you and your town police officers who are breaking the law out here. I suggest you go home and leave this to me and to the legal state and county authorities who are here.” He turns to his senior state police officer. “We will permit these people to hold their service on the hill on the condition that they vacate the premises when the service is concluded.”

“You’re making a mistake, Governor,” says the banker in a voice clearly heard. “Look around. There are too many weapons out here. I realize you’re completely and willfully ignorant of everything that’s been happening here, but surely even you can see that much.”

“Nonsense, Cavanaugh. You’re becoming hysterical.” The state police have stepped aside and the cultists are on the move, singing their Brunist battle hymn, but the governor holds up his hand and they pause. He turns to the sheriff. But the sheriff is not there. He has been called away to his squad car for a message from his dispatcher. The helicopters are wheeling away. Captain Romano has also withdrawn. He calls the banker over. The reporters press forward with questions, but Lieutenant Testatonda keeps them at bay. It is Monk Wallace back at the station. Romano asks Wallace to repeat the message. Cavanaugh holds the walkie-talkie to his ear: “Some folks has heard a explosion out to the power plant. May be that dynamite again. They still don’t answer the phone. Might be some dead people out there.” “Better get those units you’ve alerted moving now,” the banker tells the chief, “but try to keep quiet about it, so we don’t stir a panic and block our own way out of here. And ask Monk to phone the bank, tell them to lock the doors.” He turns and strides down the hill toward his car. The chief is already on his way, barking out orders to Wallace on his walkie-talkie, cameras and reporters trailing after. He’s thinking about his young nephew, who just hired on at the power plant. Officer Testatonda spies his daughter Ramona among the spectators and he jerks his thumb at her to follow him.

“Ted…? What’s happening?” the governor asks, his bravado evaporating. The reporters want to know, too.

“You win, Kirk. The hill’s all yours.”

Darren feels himself on a plane of existence beyond anything he has known before. Nothing seems quite real in the old sense, and yet everything is endowed with a kind of dazzling super-reality. The glittering hill above them beckons like a mother opening her arms to receive her children; the very sun, now emerging, is at his command. When he lifted his hand a moment ago, it was not merely to hush the assembled faithful; he knew he had the power — like Moses, like Jesus — to change reality itself. And now, in response to that gesture, all the obstructions to their goal are melting away. The governor and his lackeys are leaving as well, the prying cameras and insidious journalists, all fleeing as if for their very existence. Not all vanish peacefully. Some burly Romanists barrel right through the gathered believers, issuing threats, promising to return, but they too disappear, pushed along into oblivion by the Christian Patriots and Darren’s Defenders. Young Abner Baxter has been knocked down by one of them, muddying his tunic, and he is grimacing with panic, his headband slipped down over one eye and exposing his scar. Darren helps him to his feet and suggests he could go back and guard the camp if he wished, for it is their home and it is vulnerable now (the occupants of several trailers that have pulled out down there are noticeably absent here at the Mount; they will not be missed), and Young Abner, chewing his little red tuft of a moustache, seems eager to do that. Darren, prying himself away from Colin, takes Young Abner aside and slips him his revolver. Young Abner says he already has a rifle but Darren tells him he may need more than that, for the powers of darkness are restless and afoot, and Young Abner takes it and thanks him and hurries away. One must sometimes destroy the demonic, Darren thinks, to save a soul and open a corridor for God’s grace. And later tonight:

a moment of holy fire. He has spoken with Young Abner’s father about it and the word has spread. When the summit is theirs and they are standing inside the cross of the tabernacle and the sky has darkened, should that time arrive — should time still be—they will offer to the uninitiated baptism by fire. Colin has been begging for it, and he will be satisfied. Others have approached him as though he were the conduit to this form of grace. Today is the day. He knows this. All those paired sevens causing him to wonder whether the date would be a week of Sundays or two weeks of Sundays. It’s all so much simpler than that. It’s today’s date. 7/7. God has spoken with thunderous clarity. Reverend Baxter watches him, awaits a sign. Darren nods and Abner Baxter nods. “For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord!” Abner calls out to all. “Arise and walk! Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon ye! Arise and walk as children of light!” And solemnly yet joyfully, full-throated, their way prepared by the Lord, together they climb, unimpeded, their Mount of Redemption. Dark, Darren thinks. Light… Ecstasy!

“Oh the sons of light are marching to the Mount where it is said

We shall find our true Redemption from this world of woe and dread,

We shall see the cities crumble and the earth give up its dead,

For the end of time has come!

“So come and march with us to Glory!

Oh, come and march with us to Glory…!”

With the electricity off in the beauty shop and her client’s hair only half done, Linda calls the power company, but no one answers. They never do, it’s so frustrating. So she calls the police. It takes forever, but finally Lieutenant Wallace answers and tells her he doesn’t know what the problem is, but he’s working on it. Just what you might expect! Even as she slams the phone down, it rings. It’s Tessie Lawson at the sheriff’s office, asking for Lucy Smith, who has just walked in, and she hands her the phone. “What did you say?” Lucy asks. But the phone goes dead. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” Linda says, taking a listen. Lucy is confused. “I think she said he said I should go home right now and stay there, but maybe she said he said he was going home, and I should stay here. I just don’t know what to do!” “Well, why don’t you come with me,” Linda says. “I’m going to pick up some money at the bank, if they still have any, and do a little quick shopping. We can stop by the sheriff’s office and ask Tessie personally. Would you like to come along, Mrs. Abruzzi?” “No, dear, I only wait for you here and read your magazines.”

On her way to the corner drugstore for her second breakfast, the real one, Angela Bonali pauses for a moment in front of Linda’s Beauty Salon to study the hairstyles pictured in the window. Perhaps that’s what she needs to lift her spirits: a new hairdo. Something different. Life-changing. She remembers a phrase from a book she read (she wrote it down in her diary): “Loose tendrils of hair softened her face.” How do you get that in a hairdo? The trouble is, most heroines have blond hair, light and silky, or at worst flowing auburn hair — it’s the men who have stubborn black hair like hers. Women in books whose hair is said to be like shining glass or polished wood or the black of a starless night tend to be half-men or loose or wicked. Inside, she can see Signora Abruzzi sitting in the dark with her thin dry hair in curlers, her beaky nose in a magazine. She’d go in and turn the lights on for her, but that’s the old tattle who got Angela in trouble during her dark ages. Hard to imagine Widow Abruzzi ever eliciting moans of ecstasy, but then that’s true of anyone that old. It’s just awful how the body lets you down. You only have a moment, and when it’s gone… She shudders, crosses herself, and hurries on.

Further disappointments await her in Doc Foley’s. Stacy’s not there and the waffle griddle’s not working because the power is out. Angela loves their blueberry waffles with strawberry syrup and ice cream and crispy bacon on the side. She has to make do with just the syrup and ice cream. Because they are afraid the ice cream will melt with the power off they’re offering it at half price until it comes back on again, so she orders up a double portion. Stacy is probably over at the First National, but Angela doesn’t have the nerve yet to go back there. She feels terribly guilty about something, but she doesn’t know what, and it doesn’t seem fair. She’s not the one who has done anything wrong.

The shy, spindly soda fountain girl (what’s her name? Becky?) lingers at her table when she brings the ice cream. She has added some chocolate cookies for free and Angela thanks her for them. She’s not pretty, but at least she has no worries about weight. Of the magic numbers—36–24–36—she has only the middle one, straight up and down. Awkwardly, the girl asks about Tommy. Angela wonders what she knows and doesn’t know and whether or not she’s salting the wound. Well, surely she knows nothing; she’s not part of Angie’s crowd. She admires Angela the same way that Angela admires Stacy, and she’s just trying to be friendly. Angela smiles and says Tommy’s just great and she likes her bracelet.

“Oh, it’s only a cheap thing I won in a carnival…”

“It’s nice.” Angela feels generous and wise, a beautiful woman of the world, a model for sweet homely girls like Becky, if that’s her name. Angela does not seek worldly goods like money, power, fame, or even beauty. All she truly wants is to be regarded in some modest fashion as the Virgin is regarded. Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve! That’s her model. Blessed art Thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb. Which thought — yet another disappointment — depresses her again. She got through her last period with difficulty, not wanting anyone to see her in here buying tampons after all the fuss she’d made. She still hasn’t figured out yet how to catch up to her own history. The girl continues to stand there, so Angela, fishing about for something final to say, borrows a line from Stacy, which she has also written in her diary. “A friend once told me,” she says, “that love is not an island. I liked that.”

“Tommy was in earlier for sausage and scrambled eggs,” the girl says. “He had that funny thing on his nose. The power was still on then. He said it was his last breakfast special. He said he was leaving town forever.”

Angela smiles, hoping her makeup is hiding the flush. And that she won’t get sick. “He was teasing,” she says. “He had to run an errand today for his father. Because of, you know, what’s happening out at the mine hill. Tommy is becoming very important at the bank.” The stupid girl doesn’t say anything. She just stares at her.

Should Angela decide to risk a visit, she would find the bank closed, for Officer Wallace has called to say that Mr. Cavanaugh wants the doors locked until further notice, and they have done that, continuing to serve only those customers who are already in the bank. It’s like an extra day of holiday added to the long weekend, except that he asked them to stay until he got back. But why must they lock up so early? The bank often closes during power failures, but Mrs. Wetherwax, who is filling in for Angela and Stacy, took the phone call and she said the officer made it seem much more urgent than that. So many horrible things have happened of late, almost anything seems possible. And now the phones are dead, too. Just before they closed up, Mrs. Catter came in with Mrs. Smith, and she told them about it and they tried them, and sure enough, they are dead. Mr. Gus Baird, who almost always comes into the bank at this hour, does a little waltzing turn and sings: “All alone, by the telephone, waiting for a ring a ting a ling!” and they all laugh nervously. There’s an irate gentleman speaking with Mr. Minicozzi in Mr. Cavanaugh’s office about the foreclosure on his house (he can be heard plainly all the way out here on the bank floor, and his language isn’t nice), and when he leaves they’ll tell Mr. Minicozzi about the policeman’s call and ask him what it means. He always seems to know what’s happening. Mr. Beeker of the hardware store, just being let out of the locked front door, says he hopes it doesn’t mean the bank is running out of money, and the city hall janitor leaving at the same time — he has been in making a withdrawal, which leaves his account almost empty because the monthly payroll checks are late — says that as long as they have Mr. Beeker’s millions on deposit, there should be no problem, and they all laugh at that and feel a little less nervous afterwards.

Young Mrs. Piccolotti, who is in picking up rolls of coins for the family grocery (they have all had a turn cuddling her cute baby), says the trouble is probably the fault of that awful religious cult out at the edge of town; they’re completely crazy and they don’t belong here. That upsets Mrs. Catter and she says that many of them are friends of hers and have lived in this town just as long as Mrs. Piccolotti’s family, and they are decent Christian people. Religion is a private matter between a person and her God, and no one should interfere with it or make fun of it, the Constitution says so. They all agree and apologize if they’ve said something out of place. Mrs. Smith says she thinks she wants to go home. Mrs. Catter says in fact maybe they should start praying and repenting of their sins, because something very important might be happening, just like it says in the Bible, and Mrs. Piccolotti sighs and says, that’s just what I was talking about, and then she clams up because she’s the only Catholic in the bank except for Noemi and Mr. Minicozzi. It’s getting a bit warm without the air conditioner, and arguments don’t make it any cooler.

Mr. Baird changes the subject by saying he’d really love to see them all in bikinis on a beach in Brazil, that he might make a trip down there himself just for the amazing sight (he rolls his eyes in his comical way), and since they’re the only people in town with their hands on real money, they ought to consider one of his special end-of-summer holiday opportunities. Mrs. Wetherwax knows Mr. Baird as the rather tedious class clown, but to the younger girls he’s the bald guy with a bowtie who runs the local travel agency and is president of the Rotary Club. He wanders in and out of the bank most days, looking for people to tell his silly jokes to.

Then the phone rings and everybody jumps. It’s back on! No, it’s only Mrs. Wetherwax’s husband from the phone company, up a pole somewhere and tapping in. He tells them that the motorcyclists are back, what looks like three or four different gangs, and that they have blown up the power station and phone exchange and radio station. Armored trucks full of soldiers have arrived at the edge of town and there are more helicopters out by the county airport. They should all stay where they are and not go out on the streets. The motorcyclists might be converging upon the center.

In Mick’s Bar & Grill on Main Street, a block or so from the bank, the former Chamber of Commerce secretary has just ordered up another iced vodka when he suddenly remembers why he is supposed to stay off the gin. “Tag that with my social security number, Mick. I’ll be right back,” he says and staggers toward the door, singing “Joshua fit de battle ob Jericho! Jericho!” But the walls do not come tumbling down, and after slapping up against one or another without the door ever finding him in spite of the ever-helpful directions shouted out by his fellow klatchers (to him? to the door?), it is he who succumbs at last to the remorseless force of gravity.

Consequently, the intended object of his quest, young Reverend Joshua Jehoshaphat Jenkins, prospective pastor of the local First Presbyterian Church, arrives after overnight travels at the West Condon bus station unmet. There are numbers he could call, but being a self-reliant fellow, he deposits his bag with the stationmaster (“I see you are planning to settle in here, mister, and have brung your own bricks,” the stationmaster says sourly) and sets out upon the wet glittering streets on his own in search of his future place of employment, humming his favorite Sunday School tunes because he cannot seem to get them out of his head this morning. The downtown near the bus station is full of smiling people, young and old, emerging into the sunlight after the heavy rains. There are SALE signs everywhere, church bells are ringing — it’s a happy day.

Joshua believes in the simultaneous veracity of various and even contradictory modes of discourse, and as he leaves the center and enters the residential neighborhoods, he chooses the descriptive one, which finds its truths in perceptive accuracy, not narrative coherence or moral judgment. Thus, while his observation that with the hot sun he is somewhat overdressed in his new three-piece corduroy suit remains within the descriptive mode, the reasons for his discomfiture (good first impressions!) do not. Not that the descriptive mode is without its own rationale. If everything in existence is God’s handiwork, as Joshua believes it is, then close descriptive attention to one’s surroundings is an approach to understanding God, and — reverentially — feeling His presence. In that respect, this sight of a bountiful garden of hollyhocks and sunflowers is equal to that of a dog squatting to relieve itself, and Joshua mentally records it all, finding in the activity, in spite of distant wailing sirens and a gathering awareness that he has forgotten to have breakfast, a profound peace and satisfaction. “He gave us eyes to see them, and lips that we might tell,” he sings to himself, “how great is God Almighty, Who has made all things well!” Bright and beautiful, yes, all things certainly are, must be. Although, slipping momentarily out of the descriptive mode into the utilitarian one, he could do frankly with a little snap, crackle and pop.

As he thinks that, astonishingly, those are in fact the sounds he hears, as if conjured from his hunger, but caused, he sees, by the distant approach down this sunny tree-lined street of a procession of army trucks. Ah. The mere descriptive mode will perhaps no longer suffice.

Out at the city hospital, the head nurse, on her own up on the second floor, has just hung up from alerting the doctors, nurses, and hospital emergency team to the power blackout — must get the generators turned on to keep the life support systems running and the operation theater functional — when a busty foreign woman and four armed men, one wearing a black stocking mask, another a silk black tie over a luminous flame-red T-shirt, storm up to her station, poke guns in her face, and demand to know what room a man named Suggs is in. She points down the hall, gives them a number, and faints. Seems to. One of them gives her a kick — which seems to satisfy him, or her — and they dash off, their boots clocking on the polished floor. Shots are fired, hundreds of them seems like, as she scrambles desperately, heart pounding, into the restroom at the nurses’ station and locks the door. When they come thumping back they notice her absence, shout death threats, not all in the mother tongue, and shoot up the place. Bullets come smashing through the restroom door, but she is as far away from it as possible, hunkered down behind the toilet. “Basta, Rupe!” she hears the woman say. “Don’ waste your beebees!” “Two minutes!” another calls out. When the boots and voices rattle away and it’s quiet again, Maudie peeks out through the bullet holes. They’re gone. Just the same, she keeps her head below counter height as she hurries in a squat past the ransacked medicine cabinet (more shots below, an explosion), and grabs up the phone. The line’s dead.

Mayor Castle snorts like a horse, roaring har-har sounds. He might be laughing. Georgie has been trying to weasel out of working as a mole for the mayor in Charlie Bonali’s Dagotown Devil Dogs, but needing a job and having already eaten an indigestible bite out of the small bill the mayor gave him, he has been proposing alternative, less life-threatening schemes for keeping tabs on Charlie. “Hell, I didn’t ask you to see me about that, Georgie,” the mayor booms. “You drove a cab up in the city for some years, ain’t that so? Well, I’m just a country boy and city traffic gives me the running shits. Besides, I lost my goddamn license. Something fucking wrong with a town when the mayor can lose his license just because he’s had a few, but that’s the kind of pisshole we live in, right? So right now I need somebody who can get me to the international airport fast and keep his fucking mouth shut. I can trust you, right?” Georgie grins and nods. Of course, he’s always grinning. But now he means it. He can even start working on that lump of pie sitting like a stone in his belly. The mayor lifts a briefcase from the floor, sets it on the desk between them, opens it. It’s full of money. More money than Georgie has ever seen. “There’s over a mill here, Georgie. I’m thinking Brazil. If we make it, we’ll split this pile 60–40. That’s several hunderd Gs for you, minus expenses. Decent taxi fare. We’ll take the official limo. You game?” Hell yes, he’s game. Besides, it occurs to him that Castle didn’t show him that money for nothing. It was to let him know that if he said no, he’d shoot him. “When are we leaving?” he asks. He’s grinning, and the mayor grins back. “Now.” That gives him brief pause. What is he leaving behind? Niente. “All right,” Georgie says, “but I need an advance. Three-thirty, that’s all. It’s to pay off a loan. The thirty is interest.” “Hey, Giorgio, you’re outa here forever. Forget it.” “Can’t. La mammina. It’s all she’s got. We can drop it off on the way out.”

When the Kid assigned him the high school, Houndawg said it was summertime, it would just be empty buildings, ditto the grade schools the others got assigned, and the Kid said, if it belongs to the enemies of the Big One, it’s never empty. Sure enough, it isn’t. There are three army trucks there, guys in summer khakis unloading gear, going in and out of the school gym. Jackpot! “We’re disabling them three trucks,” he says. “Don’t worry about personnel less they get in your way.” Houndawg handled explosives in the army, but this stuff is pretty crude. Just dangerous footlong firecrackers leaking their innards, really, that he and Hacker fused and partly bound in three- and five-stick packs yesterday while they were sitting out the rain. Thinking about Runt. Feeling the wrath. Things could go wrong. The timing has to be perfect. So far so good. Houndawg is a reluctant holy warrior, skeptical of the zealotry that motivates most of the Wrath, but they fill the aimless loneliness that had threatened to steal away what little life he had left in him, and he’s grateful for that. He’s having fun for the first time in a long time, not since the war — even if only for a short time, maybe just this one day long. He has the luxury of the ex-sheriff’s high-powered rifle, but limited ammo, just what they found in the sheriff’s trunk when they were stuffing the kid in there minus what he pumped into the head of that evil old cocksucker who killed Paulie. Silver bullets. He has to make them count. After knocking out the power and phones as a unit, the Wrath divided up into three teams of four to hit a sequence of separate targets simultaneously, synchronizing their moves with stopwatches, with the Kid roaming between the three. Houndawg’s team is the least stable of them. Brainerd is cool, even with one hand disabled, but Sick has been shooting up and X has been eating uppers like they were a bag of Red Hots. It’s the only time X ever smiles, but it’s a twitchy smile and his set-apart eyes jiggle. Still, he’s probably safer than Sick, who has painted his face red to match his boots and put on feathers and seems to be living in some other reality zone. Houndawg, on a heavy dose of painkillers himself, takes one of the trucks, assigns Brainerd and X the other two, explains to them how to pop the hood, and tells Sick to give them cover. “We got just two minutes. In and out. If you have a problem with the nitro, don’t try to solve it. Okay, let’s move.” They have to take a guy out on the way in, catching him by surprise. Nothing personal. He can hear Sick firing away, who knows at what, while he’s planting the squibs. “One minute!” he yells. Other people are shooting now, and he worries Sick may have taken a hit. “Now!” The three of them tear out of there, but Sick’s not in sight. Then he comes backing out of the building, firing away, jumps on his bike and joins them as the building explodes behind him, the trucks blowing up as he guns past them, head down, wahooing like an Indian on the warpath, his topknot fluttering on his gleaming red skull like a raised flag. “Three fucking bells!” Houndawg laughs as they roar away. He can hear shooting, but they’re gone from there.

Franny Lawson is keeping her sister-in-law Tessie company in the sheriff’s office while her husband Steve is out at the mine hill with the Christian Patriots, doing his thing for God and country. They’re talking about what to name the baby when Sheriff Smith radios in from his car to say he’s on his way in but he’s stuck in traffic. He tried to get away as soon as he got her call about the power plant but still got caught in the jam-up. Did they reach his wife Lucy? Tessie explains about the phone going dead so she’s not sure Lucy got the message, but says that, yes, she was at the beauty shop. The sheriff tells them to shut down the office and go take cover. Gratefully, they do so.

It is a time for thanksgiving. The Brunists have reached the summit of the Mount of Redemption under a midday sun now sallying forth from the clouds as if joining their march and have entered into their outlined tabernacle church, though their numbers exceed its capacity and spill out over the hillside. Children are playing (they have got up a game down by the empty graves and are splashing in and out of them) and their elders are relaxing from the heightened tensions of the morning, when death and injury seemed all too near a prospect. There is still, however, an air of apprehension. The sudden dispersion of the authorities, releasing the Mount to them: was it God watching over them, shepherding them to higher ground, or is something more or other happening? Those ominous ker-whumps in the distance… But they are here now where they belong. Mr. Ross McDaniel, a man from the West of fierce faith and fortitude, has promised them that the Mount is theirs and they will not be moved, and they believe him. They all share the blessed hope of the rapturing of the church by Lord Jesus and the visible return of Christ with His saints to reign on earth for one thousand years, and today could be the day for that — as could any other, but as their young prophet and evangelist Darren Rector says, these days are overripe with omen.

A Brunist Defender and pastor who arrived this morning by bus from east Tennessee with two sturdy members of his congregation, rifles strapped to their backs, steps into the center of the outlined cross to add his voice to the exhortations and prayers of gratitude for their safe passage up here and to lead the assembled Followers in a prayer of remembrance for their fallen leader, Brother Ben Wosznik, a kind and holy man of unbending courage, tireless endeavor, and profound faith. He tells of Brother Ben’s visit with Sister Clara three years ago to his “little church in the wildwood,” as he calls it, and of all the souls that were saved that day through the mere power of the man’s inspired singing. In his memory, they sing — joined by many of the sheriff’s remaining deputies — some of the famous Brunist songs Brother Ben wrote and recorded, “The Circle and the Cross,” “She Fell That We Might Live” (heads swivel thoughtfully toward the mine road, fingers point, the tale is whispered), and “The White Bird of Glory.” This latter number, with its recounting of “the disaster that struck old Number Nine,” reminds them that they are standing on ground hallowed not only by those members of the faith who stood here on the Day of Redemption and suffered death, incarceration, and persecution because of it, but also by all the brave hardworking men, friends and loved ones of many present, who perished beneath their feet in the worst mine disaster the area has ever known. There are many “amens” and “God blesses” and spontaneous prayers for the souls of the deceased, not excluding the saintly Ely Collins, whose leg is still down there somewhere. His widow, also Brother Ben’s, is said to be too stricken by grief to attend, and she is remembered in their prayers, as are her unfortunate daughter and Brother John P. Suggs in his hospital bed. What a thrill to know he’ll be raptured with an undamaged brain, and Brother Ely with his leg back on! Sheriff Puller, who was so supportive and protective, is also remembered, as is the oldest boy of Brother Roy and Sister Thelma Coates, both Royboy and the sheriff so cruelly murdered. Sister Thelma lets out a sad little wail. Sometimes the world seems completely insane, but they feel protected by each other, and by their faith, the truth they share. There are those who say they should also pray for the souls of the motorcyclists who died in the camp blast, for that is the charitable and pious thing to do, and Sister Sarah Baxter, who has lost her wayward middle son in it, especially seems to want this, but her husband scowls and turns his back, and this part of the Defender’s eulogistic prayer is shortened to a passing mention of their youngest boy, Paul, who will hopefully return to them now that his older brother has passed away.

Reverend Baxter turns back, frowning at his wife in consternation. Where, he wants to know, are their two remaining children? She starts to cry. She doesn’t know. Young Abner, Brother Darren explains, asked permission to go check on the safety of the camp now that it is emptied out except for a mobile home or two. Young Abner said he thought he heard the sound of motorcycles in that direction and Brother Darren proposed they send a team, but Young Abner was well-armed and insisted he could handle it on his own and would be back shortly. Brother Darren hasn’t seen Amanda, but her brother was watching over her, and she might have followed him there. A further prayer is offered up for the safety of Young Abner Baxter and his sister, and another for the protection of the Wilderness Camp, where many here on the hillside will now be living, should this day be succeeded by another.

And where is Amanda Baxter? Far from the Mount of Redemption, sitting in her panties astride a motorcycle behind a biker known only as X outside the blazing West Condon Church of the Nazarene, and smiling her sweet winsome smile. “Hey, that’s my sister,” Kid Rivers says, pulling off his black stocking mask to give his face some air. He has just arrived from the hospital, leaving Hacker’s team after finishing off Old Man Suggs and blowing up the ambulance, Hacker and the others meanwhile on their way now to leave the Wrath’s signature at a couple of fat-cat churches. “She’s mental, man.”

“Yeah, well, X is mental. So what?” Sick says, speaking for his silent buddy. Both of them look dangerously spaced out.

“Why is she only in her underwear?”

“How we found her. Said she lived somewhere around here and was looking for her clothes.”

“That was five years ago.” The Kid doesn’t like it and may have to take care of X when all this is over, but on the other hand, it can’t be worse than living with the old man. He asks his sister where the others are and she only smiles dippily and points. The church camp, maybe. Or the hill. Probably why they’ve had such an easy run so far. His old man’s moves have sucked everybody out there. Perfect. All falling into place, like it was meant to be. When the news about the Wrath gets to them, they’ll be heading back in, but it has given them an extra minute or two. He raises a fist of gratitude to the Big One. Bells are ringing somewhere. Sirens off in the distance. Fire truck heading out toward the power plant. The bad guys are always dumb and do the wrong thing. He and Houndawg exchange quick notes on the hospital and the high school. Army trucks! Cool. And now his old man’s church going up in flames.

Chopper rattling overhead. Doesn’t look army. News creeps, probably. Trying to hang on to history when it’s already too late. Could be a complication, though, when they try to get out of here. “Shall I take that whirlybird out?” Houndawg asks.

“Yeah. But not yet. There are more. Wait till we get downtown and they start flocking. Easier to shoot into a bevy than hit a single bird.” Something old Roy Coates used to say. Coates will be browned off about his kid. He’s a good hunter. Don’t want to get within his shooting range. Kid Rivers glances at his sister (should he tell her something? maybe, but he doesn’t know what) and at his stopwatch, pulls his mask back on. “We got less than twelve minutes. Deacon should be at the Baptists by now. It’s big and brick and has a lot of steps. They may need help. See you at city hall.”

But Deacon’s team is not at the Baptist church and there’s no sign they’ve been here. Rifle fire explodes from the doorway and The Phantom takes a glancing hit off the taillight mount — he rockets away from there. Word must be getting around. Those bells are banging away in Dagotown like a fire alarm. Catholic church bells. Where Deac was headed next. He’s in trouble. The Kid heads that way, but through back streets, head down, expecting to be shot at. He reaches the asphalt basketball courts and parking lot behind the church. A guy jumps out of a car with a gun in his hand and The Kid shoots him, the shot drowned out by the headachy bells. He’s not dead. And then he is dead. The Kid busts a window, crawls into the basement, his jaw clenched under his stocking mask, but he’s grinning, too. He could fly if he wanted to.

In Mick’s, Burt Robbins is venting his anger against the racket of the bells. While on the city council he got an ordinance passed forbidding the ringing of church bells except on Sundays. The Catholics were the main abusers. Rang them every day at dawn, noon, sundown. He stopped that. Toot sweet. Can’t have a goddamned immigrant minority moving in and imposing their way of life on everyone else. He makes a few snarling remarks on the theme that affect none of Mick’s customers, but ignore the fact that Mick himself is a Catholic, potato-famine Irish on his mother’s side, who knows what bastardy on the other. Mick says it sounds more like something’s wrong. Church bells aren’t rung like that. Burt’s lip curls in disdain. From the floor Jim Elliott can be heard crooning “The Balls of St. Mary.”

Then Earl Goforth, who owns the skating rink and bowling alley and has a face grotesquely chewed up from the last war, comes rushing in and growls through the side of his mouth, “What do you make of this?” He is carrying a transistor radio, but the signal is so staticky nothing can be understood.

“What I make of it, Earl, is you need a fucking new radio,” Robbins says with customary bonhomie.

“No, I just heard. It’s a station from over in the next county. It comes in better out on the street.” He holds the radio up to the one half-ear he has left; the other is just a button. “They say our power plant was blowed up. The phone exchange, too. People killt.”

“I told you it wasn’t my fault,” Mick says in his squeaky voice.

“Also, there’s something about the hospital and the National Guard, but I couldn’t get it.”

“National Guard!”

“It’s them!” Robbins says in a voice that sounds like anger but is more likely fear. “They’re still here! Lock the doors, Mick, don’t let anybody in! And stay away from the windows!”

Vince Bonali and Sal Ferrero, gloomily shooting the shit on Vince’s front porch not far from where the bells are ringing, also remark on them, wonder if they should wander over and see what’s going on. Somebody getting married? But Sal’s wife has the Ferrero car, needing it for the hospital, and Charlie has Vince’s old wreck out at the mine hill — he takes it now without even asking — and that’s excuse enough to stay where they are. It was raining when they first sat down here. The lights were on, the phone worked, and their coffee was hot. Now, except for the rain stopping, all that’s changed for the worse. Their mood, though, has not; it couldn’t. They’ve been sitting here, screened by the dripping of the clogged and rusted-out gutters, talking about the hard times they’ve been through, which are only getting harder. About this fucked-up town and those murderous lunatics out at the church camp, who have brought all this misery down on them. About the true religion, which is about all they’ve got and which should be of more help than it is, and about women they’ve known who have grown old, pals too, many dead, and how distant all that seems. Conversations they’ve had many times before. About all that’s different this morning is the news about Sal’s father-in-law, Nazario Moroni, who died last night in the hospital, not unexpectedly. Not the easiest guy to get on with; Ange had difficulties with his old man. Gabriela did, too. But in mean times, he was a guy you could count on, and Vince had always somewhat modeled his own life as a union man on old Nazario. Gabriela had to stop by the First National this morning to ask for a loan to pay for her father’s funeral; if they turn her down the only hope left to avoid a pauper’s grave is the mine union, which is in tatters. They gave Dave Osborne a big sendoff and he didn’t even have the guts to see it out to the end; cranky old Nonno Moroni was worth ten Dave Osbornes, but except for a couple of senile old farts at the Hog no one will even notice he’s gone. Several times already Sal has sighed and said he’d better get back and tend his chickens, they’re all that’s keeping them from starving, and he does so again, and Vince remembers to thank him again for the eggs and coffee he brought this morning and takes another sip from the cold cup. Sal says much as they love the Piccolotti salomeats, they’re reduced nowadays to eating cheap breakfast sausage bought directly from a backyard pig farmer — who knows what’s ground up in it, but they haven’t got sick yet — and Vince says he couldn’t even afford that. Sal actually stubs out his cigarette and gets to his feet and stretches and then Vince does too and says he’ll walk Sal partway, wander past the church and see what all the bell-ringing is about.

By the time Gabriela Ferrero and her sister-in-law, Concetta Moroni, reach the hospital, senior staff have arrived and put some order to the chaos. The destroyed ambulance is still smoldering, there have been casualties, and the front lobby has been heavily damaged, but they have restored emergency power by way of the standby hospital generator and have cordoned off the building. Gabriela and Concetta have been told to go home or wait indefinitely in the parking lot or the basement canteen. The staff has secured two floors for receiving casualties, dispensed calmatives to the traumatized nurses, set up volunteer guards at the entrances, and they have moved quickly through the hospital to reassure patients in their darkened rooms, many of whom are terrified by everything they’ve heard, while others only complain about the television being off and ask them to please fix it or else give them a reduction in their bill.

The fire department, with its crew of four, stopped by the hospital on the way back from the power station (they brought in two bodies and three injured workers), but after a quick dousing of the blazing ambulance, they have gone on to the high school to deal with the fires and carnage at the basketball gym, serving now as both fire engine and ambulance. They used this gym after the mine disaster as a temporary morgue. It’s one again. Governor Nolan Kirkpatrick, visiting what’s left of the decimated National Guard unit, confers with school officials, looking like a man who has just learned he is suffering from a fatal illness. He has had the young officer in charge call up reinforcements and more state police on his orders and send an official plea for help to the federal government, which he always denigrates in his election campaigns. Now he commandeers some yellow school buses parked for the summer over near the football field, ordering the remaining troops out to the mine hill in some of them and sending the others to the county airport to meet the new Guardsmen being flown in. Fire Chief Mort Whimple picks up three more firefighters from among the troops, but he is beginning to feel the hopelessness of his task. The high school fire is not yet under control, he can see smoke rising from other locations in the town — can smell it in the air — and the water pressure is rapidly dwindling. On his way here, he saw flooding in the streets. Thought it was just from the rain until he saw all the open hydrants.

Much as Baptiste loathes the Catholic Church and disbelieves all its teachings, he still could not stop himself from genuflecting as he entered (Deacon laughed at him), laden with his grave tidings. He has paused in the narthex to peer in on what awaits him while Deacon and Spider clamber silently up into the choir loft to cover him, Thaxton standing guard out front on his motorcycle. The Kid’s carefully mapped plans are ticking along like clockwork. It’ll all be over before anyone knows what’s happening. The nave looks empty, though there is a disturbing fragrance of incense, a banging of bells. Baptiste is not unfamiliar with the Kid’s vision of a Holy War. He was raised Catholic in an illiterate dirt-poor Acadiana family, and he was first taught about the violent way the world would end by a mad French priest who wore a haircloth and shaved his head and went barefoot in all weather. When Baptiste was nine years old, the priest, after first scaring the pants off him with his fiery description of the Last Judgment—Dies Irae! — then fucked him, telling him it was the sacred route to eternal life and salvation from the horrors of hell, praying feverishly all the time he humped away, and making Baptiste pray, too, adding that his tears were holy and he should not be ashamed of them. This path to salvation was not a short one. It lasted almost four years before Baptiste, consumed by hatred of the stinking priest and inspired by a folktale his grand-père had told him, reached between his legs with a knife and did a little mid-fuck creative gelding. He told the priest his screams were holy and he should not be ashamed of them. Last time he was in a church, until now. His grand-père, Pépé Jules, was an old-time Bayou fiddler who spoke no English and taught him all the best Cajun swearwords, most of them as used against priests and nuns. Pépé Jules also fucked him. Called it making family music. Baptiste never liked it, but he never hated him for it, because there was no praying, just singing and laughing. Pépé bought him his first whore and his first motorcycle, on which Baptiste ran errands for him, learning the neige trade. When Pépé Jules died one night in a tavern knife fight, Baptiste hit the road and hasn’t looked back since. Mostly lonely years, but he is finding a home now with the Wrath, who treat him with a respect he has not known before. He glances at his stopwatch and then, crossing himself again, pushes on into the aromatic church, moving quickly, intending to place the strapped packets of dynamite under the covered altar, but an ugly baggy-eyed priest rises up from behind it with a rifle, and before he can draw a gun or light the fuse, brings Baptiste to his knees with a shot in the gut. More shots ring out from the loft above him and the priest crumples. Without warning (where the hell is Thaxton?), the church is suddenly swarming with locals. Baptiste lurches to his feet, but meaty types barking in some kind of wop wrestle him to the floor and pound his head against it as if trying to crack it open. Can’t reach the batons. Just inches away. Baptiste needs help. He’s not going to get it.

The man above him in the Presbyterian pulpit, who says he is Jesus and looks and talks like Jesus and for whom young Reverend Joshua J. Jenkins has no other name, is explaining that the end of the world is not an event but a kind of knowledge, and has therefore already happened, at least for those in the know; and those who are not in the know are living in sin, are they not, for ignorance is itself sinful. Whether he is addressing Joshua or the anxious woman in the silky peach-colored gown who has come tiptoeing in or someone else altogether is not clear. Earlier, when introducing himself, the man said he was often spoken of as the Incarnation of the Word, an expression that has fascinated and solaced Joshua in the sense of the Word being the design in the mind of the Architect of the Universe, that Word made flesh at one transcendental moment in history, a concept grandly profound and nobly expressed, but Jesus, this person calling himself that, a madman probably, said that it was, as they say in the fairytales, just so, and that that word he incarnated was Oblivion. “Or sometimes Desolation, the Abyss, Vanity — there are synonyms.” Said with the most unnerving of blissful smiles, marred only by the strange startled eyes, as if someone else were staring out through them.

This is not the interview experience Joshua had anticipated, that for which he has prepared by carefully reviewing church dogma and history, by assembling a vast array of Biblical and philosophical quotations as well as his own personal meditations, by outlining several possible inaugural sermons, and by attiring himself in this suffocating corduroy suit. Nor is he certain which mode of discourse he’s now in. It is like that of dreams, but it is not that of dreams — unless he is still on that bus, and he does not think he is. It feels like a mode more in tune with all those Sunday school songs that have been running through his head all morning. Now it is the man’s proposal that they all proceed out to some hill, one occupied — if the woman’s opinion, frantically stated, is correct — by dangerous crazy people. “We shall take Mr. Joshua J. Jenkins with us,” he says. “He is the grandson of a king. He will protect us. Come! Follow me!”

“But I can’t!” the lady says. Her sorrowful gaze reminds Joshua of portraits of the Virgin, cradling the head of her crucified Son. “My condition!” She tightens the gown over the little bulge in her midriff in demonstration that she is expecting. Young Reverend Jenkins is not accustomed to such intimacies; his gaze flies to the ceiling then drops to his new shoes. But is Jesus…? he is wondering with alarm. Has he…? Well, of course, he is not Jesus. Is he? “Please don’t go!” the lady pleads. “We could — we could go use the bath in the manse again?”

Whereupon Jesus pats her in a shockingly familiar way and says, “I have no choice, beautiful lady. I am who I am. Take courage! I will return again unto you, as is said. Come then, Mr. Jenkins,” he adds, stepping down from the podium and taking his arm. “Off we go! Just a closer walk with me!”

“I was just… I was just humming that!”

“Of course you were. Let us set forth now to sow our tidings, short of wholly glad though they be!”

At the car (church bells are ringing somewhere, like a movie soundtrack), Joshua’s companion pushes him in, slams the door, and hops into the driver’s seat. He pulls his gown up over his bony knees and reaches for the key miraculously waiting in the ignition. By now, Joshua has not the faintest idea who the man is or if he is just a man. He cannot really believe he is Jesus Christ — that’s absurd — but at the same time he finds it wondrous that a man of the first century knows how to drive this contemporary machine, a skill Joshua himself has not yet mastered. As though reading his thoughts, Jesus — or his impersonator — says: “If God had been the big deal they say He was, I could have ridden into Jerusalem in one of these instead of on a damned donkey! Right?”

They are about to pull out when four motorcyclists, three men and a woman, roar up in front of the church. Two of the men go running inside, then come running out again. As they watch in amazement, they are discovered. “Down!” Jesus commands and hauls him roughly below the dashboard. Bullets smash through the windshield. There is a loud crack like a thunderclap and fragments of glass strike the car, followed by louder thumps. “It is not Being that is ineffable,” Jesus remarks, uncorking a bottle he has conjured from under the driver’s seat and taking a long thirsty drink before offering it to Joshua, who can only shake his head helplessly, “but Becoming.”

As the roar of the motorcycles fades away, the lady in the flesh-colored smock comes staggering out of the back door of the church and throws herself into the back seat. “Oh my God!” she cries.

“Yes?”

“What’s happening?”

Young Reverend Jenkins has difficulty finding his voice. When at last he is able, he wheezes: “Could you just drop me off at the bus station, please?”

Georgie’s mother slams the door in his face, but when she sees him waving the bills at her she opens it again. “Are you in trouble, Giorgio?” she asks, peering out at the mayor’s fancy black car.

“No, Mama, my ship’s come in, just like I told you. But I won’t be seeing you for a while.” She reaches one claw out for the money—“With interest,” he says — and he blows her a kiss through the tattered screen door—“Ciao, bella!”—and bounces down the steps back out to the limo. He has just popped in behind the wheel when a loud explosion rocks the neighborhood and the church bells stop ringing. “Hey! That mighta been our church!”

“Their church, Georgie. We don’t live here no more. Now let’s get the fuck outa here while we still can! We’ve wasted too much time already. And don’t go near the goddamned mine. Head over toward Wilmer on the Waterton road, pick up the highway at Daviston.”

The Waterton road, a route (alas, poor Ruby) Georgie knows all too well. But they’re already too late. Traffic approaches from both lanes, horns blaring, lights flashing, sirens wurping. Un ingorgo. They both swear simultaneously in their separate tongues. “Tieniti le palle!” Georgie shouts, and he throws on the brights and jams his foot down on the accelerator, heading straight at the oncoming traffic, dipping down at the last second into the muddy ditch, then racing along the edges of it, swooping from one side to another at top speed not to get stuck in the muck in the middle. Kicked-up mud, sticks and stones rattle on the underbody. Suddenly, just ahead: a culvert! Trees on the right, double lane of traffic up on the left! But they’ve reached the back end of the wrong-lane file, or almost. Georgie swings up onto the road at the last possible moment—“Eight ball into the top corner!” he cries — picking up a ding on the last car’s bumper and a scrape off the culvert (in his imagination, la bella Marcella is showing her ass or else it’s the Virgin Mary’s and he is worshipfully kissing it), and they’re on the way.

“Fucking Christ!” the mayor gasps, turned stone white. “Hope I packed some spare pants!”

The West Condon police chief, Dee Romano, trapped in the traffic heading into town on the Waterton road, has just witnessed the amazing maneuvers of the mayor’s limousine, the madly grinning Georgie Lucci at the wheel, the terrified mayor sitting rigidly beside him, gripping the dashboard with white knuckles, and he wonders if he has just seen Castle being kidnapped. Some shit Dee’s city cousins are up to? Dee, leaving the mine hill a few minutes too late to avoid the jam-up, has cut cross-country to a less-used road but found himself sucked up in a noisy congestion of police cars, ambulances, fire engines, and ordinary traffic — the latter headed in the contrary direction, the drivers utterly confused by the horns and bleating sirens. Except for a crossroad or two, there are no pullovers on this old road, just ditches to either side, so when cars stop in panic, everybody stops. His fault. He has called them all here. Only the state police motorcycles, weaving through the snarl, are getting through, and Dee flags one of them down, asks for a ride in, turning the squad car over to Louie Testatonda. “We’re going to the Catholic church,” he shouts in the state trooper’s ear. He has just been on the squawkie to Monk Wallace back at the station, learning that the bikers have not only blown up the power plant and phone exchange, but the rumor reaching him is that they’ve also attacked the radio station and the hospital, done some serious damage to the National Guard at their high school bivouac area, and now seem to be targeting the churches. “St. Stephen’s?” “Yup, purty sure,” Monk said. “Big noise summers over there.” Now Dee calls back to let Monk know he’s hitching a ride in with a state trooper and to ask him to send somebody over to ask his cousin Gina Juliano if she knows anything about the mayor. “Send who?” Voice thin. Can hardly hear him. “I’m all alone here.”

Four men are carrying the old priest out of the church and loading him gingerly into Vince Bonali’s car, Vince’s son Charlie giving the orders, just as Dee swings up on the back of the trooper’s motorbike. Dust and smoke are still roiling out of the double front doors like escaping demons. “There’s more people hurt inside,” Charlie shouts, and two or three guys go running in.

Dee sends the state trooper into the town center, tells him how to find the police station. “If you have to shoot, shoot to kill,” he says.

“Where’s the goddamned ambulance, Romano?” Charlie wants to know.

“I don’t think it is no more. Monk told me the hospital got hit too, and things are burning there. There’s some rescue vehicles on the way from towns around, but it’s a mess out there on the roads. What happened to the Monsignor?”

“Got here just too late. Old Bags was trying to win the war on his own and got badly shot up. Don’t think he’ll make it. Those holy-rollers out there on the mine hill were a diversionary tactic, dragging everybody out so as to give their fucking death squad free rein here in town. You can see that now.” Maybe, maybe not. Dee has still not linked up the bikers with the cultists in his mind. Sometimes it seems just the opposite, though admittedly there’s a family connection. That sonuvabitch Baxter. “We did reach the cunt with the explosives before he could set them off and were beating the shit out of him, and we had two or three of his buddies pinned down up in the loft when some motherfucker in a stocking mask popped up from behind the altar and set off the dynamite with gunfire. Blew the fucking hell out of the place. That did it for their bomber pal and two of our people, and there’s others badly hurt in there.” Dee peers in at the murky devastation. Bodies, a lot of wreckage. He can see that the rose window has been partly blown out. He should take control of this, but what’s happened here has happened, and he’s wondering where those godless bastards have gone now. Into town probably, unless they’ve shot their wad. They’re bringing out another victim, still alive, moaning, badly hurt. Old one-armed Bert Martini. “He was brave as hell,” Charlie says, “but he’s short another peg now and will have to play pinochle with his teeth. Besides the asshole who got turned into hamburger there were at least three others. They got away when the explosives went off, but one of them made the mistake of trying to get back to his bike. His body’s over there to the side. There’s another stiff out back. Hate to tell you, I think it’s your cousin Timo. There may be more. Coming in, we saw a chopper tailing somebody out of town, coming our way. We figured it might be one of those cocksuckers and we laid in wait for him. It was. You could tell by all the shit on his bike. He tried to surrender and kept crossing himself to show he was supposedly a Catholic. Didn’t do him any good.”

“You mean, you shot him?”

“He got shot.” Charlie cracks his knuckles, gum snapping in his jaws. “Like it or not, Romano, you’re gonna need guns. You gotta deputize us, give us the legal authority to bring them fuckers in — dead or alive.”

“I got state cops here now.”

“You don’t own ’em.”

They won’t like it. Cavanaugh especially. But to hell with them. Survival, goddamn it. He nods—“Twenty-four hours,” he says — and as Charlie goes loping off to rally his troops, he radios Monk to warn him that the bikers may be headed into town. He can see helicopters hovering there. “Somebody has to get here and get all these people off the streets,” Monk says.

“I just sent a state trooper your way, Monk. Keep an eye out, and lots more reinforcements are coming,” Dee says. “Did you get hold of Gina?”

“Gotta go. I think I’m gonna get busy here.”

“Monk…?”

“Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled,” Jesus says as he drops young Reverend Joshua J. Jenkins off at the darkened bus station. Joshua bangs on the locked door. His precious books! Not far away, he hears the roar of approaching motorcycles. What he feels is the icy chill of the void. Where books are useless. Help! His hat flying, he goes running after the car, now a couple of blocks away, waving his arms frantically — it’s like one of those dreams where he’s trying to hurry through a sea of mud — desperately hoping Jesus can see him in his rearview mirror.

Out on the highway, far from West Condon, Tommy Cavanaugh’s silvery spoke wheels are taking him back to his old university town as if by some will of their own, music blasting to beat back irresolution. He feels some regret, but once you start a move you have to see it through, even if it means committing a foul. Running out on his mother bothers him most. For all the religious craziness that has distanced him from her, he knows she is suffering and that he should not leave her. It’s his father’s fault. When he was a kid they used to sit around on street corners or front porches playing the what-if accident game: Suppose you were in a lifeboat after a shipwreck and both your parents fell half-conscious from the boat and were drowning and you could only save one of them, which would you save? He usually joined the others in choosing his mother, but he loved his dad, maybe even more, and was torn more than he wished to show. A rule of the game was that if you waited for more than five seconds to decide, they both would die. In his mind’s eye, he could see them foundering and he always counted the seconds in his head to let his father live as long as possible. To hell with him now; he’ll have to hack it on his own. He tried to reach Sally before pulling out to apologize for his obnoxious behavior at the motel — shouldn’t have left her there, called her what he did — but only got her mother, who said Sally was not at home. Was there a message? There was none. He has met several Army trucks going the other way and now another convoy passes. Out of curiosity he switches to a news station. And, tires squealing, makes a U-turn.

Signora Abruzzi, reading the movie magazine for the third time, is shocked, shocked! The scandalous lives these people lead! You would think God would deal more harshly with such indecency. Make a public example of them. Thank Heavens for the Last Judgment! Though it’s almost painful to think that they could repent before then and get away with all this sinning. Where’s the justice in that? It makes her angry. A young man in uniform banging in through the beauty shop front door and asking for Lucy Smith startles her. She’s not deaf, he needn’t shout. She tells him that he should mind his manners. Then adds that Mrs. Smith went to the bank with Linda, and he runs out again without even thanking her. What the world is coming to!

The mayor’s secretary, Gina Juliano, is waiting for a telephone call from the President. The mayor was in early today and more demanding than she’d ever seen him, sending her away on ceaseless errands, asking her to go bring him coffee after coffee which he just let go cold, barking at her if she asked him any questions. He grabbed up the phone whenever it rang and sometimes he shouted into it and sometimes he muttered like he didn’t want to be heard and once she even heard him speaking in a high voice like an old lady. Then that ne’er-do-well Giorgio Lucci, a bad-apple second cousin on her mother’s side, turned up at city hall with his stupid grin smeared all over his face, and the mayor said they had a very important meeting and on no account were they to be disturbed. On no account, sweetheart, he repeated, jabbing a finger at her. It’s that crazy cult out on the mine hill, he said. They’re at it again and he’s having to do something about it. Something big. He told her he was expecting a very important call from Washington — from Number One, he said — so she mustn’t leave her desk for any reason, but he let her go use the ladies’ room before he locked himself and Georgie in his office. When that call comes, that’s when she can knock on his door. What a thrill! She can see why he has been so jumpy. Even though you can’t see people on the telephone, she freshened up her lipstick and combed her hair. She made herself busy at her desk, waiting for the call, but then the lights went out and her typewriter stopped working, so what could she do? There was filing to be done, but she’d have to leave her desk, and he told her not to, so she took up her knitting (a matching bonnet and booties; her teenage daughter has already gone too far, and there you have it) and thought about what she’d tell the President when he phoned. Of course she’d tell him how she admires him and voted for him (though voting is something she usually forgets to do, what difference does it make?), but she’ll also mention her secretarial skills just in case.

The phone did ring, and her heart jumped, but it was only her friend Francesca out at the hospital, calling the mayor’s office about the power outage. She said she’d tried to reach the power company but no one answered and can the mayor help? Gina said she was sure it was only temporary because of the storm and that the mayor was in a meeting. When Francesca started to tell her about old Nazario Moroni dying overnight, Gina had to interrupt to say that she was really sorry but she couldn’t tie up the phone because the mayor was expecting a very important call. Then the phone went dead and she wondered if Francesca thought she was lying just to get rid of her and hung up on her, so she tried to call back, but, no, it really wasn’t working.

So now how could the President get through? She wondered if she should tell the mayor. He said he was absolutely not to be disturbed and he could be very unpleasant if you did something he asked you not to do, but he was also waiting for a call that now could not be made. He is only her second mayor, because she has only been able to work at all since the mine tragedy when her husband Mario died. She liked Mr. Whimple better, but even though Mr. Castle uses bad language and talks very loud, he is easy enough to get on with and often lets her go home early. He is something of a rascal, but they all are. Probably the President, too, if truth be told. She loves the job, but Mario would never have approved. He wanted her to be a housewife and a mother and always to be at home when he wanted her, even though he almost never was there himself except to eat and sleep. They all had to go to Mass every Sunday, even the tiny ones, he insisted on that, too, even though he was sometimes too worn out to go himself. She and Mario spent more than a dozen years together, but though she washed his pit clothes, prepared his dinner buckets, and slept in the same bed with him, she can’t say she really knew him. She keeps a photograph of him here on her desk beside a porcelain statue of the Virgin that he gave her once for her birthday, but it’s a picture of a stranger.

Gina’s mother was the wife of a coalminer and she always said, Gina, whatever you do, don’t marry a coalminer, but then she did. Well, she was a coalminer’s daughter, it was what she knew, but her mother was right. Gina kept trying to get Mario to better himself and to learn another trade, one that would keep him at home more, but he was not bright or disciplined enough, none of the Julianos are. He wasn’t really good-looking either — he had the meaty Juliano face and big ears — but he was a good football player and that was a big deal back then. It still is. Her daughter’s boyfriend is on the football team. Mario was also a good Catholic boy and when he learned he was going to be a father he did the right thing, and she has always been grateful for that. He was a little resentful about it, though, and didn’t hesitate to play around if the occasion arose; Catholic boys don’t take the sin of fornication very seriously. As she put on weight she could see that she was becoming less attractive to him and had no choice but to slim down or let him look elsewhere, and it was just too hard to lose so many pounds. And besides, she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about having more babies, even if making them had, for a moment that was always much too short, its fun side.

Mario was one of the seven who barricaded themselves off the night of the mine accident and left an undershirt tacked up outside with their names on it. COME AND GET US, it said. But they came and got them too late and only Giovanni Bruno was still alive, though he didn’t even have his name on the shirt, and that’s why all those people are out at the mine hill today. If they only knew Giovanni Bruno like she knew him, they wouldn’t be making such fools of themselves. Faith is a good thing, it never hurts anybody, but it would be better if people all believed the same religion and didn’t keep inventing new ones. The undershirt is in the mining museum up in the state capital. As Mario’s widow, Gina went up there for the presentation, and she was famous for a while and was interviewed on television in her black dress with her children around her. And she did miss him, though mostly because, with the children to raise, she needed his income, which is why, even though she could just see Mario scowling down on her from Heaven, she took this job in city hall, thanks to her cousin Demetrio in the police department and the child-minding help she gets from the family, especially her Aunt Delfina Romano, who never married and always said marriage was the ruin of women. For a while after the disaster, all the younger widows were competing for the same single men, but there weren’t enough of them to go around what with so many getting killed in the mine, it was like musical chairs, and Gina had a weight problem that disadvantaged her. Also three small children. Men don’t get excited about other men’s children. She was briefly wooed by one or two guys who remembered her when she was cuter, but nothing came of it. Her heart wasn’t really in it. Some of her friends did remarry, but mostly those have not been happy marriages.

It was still cloudy and dark when the lights went out, but now the sun is pouring through the high dusty windows. She’d clean them, at least from the inside, but her boss told her not to leave the desk. Whatever you do, don’t leave the desk! What if the phone came back on and the President rang and she was up a ladder and couldn’t get down in time to answer it? Though maybe all that was just a fib and she might as well go home like the sheriff’s radio dispatcher Tessie Law-son, whom she saw walking through the corridor with her new sister-in-law, leaning into each other and giggling like schoolgirls. They are always laughing together over some private joke or other (now it was something about “taking cover”); it can be quite annoying.

City hall is a heavy stone building, often called “the Fort” for not much leaks in from the world outside nor is much distributed to it, but Gina can hear beyond its thick walls the muffled sound of helicopters and motorcycles and sirens. Is something happening? A distant boom rattles the windows. Could be a last clap of thunder, but you never know. It has been quiet in Mr. Castle’s office for a long time, and Gina decides to risk the mayor’s anger by knocking and telling him that the phone is not working and she has to go to the hospital to be with her cousin Concetta Moroni because Concetta’s father-in-law has died. Whenever she says something like that her boss always says it’s like everyone in town is one of her cousins — here he usually adds in a few swearword modifiers — and that’s very nearly true, at least in her part of town. Her own children would be related to her in some way even if she hadn’t given birth to them herself. She gets no answer and knocks again, louder this time, and calls out his name. Still nothing. She can hear running footsteps out in the corridors, doors slamming. She fishes her key out of the desk and opens his door: no one there. They must have left by the other door, the one at the back that leads out into the hall where the men’s room is. The mayor was upset about what was happening out at the mine hill; maybe that’s where they went. Or they’re out there in the street where the noise is. But he could have let her know. If the President had called, what would she have told him? Well, that it was turning into a nice day here and he should come for a visit, she could show him around. The children will be at the pool by now, so with the mayor away and phones and power out, the afternoon is hers. The furniture store is having a summer sale, which is more or less a continuation of their winter sale. Maybe she’ll make an offer on that pretty stuffed chair in the window with the orange-and-green flowered pattern, give her daughter the old red one now that she’ll soon be setting up a home of her own. Paychecks are late this month, probably because of the holiday, but her credit is good. Desperate as they are, they’d probably sell it to her even if she had no credit at all. Then she’ll go pick up some nice hamburger and fresh buns and a bag of charcoal and marshmallows to roast and have a picnic supper tonight in the backyard. Invite Aunt Delfina and her daughter’s boyfriend, get him thinking in the family way, only hoping Aunt Delfina doesn’t chase him off. The President is welcome to join them. He can wear Mario’s old “Mister Good-Lookin’ Is Cookin’” apron and grill the burgers. If she has time, she could haul the old baby crib out of the basement and clean it and repaint it. Decorate it with little colored stickers from the dimestore. She’ll drop by there on the way home, and at the same time she can buy some more blue yarn (she’s betting on a boy). The booties and bonnet are almost done; she can start a matching jacket. There’s lots of time. She picks up her needles and knitting but, just as she tucks them in her bag, there is a sudden flash of light—

The blast rocks the Fort, followed closely by other thunderous bursts, one on top of another, as if in imitation of the fireworks finale on Saturday night: the fire station, the post office, the police station. There is shouting, screaming, the rush off the street for open shop doors before they’re slammed shut, the crackle of gunfire peppering the gaps between explosions. Shopkeepers throw themselves down behind their counters, motorists press their accelerators to the floor, arriving reporters and cameramen turn on their heels, abandoning their equipment. Storefront windows shatter, streetlights and neon signs are blasted away. Somewhere a dog yips frantically. “God is good!” shouts a mountainous undershirted man astraddle a motorcycle bearing official government plates as he speeds away from the exploding courthouse. Grinning a wide, whiskery grin he roars past the Chamber of Commerce offices, shooting out its plate-glass windows. A fish-eyed biker in fluttering black rags rolls down Main Street, the near-naked girl behind him splashing gasoline from a can on the hoods of all the cars and pickups they pass. They are followed by a strange glassy-eyed creature in red boots, loin cloth, and feathers with a wagging topknot rising from his shaved painted head, bearing the Number of the Beast tattooed on his bony shoulders and wielding a flaming torch he touches to the cars the girl has doused, setting the whole street on fire, mini-explosions counterpointing the larger ones. “Five minutes!” shouts a motorcyclist in a black stocking mask, as he takes aim at a bald chubby man in a stained butcher’s apron rushing from the barbershop to try to douse the flames on an old beat-up Dodge coupe parked out front; he doesn’t get that far. A dark stocky woman and a goateed biker with goggles, both wearing coalminers’ helmets, leap off their motorcycles and smash their way into the corner drugstore, the woman covering for the man — there is a great crashing and tinkling of glass as she fires away, the mirror behind the soda fountain falling like a melting glacier — while he strips the shelves behind the pharmacy counter, dumping everything into his leather backpack. Out on the street, one of the burning pickups circles about, unbraked and driverless. It careens over a curb, caroms off a corner street sign and mailbox, and piles into a furniture store, setting it alight. At the liquor store, where the staff has taken refuge in the cellar, racks of bottles are tipped out and shot up and a lit cigarette is flicked into the mix. An elderly man in carpenter’s overalls emerges from the hardware store with a shotgun, takes aim at the begoggled cyclist speeding away from the drugstore, the buckshot thudding into the rider’s leather backpack, clanging off his mining helmet. The man turns to duck back into the store, but the masked rider following behind on a ghostly gray motorcycle draws a revolver from a hip holster and does not miss. He brakes to a stop, takes two-handed aim, fires five more times. “Four minutes!” he yells. The first out-of-town police units to arrive encounter heavy fire and the occasional hurled stick of dynamite. Even when taking cover, they find themselves being shot at; it takes them just a moment, but too long a moment for some, to discover the sniper up in the top floor of the town’s derelict hotel: an elusive gunman in a golden guayabera and tight pants, colorful headband, who appears and disappears tauntingly from window to window as if there were a dozen of him, shouting out what are probably obscenities in a foreign language, then firing from where least expected. The troopers return fire but without conviction, staying hunkered down. A great many sirens can be heard approaching from all directions. They can wait until those guys get here. They were told there was trouble here, but nothing like this. The cyclist with the painted head, topknot and feathers smashes a ground-level window of the hotel with his rifle butt and springs lithely through with his weapons and backpack. An unmarked helicopter swoops low, drawing high-powered rifle fire from a biker with a gray braid. It lurches, continues to try to fly like a wounded bird, slowly loses altitude. The biker fires again, then swivels, leaning on his good leg, to aim at a second helicopter wheeling past overhead. More come clappety-clapping in from the east, where the county airport lies. Several attackers try to force their way into the First National Bank, kicking at the locked door, shooting at the lock, losing patience as time ticks away. The masked biker swings up, black head with eyeholes blackly framed by his high leather collar. He seems to be everywhere at once. “Three minutes!” he shouts, and hauls some packs of dynamite from the silvery saddlebags draped over his back fender and tosses them to the others. The acting sheriff has thrown himself down behind some trash cans in the back alley as bullets ricochet off the brick walls overhead and he now picks his way hurriedly down the alley, scuttling close to the walls, toward the bank’s rear service door, hoping one of the skeleton keys on his key ring will open it. Inside the bank, the city manager, having abruptly dismissed the disgruntled client when the first blast was heard in the street and snapped at the women for not having warned him, races up the back steps to arm himself and to prepare for possible flight. The bank is solid and should be safe, but if he has to leave, there are things he must destroy or take with him. And opportunities may arise. The first emergency fire truck reaches the blazing street. It is met with rifle fire and a dynamite pack tossed through the cab window. The pool hall is hit. An Italian social club. When the movie house is dynamited, its antiquated marquee drops, biting the street like false uppers, letters flying like broken molars. Inside the nearby bar and grill, its walls pocked with the bullets that have crashed through the front window, they hear someone frantically banging on the back alley door, but after the loud overhead crash a few moments before — half the ceiling plaster fell: “Holy Christ! We’re being bombed!” the dimestore owner wailed, scrunched down behind a table he had tipped over to hide behind — they are afraid and shrink back. The proprietor, hearing a woman shrieking, ignores the pleas of his customers and opens the door. It is the wife of the former Chamber of Commerce secretary. “Is Jim here?” she cries, staggering in. The scar-faced man squatting in one corner with a tray over his head points at the body on the floor. She screams. The body stirs. “Hello, dear,” it says. Pushing in behind the woman before the proprietor can slam the door limps a grimacing man, fierce with rage, and the others duck behind their tipped tables again. There is a tumbler of vodka on the bar, its ice melted, sitting alone in its evaporating puddle like a minor miracle amid the shattered glass, and the man grabs it up and tosses it down, slams the tumbler back on the bar, explaining when he can get his breath that he’s the pilot of the helicopter that has fallen on their roof and he thinks his leg is broken. “Those assholes were shooting at me! I don’t shoot anything except pictures for fuck sake!” The bank’s owner has at last fought his way through the clogged traffic, has parked behind the smoldering ruins of the bus station, and is making his way on foot toward the center, rifle in hand, when an out-of-town police car stops him, the officers pointing weapons at him, ordering him to drop his gun. He does so, tells them angrily who he is. “We’re just losing time, goddamn it!” They ask for identification. “No, it ain’t damp squibs,” one of the bikers in front of the bank door is grumbling, a shaggy hayseed with yellow teeth, the fingers on his right hand in a splint, suspenders holding his pants up, “it’s the fucken matches.” A tall mustachioed man dressed in satin-striped tuxedo pants, a dazzling red T-shirt and a black silk tie, swastikas on his upper arms, produces a silver cigarette lighter. The sirens encircling the town are now as loud as the roar of the motorcycles in the center. Two military helicopters with multiple machine gun and rocket mounts have appeared and are hovering overhead, adding to the racket. Radio contact is established with them and they are asked by the police units on the ground to try to take out the sniper in the derelict hotel. The acting sheriff is pinned down on the back steps of the bank in a shootout with the masked motorcyclist, who is firing at him from behind the corner of the building, when he suddenly hears someone approaching from behind. He wheels round to blow the attacker away but sees in the nick of time that it’s a young unarmed man in a grocer’s apron with his hands raised. “My wife’s in there!” he gasps. “Mine too,” says the sheriff and tosses the kid his rifle. “Cover me!” In an instant, the kid is across the alley in a doorway, firing at the masked biker, driving him back. But none of the keys on the sheriff’s ring seem to work. “One minute!” the masked man calls out, pulling away from the alley fire fight. “Mufflers on!” A scrawny unshaven straw-headed fellow with one arm in a sling ambles down out of the Legion Hall, where he has spent the night on the floor. Grinning his gap-toothed grin, he surveys the scene through the scrim of his piercing hangover. Biggest fucking bonfire he has ever seen, hairy dudes on motorbikes storming around, raising hell, bodies here and there like bundles dropped by rag merchants. Not far away, there’s a man under a flaming store awning sprawled beside a prehistoric shotgun. He picks it up. Not easy to fire the thing with one arm, but he figures he might as well shoot a few people because that’s what’s happening and why not. There’s a guy up a telephone pole watching the action down below. He shouldn’t be up there. He gets him in his sights, imagines the fall (slow-mo, like in the movies), but does not pull the trigger. This old shotgun probably has such a kick it could break his other shoulder. Anyway, it’s not his nature. “Bang!” he says and laughs, lowering the gun. The Woolworths under the Legion Hall is shot up and abandoned, the door agape, small fires erupting, so he goes in and raids the candy counter for breakfast, helps himself to a change of underwear and bright purple and green socks with white toes and other useful and redeemable items. As the police chief reaches the station, too late to be of help to his duty officer, the police and emergency vehicles he called in from other towns are beginning to arrive in large numbers and overhead the army helicopters are firing round after round into the old hotel. Along the way the chief has come upon the state trooper who gave him a ride in, his throat slit, his motorcycle missing. He watches as a patrol car driven by a friend of his from the next county blows up less than half a block away, and he spies the missing motorcycle, in its saddle a huge bearded man in a strapped undershirt and leather vest, now pulling away from the blast: a big target, but he gets off only a couple of shots before the street is rocked by a tremendous explosion on the bank corner, a signal for the city manager up on the second floor to head down for the back door, on the double. He slams out, bowling over a man knuckled down behind it, sending him tumbling into the alley. The city manager levels a revolver at his head, but the young man across the alley shouts out: “No! No! It’s the sheriff!” The sheriff has drawn a revolver of his own and all three men have weapons pointed at each other. A blink. Recognition. The city manager jumps down into the alley, a bag and a bundle of folders under his arm, and sprints away while the sheriff and grocer rush into the bank. Outside the front door, which is no more, the masked man shouts: “Time’s up! Forget it! Let’s go! Now!” The tall biker in the black glasses, suspendered tux pants, tie and crimson tee, calmly raises his hand and says in a precise commanding voice: “Go, and may the Big One be with you!” The others hesitate, then leap on their bikes, tearing off in all directions, gunfire chasing them. The man combs his hair and moustache with his fingers, adjusts his black silk tie and sunglasses, and strides into the bank through the floating dust with the stiff erect bearing of a mechanical tin soldier, carrying under his arm neatly tied packages to which he is applying a small blue flame. The banker, freed at last from the bumbling cops, reaches Main Street. A vast devastation, blazing cars and buildings, a scatter of dead and wounded amid the glass and rubble, police swarming in, ambulances, fire engines, helicopters overhead slamming the old hotel with rocket fire, another copter fallen in a rumpled heap on the flat roof of the bar and grill. The tall man in the tux pants and luminous red shirt is just disappearing into the gaping hole where the bank door once stood. Too late and too far away, but the banker fires off a shot anyway. He catches a glimpse of a biker in goggles and miner’s helmet streaking down an alley. Not in a position to shoot at him, but in the street where the alley opens out many are, including the chief of police, white with rage. The biker is gunned down in the percussive crossfire of nearly two dozen armed personnel, all banging away at once, while in the bank the terrified clerks and their customers shrink back from the robotic figure in black glasses who has entered through the hole that was once the front door. “In the name of all that’s holy and all that’s unholy!” he cries out, and like a newspaper boy tossing his folded papers onto front porches, he distributes his lit packages. This is what the sheriff’s wife hears before someone lands on top of her and the world ends around her. As she crumples to the floor — an explosion! another! — she is thinking: They were right! It’s really the end! Her poor children! One lit package is winging its way toward a woman huddled with her howling baby behind the water fountain when it is plucked out of the air by the young grocer and former high school basketball star, leaping high as if for a jump shot, and in the same movement flipped back at its thrower, terminating the assault with a final massive blast. A hot dusty silence descends, broken only by groans. Things are winding down outside, too. The bikers are dead or have vanished. The hotel has fallen silent after the helicopter fusillade. A senior police officer assembles an assault team to enter the building and they are gathered at the front door, trying to force entry, when the feathered biker with the topknot springing from his shaved red head appears on the damaged roof with an armful of strapped dynamite packets, which, while bellowing out his praise of God — some god, praise of an eccentric sort — he lights and drops on the state troopers and neigh boring town police below, now frantically scattering. The army helicopters, distracted by the fleeing bikers, come clattering urgently back. The biker greets them with an Indian war dance, leaping and howling, beating his bared chest; the helicopters spare no firepower but obliterate him with rocket fire, leaving nothing on the roof except leg stubs in tooled red boots.

To while away the time on their way to the airport and out of the state and country, Georgie Lucci and the mayor have been trading whore stories. Which when real mostly depress Georgie, so he has been inventing a few bigcity yarns, borrowing on the plots of blue movie queens like Nellie Nympho and Red-Hot Ruby. “Ruby lipsticked her asshole and jiggled it around, and with your hands bound behind your back you were supposed to kiss it before poking it. It was like bobbing for apples.”

The mayor’s laughter booms. “You’re fulla shit, Georgie, but your stories are better than mine. Christ. Since I got married, the occasional cheap whore is all I’ve had. Of course, all women are whores, so I guess that’s all I’ve had or coulda hoped to’ve had. And I can’t honestly say I’ve ever had a good one.”

“I could introduce you to a few.”

“Nah. What I need is some child sex slaves. They tell me Brazil is full of them. Dime a dozen. Ever fuck a little kid?”

“Not since I was one myself.”

“Your kid sister or little cuz, you mean. Rec room romps when mommy’s away. That don’t count and can mess you up. I’m talking about sex market specialties. Clean, dressed, and prettily packaged consumables.” Maury Castle’s loud grating voice and nasty imagination are getting under Georgie’s bark. “Like buying choice baby lamb in the meat market.”

“Not my style, I guess. I go more for the fleshy bargains.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I married one. Beachball britches. Ever think about getting married, Georgie?”

He hesitates. Shouldn’t talk about this with a guy like Castle. “Yeah. Once.” He seems to see her bent over a water fountain. His high school sweetheart. In a pleated skirt. Or a crisp yellow frock. Actually, in nothing at all. Her sweet little buttocks. His hand between them. Her terrible vulnerability. “She was…different.” The way she looked up at him after he’d saved her from that newspaper fuck. So intense, so giving, a whole-body look, total surrender. But so still…

“What happened? Cold feet?”

“No.” Can’t stop himself. He’s fucking starting to cry. “She died.”

“Jesus, Georgie, sorry to hear that.” That night out at the Brunist camp, the night of the bees and the fireworks when he was trapped and being shot at and he was pleading for mercy from everyone from God to Lady Luck — she was there. She was Lady Luck. He remembers this clearly now. “She probably did you a fucking favor, though. Did you get in her pants before she kicked off?”

What a question. He hates this filthy sonuvabitch. In his mind’s eye, though, there were no pants he could get into. She was like Eve. Spread for him. La bella… “No. We were saving it for…you know…”

“Big mistake. Unless somebody else dicked her, the poor little cunt died without ever getting laid. What kinda fucking life is that? You owed it to her. You let her down.”

Coglione. Maybe he should spin the car in front of a big semi so it gets hit broadside on the passenger side. But he might get hurt himself. And even if not, how would he get away with the pile of cash in the back seat? This vehicle is what he’s got.

The fire chief has reached the town center with his exhausted crew and has half a dozen volunteer fire trucks from the towns around at his disposal, but water pressure from the sabotaged hydrants is low and some incautious units have suffered demoralizing casualties. It is a hot day, hotter here. They beat the small fires out or smother them with foam. A few of the larger ones are brought under control in city hall, the post office, and the fire station itself, but in the untenanted Main Street shops, the liquor store, the furniture store and pawn shop, the surging flames rage unchecked, spreading now from building to building, and torched cars and trucks, no longer worth saving, are allowed to burn themselves out. The police chief’s hunting dog — retrieved from one of them and half-blind, its coat on fire — immediately attacks its rescuers and must be destroyed. Crews lift the dead off the street and deposit them temporarily on the tables of the bombed-out pool hall and on the sorting-room floor of the demolished post office, where they are covered with gray canvas mail-bags, all of it recorded by grimacing television and radio reporters, many now wearing combat helmets and kerchiefs over their faces. Ambulance teams gather up the wounded and wheel them urgently off to the city hospital, guided by local townsfolk jumping aboard to accompany friends and relatives.

The banker, his face marked by flying debris when he rushed toward the bank at the moment of the final blast, grabs one of the ambulance crews and together they stretcher out the injured from the bank. Among them: Archie Wetherwax’s wife Emily, pinned under a fallen desk. The Rotary Club president, Gus Baird, in bad shape, midriff bubbling. Tommy’s young friend from the Italian grocery, out cold, his face bloody, his wife wailing over him. Also the acting sheriff and his wife, looking bruised and stunned though both on their feet, the wife staring blankly, muttering to herself, shrinking from everyone, even her husband. Smith must have left the mine about the same time Ted did but somehow beat him back. Smith tells him about Piccolotti’s heroism and personally organizes an ambulance for him. Those who can walk are helped to police cars, which are also filling up with wounded off the street. Ted has a word of encouragement for each. For the moment, the dead in here are left in the rubble where they lie, ambulance blankets tossed over them. With a gaping hole where the front door used to be, the place is vulnerable to looting. He’ll have to secure the tills and vault, gather up everything of value and lock it away in his office. Nail something up over the shattered windows and block off the door.

He’s just starting the lockdown when Dee Romano stops in to check out the damage. He kicks at what’s left of the bomber in tux pants, gives a terse angry report. Monk Wallace is dead. The mayor’s secretary, Dee’s favorite cousin. Others at the post office, county courthouse, hospital, phone exchange. A nephew from the power plant hospitalized with a bullet in his lungs. The mayor? He’s gone, fled or kidnapped. Dee tells him what he saw out on the Waterton road, mentioning in passing that no one employed by the city has been paid yet this month. Father Baglione, he says, is in critical condition at the hospital. The church was dynamited, people killed and maimed. His second cousin, Timo Spontini, was shot down in the parking lot. Apparently the old priest defended the church with sheer bravado, facing the bombers on his own with bells and incense. Ted lights up, offers the chief one. The chief shakes his head. “None of this woulda happened if them goddamned holyrollers had not come back here,” he says through clenched jaws. “But I’m taking care of that.” He says nothing more when asked, just glares coldly. Ted likes Romano, trusts him, but feels a new distance between them. Almost as if Romano blames him somehow for the attack on his church. Ted thinks back on the scene at the mine hill. “Wait a minute,” he says. “You mean, Charlie Bonali’s gang?” Romano leaves him without reply.

Ted glances at his watch: barely past noon. Can it get any worse than this? It can get worse. He knows what Bonali is capable of. And the Brunists are in league with Suggs’ rightwing militia. He saw something of a battle scene dress rehearsal this morning. Will he have to go out there again? How can he not? But who will care? Ted has never known despair, too much of a fighter for that, and a dogged believer in the prevailing power of the right, but standing there in the ghastly ruins of his family bank, he’s at the edge of it. He has never thought of God as the Almighty but as something more mysterious than that. The ground of all being, as someone has said. Something like that. Well, the mystery has just deepened. A young teller lies a short distance away in a scatter of bills and coins. Daughter of friends of his. Might have been Stacy, had she still been here, so he has to be glad she’s gone. But he has lost her just the same. Lost his wife, his son, and now his bank and all these innocent people. He has failed them. He has called the plays and none have worked. The bank is insured, of course. But is it covered for this kind of madness? Does it matter? Does he really want to reopen? He realizes how easy it is for lives to have bitter endings and is determined not to let that happen. This town is a mess, but it’s his town and he can’t walk away from it. He will not let himself be defeated, even when victory is hollow. That’s what he tells himself, in the old way, team captain up against it, back to the goal line, standing firm, jaw a-jut, shoulders braced. But his heart is sinking. Fuck it, he thinks, wiping the tears away with his sleeve. It’s finished. Then he feels an arm around his shoulder. “C’mon, Dad,” his son says. “Let’s clean this up.”

The bank explosion sent night duty police officer Bo Bosticker leaping with a scream out of one of his coalpit nightmares, a persistent haunting from his mining days, the leap taking him out of his bed and onto his damaged knees and thence to his face on the floor. He lies there, wondering whether what he heard was real or part of the dream. For Bo, a leap from sleep is a mighty one from the abyssal deep and is violent by nature, for he is a heavy sleeper, known for his powerful snore. He has had a number of women move in with him over the years, then move out pretty quickly with bags under their eyes. He never leaves sleep with a light bounce — it’s more like clawing up from a deepshaft grave — unless rocketed out in terror like today. A glance at his watch tells him it is still early in the day, that he should get in a couple more hours of shut-eye if he’s going to last through the night watch, and he considers doing that right here on the floor where he lies. But his knees hurt and he is hungry and by now he hears the sirens, the helicopters, smells smoke in the air. Not slag smoke. Wood smoke. He also seems to catch a whiff of something that reminds him of entering the mine in the old days after the shotfirers had done their thing. So he pulls on his uniform shirt and pants and launches forth from his little house down by the old railroad tracks to limp into town on his wooden crutches. It is a hot sunny day — the sort Bo rarely sees at this hour o’clock — yet damp underfoot, and he remembers it was raining when he went to bed. Long before he gets to where he’s going, he perceives that there has been a serious amount of vandalism while he’s been sleeping: a grade school with its windows smashed, spouting fire hydrants, a church on fire. The military helicopters overhead seem to be firing at something right in the middle of town.

The closer he gets to the center, the worse the damage is, the thicker the smoke now clouding out the sun. The post office is a smoldering shell. He hobbles in on his crutches for a look. There are people on the sorting-room floor covered with gray mailbags and other people carrying on over them. Bo wants to ask them what’s been happening, but they are mostly too hysterical. “Everybody’s dead!” one of them screams, shaking her fist at him. An older cop he doesn’t know stands guard over the place and Bo asks him what’s up and the guy says he doesn’t know, he just got here himself, something to do with a bunch of religious fanatics. He says he hasn’t seen anything like it since the last war.

That’s what it looks like. An old war movie. Main Street lit up with burning cars and trucks and many of the buildings on fire, their windows smashed, black graffiti sprayed on them. Fire trucks, police cars, ambulances parked at whatever angle, mostly empty inside, their lights whirling. Flat water hoses snaking about underfoot. The helicopters are pounding the old hotel for no clear reason. One of them is parked on top of Mick’s Bar & Grill. The old moviehouse marquee is down, which makes the building look like it has dropped its pants. The bank has also been hit. Seems to have lost its front door, the whole corner just a big hole. Some of the police cars and motorcycles rev up their motors and pull out. Bo asks one of them where they’re going. “Out to the mine hill! The ones who did it are out there!”

He runs into Charlie Bonali loading a bunch of weapons into some young guy’s car. The guns look like they might have come from the station. He should ask about that, but Charlie is wearing a bent tarnished badge and Bo isn’t sure of his authority or even exactly what is going on. “Where’s Monk?” Bo asks. “You’ll find him over at the pool hall,” says Charlie, pulverizing a wad of gum in his jaws. “On one of the tables.” “What the heck’s he doing? Resting?” “Yeah. In peace.” He’s pretty sure he knows what Bonali means by that, but he doesn’t want to ask.

He heads to the station to report in. Looks like it’s going to be a tough day; they’re going to need him early. It has already been a tough day. He figures he should fuel up first with some meatloaf or else a hot turkey sandwich, but at Doc’s drugstore, which is one of the few buildings not burning, they’re bringing a body out. “Dead,” they tell him when he asks. “Shot down in cold blood.” Well, maybe they can call the Italian grocery and have them send something over.

The first face that Angela sees, peering woozily up over her shoulder, is that of her friend Joey Castiglione. He’s holding her hand, which is cuffed to the cot. They’re in some kind of van. She hears a siren. “Take it easy,” he says. “You’ll be all right.” All right? Why shouldn’t she be all right? Where is she? Kicked. She feels like she’s been kicked. Who did that? She’s lying on her tummy, a pillow under her, her numb bottom raised. It hurts, other parts, too, but distantly as though they don’t really belong to her. She can’t move. She thinks her spine may be broken. “Where are we going?” she asks. “To the hospital. We’ll be there soon. Ramona told me you’d gone downtown, so when all hell started breaking loose, I came looking.” “Ramona?” She remembers something happening in the drugstore, people slamming in, she was trying to duck under the table, crawl somewhere. “Joey? Have I been shot?” He grins, gives her hand a little squeeze. “Yeah. But if it was going to happen, you got hit in the right place.” She feels very sleepy. Her eyes keep crossing. “Joey? Thanks a lot, Joey. You didn’t have to do this.” “Hey. It’s worth it just for the view alone.”

When Vince Bonali learns that his daughter is being ambulanced in with bullet wounds, he breaks down in tears. He is down in the dimly lit basement canteen, sitting with the Ferreros and Concetta Moroni (no coffee, the percolators have been turned off to save electricity), and his old friend Sal wraps an arm around his shoulders and says, “Easy, Vince. Easy. It’s gonna be okay.” “It’s too much, Sal!” he sobs. He feels foolish, especially in front of the two women, but he can’t help it. “It’s too fucking much!” He hauls out his handkerchief and blows his nose loudly. He and Sal have brought Father Baglione here in Vince’s car; the old priest is in the emergency room with multiple bullet wounds and is not expected to pull through. Gabriela and Concetta are out here because old Nonno Moroni died last night, and both of them are in a fury about what happened to Nonno’s body (Gaby tears up whenever it’s mentioned) and are talking about asking Gabriela’s city lawyer cousin Panfilo to take legal action. Lights pop on in one corner of the canteen, where Doc Lewis, looking shattered, is being interviewed live for TV news. When they bring Angie in, Vince is waiting at the ambulance door. Joey Castiglione is with her. That’s good news. Joey winks unsmilingly and gives him a thumbs-up. He feels better.

Out on the Mount of Redemption, the self-appointed Brunist Defender Dot Blaurock feels woozy with hunger. Breakfast didn’t amount to much. It’s getting hot and there’s no proper place to relieve yourself out here, though many have been doing so behind the backhoes or their cars or on the backside of the Mount or wherever. Young Darren Rector, still getting a lot of mileage for striking down the false prophet on this very spot two days ago, feels certain that they’re here for a purpose as yet unrevealed, a purpose that may be thwarted if they desert the Mount, and he suggests they open up the mine building restrooms as they did on the anniversary of the Day of Redemption. A good idea, but no one has the key. That guy McDaniel, Mr. Suggs’ strip mine manager and newly appointed deputy acting sheriff, says they should stay here. They could get trapped in the camp, and they’re better off holding the high ground. But what if those helicopters on the horizon should come this way? They’d be sitting ducks on this open hillside. No, Dot is one of those who is ready to call it a day. They’ve made their point, they’ve achieved the summit, they’ve held their memorial service — better to go back to the camp, try to find something to eat. Besides, she has squatter’s rights to the camp sickbay cabin and she doesn’t want anyone taking that away from her. “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on,” the preachers say, quoting Lord Jesus, the Son of Man, the one they’re all waiting for, “for is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” Sure. But they’re starving, and they can’t hold it much longer. The Son of Man never talked about what to do if you can’t find a restroom. There’s not much food left at the camp, but they can harvest the rest of the garden, eat it up before the Rapture comes. The camp is full of birds and animals that can be hunted. God will provide. One of her fellow Defenders says they could take up a collection and go pick up some hotdogs and buns and soda pop at the highway supermarket. Several of the women volunteer to do the cooking. Spirits rise. Then some terrified people arrive down on the mine road, jump out of their cars, and come running up the Mount to join them. “It’s the end of the world!” they wail. “It really is!” Sobbing and blubbering, they tell them about the demons on motorcycles, the bombs, the guns, the fires, the slaughter, the destruction. “They’s hunderds of them!” “They’re everywhere!” “They’ve blowed up all the churches!” “Ours is burnt plumb to the ground, Abner!” People start praying in earnest. It looks like a long day. Maybe even an endless one. “Now is the judgment of this world!” cries Abner Baxter. “Mom, when is Jesus coming?” Mattie asks. “Soon,” she says hopefully. And then He does.

With the improving weather, Glenda has taken the children — hers, Hazel’s, Wanda’s and a few others temporarily abandoned by people who arrived at the camp this morning — down to the garden to collect fruit and vegetables for their lunch and do a little weeding. Hunk has killed and gutted a chicken they will all share, hoping that the others over on the Mount of Redemption do not come back before they are done. Not even Jesus could stretch a chicken out among so many, and anyway, he’s not yet around to work such marvels, were he able. She also has some canned and packaged goods that Ludie Belle Shawcross gave her before she left, but Glenda intends to save them for the hard times ahead that she foresees. This is not prophecy or fortune telling, it’s just the stone truth they face. If Hovis or Uriah had come back, she would have had someone to drive the Dunlevy caravan and they might have left with the others, but those two fellows never showed and their house trailer is still parked in the lot. They both seemed more befuddled than usual this morning and they have probably ended up over on the Mount without knowing how they got there. She oversees the children’s little harvest, making sure the plants themselves are not pulled up with the weeds, and leads them in singing while they work — children’s hymns and nursery rhymes and popular songs like “Mairzy Doats” and “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” When she hears the roar of intruders coming up the back road, she hurriedly shepherds the children into the garden shed and closes the door and tells them they’re all going to play the quiet game while she reads their palms. Everyone wants to be first and they all start shouting and she has to shush them, telling them that there is a little voice she listens to when she reads their palms and they have to be very quiet so she can hear it, and if they listen very very hard, they may hear it, too. She does not tell them what she really hears in here: rustlings of the flesh. For here the two of them were found naked with the bullet holes in their heads and here something of them remains. As Glenda examines the children’s plump little hands, she whispers all the happy wonderful things she sees there. She sees dark things, too, but she keeps these to herself. Even if there’s sadness ahead for them, they’re only children and need not fret over it. And then, just as she hears the intruders sputtering along on the old two-track road on the other side of the creek, then pausing ominously, only yards away, one of the little ones starts to howl. Wanda’s oldest, Davey, a boy not all there. He is hungry and thirsty and has made a mess in his pants and there’s no stopping him. She claps her hand over his mouth and then the others start. Would God approve strangling one to save the rest?

Why did you bring us out here? Wasn’t once enough?

It’s my suffering Christ side. Being reviled we bless, being persecuted we rejoice, and all that. But now that I’m here, seeing this great multitude sunning itself on the hillside, I feel some more blesseds coming on.

Oh no. You’ve done that already.

I know, but I’m doing a rewrite. I shall open my mouth and teach the many, for it is my task to bear witness to the truth.

They’re beyond teaching. Look at them. They’re not sunning themselves. They’re out of their minds with fear and religious frenzy.

They stand — their shared arms outstretched in iconic embrace — on the cusp of the mine hill above the chalky cross trenched into the side, gazing down upon the astonished followers of the coalminer Giovanni Bruno, the pale plump Jehoshaphat fellow sweating in his brown suit at their side, excited children scurrying around their feet like foraging rodents. Some of the cultists have fallen to their knees in the greasy mud in frenzied prayer, tearfully repenting of their sins, which are no doubt multitudinous and unforgivable, and begging for admittance into the kingdom of Heaven, while others, more skeptical, draw together, scowl and grumble. “What’s goin’ on here?” the one in the wheelchair asks, peering virulently up at them from between his hunched shoulders. They fear most those on their knees. And the children. That troublemaker dragging the filthy pink slipper, for example, who is at this moment describing for all her pals what she saw last time when she crawled under their robe.

“Can we go now?” the quivering creature at their elbow asks, sotto voce.

“In a moment, Mr. Jenkins. First, I have some devils of false expectations to cast out.”

“Devils—?”

Well, if you’re going to insist on acting out this mad charade, we should stop standing here with our arms out like a scarecrow and sit as Jesus sat.

As I sat, I know. But there is no place to sit here unless you offer me your knee.

My knee is your knee.

Sometimes in nightmares young Reverend Jenkins has found himself standing before a great throng in his underwear, obliged to give a speech or a sermon he has forgotten. Though he is now dressed in a handsome if slightly stained three-piece corduroy suit, he feels as naked and lost as in his nightmares. It seems a lifetime since his bus ride into this crazed community — crazed with religion, true, but in some ghastly medieval or else futuristic way, not at all the peaceful-valley pastorate he had imagined, more akin to his happy days back in his hometown Sunday School Brigade. Unimaginable catastrophe has followed unimaginable catastrophe like the turning of pages in a horror novel, with footnotes by Jesus’ lady friend, who on the drive out here explained to him, among many other improbabilities, that Jesus, as he is known now, whoever he was before, is one of the true megalopsychoi of the world, and though Joshua didn’t know what that was, he did know that “mega” meant big, so it probably meant something like a great huge psycho, a total raving lunatic, and that made complete sense even if it did cast a shadow on Jesus himself — in his own time, that is — especially when she drew the comparison. “Blessed are those who learn by unlearning! who make by unmaking!” the fellow is crying now, stirring devotion and hostility in equal portions among the cultists like contending fires. “Who have faith in faithlessness and believe in unbelieving!”

“Hallelujah!”

“What did he say?”

“He said, have faith and believe!”

“I do, Lord!”

Joshua knows this is not going to end well. He did not want to come out here, but everything was blowing up and people were shooting at him and there were thunderous crashing and booming noises, so he was grateful that they spied him chasing after the car and stopped to let him in, no matter where they were going. By then he was crying, couldn’t help it. He is a modern man with modern beliefs who does not believe in Leviathan or Behemoth or the Whore of Babylon, much less the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse, beyond their usefulness as metaphors (when engaged in that mode of discourse), but back in that town he felt as if literally pursued by all of them, and he feared worse ahead. The woman did not want to come here either, and on the ride out she begged the man to drive away to some safe place, but the man seemed not even to hear her, singing loudly that he was going to go tell it on the mountain. When they arrived, he jumped out and commenced to climb what turned out to be the malodorous back side of the cultic hill, Joshua and the lady following, because what else could they do? Joshua’s heart was in his mouth or else sunk in his sweaty new brown oxfords (blisters on both heels!), his terrified gaze taking in everything and nothing at the same time. As they drew near to the summit, they could hear people on the other side loudly reciting the Lord’s Prayer — barking it out, really, like at a football pep rally. The lady gave a little cry as though she suddenly had a pain somewhere down where she was holding herself and ran back down to the car. Joshua tried to follow, but the Jesus fellow had an iron grip on his elbow, and arguing with himself all the while as if there were someone alive inside him, he dragged Joshua on up to the summit. And there they were, the infamous Brunists, spread out below them in the blazing sunshine, a kind of vast holy bedlam, hundreds of them, many in glowing white tunics sticking wetly to their bodies and belted with ropes, the wildest of them clustered behind a wet trench dug into the hillside as though penned up there. And guns, guns everywhere. As the helicopters clattered overhead, a preacher ranted about the children of the kingdom being cast into the outer dark with weeping and gnashing of teeth (he was weeping, he was gnashing his teeth!), and the Jesus person next to him, against whom he leaned, shouted: “Blessed, my friends, is the outer dark!” Whereupon there was a gasp of recognition, or else of alarm, and people fell to their knees in the mud, and there were howls and hallelujahs, and shouts of anger and disbelief. “For it snuffs out the illusions of the inner light!”

“Yea, Lord, punish the wicked!”

“Bring the light!”

“No! Cain’t you hear? It ain’t him!”

“Yes, it is! Praise Jesus! He’s come back!”

“Just like He promised!”

Joshua was introduced to the gathered ecstatics as friend and disciple Jumping Jehoshaphat—“His father was a king!”—and his knees turning to jelly, he cracked his lips in a quivering imitation of a smile, pleading with his tearing eyes not to shoot. The man had released his elbow. He could run, but he couldn’t run. He could only hold on. “Can we go now?” he whimpered into the man’s armpit, but the man, after waving off the doubters and announcing to himself and the hillside what he is going to do — devils are part of it! — began unleashing his mad beatitudes. The language was familiar, but in the way nonsense in dreams is somehow familiar, and Joshua found himself grasping once more at the hope he might still be sleeping on the bus ride in. When the fellow in plaid shirt and suspenders who was riding the bus with him (so long ago!) removed his billed cap, stood his rifle on its stock, and started singing, “God sees the little sparrow fall, I know He loves me, too!” the man in the robes sang back (his singing voice was not divine), “Damned are the fallen sparrows for they shall be eaten!”

“Lord, save us! Don’t let us be eaten!”

“Shut up, you fools!”

“Hear me now! You must leave this wicked place! Go forth, be fruitful, and multiply!”

“He said we are leaving this wicked place!”

“Save us, Lord! Take us to the Promised Land!”

In the distance, smoke rises from where the town must be — or have been — as warplanes swarm and explosive thuds resound, and it occurs to Joshua that the man beside him might really be who he says he is, that the Christian end times he always believed in — or believed he believed in — are really upon them in all their monstrosity after all, and that he is standing amid the Holy Remnant. But then the man says: “Verily, I say unto you, blessed are ye that have seen, and yet have not believed!” and though he can’t think why — he can’t think at all! — Joshua feels certain this is not right. He knows all the songs (that scary Sunday School tune “Too Late, Too Late!” is now pounding through his tormented head), but he has never been good at quoting the Scriptures. Understanding the varieties of human discourse is something he is good at, and he knows that, at such a critical moment, he should be employing — and urgently! — the analytical one in search of efficacious action but that mode has abandoned him and all others — even prayer! — as well. He is paralyzed with fear, fear and confusion, his mind turned to a hot burning coal (he is standing on black chips of coal, the whole hill may be made of nothing but coal; his feet are burning, too), even as his belly turbulently liquefies. Once able to hold several contrary notions in his head at the same time and act separately on each, Joshua can no longer hold one thing in his mind at the same time and could not act on it if he could.

A young white-robed fellow with long golden curls like someone out of a storybook steps forward and says: “I’m sorry, but that is not what Jesus said.” A hush falls. The boy seems to have everyone’s respect. Perhaps there is hope. There is another creature pasted to him like a pop-eyed Siamese twin, or else Joshua is seeing double. He may be. His eyes are misted over with tears and sweat. It is stiflingly hot. It’s as if the torrid Bible lands have been transported here, or they there. His chest hurts. His feet hurt. He has a stitch in his side. His corduroy suit suffocates him. He envies that other boy perched over across the way on that strange rickety structure (a carnival ride?) with his shirt off. Probably a boy. “He said: Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

“I know, young man. I already said that. A long time ago. I am saying something else now. The old has passed away, as I have also said. The new has come.”

“But if you are who you say you are—”

“I say nothing. The words are yours.”

Houndawg is also hurting. He can hardly walk, but he can still ride, his bike a kind of wheelchair operated mostly by hand. He once traveled with a pegless guy, a paraplegic shot up in the war. The guy taught him a few tricks that are useful now. None for stopping the pain, though. Hacker promised him meds from the hospital and drugstore raids, but he hasn’t shown up out here at the Brunist camp. Teresita said she heard a lot of gunfire on the way out of town and she doesn’t think the poor dude made it. There was a supercharged moment back there when Houndawg felt about as alive as he’s ever felt, but it has sputtered out with the pain. Not running on all barrels either. A kind of fading in and out, like a loss of compression. Fever probably. His leg has a wrecked, ugly look and he leaves it mostly hidden away in his pantleg, not to be sickened by the sight and smell of it. And now Kid Rivers is talking about a head-on assault on the hill. Wherever the Kid goes, Houndawg will follow, the Kid being pretty much what’s left of his fucked-up life, but he hopes he doesn’t do that. Catch them by surprise, he says. Roar at them from all sides at once. The Big One’s with us, he says. The Kid believes that. Even if “us” is only these six, all that remain of the Wrath of God. And anyway, you never die. The comicbooks tell him so. Cubano and Littleface and Spider and all the rest aren’t really dead. “They’ll be back, man.” Houndawg doesn’t think so. Another notion from the Kid’s strips: the Legions of the Holy Dead joining the living in the final battle against the Forces of Evil. Houndawg heard him talking to himself one night and asked him who he was talking to. “Face. He’s there, man. He’s still there.”

Who is the Big One? In the Kid’s scheme of things, best Houndawg can tell, it’s the Devil. The one who lost the first War of the Gods and now wants his own back. Which makes them all players on a bigger stage than the one Houndawg was cast for. In reality, the Gods’ battleground looks a lot like Nat Baxter’s hometown, the combatants his family and friends, imagined enemies. And who he wants now, of course, is his old man. His ass still smarts from all the whalings he took as a kid, and he wants his own turn. But the others have been up on that stony rise above the camp with their binocs and have seen everyone over there on the mine hill armed to the molars. They’d be so many birds at a turkey shoot, as Brainerd says. Unless they could get in behind the mine buildings unseen and hit them suddenly from the blind side. That’s Chepe’s idea. But how would they do that? It’s all so naked over there. Unseen is a fantasy. Chepe himself looks like a fantasy today, dressed in bright colors as if for a party. Tight shiny pants and one of those lacy faggot shirts from south of the border the color of hot piss. He’s been brilliant, though. Fearless. The Kid reminds them that he still has the two Brunist tunics saved from the day they buried the nitro here at the camp a couple of months ago, and there are a few sticks left. Someone could strap them around his body, he says, wear the tunic over the top, walk into their midst over there as a fellow believer and give them all a grand send-off into the Promised Land. The others glance Houndawg’s way. He’s half-dead anyway, they’re thinking, so why not? Because he’s no Juice or Sick or Rupe; he wouldn’t be as old as he is if he were. And he doesn’t buy the immortality wheeze. He leans on his good leg and waits them out. Then Deacon comes up with an idea that might work. Steal one of the campers left behind here and take the nitro in canvas bags around to the back side, climb the hill in the tunics and mingle with the believers, leave the shit with long fuses lit and drift back to the wheels again. “Have to be somebody they don’t know,” Brainerd says. Which excludes Houndawg and the Kid. So Houndawg nods and says he likes the idea. Chepe and Teresita don’t fit in with the white trash over there and Deac is not of a size to pass unnoticed. Brainerd has just volunteered himself.

They probably shouldn’t have come back to the camp at all. Wasn’t in their original plan, which was to hit the town hard and fast, then scatter, gathering later at an abandoned Colorado ghost town Brainerd told them about. But then came the ambush on Sunday over in the woody patch the other side of the creek here. It was the same place they gangfucked that scrawny virgin, the killer blast a kind of awesome punctuation for it. Houndawg, crippled up by it and with little Paulie and his Apostle pals blown away, was feeling the rage and proposed they terrorize the camp and burn it down; the others bought into that, and during the rains they started collecting ten-gallon cans of gasoline and parking them in the woods off the old farm road at the far side of the camp. So it’s his fault they’re here. Though where else they could have gone except to hell is not clear. So maybe he did them all a favor.

As it turned out, the camp was empty, everyone having vacated the place to go sing Jesus songs on the mine hill. They could have strolled in, but that’s never the Kid’s way. If there’s no action, it’s not real. Doesn’t fill the frame. So after picking up the gas cans, they rolled in, blasting away, shooting the place up. That the camp was at their disposal, the Kid, with his cosmic view of things, took as another sign of otherworldly support for their mission, as he calls it, which is one of severe judgment and devastation. Desolation is the word on the Kid’s tongue these days. Utter desolation. That’s the state they left the town in and how they will leave the camp. Since he stopped being Nat Baxter, he has come to sound more like his old man every day, though it would rile him if anyone said so. Beginning to look like him, too. Putting on weight, neck and shoulders thickening. And he has suddenly grown older. Though some ways yet short of twenty, Nat has always said he felt like forty, and now, with Toad Rivers’ license in his pocket to confirm it, he is. Changing who he is has toughened him, smartened him. Young Nat Baxter might not have succeeded at this day’s operation. For Kid Rivers, it has been a walk.

After “capturing” the old lodge, as the Kid put it, they’d gathered in it to wait for the others, but nobody showed. Deacon said he thought he saw X and the girl peeling off right after they torched the liquor store, and Thaxton may have double-crossed them. “I caught him doing that R.C. abracadabra stuff with his fingers as we were running into the church and he had a stony look on his map like he’d just written us off,” he said. “And he wasn’t there when we came out. Thax wasn’t who he said he was.” “Warn’t even Thaxton t’begin with,” Brainerd said, scratching his head with his filthy finger splint and spitting chaw. “Tole me that was the name of a bud a his who got killt by a sideswiper, and he tuck it as his own cuz his name was on too many bounty lists.” They’re not sure what happened to Rupe, but he’s not back and has probably, as the Kid says, joined the Legions of the Holy Dead. Deacon told everyone how the Kid set off the dynamite Baptiste was carrying by shooting at it so that he and Spider could escape. “Didn’t do Baptiste much good, but he had a bunch of angry papists piled on him and was already done for. The Kid saved my ass, and Spider would’ve made it too, but he went back for his bike, and they were waiting for him. Not smart. But Spider had all his inks and designs in his saddlebags, couldn’t let ’em go. They were his life. A real artist, man. Right to the end.” Deacon is the Kid’s deputy, or maybe vice versa. They’re both driven by the need to destroy something, but for Deac it’s the system he hates and everything that holds it in place. The Kid knows the truth and is going to enact it; Deac knows the enemy and he’s going to bring them down. Deac’s enjoying himself in his dark grinning way; the Kid’s in a holy rage. As far as Houndawg can tell, Deacon doesn’t have a religious thought in his head. When he goes through the motions for the Kid’s sake, it’s like he’s playing out a private joke. Right now they suit each other, though he can see Deac splitting when they get out of here. If they ever do.

The Kid walks over to the blowup of the Man hung up near the fireplace — an awesome sucker in truth, looking wild-eyed and dangerous, wielding a mine pick like some kind of Iron Age killer — and he goes down on one knee in front of it in a kind of stiff deliberate way, like he’s trying to signify something. A kneeling knight, maybe. Chepe and Teresita do the same, adding in some genuflections, though the Kid doesn’t seem to be looking for imitators. He’s just into it. After he has done that and mumbled a few things about retribution and the end of things, talking maybe to the Man, he takes the picture down, smashes the frame it was in, and folds it up to take along. Then he says that Deacon’s notion of delivering the nitro from the back of the hill via one of the caravans has given him an idea: They’ll strip out three or four of the campers and trailers, stow their bikes inside, and drive them out of here, dump them later. Move slow, like old people, take different routes to throw off the guys in the sky and anyone else who might get curious. This seems pretty cool, though Houndawg, too wrecked to drive a cage with all its floor pedals, has to team up with somebody. He tells the Kid he’ll ride shotgun for him with his rifle; still enough bullets to bring down a chopper or two, if they get chased. They choose their vehicles and throw out the shit inside them, setting aside what’s edible or eating it, pocketing what’s valuable. Not much. These are poor folk.

But then Deacon steps out of a house trailer, clutching by the scruff a bedraggled woman looking too tired and beat up to complain. “Look what I found,” he shouts, grinning in his beard, and he lifts her off the ground like shot game. “We ain’t got time for that,” Brainerd says, and Deac says: “No, not now. I was thinking hostage.” The others nod at that, but Houndawg figures she’d be more trouble than she’s worth. Most women are. Better to tie her to a tree before setting the place alight. He’s about to say so when a powerful big-bellied man with a gray burr around his puffy ears stumbles out of the trailer, still pulling his pants up. Must have been in the can. Deacon drops the woman and pulls a knife, as the fat man, faster than he looks, leaps forward and throws his arms around the Deac in a bear hug. Not easy to do. Deacon’s a big man, too. They all unsheathe their blades and advance on the two of them, but the Kid holds his hands up to stop them, a dry hard grimace on his face. He seems fascinated by the sight of the two huge men locked in their fierce embrace, Deacon’s knife deep in the other man’s meaty back but, arms pinned, unable to pull it out and strike again. Like hulking giants in a death dance. Something the Kid may have seen in one of his superhero comics, acted out now before his eyes. Though in the strip the pants of one of them probably wasn’t around his ankles, his hairy butt framed by unbuttoned trapdoor longjohns. There is a long quiet moment broken only by soft wheezing grunts as Deacon slowly presses back against the man’s grip, the Brunist tattoo on Deac’s shoulder with its skull and lightning bolt seeming to bulge and tremble as if about to pop. It’s like time itself is slowing down and so motionless are they, eyes squeezed shut, they seem almost to have fallen asleep in each other’s arms. Houndawg, leaning against a tree not to fall over, is taut, almost breathless, stuttering a bit in the brainpan himself. Deacon, feet spread and pushing against the earth as if to stop its turning slowly leans forward, trying to tumble his opponent to the ground, but then blood begins to leak from Deacon’s mouth, nose, eyes, and there is a crackling sound. The Kid lurches forward, they all do, except for Houndawg, driving their knives into the longjohnned fat man over and over, turning white to crimson, Brainerd finally yanking the man’s head back from behind and slicing his thick white throat. Too late for Deacon, whose bleeding eyes spring open at the end as though to witness their avenging. Teresita turns on the sadsack woman and is about to plunge her blade in her when Brainerd grabs her arm. “Leave her be, girl,” he says, taking the woman by the hair and hauling her to her feet. “I kin use her.”

“Blessed are the fantasists for they shall not be dismayed by oblivion!” the man who calls himself Jesus is declaring.

“Yea, Lord, save us from oblivion!”

“But damned are they who project their mad fantasies upon others!”

“Is it a parable, Lord?”

“It’s a prophecy!”

“That’s crazy! Don’t listen to him!” Angry shouts, heard now as then, so long ago, growing ever fiercer, commingled with the wails of woe and worship, a cacophony of dissent and fervent prayer and threat and lament, and also the rackety flapping of the helicopters overhead, with which Jesus did not have to contend in his own time.

The rising anger might have turned to violence did not the man, swarmed about by small children as though costumed by them, look so uncannily like the image of Christ on their Sunday morning church programs, and had not Reverend Baxter — who at such a moment would ordinarily be railing at full throat against false prophets and other deceptive abominations of the sinful world — fallen, while gazing upon the intruder, into a dark contemplative silence, as if stilled by the ominous workings of the day; for, as he declared it would be, so it is, if what is seen can be believed. He does not believe it (who is this fool?), but he distrusts his disbelief. The announced hour of fulfillment—he has announced it! — is this it then? Is this He? He who will create a new Heaven and a new earth, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the one who always was, who is, and who is still to come? He can’t be! And yet, for such are the mysterious workings of the Lord, he — He? — can. There is also the alarming apocalyptic testimony of those who have fled West Condon. No one can doubt the muffled explosions, the smoke billowing over the town, the hovering helicopters (are they firing rockets?), the wild chorus of sirens over there getting louder. Some say they have seen bodies rising into the sky, though none can be seen from here. Should they flee while they still can? Or is the same thing happening all over the world? Many have been urging a return to the sanctuary of the camp. But is it sanctuary or entrapment? They ask this Jesus who has appeared before them. He only smiles with glittering eyes and says: “There is no sanctuary!” Which is exactly what Abner would have said himself.

In the Meeting Hall below, when Abner called for this Holy March, he felt a surge of conviction more powerful than he’d ever felt before, and it’s almost as though that very certainty has provoked its contrary. Torn between yea, yea and nay, nay. Abner is most himself when most righteously enraged, and as they climbed up here, that rage, which served him well in the camp lodge, began to evaporate under the brightening sun, giving way to a kind of awed anticipation. Has God spoken through him, as he so often feels He has? If so, is he ready? Can he be, assailed by doubt? He felt the first presentiments of this strange bafflement of mood when they arrived down on the mine road at the place where he struck and killed the girl that terrible night. He seemed for a moment to see her there or to feel at least her presence, and the road seemed to blacken under his feet, and he knelt to pray. Her shattered face against the windshield scrimmed his mind, hanging like a transparent curtain against the thinning clouds when he looked up. He thought that climbing the hill away from the road would free him of her, but she has risen with him, haunts him still. Young Rector has taught him to trust these mysterious impressions as fleeting experiences of the real world beyond the corrupted one of our senses, and he has learned to trust the boy; he has been so right about so many things, and more loyal to Abner than his own family. He is less certain about the peculiar bug-eyed orphan at his side, even if he is one of the twelve First Followers; there is something not right about him. But young Rector has assured him that the boy is subject to a kind of divine madness, which makes him particularly receptive to holy visions. “Illuminations.” Glimpses beyond the veil. Where there is no dark and all is light.

Light.

And so Abner finds his voice. “Ye are the light of the world! You do not light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it gives light unto the world!” he declares, though without his usual vehemence, hearing himself somehow echoing himself, and the man who says he is Jesus replies: “Blessed are they who put their light under a bushel for they shall ignite a great conflagration!” Whereupon the very mention of fire sets everyone on the sacred Mount of Redemption off again.

Not all hold the mine hill in such reverence, nor see the followers of the apostate Catholic Giovanni Bruno as anything but heretical, if not demonically possessed. Another of God’s armies, the Knights of Columbus Volunteer Defense Force, who also call themselves, throwing insult back as pride, the Dagotown Devil Dogs, are even now gathering in the empty field near the hill, once meant as the site for an industrial park that was never built. They have been officially deputized by the city police chief and are turning to march upon the hill and arrest all those on it, with orders from their leader to shoot to kill, if necessary. Their church has been dynamited, friends and family killed or maimed, their priest hospitalized in critical condition. They are impatient to exact due justice; there will be no negotiations. In town, the police chief himself, as the reluctant de facto leader of all the volunteer police and rescue units from the region who have rolled in to help, has issued instructions to many of them to proceed toward the mine hill, and they are doing so. They too have suffered casualties and will brook no further resistance. More ambulances and medical teams arrive, and the chief sends them out there as well. The town banker, whose place of business, so central to the community, has been dynamited with a substantial loss of life and property, confers with the state governor before also heading to the mine. He demands that what remain of the troops called in by the governor be, for God’s sake, dispatched out there immediately to secure the hill and prevent the outbreak of anarchy and further bloodshed. The governor, who has just told a network interviewer that the problems here “have nothing to do with religion, these are just evil people assaulting a decent Christian community,” knows that no good will come of it. The young soldiers have been traumatized and are ill prepared for this sort of sectarian conflict, many of them being themselves believers of one or another of the contending persuasions, nor is it clear what exactly they will do when they get there. “Securing the hill” is probably an unexecutable command. But he also knows that he has no choice; he has made too many mistakes, the town is burning, and the banker has made it clear he will be held accountable. The swarming and increasingly hysterical news media, some of whose members have also been targeted, already hold him accountable. He has commandeered yellow school buses to replace the destroyed army vehicles and even now they are rumbling slowly out of town, bearing their whey-faced battalions.

From her grandstand seat high up on the mine tipple steps, Sally Elliott can see the buses in the smoky distance, rocking in tandem on the approach road like liverish elephants, trunks to tails, and she takes a photo of them. They remind her of the last time this happened out here, when they used those buses for the mass arrests they made. She ran home that day before all the bad stuff began, but she remembers the buses, how surreal they seemed, and sinister, parked there side by side in the rain with their blunt impassive faces, waiting to open their maws and eat the people. She has been scribbling in her notebook, shut off from the world, totally absorbed, willfully ignoring the carryings-on of the Brunists on the hill and the more disconcerting sounds coming from the direction of the town. New principle: Writing first, everything else second. But there’s smoke on the horizon now, too. Helicopters wheeling about like chicken hawks. She worries about her mom and dad. Actually, she has been worried all along, but only now has she brought it forward into the thinking part of her head. Things may be turning out not so funny.

She stands to stretch. Over on the hill, the Brunists seem to be having a row. The wacky Presbyterian minister has turned up there in his Jesus outfit and is apparently stirring them up, a chubby little fellow in a brown suit beside him like a company lawyer, or maybe his agent. His lady friend, the church organ lady, is bobbing indecisively up and down the back of the hill in her flesh-colored nightshirt, like a terrified puppet on elastic strings. She’s painted some of herself red. There’s a new crowd marching toward the hill from a distant field in a kind of loose military formation. Can’t see who they are, but the one out front in the blue police shirt might be Angie Bonali’s brother. Sirens are approaching from all directions. In a ditch at the edge of the old county road that runs past the church camp, a shiny pea-green bump catches her eye. Almost everything is green over there, but the bump is brighter than the rest, reflecting the sun. Metal. Like the top of a car.

She has sat too long in the sun. She touches one finger to her chest, it leaves a white spot, then turns bright pink again. A helicopter buzzes her, the pilot grinning out the window, and she waves her shirt at him, grinning back. As she does so, she glimpses the weird golden-haired pal of Billy Don on the hill. Shielding his eyes. Staring over at her. That mental orphan at his side. He points. Uh oh. Time to go.

Prissy Tindle has carefully choreographed her “Save the Fathers Arabesque,” a routine meant to whisk Jesus and his inner Wesley away from the danger they are in with a simple fluid and irresistible movement while paralyzing all those confused people with surprise and wonder. It would be better if she could pop suddenly from behind one of those big earth-moving things, but they’re too far away to reach unseen. There’s only one way and not much time. When they first parked down here behind the hill, there were a couple of muddy old junkers resting by the ditch with no one in them, but more people have been arriving by that road, several of them dressed in those white bedsheet things, almost all of them carrying guns and looking insanely dangerous. Jesus doesn’t understand the trouble he is in, or else he’s just trying to get killed. Which some say was Jesus’ problem in the first place, back when he first made himself famous. She finds herself calling him Jesus all the time now, for it’s the only name he answers to, and anyway it’s like poor dear Wesley has sunk away somewhere beyond her reach. She felt more comfortable with Wesley on top, so to speak, for she still had some sway, but she has to admit that Jesus is sexier — so forthright and self-assured and virile. Thrilling, really. It’s like Wesley has been saved after all. And for all their bold new style, they still need her — maybe more than ever. She brushes their hair, keeps their beard trimmed, creates and cares for their wardrobe, feeds them, and, when she can, shields them from trouble. If only they would stop arguing with each other! Down at the far end of the road, men are forming up and beginning to march this way. She does not know who they are, but she does not think they will be friendly. And those shrieking sirens! Like burning cats! She has to get him away from here! If only Jesus will cooperate! How can he not, seeing the danger she will be in? She wants only to be away from here, but old trouper that she is, she takes one determined but terrified step after another and arrives at the top and there they are again, spread out below her, all those wild mad people! They are shouting at Jesus and at each other — anything could happen! Be brave, her inner voice shouts. She has used up all her lipstick on herself, hoping she has created the right effect. She flings off her gown and opens her mouth to do her naked Whore of Babylon shriek. But nothing comes out. She’s too scared. She’s a dancer, not a singer. That panicky little preacher at Jesus’ side with his hair standing on end and shirt tails out stares at her in abject horror, and his eyes roll back and he keels right over. “It’s the Antichrist!” she hears someone scream. Hysterically, over and over. That orphan boy who so hates Wesley. Oh no! They all start shouting. “Don’t let her get away!” “She killed an old lady!” What? There is a terrifying rattle of gunfire. But well in the background, for — that does it! — Prissy Tindle is already performing her “Leaping Gazelle Adieu” through a crowd of advancing armed men (there is rude laughter, a passing slap on her bare fanny) on her way back down to the car. Jesus is in great jeopardy, and she fears for him and she loves him, but he’ll just have to miracle himself out of it somehow. She’s retiring to the wings. Bring down the curtain and kill the lights. This show is closing.

Hovis, holding up what looked like a raggedy tarpaulin thick with mud, had just been showing Uriah the missing slicker he’d found—“It looks different,” Uriah said, and Hovis said, “Gotta be it, Uriah. Ain’t nobody else but you’d wear nuthin this old and ugly!”—when Sister Debra’s strange boy interrupted Jesus’ recitation of his newfangled beatitudes and started screaming about the Antichrist, and everybody commenced shooting at the old mine tipple like it was some kind of giant coming after them. Neither Hovis nor Uriah could see exactly what they were shooting at, but they fired off a few rounds because it seemed like the way this day was panning out. A day which — both have thought but not at the same time — may be the last of its kind. Even before Jesus turned up with his sweaty little pal in the suit, Uriah could feel it in his bones, like the onset of a thunderstorm, though the skies are clear. The end of things. Uriah had said as much to the scruffy fellow in the Brunist tunic from back home, pointing out that the very sun seemed stalled up there, right smack on top of the Mount, and the fellow, a friendly and poetical sort, had said, “Yep, know what you’re sayin’, brother. Like it’s been a sweet ride, but bad curves a-comin’.” Sister Wanda had come to the hill with him, and when people asked after the big fellow she stared at them like she was only half there and said he was feeling poorly, and people said they were sorry to hear that but they were glad that he had let her be up here with the Elect now that things were really starting to happen. Poor worn-out thing, her belly hanging low on her scrawny frame; Uriah hopes she’ll be blessed with more smarts and gumption in the next world.

Isaiah Blaurock came past about then, just before the shooting at the tipple commenced, looking both fierce and quietly determined, like he always does, and Uriah thought he might have brought them all something to eat, but instead he just gathered up his three younguns from under the feet of Jesus and, without a word, carried them down to the foot of the hill where his pickup was parked. His wife Dot, who was just asking Jesus about the marriage supper of the Lamb, when could they start tucking in, seemed as surprised as everyone else and just stood there for a moment watching him go. Then she tossed her little one over her shoulder and went gallumphing after, shouting back over her shoulder: “Hold on! We’re going for reinforcements!” Which was when that boy started screaming about the Antichrist.

Now, they’re still blasting away at the tipple like it’s the Fourth of July (and maybe it is, wasn’t it supposed to happen sometime soon?)—“I got her!” someone shouts — when a number of armed men appear from different angles at the crest of the hill with rifles pointed down at them, and order them to lay down their arms in the name of the law; they’re all under arrest. Italians by the look of them, though others cry out that it’s the Powers of Darkness. And they could be both at the same time, because it was the Romans who crucified Jesus, wasn’t it? “We are afflicted from all sides,” Jesus says, seeming somewhat exasperated. The boy won’t stop shrieking and somebody says, “Who is that crazy kid? Shut him up before he gets us all shot!” and somebody else says, “Sshh! He’s one of the First Followers!” “What?” Young Darren puts his arm around him and he eases up and starts to sob softly and Darren leads him downhill, away from the center of things, toward the “doorway,” as it might be called, of the outlined temple.

And then that mean cuss McDaniel from the Christian Patriots points his rifle straight at the armed men’s leader, the one wearing a badge, and shouts back that he’s the acting sheriff out here and is the boss and he is arresting them if they don’t clear out immediately, or stormy words to that effect, not all completely Christian, and besides, he says, we got a lot more guns, so if you want to have a shootout, let’s get started. Then for a moment they’re all just standing there with their rifles and shotguns loaded, waiting to see who’ll shoot or back down first, the overhead sun casting ominous shadows under their brows and noses. Down on the mine road, a parade of yellow school buses with soldiers in them are pulling in and also some police cars with their sirens cranked up. “Reckon it’s time to go take a leak,” mutters the beardy fellow Uriah has been conversing with and he looks for a place to toss his smoke, finally just stubs it out inside his canvas bag and hands the bag to Uriah and asks him to hold it for him until he gets back. Hovis asks who that was and Uriah says it was a fellow from their parts who was agreeable to talk to if you could get past his smell. “He knowed a lotta friendsa ourn, or said he did when I mentioned ’em. Said he seen us on the tellyvision and come a-runnin’.” “Where’s he gone now?” “Off to take a leak, he said.” “With Sister Wanda? Don’t seem right.” “No. But you know Sister Wanda.” “She looked purty skeered.” “Well, I’m skeered, too.” “Whaddaya reckon’s in the bag?” “Cain’t say. Didn’t ask and t’ain’t polite to—”

Far from all these apocalyptical doings and without access to any TV screens now broadcasting them internationally in all their entertaining horror (the blast on the side of the mine hill is so powerful it knocks back the cameras and the images go bouncing up to the sky and back and even end up sideways, and by now everybody’s watching — wow! did you see that?), Georgie Lucci has just made his fortune. Long overdue and much deserved, beloved and noble faccia da culo, gran testa di cazzo that he is. At the airport, the mayor told him to wait in the car while he got the tickets. He left the briefcase in the back seat, but showed Georgie he still had the key: “No fucking funny biz, partner. I’ll just be a jiff.” Once the chump was out of sight, Georgie took off, barreling down the highway bat-outa-hellwise aiming for the state line, laughing all the way, pounding the wheel with his palm, jerking on his boner, blowing thankful kisses at la bella Marcella, his Lady Luck, his Virgin Mary, his Red-Hot Ruby, blowing kisses as well at his nonna, his mother, even the puttana who gave him his present dose, singing “Fly Me to the Moon” at the top of his voice, and imagining what he was going to do with all that money. He figures if that crook Castle said Brazil, that’s the one place he’s not going. He doesn’t know where it is, but it did sound cool, full of naked young ficas lying around on soft golden beaches, all aquiver with pent-up desire. A kind of island paradise, how he pictured it. But, too bad, he’ll have to miss it. He’s not that stupid. There are other beaches, other hot women. When he’s out of the state and far enough away to risk it, he pulls over beside some roadside picnic tables. The briefcase is a tough nut to crack; the mayor knew what he was doing when he bought it. His knife is as useless as a soft dick against a resistant maidenhead, so he takes the limo’s crowbar to it, alternatively smashing and prying at it, one eye on the highway for cops or snoopers. He speaks sweet nothings to the briefcase while he beats it. “Spread, amore! Show me what you got!” The lock breaks at last and he jimmies the case open. What he finds inside is wadded newspaper. Old yellowing West Condon Chronicles. The ones with the old Cunt Hill photos that caused such a storm. Like the one raging inside him. He’s grinning, can’t help it, but he’s murderously pissed. He leaves the newspapers to blow in the wind, hops back in the limo, pockets the revolver he’d noticed Castle hiding in the glove compartment, and guns it back to the airport. Where, after an emergency call from the mayor of West Condon, they are waiting for him. Caution. He may be armed.

When officer Bo Bosticker reached the police station at the end of his odyssey through the burning town, he found the front of it reduced to a pile of grimly decorated sticks and stones, though the unlit holding cell at the back was still intact and occupied. He himself had arrested Cokie Duncan the night before for loud-cussing, pissing-in-the-street, fall-down drunk behavior, and as the otherwise agreeable old fellow seemed to need a place to sleep it off where he wouldn’t get stepped on, he locked him up there and supplied him with coffee and smokes until he passed out. Dunc, like Bo, survived the Deepwater mine disaster, so he feels a fraternal regard for him, and even a certain duty in that he has a job and Cokie does not. He stumbled on his crutches over the debris to the back, and found the old boy still in there, jawing with Cheese Johnson, who was sitting on a wooden chair outside the cell, one arm in a filthy plaster cast, the two of them sharing a bottle of some kind of whiskey of a good color with a charred label. “Well, look-it here,” Duncan said, “it’s ole Bo! If it ain’t his ghost! Thought you was dead, Bo!” “Well, I was dead to the world for certain, and missed out on all the dramma.” “Drop your props’n pull up a chair, Bo,” Cheese said. “Have a wake-up snort.” “They killt everbody else,” Duncan said. “You’re the only one left!” And so he sat down for a minute to rest his aching knees and Cokie told him about the blast out front—“I got hit smack in the face by a piece a pore ole Monk! It was like he was lettin’ fly at me with one last gob!”—and Cheese filled him in on some of the wild doings out in the street while the bikers were still on it, including an illustrated account of the war dance of a Red Indian on top of the old hotel before he got blown away in a manner that Cheese called “outright magical.” While Bo eased the pain of his ruined knees with a few medicinal breakfast swigs, a bunch of other killings and explosions were colorfully recounted and somehow that got them onto the mine disaster again, which always had a way of coming up regardless, ever more so when calamity was the theme, and then Cheese left to go rescue some more bottles out of the liquor store fire. When he came back with an armload, plus a couple of cartons of cigarettes in his sling, he said he heard something big go off in the direction of the old mine and now everybody was tearing ass in that direction, the word being that they’re all shooting at each other out there, it’s a fucking free-for-all, so the three of them now have the town pretty much to themselves, what there is left of it, though besides the smokes and whiskey there’s not much they need. Risking the flames that are eating up the inside of the dimestore, Cheese has also retrieved a soft over-shuffled deck of cards from the Legion Hall above it. One thing leads to another and pretty soon the three of them find themselves quietly day-juicing over a wistful unfocused game of pitch, a particular pleasure for Bo, card-playing being something he has generally had to miss out on since getting hired for night duty and one of the few things he is somewhat good at. He has often thought that playing cards would be the way he’d most like to spend the afterlife, and, who knows, given the look of things outside, maybe the worst has happened and this is the afterlife. He says so and makes it clear that, if so, he is happy with their eternal company. Of course, he shouldn’t be drinking on the job, but strictly speaking he’s still on his own time, though with everyone else dead, it’s probably up to him to take over. If he wants to. A circumstance that has never previously arisen and he is not comfortable with it. He asks, thinking aloud, if they ought to go out to the mine and see what’s happening, and Cokie, peeing on the wall of his cell, says, “Some things, ifn you cain’t do nuthin about ’em, ain’t wuth lookin’ at.” “Your ugly pox-eaten dick, for example,” says Cheese in disgust, and then he falls off his chair.

Bo’s boss, West Condon Chief of Police Dee Romano, sits alone at the back of the bomb-damaged St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, trying to imagine an alternative career and seeking divine counsel in the matter, when his lieutenant Luigi Testatonda, returning from a check on his family, piles in heavily beside him, settles his cap on his lap, and informs him that another big one has gone off out at the mine hill and it has reportedly set off a lot of reckless shooting. He has a worried look on his sad moony face and Dee says, “It’s not our territory, Louie. We’re not going out there.” The worried look is nodded away and Louie busies himself with wiping his brow with a handkerchief and muttering a few prayers for the dead and dying. Of which they have seen their fill, need see no more. After organizing the volunteer units, they have toured the temporary downtown morgues in the post office and pool hall, where they said goodbye to what was left of their colleague Monk Wallace; have visited the various outlying targets, including the devastated National Guard bivouac area at the high school gym, where army medics, flown in by helicopters now sitting on the football field, are tending to the wounded and tagging the dead; have checked in on Father Baglione at the city hospital and some of the others who are out there. Dee’s nephew is pulling through, though he’ll have to give up smoking. The old priest is still touch and go. They have made consolatory house calls to the Juliano, Vignati, Spontini, and Lombardi families, most of them related, by one womb or another, to the Romanos. There were others, but they were both drained and could bear no more, so they stopped by to see that Dee’s family was all right (large ingathering at the house, general state of mourning, wife organizing a vigil for the priest), and then he let Louie drop him off here, giving him the patrol car to go look in on his own family. Shock and worry, Louie says when Dee asks, but no calamities. His daughter hiked out to the hospital when she heard about the Bonali girl getting shot, but they turned her back. Only letting in immediate family. Ramona keeps picking up the dead phone, he says, listening for the dial tone to return. The early afternoon sun casts a bright dusty beam through the shattered rose window much like those often shown in pictures of saints, or the Virgin at the Annunciation, or the boy Jesus astonishing the elders in the synagogue, the sort of beam that makes you feel that, if you walked into it, you’d be transported straight up to Paradise. The only trouble is, it’s falling on the blood-stained crater in the floor, not so much a welcoming beam as an accusing one. Step into it, you might get fried. The main impression it gives, though, is of the messy nothingness that it is beamed upon. Man’s life on earth: there has to be something more, or it’s not worth living it.

The doctor and nurses have come to Angela Bonali’s room to take the bullets out. It’s not that her case is urgent, they say — the bullet went deep and hit her hip bone, but there’s no breakage or spinal damage — but that the operating room is in constant use and they need her bed. There are casualties coming in every minute, and from what they could see on the TV outside, there are soon going to be a lot more. She can hear the gurneys with their squeaky wheels constantly rolling by. The doctor says there will be a small scar but she should think of it as a beauty mark, and she is able to smile shyly at that. Once it stops hurting, it will be fun to show it off. Really, she’s lucky. Her friend Monica Piccolotti stopped by for a moment earlier. In tears. Pete’s head is wrapped, blindfolding him, and Monica can’t bring herself to tell him that he won’t notice any difference when the bandages come off. That made Angela cry, and Joey hung his head. Pete saved Monica and their little boy and their unborn baby, and Monica said that for the first time she really understood what marriage was all about and why it was ordained by God. She would love Pete now forever, and take care of him until they were in Heaven together and Pete could see again. Pete saved the life of Sheriff Smith’s wife, too, and the sheriff has been in and out of Pete’s room ever since, praying over him in his intense Protestant way, though now they say he has left for the mine hill again. Where something awful is happening.

“Somebody blew himself up along with a bunch of others and now they are all shooting at each other and there are bodies everywhere,” Joey Castiglione says when he comes back after they’ve bandaged her up. He’s trying to be cool but his voice is shaking. Because the emergency generator still runs the hospital, all the TVs are off, except the one at the nurses’ station, and while they were digging out the bullets, Joey, who most people out here think is her brother, left the room and joined the crowd clustered around the set there. “It’s really gross, Angie. I saw some people down on their knees praying and they suddenly just keeled over!” Angela hopes she didn’t know them and is glad her dad is here at the hospital and far from trouble — and Joey, too. He says she ought to see it, but no, there are some things it’s better not to look at. When bad things happen on the TV, even when it’s just a made-up movie, she always closes her eyes or leaves the room. People go crazy, especially around other crazy people, and you can go crazy watching them. Joey also said some things about religion that she didn’t want to listen to. A Baptist preacher out there in the hallway now is blaming everything on the sins of the town and has got people into an emotional prayer meeting right in the hallway, and that’s the sort of thing, Joey says, though less politely, that gives him stomach cramps. Joey thinks he saw her brother Charlie right in the middle of everything. Well, Charlie was made for trouble, he can take care of himself. And if he can’t she’ll be sad, but mostly because her dad will be sad. Charlie is a total pain, and she doesn’t want him to die, but she does wish he’d just go away and stay away. His latest idea was to take her to the city and make money with her in an evil way. Angela told him he was the most disgusting person she ever knew and he only laughed and popped his gum in her face.

When people die — and when you almost die! — it makes you think about things, so she and Joey have been having a very intimate conversation about how short life is and what it all means, and though neither of them have mentioned marriage, it seems like that is what they have been talking about. Joey is not any taller than she is and has the knobby Castiglione chin, and she’s not sure she really loves him, certainly not in the my-heart-stood-still way, but she has always felt easy around him, in some ways he has been her best friend ever since they were little, and she knows he would do his best to make her happy. They could go visit the fountains of Rome on their honeymoon and have their marriage blessed by the Pope, even if Joey’s not very religious. That’s what she finds herself thinking. But then, out of the blue, he says something that makes her cry. He says not to worry about the kid she is carrying, he’ll help her take care of it, and she breaks down in tears and tells him the truth but begs him not to tell anyone else. “I’ve made such a fool of myself, Joey!” she weeps. “I’m so embarrassed!” He smiles. “Hey. It’s okay,” he says. He kisses her. It’s awkward, with her lying face down and her sore bottom in the air, but she likes it. Not a lot. But enough. The word “comforted” comes to mind. Like in some romances she has read, though usually about older women. She feels comforted. And now, if anyone asks, that stupid girl from the drugstore, for example, who is also somewhere here in the hospital with cuts from the broken mirror which crashed down, she’ll tell them she is dumping that jerk Tommy because she has found true love with Joey, who is not such a spoiled selfish egomaniac and is ten times a better lover.

At the Brunist Wilderness Camp, Young Abner is standing up on Inspiration Point, sometimes also known as the Higher Ground, leaning on his rifle and gazing down in fascination upon the burning cabins beginning to snap and crack, and he asks himself if — should his father die — he is ready to take his place. He decides that he is. Why else has God spared him by sending him here to the camp away from the terrible punishments on the Mount of Redemption? He has much to learn, but he already knows a lot, too. You don’t live all your life with a father like that without it becoming part of you. Since he is all alone here now, he has been reciting out loud some of his father’s famous lines—“The moment of holy retribution and rivers of blood is at hand!”—and, with practice and a little more courage, he’ll be able to sound just like him. “Ye shall set the city on fire!” Also, he’s taller, so he’ll be able to look down on people and not have to shout up at them like his father. He may be called on soon. Since the bomb went off over at the Mount, there has been a ceaseless poppety-pop of gunfire and a lot of people, he can see from here, are falling over, and that doesn’t even count the ones who must have died when the bomb went off. He can’t see his father, so he may already be dead.

Young Abner may have seen the making of that bomb. After Darren sent him back here, he patrolled the grounds, finding little of interest (a pair of cracked sunglasses that he is wearing because they make him feel more heroic, a jar of honey with a homemade label in a cabin cupboard which he ate) and there were still some pesky children running around, so he posted himself up here on the Point to guard the camp as he was asked to do. It’s drier and the chiggers aren’t so bad. He was resting against a tree, half asleep, considering what acts of retribution he might have undertaken had that jezebel’s trailer still been down in the parking lot, and keeping a lazy eye meanwhile on the sky over the Mount just in case something started to happen, when his brother’s motorcycle gang suddenly came roaring in below, guns out and firing into the cabins. That woke him up in a hurry, and he spread himself flat, peeking at them over the edge, his heart banging away at the stones under his chest. He recognized Nat immediately, even though he was supposed to be one of the ones who got killed. The one without a head, they said. Well, he was certainly still wearing it. And bossing everybody like he always does. Who was missing was his other brother, the little one. They left their motorcycles outside the Meeting Hall and charged in like storm troopers, kicking the doors open, blazing away.

After that it was quiet and they stayed in there for a while and Young Abner was just thinking about rising from his prone position and scuttling down the back way while he still could, when two of them came out and started prowling around and he ducked his head again. The next time he got up the nerve to look, there they were, the whole gang, coming up the path to the Point. He had to scramble behind some thick bushes, which were not much protection. Scared spitless, as that wall-eyed boy who worked for Clara Collins used to say. Then the worst possible thing happened: his family has been eating a lot of canned beans lately with the inevitable consequence and it was like the devil had got into his bowels and was just trying to get him killed. But Nat and the others kept studying the Mount through their binoculars and arguing and they didn’t hear it (it was only the softest little poot), so God was still watching over him and answering his prayers. He saw now that Nat was wearing a leather jacket that said KID RIVERS on it in metal studs, and the main thing you’d say about him was that he didn’t look like a boy anymore. But it was Nat. Or at least the head was. Maybe they sewed it onto somebody else’s body. He realized, seeing him again up close, how much he hated him. And feared him. The big one in the undershirt, who looked like Goliath in Young Abner’s Illustrated Bible for Children, had a shiny policeman’s badge on his greasy leather vest, and the others wore bracelets and necklaces and upside down crosses in their ears like earrings. Not all of them were real Americans. Maybe none of them were. Some kind of monster aliens. Young Abner knew he could shoot them. That’s probably what he was expected to do — but what if he missed? He didn’t want to die! And if they weren’t all human, it might not do any good to shoot them. Nevertheless, he kept the revolver Darren gave him pointed at Nat the whole time just in case they did see him there; at least, before they killed him or did other terrible things, he’d be able to get back at his cruel brother for scarring his forehead. Nat shouted and shook his fist in what might have been some kind of prayer but sounded more like cussing, and then at last they all went away.

Young Abner could hardly breathe, and when he crawled to the edge for another look, he saw that they had joined up with a sixth motorcyclist down below, an old crippled guy with a gray braid whom Young Abner recognized from the last time they were here, the one little Paulie was riding with when they left and the only one who looked like he might still be human, and they all went over to the emptied out trailer lot. He couldn’t see well through the trees, but it looked like two fat men got into a fight in which they both fell down, or maybe they were killed by the others; they didn’t get up again. One of the fat men was that big Goliath guy with the police badge. The others started vandalizing the few trailers and caravans still parked there while the old guy with the braid limped back up toward the Meeting Hall. He got some things from a sack that looked like big firecrackers, and he tied them up and settled them into a canvas bag. When the others came up to the Main Square, they were dragging along an older woman with scrawny arms and legs but a poochy belly. They must have found down in the trailer park. Did he know her? Possibly. From the old church. They dressed her in a raggedy Brunist tunic and one of the bikers put another one on like maybe they’d converted and he stowed his motorcycle inside the house trailer he’d driven up from below and the two of them drove away in it. The others stole other caravans and trailers and did the same, but before they left they splashed the buildings and grounds with big cans of gasoline and set everything alight. As they pulled out, he fired his rifle a few times in the general direction of the camp access road just to be able to say he had done what he was supposed to do. He will say they were shooting back, it was a real fire fight, he’s lucky to be here, and he fired a few shots into the trees behind him as evidence of that. He didn’t see what happened to the canvas bag, but now he can guess.

After they were gone and he was alone except for the two dead men, he could pass wind as much and as loudly as he wanted — he thought of it as a kind of exorcism, and God-blessed himself with each ker-blatt! Down in the camp the fires were dying out. One thing Young Abner knows all about is building fires — burning the trash being one of his main chores growing up — so he gathered dry kindling and firewood from the stacks by the fireplace in the Meeting Hall and paper from the church office files and added it all to fires that were still smoldering, crumpling the paper to let the air get through and building little tepees with the wood. He knew that to make big fires you had to start with little ones. He broke up some of the wooden folding chairs and made the tepees bigger with them. Some of the gas cans were not completely empty and he sprinkled what was left over his constructions, and also into the old upright piano in the Meeting Hall, tossing a burning splinter in (there was a sweet responsive whoosh!), and then he capped the empty cans tightly and left them on the fires just for fun. He also remembered the old creosoted half-rotten boards from the ruined cabins and piled up on the far side of the trailer lot, and though it was hard work, he managed to haul most of them into the Main Square and add them to the cabin and Meeting Hall fires and they caught right away. While passing through the trailer lot on the way to get another armload, he paused to study the two dead men (the bearded one with the police badge was especially scary with his bulging eyes, which seemed to be looking right at him and crying, but crying blood, and with little red blood-worms crawling out of his nose and mouth and ears) and he took out the revolver and shot them both in the head, killing them a second time. It didn’t make much sense to shoot them both if he was trying to take credit, but he did. And that was when the huge bomb went off on the Mount of Redemption, and he hurried back up here to the Point to see what was happening. He saw the black spot where the bomb went off over there and all the crowds that had gathered and saw the helicopters and people shooting at each other and falling over, and he watched them for a while. They looked like white ants fighting black ants.

Down in the camp, the spreading fire is popping and crackling healthily now, thick smoke billowing. There are flames in the bushes. If it gets hot enough, he knows, everything will catch and burn. He ties his bandanna over his nose. The smoke will draw attention. He may have to leave soon. But not yet. It’s an amazing sight. He can’t take his eyes off it. A God-sized bonfire, only lacking the bodies of the wicked. But he can imagine them, God plucking them from across the face of the earth and bringing them here and tossing them in, watching them scream and claw at the air as they fall, and knowing that it is good because He is good. The way Young Abner used to throw ants into his trash fires. “Let them be cast into the fire, into deep pits, that they rise not up again! For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains!” Texts he knows well, having often recited them over the dying ants. They will be at the heart of his ministry. “For our God is a consuming fire!” His voice is a little too high. He tucks his chin in and practices making it deeper. “For our God is a consuming fire!” Better. He fondles the revolver, points it at the continuing mayhem on the hill. It was fun shooting the two dead men. He wishes he had something else to shoot. Behind him, somewhere below, even as he makes that wish, he hears a cry. A girl, it sounded like. Maybe God has just answered his prayer, and appointed him His avenging angel.

The Brunist Followers on the Mount of Redemption are not sure whether it is the beginning of the Tribulation or if they are into the midterm Rapture and the dreaded Abomination of Desolation or if it’s the Final Rebellion and the all-consuming battle of Armageddon, but, wherever they are in God’s awesome plan, the End Times are as horrific as the Bible said they would be. There was a mighty explosion that rocked the world on its axis and, some say, caused the sun to bounce, followed by the unleashing of a great slaughter, which seems to have no end. Indeed, depending on how you read the Bible, it could last for a thousand years. In the mind of God, of course, a thousand years is just an instant, the seeming passing of time being an illusion of human existence. For God, all things happen at once, and that’s exactly how it seems on the Mount of Redemption right now: eternity squeezed into one punishing explosive moment. They have heard the trumpet judgments, felt the earth quake under the scorching sun, been stung by the ice and fire raining from the cloudless sky, experienced within themselves the shattering of the bowls, for it is written that “as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers.” “Send the fire!” they sang in genuine hope and longing, and now the fire has been sent and the bodies of the wounded and dead, as yet unraptured, litter the hillside. Day of wrath, O dreadful day! When this world shall pass away, and the Heavens together roll, shriveling like a parchéd scroll! They have known this was coming, all the shriveling and shivering, ceaselessly they have announced it, prayed for it, sung about it, and yet they have not known, could not have known. The paltry human imagination is not up to it. When the fire (when the fire)/Comes down from Heaven (down from Heaven),/This old world (this old world),/Will melt away (melt away)!/ Millions then (millions then)/Will cry for mercy (cry for mercy)/But it will be (it will be)/Too late to pray! Those with clear consciences smile with pious joy as they welcome their transport into the hereafter, their raised eyes ablaze with an inner light, while others, less certain of their fate, cry out in desperation to the Lord Jesus Christ for mercy, for forgiveness, for an end to the torment. Christ Jesus has indeed made his Glorious Appearance, returning as so often foretold, but he seems as stunned by events as the wailing believers who swarm about him, groveling at his feet, hands reaching out over other reaching hands to touch his garments, tug at them in supplication. All believe now. How can they not? He is, in the crushing horror, what hope remains. Children have crawled up on him, each trying to climb higher than the other, as if clambering up a crowded ladder to Heaven. As others have cried out, he has remained silent; as others have fallen, he has remained standing, overseeing what must be. Somewhere on his vesture and his thigh, they know, is written KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS, but under the clinging children this cannot be seen. His demeanor is stern, but composed. Bullets seem to have passed right through him!

Don’t you have anything to say to these people?

What can I say that I’ve not already said? I am confused by their confusion, oppressed by their hope. It’s all very sad. Yet I long for such innocent longing!

Then what are we doing out here? It’s really dangerous! And we’re not even ducking!

I know. Somehow that feels out of character.

But this is madness! Where is that wretched fellow who was with us?

Somewhere under all these others, I suppose.

Shouldn’t we at least be protecting all these children?

No. They are protecting us.

Helicopters clatter overhead with hollow amplified voices like those of creatures from outer space. “You must leave this property immediately! Put down your weapons! You are all under arrest!” They go largely unheeded. Though many have been brought low, the remaining Brunist Defenders and Christian Patriots, under the command of Ross McDaniel, the deputy acting sheriff and Patriot sergeant-at-arms, have managed to pin back the enemy forces at the top of the hill, using the excavated outline of the temple floor plan as a shallow trench bulwarked by fallen bodies, and they continue to exchange sporadic gunfire. At least, for the moment, the shooting has stopped from the base of the hill, where the town banker, exercising his wartime experience as a decorated senior officer, has pushed aside the state governor and the frightened young National Guard captain and ordered the rattled troops to stop firing and take cover behind the buses. With the megaphone wrested from the young officer, he turns to the outraged townsfolk, arriving now by the carloads, seeking revenge for the horrors visited upon them, and appeals to them to put away their weapons, warning them that they could face imprisonment or worse. They should return to their cars at once and clear the area. None do — it was the banker himself, after all, who urged them all to arm them-selves — but at least, after his warning, they stop taking potshots at the tunicked zealots on the hillside. He moves through the crowd, seeking out law officers, firemen, medics, conferring with them, and as he points out various positions, they all spread out.

Although they think of themselves as righteous servants of God and country, the citizenry at the foot and those in the air are serving human laws, not divine ones, and thus are recognized by those fighting the Holy War of the Last Days as members of the legions assembled by Satan, it being in the nature of the Powers of Darkness that they do not know they are the Powers of Darkness, just as, though they are doomed, they cannot know that they are doomed, else they would not play the roles in God’s grand scheme that they are obliged to play. Such are the beliefs of the ardent young Brunist evangelist, presently scrunched down in the puddled grave at the temple cornerstone intended for the last remains of the Prophet Giovanni Bruno, together with the hysterical First Follower and visionary who is his constant companion. As he once replied to the young woman accused by many of being the Anti-christ — and perhaps she is indeed an unwitting manifestation of that enigmatic figure, so essential to the Apocalypse — when she protested that it seemed unfair of the deity to single out a chosen elite: “Well, too bad. That’s how it is.” Victims have fallen in on top of them, but they have been pushed out again.

“Can we fly to Heaven now, Darren?”

“No, we’ll wait here.”

“I’m afraid. I want to go sit in my chair.”

“Stay down, Colin. We’re safe here.”

“I want my chair!”

“Here, this is like your chair.”

“It’s wet!”

“No, it’s all right. Just sit on me. Raise yourself up a little so I can… there. Is that better?”

From the other empty cornerstone grave comes the stentorian voice of the spiritual leader of the Holy Remnant, the Brunist Bishop of West Condon. “Sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the habitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord has come!” He has been foxholed there by his loyal supporters, who shield him from those who wish to kill him. He is staunch and unbowed still, fist raised in defiance of the stuttering gunfire around him. “There has never been such a day before, and there won’t be no other after it! The sun and the moon they’ll go dark, and the stars will quit their shining!” On top of the Mount of Redemption, intent on thwarting the will of the Almighty, is the Romanist villain who thrashed him so mercilessly when he was held, like the Apostle Paul, in captivity: It is all falling into place. Divine history is revealing itself. He is who he has always thought he is. “Do you hear?” he bellows, his voice resounding over the scorched hillside. “Yea, God is fed up with the wickedness on earth and nothing will escape His fury!”

His chief guardian, the black-bearded deputy acting sheriff, hunkered down in the trench next to him and firing at anything that moves up on top, is not so certain God has the upper hand. Through carelessness they have ceded the higher ground, and now they are easy targets out here on this barren hillside and risk total decimation. He turns to the Christian Patriot nearest him, the bishop’s new son-in-law. “I want you to cover me, Lawson. Keep them pinned down up there. They’re mostly just kids and scared outa their skins. You shouldn’t have no problems. If they show more’n their cowlicks, put a bullet in their dumb brains to give ’em something new to think about. I’m gonna make a run for them backhoes.” He selects two Brunist Defenders to go with him, and as they are about to attempt their run, another in a plaid shirt and billed cap, leaning on his rifle, struggles to his feet and begins to sing: “Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross!” Yet another rises beside him, then another. “Lift high His royal banner, it must not suffer loss!” Soon there are half a dozen, then ten, twelve others courageously pulling themselves erect and raising their militant voices, rifles at their shoulders, their fusillades pounding the hilltop rhythmically as they sing. Even the old fellow in the wheelchair pushes himself forward and joins in with his sharp nasal caw. “From victory unto victory His army shall He lead…!” It works. The Patriot leader and his team run low behind them, sprint the final open yards, and reach the backhoes before the first shots are fired at them, bullets now whanging ineffectually off the backhoes’ pressed steel bodies.

At the foot of the hill, the town banker and team captain, having positioned his gathered forces in preparation for wresting the hill away from the cultists and their adversaries, delivers his ultimatum to the governor. His price is a multi-million dollar emergency rescue fund for the town. “Otherwise, these cameras are writing your political obituary. You might as well go up there and lie down with the others.” The governor, though clearly shaken by events, tells him to go to hell, his jaw thrust forward in political poster defiance. “Moreover, Governor, I can prove criminal negligence. I have all the evidence. Including recorded phone conversations.” The governor cries out in exasperation as someone else cries: “Look out!”

A backhoe bears down on them like some long-necked prehistoric monster, head bobbing and smacking the earth, iron jaws agape, picking up speed as it careens down the hillside, rolling over the crippled and the dead, taking out the little tree, its lifeless black-bearded operator slumped over the controls. They barely have time to lurch out of the way, the banker shouting a warning to those huddled down behind the school buses, when the backhoe slams into them, overturning one of them, somersaulting over its own bucket and dipper stick and landing on top of the heap, belly up.

Shocked silence follows, broken only by scattered moans.

And then: “Fire! Fire at the camp!”

Pillars of smoke are indeed rising over the camp. “It’s the biker gang!” The helicopters go wheeling urgently in that direction. “Yes, there’s a motorcycle down there!” comes the crackly report from the sky. “And a couple of dead guys. One’s wearing a badge, might be a cop. And—wait! — we do see movement! Over near some kind of shed! Looks like they might be shooting at us!”

“Whoever they are,” the governor screams, “take them out! Now!”

“Careful, Kirk, there may be some innocent people over there.”

“Out of my way, Cavanaugh! Captain! Mobilize your forces! Prepare to occupy the camp!”

The banker shakes his head, lifts the megaphone, and directs his own hastily assembled troops to move up the hill with him, drawing a net around the belligerents, just as the Knights of Columbus Volunteers appear at the top, weapons leveled at the cultists, ordering them not to move. Their leader, grinning around a thick wad of gum, waves the banker up, saluting him ironically. One last moment of suicidal madness, and then it is over. At least on the Mount of Redemption. Not far away, the camp is being shelled. And then that stops, too. It is not yet three in the afternoon.

The Brunist Tabernacle of Light, represented by the chalky cross carved out on the side of the hill, slowly empties out, its traumatized worshippers and their Defender and Christian Patriot guardians ported off to jails, hospitals, mental institutions, and the temporary morgue in the West Condon city hospital parking lot. Some at the foot have cheered the takeover of the mine hill and the humiliation of the cult, shouting insults at them as they are led away, but the majority, somewhat awed by all that they have witnessed, watch quietly, then they drift away, returning to their smoldering town. Most West Condoners, like people everywhere, even if church-goers of one persuasion or another, are content to live out their insignificant lives (ultimately, they console themselves, all lives are insignificant) within the conventions of human history, the modest everyday stuff as found on tombstones and in newspaper obituaries. It is for them that the many reporters and cameramen are recording all these happenings, looking always for those iconic moments by which large events are later remembered — the helicopter on the bar-and-grill roof, for example, the runaway backhoe, the present scatter of abandoned tunics on the hillside — and they find another now when the young Brunist evangelist with the blond curls rises peaceably from the empty grave at the foot of the trenched cross with his terrified friend clinging to his side. Though the young man respects human history as evidence, sometimes hidden, of God’s entrammelment in human affairs (this is how the Christ story is to be understood), he himself lives within divine history, as best he understands it. Today that history has been full of a terrible violence, but, as he knows, it is not terrible to God, for whom death is only a kind of brief translation to a more glorious state and not to be feared. Both are handcuffed, and as the terrified boy is torn away from his side and commences to scream hysterically, the young man says, “Please. Don’t hurt him. He needs help.” There is a vulgar reply, which will be cut from the evening newscasts, and then he who lives in divine history turns to the news cameras on the slope below him, and with a sad, forgiving smile, raises his manacled wrists above his golden head, and this is the image that will appear over and over that evening across the nation.

Wait a minute, you can’t leave me!

Of course I can. I am already on my way. Electric shocks, drugs, needles in the brain: who knows what terrible scourgings they have in mind? The baths probably aren’t as much fun as the ones we’ve had either.

But what will I do? Who will I be?

You will be what’s left when I am gone. You have to admit it wasn’t a perfect arrangement. No man can serve two masters, as they say.

As you said, you thieving sophist. But where will you go?

Who knows? The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head…

There are NO VISITORS and RESTRICTED AREA signs posted on the taped-up hospital doors, but Ted Cavanaugh speaks with the staff, checks the admissions lists at the nurses’ stations, looks in on employees, bank clients, people he knows. Too many. Some are in isolated intensive care; others have already been sent home. Some have died. In general, a scene of controlled chaos. More or less controlled. Rooms full. Loaded gurneys in the corridors. A lot of moaning and crying. Medics and nurses rushing about, strangers mostly, volunteers from the towns around somewhat lost but getting the job done. Many of the victims are out under Red Cross and army field tents on the hospital grounds and in the parking lot; he makes a mental list, will visit them before returning home.

Where he will be watching over Irene on his own tonight. When he stopped in on his way in from Deepwater, where he’d stayed until the mine hill was cleared and secured, he found Tommy alone with her, Concetta and her friends off doing their grieving — the whole town is grieving — and he promised to relieve him as soon as he has finished his hospital run. Ted told Irene a bit of what had happened at the bank, leaving out most of the details so as not to upset her, and what she said was, “Well, dear, you should be more careful.” He saw by the snaking of the cord that the phone had been back in her room. Tommy said it was some friend and they were praying together in her new R.C. fashion. Meaning that conniving prick from their college days is still calling her. It was too early for a drink, but he poured one anyway. Tommy said that while one of Concetta’s friends was still in the house, he had gone back to the bank as Ted had asked, and had found the office broken into and ransacked. “I think I surprised someone because I heard noises at the back and found the security door open back there. It’s locked up again now, but probably too late.”

No doubt in Ted’s mind who it was. On a television screen over one of the nurses’ stations, he sees him now, taking credit for overseeing the emergency operations in the unexplained absence of the mayor. Some fear, he says, that the mayor might have been killed in the powerful blast at city hall, where the search for survivors goes on. Nick knows damned well that the mayor has absconded and he may know where he is, may have been in on it. On the car radio driving here: a news bulletin from the city, where they have apprehended an armed criminal at the international airport said to be a man named Giorgio Lucci from West Condon, driving a stolen official vehicle and suspected of grand larceny. Rumors of mob connections. Ted knows Lucci. Town loafer, no scruples, no brains. A fall guy. Nick tells the reporter now that the city is applying for federal disaster relief funds, and the governor has personally assured him that emergency state funds will be made immediately available to them. He mentions in passing that Marine veteran Charles Bonali, “one of the heroes of the police intervention at the mine hill,” has been appointed to the city force as temporary replacement for the murdered officer Monroe Wallace. Never knew Monk’s real name before. That’s what obituaries are for. Get to know somebody. Certainly he has gotten to know Nick Minicozzi. When the crisis is over, Ted has work to do. And he will do it. Kirkpatrick makes a cameo appearance. Ted heard the governor on the car radio complaining about the local corruption, arrogance, and incompetence that had forced the state to step in to prevent total anarchy. He lamented the local failure to heed his constant warnings about the perversion of traditional Christian values by a conspiracy of militant extremists with known communist histories. Now, however, they are showing images of the two small children killed during the shelling of the church camp, the only known victims, and he is more subdued. All he can say is that the camp was a closed-off area; the reporters who went in there were breaking the law.

Gus Baird, the Rotary president and travel agent, is on one of the gurneys in the corridor. He looks pretty far gone, but he winks at Ted and Ted grins and winks back. Gus is humming weakly. “Smoke got in my eyes,” he wheezes. “You’ll be all right, Gus.” Gus shakes his head, winks again. “Something deep inside,” he warbles faintly, a joker even in extremity, “cannot be denied…”

Doc Lewis comes down the corridor, stripping off translucent gloves, and instructs a couple of nurses’ assistants to wheel Gus into the emergency room where doctors are waiting for him. Lewis fills him in briefly on who’s dead, who’s not, who’s likely to be. “Not sure how long the old generator will hold out. We’re beginning to move many of the less critically wounded to other hospitals around.”

“Not been a great day.” Ted realizes he has been thinking in tight abbreviated phrases. Like a lot of song lyrics. And repeating himself the way songs do. Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold… “One thing out at the mine hill, M.L., really got me down. There was a lot of shooting going on and people were getting killed. And down at the foot of the hill were all these people from town. Our fellow citizens. Cheering loudly whenever one of the cultists fell.”

Lewis nods grimly. “I know. We’ve received phone calls from people saying we shouldn’t be doctoring them, they deserve to die.” M.L. looks as exhausted as Ted feels. He’s ready to call it a day. Nothing to eat since breakfast. Go home, put a couple of steaks on the grill for him and Tommy, open a fifth of sour mash. Another way of communing with the higher powers. “By the way,” M.L. says, “they brought in some preacher they picked up on the hill named Jenkins. Not from around here. But he mentioned your name.”

“Jenkins! Christ! Our new minister! Forgot all about him! Where is he?”

“I’m going that way. I’ll take you to him. I can’t find anything physically wrong with him except that he’s incontinent and rather badly bruised, probably from getting trampled on. But when we try to stand him up, he just falls down again.”

On the way in, a nurse passing by shakes her head sadly at the doctor. “Mr. Baird,” she says.

Jenkins is a pale puffy young fellow with startled wet eyes and unwiped mucus on his upper lip. Looks as if all his blood has just been sucked out of him. Damp, funky smell. Ted tells him he’s sorry he wasn’t there to meet him when he arrived, but it’s not clear that the man registers anything. He is trying to say something, but it’s inaudible. Ted bends down, asks him to repeat himself. “Don’t…” Still can’t quite catch it. The man stares at him as if at his worst nightmare. Ted closes his right ear with a finger, leans in with the left ear to the man’s lips. “I don’t think…” Reverend Jenkins whispers faintly, “…I want the job.”

When Sally Elliott finally pulls herself out of the culvert in the ditch, dusk is settling on the camp behind her, and on the mine hill across the way, fast falling the eventide. She is stiff and sore, her knees are banged up, her breasts are raw from sunburn and the grit she’s been lying in, her throat and lungs are raspy from wood smoke. But she’s still here. Wasn’t confident she would be. She’s not hungry, but her belly is so empty it hurts. When she fell from the tipple, she dropped her notebook, cameras, T-shirt, backpack, banged her knees and most everything else, but the fall probably saved her life, the bullets dinging off the tipple supports above her. She crawled frantically toward her bicycle behind the mine buildings, expecting the worst, fearing they might come over after her, but by then there had been a massive explosion like a bomb had been dropped, and they were shooting at each other. She had apparently been forgotten. Her knees were shaky, but she was able to pedal away from the mine, always keeping the buildings between her and the cultists and not looking back, heart pounding, until she reached the old county road. That in turn, heading home, carried her past the shiny pea-green bump she’d seen from the tipple. Smoke was rising from the camp. She should have kept going.

Looking. Knowing. Her mantra. Big deal. There are some things she doesn’t want to see, know. Sure. But she can’t stop herself. She always has to look. It’s a kind of systems flaw. She tried not to cry, but when she started, she couldn’t stop. If she had eaten anything all day, she would have been throwing up. Instead, a kind of hiccuppy weeping that was worse than throwing up. Next thing she knew, somebody was shooting at her again, and she threw herself into the ditch. There was an open culvert there and she crawled in, still crying. She heard a bullet hit the car and break a window. Then suddenly there were much louder sounds. Helicopters rattling away overhead, shells exploding. Sirens. The loud crackle of a big fire. The culvert was the right place to be. By the time the shelling had stopped, so had her sobbing. A moment of relative quiet and then a lot of men running past overhead, shouting commands, discovering the car, shouting some more, obscenities mostly, then running on into the camp. Gunfire. Shouts: they found somebody. She stayed where she was.

Eventually they brought whoever it was over to the car and grilled him about the body in it. They called him names. It sounded like they were slapping him around some. He was whimpering and crying out each time they struck him. He was only guarding the camp for his father, he whined. He didn’t do anything; it was the motorcycle gang. They asked him whose bicycle that was and he said he didn’t know. That was probably the creep shooting at her, but he didn’t give her away, she has to give him that much. More likely he really didn’t know who she was or where she was and was maybe afraid, if they did find her, she’d tell them he’d been trying to kill her, or she’d already be dead, and he was in enough trouble already. She could have stepped out and answered a lot of questions for them, but she decided it wasn’t a good idea. Especially being shirtless. There was a conference around the car, some walkie-talkie talk, and then an ambulance arrived and they took the body away and a police car came and took their prisoner away.

There were soldiers in and around the ditch for a while, so she stayed put. Taking mental notes. Thinking about teleological fantasies. The madness of “grand narratives”: history going somewhere. Her theme of the day. Wishing she had her notebook with her. One of the soldiers told a dirty joke, but nobody laughed. They bitched about the smoke, the officers, the bizarre things they’d seen. Life and death got mentioned. Eventually they all left, and as the long summer day drew to a close, it grew dimmer, darkness descending. It seemed safe. She crept out.

They have taken her bicycle. Which means she’ll have to walk home. Probably have to answer some questions. She’ll tell them she ran away into the woods and just kept on going. She won’t say anything about being shot at; fair’s fair. Over the camp, black smoke is rising; still burning. Across the way the mine hill is empty except for a small patrol of soldiers at the foot. It looks sad and worn out. Abused. Cratered. A few abandoned tunics. A lot of wrecked vehicles. The little tree isn’t there anymore. She wonders if her notebook is still over there somewhere under the tipple. Full of unforgettable musings she’ll never remember. She’ll go back tomorrow and look for it. Too tired now. Too tired to walk home, too, and her battered knees are killing her, but she has no choice, and so she sets out, humming along bravely. The darkness deepens…

Car lights. She considers throwing herself into the ditch again. But too late, they’ve seen her. It’s all right. It’s the family car. Her mother. Says she has been looking all over for her. Where’s her shirt? And she starts to cry again. Her mother begins to get a bit hysterical, asks if it was those soldiers, did they do something, should they go see the doctor, which makes her laugh. So she’s laughing and bawling at the same time and completely out of control, which is just about right if you’ve been through the Apocalypse and crawled out the other side.

IV.7 Wednesday 8 July and beyond

The first question Mr. John P. Suggs asks when he wakes up in Lem’s bedroom the next morning is: Where am I? Bernice knows what’s coming, all she needs is the W, but she takes her time, lets him work a bit, get his broken wits about him. “A safe place, Mr. Suggs,” she tells him when she acknowledges at last that his eye-blink question has been understood. “Sheriff Puller arranged it through the secret service. Them evil Baxter people, they tried to murder you, but the sheriff he held them off long enough for us to get away.” It is difficult to read his thoughts because his face is so frozen. Distrust? Fright? Gratitude? Mere confusion? “Abner has called his bad biker boys back. You recollect that dynymite they stole? The whole hospital got exploded and a lot of people was shot. But it was you they was aiming at. God spoke to me and I come a-running. We only got out barely just in time.” When she found the Brunist camp empty early yesterday morning, even Clara’s trailer gone, she drove over to the mine hill, where people were massing up at the crossroads. Those two old coalminers from West Virginia waved at her, and then the others did, too, but mostly they were not people Bernice knew. She didn’t see Clara’s trailer or Mabel Hall’s caravan anywhere, but she did see ill-tempered Abner Baxter, and he seemed to be in the middle of things. She couldn’t find a place to park without walking half a mile back, it was still rainy, there were a lot of guns, people weren’t getting on, so she decided to return to the hospital to check on Mr. Suggs. Was God speaking to her? He was. Through Abner Baxter and her distaste for the man and his wrathful elocutions, which chased her off. “Sheriff Puller and his men they killed a lot of them, but them bad boys blowed up the sheriff’s car. That made him mad. You might of heard that.”

At the hospital, she found the doors blocked off by outsiders issuing commands in nervous high-pitched voices, but after she showed them her nursing credentials, they let her in. Near the entrance: an ambulance, still smoking, that looked like it had had a bad accident from the inside out. Which, it turned out, is what had happened, though it was no accident. Blood on the shattered windshield, and blood and wreckage in the reception area, too. A violent devastation. She couldn’t help but be put in mind of all the End Times talk of recent weeks, talk she had a habit of not listening to, and she wondered, just for a moment, if she might regret having left the hill. Later, she learned about her friend Francesca and all the other unfortunate people who were in there when it happened. Two of them were dead and Francesca and a patient who came in with an earache were in intensive care. She describes this horrific scene for Mr. Suggs while feeding him a bite of soft-boiled egg, recounting her passage as if it were still blowing up as she went running through. She found her friend Maudie, the head nurse, on the second floor, dashing about among all the patients being wheeled in. Maudie told her about the bikers’ attack and how they asked for Mr. Suggs’ room and how, thinking fast, she sent them into the room of an old Italian man who had died overnight and that’s who they shot so many times that, as Maudie said, “There ain’t face enough left to name him by.” Bernice tells Mr. Suggs how she got a young doctor to help her whisk him out of his bed and hide him in the nurses’ restroom, even as they could hear Mr. Suggs’ name being shouted out and the boots of the motorbikers clattering up the steps. “That poor nice doctor. He didn’t make it.” She describes the bullets smashing right through the restroom door and walls (Maudie showed her the holes and the pockmarks on the inside) and zinging around their heads. She started to say that they were helped, not by a doctor, but by one of God’s angels. For that, though it certainly probably didn’t actually happen, is what it feels like when she thinks about it, but she’s not sure what Mr. Suggs understands about spiritual beings; he’s only a man, after all, and a businessman at that.

Clearly it was time to move Mr. Suggs to a safer place and that’s what Maudie thought, too, and besides, as the doctors said, if she was willing to take responsibility it would free up a badly needed bed, and they would be grateful for that. She had to wait for one of the out-of-town ambulances to find time to help her, so meantime she helped care for the injured, cutting away clothing and washing the wounds, giving pain injections and tetanus shots, hooking up transfusions, doing whatever Maudie and the doctors asked her to do. She even assisted a surgeon in taking a bullet out of a young woman’s sitter. She had hoped to sprinkle some of her miracle water on Francesca, but the poor lady was in the operating room and she couldn’t go in there. Caring for Mr. Suggs would be hard work, as Maudie warned her, for there isn’t much the man can do for himself. Though he can swallow a morsel of food now, he can’t do much chewing, so she’ll need to mash everything up. The hospital will provide a catering and laundry service that Mr. Suggs can pay for. Theropests, too, who will visit at least three times each week as soon as the present crisis is over, and Maudie promised to drop by regularly. She doesn’t tell Mr. Suggs any of this now. She only says he is being cared for by a team of the nation’s top professionals who have been sworn to secrecy as to his whereabouts because those assassins are still on the loose.

Finally, two young men came to help her, though they didn’t really know what they were doing and their ambulance wasn’t one, just a rattly old station wagon with the back seats taken out, but something better than nothing. Mr. Suggs was not easy to shift, a heavy and lifeless old thing, and the two young fellows nearly collapsed under the bulk of him. On their car radio, she could hear that things were turning darksome out on the mine hill, and she was thankful that God had guided her away from there. At home, she treated Lem’s bed with a spray Maudie said was for killing chinches and whatever other hate-fuls might have got in there since the last laundering, and the two young men managed, grunting and snorting, to roll him into it and onto the towels she spread there, and she thanked them and gave them her blessing. Mr. Suggs was restless in the spirit after all this upheaval and making bubbly groaning noises with his eyes half rolled back, so, though it’s maybe not the best thing for a stroke victim, after the ambulance had left, she injected him with a little something to relax him and guarantee him (and her) a night’s sleep, she being completely beat down after the long and tempestuous day. “What’s happening is they’s a war on out there, Mr. Suggs,” she says now in response to his laboriously eye-blinked question. “It’s maybe just only a murderous feud, but most reckon it’s a full-blowed Holy War, God and Americans against Satan and the humanits and everbody else, and famous Christian patriots like yourself are spang in the middle of it. Them killers, they knew who you was. They was calling out your name, and they pert nigh got you, but you got strong and reliable friends, Mr. Suggs, and I am one of them. We will not let them carry out their evil machineries.”

In the afternoon, after Mr. Suggs has dropped off and she has washed and diapered him — he looks set for a long doze, and even if he does wake up, he’s not going anywhere — Bernice returns to the hospital, which is still mostly frenzy and turmoil like yesterday, relatives having got in to add to the pandemonium. There are crowds of people on the grounds outside and she later learns they are mostly people from out of town, come to witness in person what they have seen on TV. Some of them take her picture as she enters the hospital, so she walks erectly with measured steps, a sister of mercy with work to do. The hospital staff is desperately stretched, many of the volunteers having faded away or been called back to their own hospitals. They are running out of things like bandages and linens and rubber gloves, and they’re so tired it’s easy to make mistakes, like forgetting people parked on gurneys or getting the medicines mixed up, so after she has gathered up the extra things she needs for Mr. Suggs, she helps out as best she can. She is glad to be here and to be useful and, above all, to be around human beings with whom she can have a normal mouth-and-ears conversation without having to worry about her spelling. There may have been hundreds of people killed and injured, she learns, worse than any mine disaster around here ever, most of the bodies now out in the hospital parking lot under the autopsy tent or else already in funeral homes. The hospital is chock full of shot and injured persons, and she is sorely needed.

One who has not made it through the night is her friend Francesca, the hospital receptionist. Bernice wonders if she might have saved her with her miracle healing water had they let her in, but she was so severely injured they say it’s a blessing she didn’t survive. It was Francesca who first told Bernice about the miracle water. She had an aunt, she said, who was suffering from a cyst so bad she couldn’t sit down and she dipped her fingers in holy water and touched the place where the cyst was and it disappeared. It has also been known to cure rheumatic fever, dropsy, and psoriasis, and can sometimes remove warts. Bernice learned that this magic water was kept in a big stone bowl at the entrance of the Catholic church and it was free, so, though she had never stepped foot in there, she put on a long black dress like the old Italian widows wear and covered her head and snuck in and stole a little medicine bottle of it. It didn’t take her wart away, but it did seem to help her heartburn when she touched her chest over her esophagus with it. When she went back for more, she was caught by the old priest who wanted to know what she was doing. She told him she was a poor widowed nurse who was thinking of converting to the Catholic religion and asked him to teach her, and he grunted and grumpily agreed. And thus, like many of her Bible heroines, she infiltrated the tents of the adversary and learned something of their ways. The first thing Bernice learned was that she was dipping the fingers of her wrong hand, which was what had given her away to the priest and was probably one reason the water wasn’t working as well as it should. The second thing was that there was a faucet not far away marked HOLY WATER and she could take all she wanted, though for it to be more than only plain water she had to become a Catholic and learn certain incantations, which were the secret of its magical effects, so she continued with her lessons. She told the priest she had a strong belief in angels and devils and felt like they were all around her all the time (omitting any mention of the ghosts, fairies, demons, talking objects and creatures, and dream spirits who also populate her world). She might have carried her deception right up to the final baptism, but the old priest wearied of her and turned her over to a dotty old orange-haired Italian lady with bad breath, so she filled up two milk bottles from the faucet and left with what knowledge she had and did not return.

That old priest got thoroughly shot up when he tried to stop the motorcycle gang from blowing up the Catholic church, but he is pulling through. His people are saying it’s a miracle. Maybe he went heavy on the water. They are showing the wreckage inside his church on the television at the nurses’ station, along with other scenes from yesterday, and Bernice can see over the crowd clustered there that truly awful things happened, including a crazy scene of a backhoe gone berserk, barreling down a hill right over people like the Biblical Behemoth she has seen in pictures. West Condon is famous again and everyone all over the world is talking about it, but not in a flattering way. Watching all that cruel uproar, Bernice feels a headache coming on and takes the vial of miracle water out of her medicine bag and dabs her forehead and the back of her neck with it. When Maudie passes by, she asks her if she thinks people should be looking at such dreadful events, and Maudie says at least it keeps them out from underfoot.

Outside Roy Coates’ hospital room, she finds his wife Thelma sitting on a chair, looking off into the distance with her usual doleful expression. Thelma says that Roy got shot and stomped on and their son Aaron has been arrested and they’re coming to take Roy away to the prison hospital as soon as he’s fit to be moved. She’s afraid for both of them because they are talking about murder, like with Abner and Junior Baxter. “Mostly they arrested the men and let the women go,” she says. Bernice says she missed all that because of Mr. Suggs, and Thelma says, “Well, you was smart to do so, Bernice, and I dearly wisht I could say the same. I hear tell you got him to home now.”

“They was trying to kill him here.”

“That’s what Maudie says. She’s a good soul, Maudie, even if she is a Babtist.” Thelma tells her in her flat sad monotone that the Cox boy got killed, and that brave McDaniel fellow and Franny Baxter’s new husband—“She’s a widder now, and she ain’t even hardly married yet!”—and also Mildred Gray. “When the police started up the hill and them Eye-talians started down from the top, Ezra was hollering out his holy curses on them all, and Mildred she said, ‘It’s okay, Ezra, I’ll go take care of it,’ and she left his wheelchair and picked up a gun from the ground and started walking up toward the Eye-talians with this spooky smile on her face, and they all shot her at once, like they was at the carnival, shooting at one a them tin rabbits on a pull-chain. Meantimes, the church camp it caught on fire just like that boy Darren foresaid it would, and Abner he prophesied it, too, so I guess it was a thing ordained. When I seen the smoke, I was afeerd for Clara who had stayed back with Mabel and some a them, but either they got out in time or more likely they was taken prisoner. That’s what they’re saying. Them army heliocopters fired a lotta rockets into the camp on accounta they thought they seen some bikers over there, but so far as I hear tell only one biker got killt and he was maybe probably already dead, but two of Wanda’s little ones got bombed on. The governor tried to blame that on the biker boys, but Maudie says it was them heliocopters of his done it. They searched all over but couldn’t find Wanda. I’m sure I seen her up on the Mount just before everything turned so bad, but then she just plain disappeared.”

“Maybe she was already dead and that was her ghost.”

Thelma nods bleakly. “Nor else she got raptured suddenly, though she don’t seem the likeliest choice. They arrested Junior Baxter over to the camp. They say he killt some people, I don’t know who. The Baxters, they are in a ruinous state. Two boys run off and into deadly mischief, at least one of them dead and his head gone missing, the oldest boy in jail and Abner right in there with him, and little Amanda kidnapped and made to do wicked things — some say they witnessed her bare nekkid on the back of a motorbike and others say they seen even worse things. Poor Sarah, she is a lost soul, she don’t even know what’s happening, though I do hear Franny and Tessie has took her in, so that’s a blessing. And our church, you know, the one in town, it also got burnt down, clean to the ground.”

“I heard. I must of seen it just before.”

“You was over there?”

“Just passing by on the way here.” Driving in from the mine yesterday morning, Bernice spied the little Baxter girl walking on the side of the road in the last of the drizzle in her black dress, no raincoat or umbrella, so she pulled over and offered her a ride. The girl is simple, and perhaps she was lost. No, she said, her dress was too hot, and now it was all wet. She wanted to go home and change. Home? She only smiled like she always does. It might have been more proper to take her back to her mother, she was not a child to be left alone anywhere, but on the car radio they were reporting that the power was out in the town of West Condon and the phones as well and it might be sabotage. If that was so, the road behind her was going to fill up with people rushing back, so her best option was to take advantage of her head start and get on into town. She decided to drop Amanda off at the Church of the Nazarene, hoping there was someone there who could take care of her. On her car radio they were reporting trouble at the hospital and the high school, so it made her trip in all the more urgent. She told Amanda to stay there and she’d pick her up later, not knowing the trouble she was dropping the poor child into.

“Also Lucy Smith was in the bank when it blowed up and she is dead or nearly,” Thelma says, continuing her drear litany. “And Linda Catter is passed on and they say they killt the barber, too.” Thelma’s voice has risen as though she is about to cry. And then she does cry. “Ain’t nobody left in town to cut your hair,” she wails. She gulps and wipes her nose and turns her teary gaze away. “God never does nothing wrong, Bernice,” she says, the words catching in her throat, “and He always does the right thing. He’s always loving, fair, honest’n pure, like the preachers say. He knows everthing and He’s more powerful than anything else or anybody who’s ever lived nor never’s gonna live. I believe that. I got to. But sometimes, when things happen, it’s all so hard to take in. Our brains is just too puny. And the question is”—she’s sobbing now—“why didn’t He make them bigger?”

“I know, Mr. Suggs, that there is some things you can’t remember. When the Devil shot you with his ray gun, he was trying to melt your brains, and he come near to doing that, but your brains is strong and they did not give up and they will not give up. And meantime we got all the best doctors in the world working on an anecdote against them rays. At the Fourth of July parade — you was there, but you probably don’t recollect this, not now, but some day it will come back to you — the governor called you a patriarch of the people just like Abraham and said that you was one of the country’s greatest Christians and bravest patriots, and he would not let Satan have his fiendish way with you, and that is why he put the secret service in charge of protecting and rehabitating you. And, oh yes, did I tell you? The governor he is a Brunist now. He is a believer. Because of how brave and dignified you were, he come to realize you must be on to something important, so he confessed his sins, or a bunch of them anyways, right there on Main Street, and Clara herself baptized him. And Ben Wosznick, he took time out from defending the camp against all them hosts of ungodly Baxterites and sung a nice song about you. About how Mr. Suggs filled all them thugs fulla slugs and got lotsa hugs.” She has worked hard on this, but Mr. Suggs looks skeptical and has one finger up as though to wag it. “Course it’s not one of his best songs.”

“Well, the governor’s not stupid,” is what Maudie said yesterday. “He can see which way the wind is breaking.” After all Bernice’s help at the hospital, Maudie wanted to have a coffee with her before she went back home to Mr. Suggs to thank her for all she’d done. “You made a big difference this afternoon, Bernice, and we are all beholden to you,” she said, and Bernice said she was just as beholden to Maudie for saving Mr. Suggs’ life. According to Maudie, that things got so out of control was at least partly the governor’s fault for not acting sooner and then for overreacting in careless and arrogant ways, but TV news was exposing all that and he was backing down from his highhat ways and, thanks to the negotiations of the smart young city manager, Mr. Minicozzi, was beginning to come across with the disaster relief funds needed for the town’s recovery. Mr. Minicozzi is in charge of West Condon, Maudie explained, because the mayor ran off with the city payroll. “They don’t know where that bandit is and nor the money neither, but at least they caught his dopey sidekick, who thought he was on his way to Brazil, but didn’t even have a passport, nor know what one was.” They reminisced over lost friends like Francesca and poor brave Mr. Beeker and the beautician Linda Catter and the kindly pharmacist Doc Foley, who Maudie said was almost like part of the family. “Dr. Lewis, he is just desolated,” she said, and Bernice thought about that old Bible word and how it fit so many things. Maudie also talked about Mr. McDaniel, who, Bernice learned, was the man in the runaway backhoe. He was an occasional Cornerstone Baptist like Maudie and Maudie said she took a fancy to him when he first turned up in town to work for Mr. Suggs, mainly because of his handsome black beard. “But then I noticed he never ever smiled, not even when he shook hands with the preacher or someone showed him their baby, and I figured there was a dark streak in him that could spoil things just when they might get interesting.” Bernice is sorry he or anyone else got killed, but it means he can’t turn up at Mr. Suggs’ bedside and contradict her account of things, an account in which he can also now play a bigger part. A sign God still has his eye on her and on her needs.

“Abner Baxter and his people is a master plague, Mr. Suggs. They just keep on pestering the camp and won’t let our people be. You can jail them and beat them and even kill them, and they just get up and keep a-swarming back, his boys carrying on their cruel killing sprees, his brash daughters seducting whomsoever chances in their neighborhood. Boy or girl, man or woman, it don’t seem to matter to them. The middle boy he got mixed up with his own dynymite and blowed his head off, and now the youngest girl she has took over the gang and goes riding around naked as a jailbird, the wicked little sprite.” Bernice feels like Rebecca at the well, refreshing Mr. Suggs with her stories as Rebecca refreshed the thirsty travelers with her water. Mr. Suggs’ mind has been scoured out by the stroke and she is anointing it with balm and refurnishing it. “As you know, before he seen the light, or claimed he did, Abner used to be one of them commynest devils, everbody knows this. Well, it turns out, he never stopped being one. That’s why he hates you so. His preaching is just only for covering up his evil acts. He’s like one of the Devil’s main captain generals.” Mr. Suggs is frantically wagging his finger. He wants to ask something. She takes her time, drawing it out letter by letter, hoping he drops off before he gets it all out. The first letter is “W” again, and soon enough, she knows he is asking where is somebody. Sheriff Puller again. She misses the sheriff. She was impressed by him and put herself in the way of him somewhat like Ruth did before her boss (Tamar’s way of catching Judah’s eye might have worked better but is not within Bernice’s talents), but he never took notice. Well, why should he, humble servant of God that she is? There are true stories about plain ordinary women being recognized by handsome young princes for the royal beauties they really are inside, but of course that fat homely man was no young prince and he saw everybody only as criminals or not criminals, with no affection for either and no appreciation of the soul within. “I have not wanted to tell you, Mr. Suggs, so as not to overworry you unduly, but Sheriff Puller, he has disappeared. There is fear that he has been kidnapped by the humanits, which would mean we might never see him again. Or we could maybe need some ransom money. But he is a man who is never afraid and who can stubbornly suffer a lot of pain so we are not giving up hope. A special secret service commander unit has been sent out to try and locate him and rescue him if possible. I can tell you about your mine manager Mr. McDaniel, though, or Mr. McDamniel, as we call him now in the secret service, in case you was about to ask. He is not who you thought he was or who we thought he was. With some money give him by the wicked moneylender Mr. Cavanaugh, he went and got him a backhoe bigger than a barn and it was fast and bulletproof and he set about attacking everbody and laid waste half the county. He was worse than Holofernes on the warpath tearing up Judea. The governor, he ordered up some bomberplanes to try and stop him, but that backhoe had a long claw that could reach up and snatch them planes right out of the air and chaw them up.” Mr. Suggs is wagging his finger again. Maybe she has gone too far too fast. “Of course, I am speaking in parables, as I’m sure you reckanize, Mr. Suggs. I mainly wisht to say he become a threat and a terror, but it don’t really matter now on account of he is dead. He attacked our people on the Mount of Redemption with his backhoe, killing I don’t know how many of our genuinest believers, but he brung about his own desolation when he up and somersaulted his backhoe clean over some schoolbuses that had accidentally got in his way. And you can see that wicked Mr. Cavanaugh directing him all the way. If we ever get electricity back, I can show you pictures on the tellyvision because they never weary of showing them.”

Without meaning to, she has let the story jump ahead. She was still at the Fourth of July parade. She hasn’t told him yet about the gathering at the Mount of Redemption and all inbetwixt, she was saving that for later, and suddenly there’s Mr. McDaniel careening down the hillside. Also she took that boy’s head off before she’d really got around to his story, but that’s all right, his wild naked sister will do as well and might appeal more to Mr. Suggs’ imagination. And though things in her story are a little mixed up, they aren’t half as scrambled as poor Mr. Suggs’ blistered brains. If he questions her, she’ll just tell him she told him already and he wasn’t paying attention or he fell asleep in the middle. The point is to theropy his crippled mind, get it fizzing and popping best she can, and to keep reminding him why they need his money and to what sacred use they are putting it.

Later, after Mr. Suggs has been fed some beef bouillon soup and a bite or two of mashed potatoes and has sunk back into his common afternoon stupor, Bernice prepares him for his enema and his bath, stripping off his diaper and hospital gown, and with some difficulty, tipping him over on one side. She never does this when he is alert, for he is a proud man and offended at being seen in this condition. The enemas are her preferred way of keeping account of how much goes in and how much comes out, and it’s convenient to give him his baths at the same time. Even when not emptying or washing him, she must roll him from time to time so as to prevent bed sores, but his heavy lifeless body is almost too much for her. The hospital food service has made its first delivery this noon, and though everything was tasteless and overboiled, it didn’t matter to Mr. Suggs and Bernice has ways of making it more flavorful for herself. She is still earning a tittle each month as Mr. Suggs’ personal secretary, but with the garage burned down and Lem in jail, her widow’s pittance from the mine union having stopped altogether, and a cruel vindictive mortgage to pay at the greedy bank thanks to Lem’s endless refinancing of the refinancing — she is already several months behind — the leftovers from Mr. Suggs’ daily meals will be a budget blessing.

When she finishes scrubbing Mr. Suggs’ back and his broad flat old man’s backside, white as the sheets he’s lying in, and giving it its daily alcohol rub, she turns him over and goes to work on the front side and is just sudsing up his floppy old prides when the doorbell rings. She rushes to the door, still carrying the soapy washcloth, thinking it might be Maudie come to help, but it is that portly city lawyer Mr. Thornton with the pasted-down yellow hair, tailored shirts, and shiny shoes. He says he saw the horrible events on television and he was worried about her and Mr. Suggs, and since there are no telephones, he felt it best to drive here and see her and him in person and make sure everyone is all right. He went straight to the hospital and the head nurse there told him something of the calamitous attack and sent him here. She sits him down in her front room and tells him to wait until she is finished with Mr. Suggs. She feels it is not proper for him to witness Mr. Suggs in such vulnerable circumstances, for it will weaken Mr. Suggs in his eyes, and moreover she herself has not finished dressing. She has her clothing on, but she has not yet made her eyebrows, and she knows her face must look half-naked. So she lets Mr. Suggs lie there for a moment in his suds while she does that, choosing an expression for today of both concern and cleverness; then she quickly rinses Mr. Suggs off and towels him, stuffs a diaper under him just in case, spreads the fresh hospital gown over him without putting his arms in, pulls the sheet up to his chin, and invites Mr. Thornton in, warning him that, should Mr. Suggs wake up, she has not, for the old gentleman’s own good, told him everything that has happened — about Ben Wosznik, for example, or Sheriff Puller, or the motorbikers’ attack on the town and all the people that died — so he should be cautious about speaking of any of that. “I also have not told him yet that Mr. Cavanaugh’s bank got exploded,” she adds, partly for Mr. Thornton’s sake, because she has come to understand in some wise just why he is so involved, “but I may try and find a way to do that, because I believe it would please him.”

Mr. Thornton smiles and tips his round self forward to peer more closely at the patient, noting with approval that Mr. Suggs has been freshly shaved and even his eyebrows have been trimmed, and he asks why she brought him here. She explains that with all the terrible things that happened, there was no room for him at the hospital, and he says, yes, that’s what he understood. “Besides,” she says, lifting her reading glasses to her nose, “he’s better here. It’s more…particular.” Mr. Thornton gives her a comprehending gaze and nods his head and asks how much this private care will cost? She is prepared for this. She tots up the rent, her hours at theropest wages, breakfasts and suppers and hospital catering, cleaning and laundry, medical supplies, personal hygiene items, and extras, and Mr. Thornton says: “Let’s drop the extras and I think it can be arranged. I will organize a trust fund to cover it, which my law firm will administer, though we will again need witnesses, which I hope you can arrange. Until all the paperwork is completed, Mrs. Filbert, it is important that Mr. Suggs stay alive and more or less competent, even if only in this limited manner. I am still locating his many investments, which he managed entirely on his own and which are therefore less than wholly transparent.”

Over a pot of tea in the front room (Bernice, having donned an apron and rolled her sleeves up like in the pictures, serves him with the same quiet humility that Martha showed when Jesus came to raise her brother Lazarus, though her head is working more like Deborah’s or Judith’s), Mr. Thornton asks how Mr. Suggs is accepting his new circumstances, and Bernice tells him that she has not told him this is her own house and explains about her idea of the secret service protecting him from assassins in a hidden location. “Maudie, that head nurse you talked with, she saved his life when the bikers busted into the hospital asking exactly for Mr. Suggs and she sent them into the room of a man who had already died, but it was plainly him they wanted, and so I figured it was best to hide him for a spell, and that is what I told him.” He says he heard something of that story at the hospital and he congratulates her on her strategy, adding that protection of their patient’s health and well-being is their primary objective, and it is easier to discuss matters like this here than in the hospital with so many other people around, which was precisely what she wanted him to say. She shows him the white blouse on which, on the pocket, she has carefully stitched B.FILBERT SECRIT SIRVIS. He smiles in a kindly way over his triple chins and reminds her that people in the secret service do not usually advertise themselves so it might be best not to wear the blouse, and she agrees and puts it away again. “I was only beguiling the time,” she says.

He tells her that it is his understanding that at least one hundred seventy people will be charged with unlawful assembly, trespassing, illegal possession of lethal weapons, disturbing the peace, conspiracy to disturb the peace, and who knows what-all, and that as many as seventeen or eighteen people are to be charged with murder or conspiracy to murder or accessory to murder. “I will send you a list when I know it. You should let me know if there are any among them who are friends of yours, and I will see what I can do.” She says she will do that and asks if something can be done now for Mr. Roy Coates and his son Aaron, and Mr. Thornton shakes his head and says that he believes those two are among those charged with murder and are well-documented co-conspirators, so they are probably beyond his powers of influence. “Well, at least see what you can do for the boy,” she says, “on grounds of compaction.” She drops her spectacles to her chest and raises one brow to suggest a worried but considerate mind. Bernice feels more like the wilier mature Rebecca now, negotiating for her favorite son, though Aaron Coates is hardly known to her. She is thinking mainly about her friend Thelma and how impressed she will be if she is able to show how powerful she can be and is already imagining Thelma on the phone telling others. “He is young and still under his father’s influence and he lost his brother when them bikers burnt the boy to death in the trunk of the sheriff’s car which was a awesome desolation for him and mightily disturbed his spirit.”

And then, even as that horrible scene comes back to mind, sobering them both, a useful thing happens. Mr. Suggs can be heard grunting and whining in the next room, the only sounds he seems able to make when he’s awake, and she takes Mr. Thornton in there to introduce him. Mr. Suggs is alert and blinking away and wagging his finger. “I been telling Mr. Suggs, Mr. Thornton,” she says, “about how them motorcycle killers came after him in the hospital, hollering out his name, and tried to shoot him, and how a lot of people died and things got blowed all to flanders, and also about how that Mr. McDaniel drove a backhoe through all those poor people on the hillside and crashed into some school buses, but it’s all so terrible and peculiar, I don’t think he quite credits me,” and Mr. Thornton nods gravely and says, “I’m afraid it’s all true, Mr. Suggs. And more you have not yet been told. We are living through strange, dangerous times. I assure you, you can believe everything that Mrs. Filbert tells you.”

“The Cravens boy he had a wee nick cutting clean through his life line. I asked him how he done that. He didn’t know. Then ‘bird,’ he said. It give me a chill.” Staring into Glenda Oakes’ solitary eyeball gives Bernice a chill. It is like staring into the middle of nothingness. Hazel Dunlevy, before she got shot and died, looked at Bernice’s palm one day and said that there was trouble on her fate line but her life line was long and deep, and that was a mostly good thing. Bernice wonders what Glenda would say now that she reads palms instead of dreams, but she is afraid to ask. The woman has become gaunt and hollow-cheeked and seems to have taken a dark turning, or maybe it’s just the darkness in her has risen to the top, stirred up by the cruel times she has been through. She wears a gun in a holster and is holding a child who has been crying but now is only hiccupping. Glenda doesn’t know who the child is. His parents have not returned from the Mount of Redemption to claim him. “And then, when later I was trying to get all them children to leave the garden and head for the woods and away from the camp by pretending to have a little Injun race, Davey he started wailing in his bereft manner and crying out that he wanted his mommy, and I knew that something bad was going to happen. He run off with his sister afore I could stop them. The rest of us we wasn’t more’n a hunderd feet away, in under the trees and running doubled-over like all get-out, when there was a thunderous racket and the garden shed wasn’t there no more, nor not the two kids neither. And that night was when them two lovebirds come back. They been haunting the camp ever since. And they ain’t sorry for what they done. They’re just only missing their nest.”

“Is that what the gun is for?”

“No, you can’t shoot a ghost. But I think I may of seen Hazel’s husband Travers sniffing around out there at the edge. If he tries to get in any closer, I aim to kill him.”

The church camp does have an eerie haunted feel, even by day, the humid overcast adding to its gloom. When Lucy Smith’s husband Calvin, who took over as sheriff when Mr. Puller was crematized, stopped her outside the hospital and asked her if she’d do him the favor of visiting a person who was badly hurt, she’d thought he was talking about her friend Lucy, who she’d heard had survived the explosions but was somewhat bedazzled by the blow she took when her head bounced off the bank floor. But instead he drove her out here to the camp, which seems a completely different place from when she last visited it only three days ago. There is a heavy smell of wet ash and lingering wood smoke and, under the blackened trees, a weedy overgrowth springing up, aswarm with wasps and mosquitoes, and thick brown tire tracks ripping through all the green parts. The desolation, she thought, moving through it. The desolation. Most of the cabins are just black skeletal ruins. She saw a toilet standing alone on its plumbing where her sick bay once was and the sassy little Blaurock girl was sitting on it, still wearing her pink slipper, thumb in her mouth and shorts down around her ankles, while others watched and giggled. Two of the children she recognized as belonging to Glenda Oakes, so she supposed that lady must still be here. The little girl’s father was working on the ruins of the cabin next to the camp lodge, the one that used to belong to Sister Debra, making walls out of old blankets nailed to the charred corner posts and roofing it with tattered tarpaulins, and two others were helping him. Calvin asked her to say nothing about what she sees here, for he is under strict orders to clear the camp, and sooner or later must do so, but he wants to protect these few remaining people from further harm as long as he can. “If it was known they were here, people hate them so, some might try to take the law into their own hands.” Bernice gave him her word. She asked after Lucy and he said she had not yet got over what happened three days ago, and if Bernice is able she might pay her a visit and prescribe something for her nerves.

Calvin led her past the guards at the door into the old camp lodge, made of stone and still more or less intact though mostly black on the inside, and there at the back of the room near the iron stove, under a hanging gas lantern, a man in raggedy underpants was lying on a camp cot with an ugly wound in his thigh. She was told he had been shot and had dug the bullet out with his own knife and had somehow managed to stagger away from the hill and escape arrest. Bernice washed the wound with fresh well water a woman brought her, sprinkled it with a few drops of her miracle water, applied mercurochrome (he screamed like a child and swore at her in an unChristian way, and Calvin scolded him for that), and bandaged it. She doesn’t know why, but when she was helping with the tetanus shots at the hospital during the crisis that first day, she dropped a clean needle already filled with toxoid into her shoulder bag, and now she had a use for it, and she saw that all this was foreseen. After the injection, she gave the man the rest of her mercurochrome and bandages and told him to wash the wound and medicate it and change the bandage every day. He was full of a feverish rage and told her she only had to fix him up well enough that he can make it into town and have it out with those papist wops who shot him and murdered his friends. Thus she was saving one life to bring about the possible ends of others. Medicine is like that. It fixes little problems, not the way the world works. The man didn’t even thank her, but Calvin did and said there were other people needing some help and asked her if perhaps she could come back with more supplies. She said she would do that, but in truth she doubted she would ever set foot in this strange, accursed place again.

The big Blaurock woman was whumping around the Meeting Hall in her elephantine way, in and out of Clara’s old office, fat baby under one arm, shouting out commands and commentary, and wishing to avoid her, Bernice asked if she could see Glenda before she left and Calvin brought her down here to the old trailer lot where Glenda is living in a cluster of old vehicles with all the children, together with a handful of other people who escaped from the Mount, mostly women. Glenda’s own two caravans were stolen, but whoever took them thankfully dumped out everything before they drove off, including most of the children’s toys, and they left behind the small house trailer belonging to those two West Virginia miners who never came back, and that’s where Glenda is living, as well as in some abandoned cars and trucks, set about in a kind of circle the way settlers used to do on the prairie. She and Glenda now sit amid them, swatting at the mosquitoes. Bernice says she saw that Blaurock family up by the lodge, acting like they own the place. “Well, they don’t let nothing nor nobody get in their way,” Glenda says, “but the camp wouldn’t work without them. Isaiah, he goes out every day and forages for food and soda pops and other useful things. Dot, she has found a post office box key in Clara’s old office and has pointed herself the church treasurer and is writing to the faithful, asking for money. And her kids is out peddling souvenir stuff they have found in there that didn’t burn up in the fire, old letters and tape recordings and suchlike, even somebody’s diary, and including, they say, some dirty pitchers them two boys was hoarding, which her little girl sold for enough to buy carryout pizza last night for everybody. It was a kinda party after all the misery. The little girl called it their nek-kid bottoms party on account of the pitchers that paid for it. Clara, she would never have ’lowed that, but most everybody thought it was cute and give her a big clapping. They were too hungry not to. They ain’t nothing left to eat here. They have harvested the vegetable garden right down to the dandylines and crab grass and killt alla Hunk Rumpel’s chickens, and they have cooked up a great many of the wild birds and small animals. They have even et the owls.”

“I took notice it was quieter than usual.”

“Sister Debra would be horrified at the slaughter, but she always did care more for birds than people. Isaiah also brings back whatever newspapers he finds, and Dot, she digs through them, looking for other end-of-the-worlders. She says she’s found a feller up in Canada who’s got it all figured out, so they’re laying plans to migrate up there and invade that movement, and they are inviting everyone along.”

“Will you go?”

“I don’t know what choice I got.” Glenda fixes her with her one eye and a little shiver runs up her spine. There’s a faint breezy rustling all about even though the air seems still and she can’t help thinking about the ghosts of Hazel Dunlevy and Welford Oakes fluttering about somewhere nearby. With the lights out and the birds dead, it must be a spooky place here at night.

She tells Glenda what she has seen at the hospital and around town — all those downtown buildings full of the spirits of the recent dead, the shoe salesman still swinging in his window — and about how she and the head nurse at the hospital saved Mr. Suggs from being murdered by the motorcycle gang led by the naked Baxter girl. She is taking care of Mr. Suggs now privately, and thanks to her miracle water, he is much improved. The doctors are all amazed. “He is setting up and eating normal and don’t need diapers no more. Even his hair is growing back on top of his head — and it’s red as a carrot.”

Several of Glenda’s collection of little ones have arrived, complaining that they’re hungry, and that reminds her that she has to go find Calvin to drive her back; it’s Mr. Suggs’ feeding time. She fishes about in her shoulder bag and finds half a packet of cough lozenges and she passes those out to the children, promising to come back with more things. Just as she’s about to leave, however, Glenda takes a grip on her hand and turns it over, palm up, and studies it, her head cocked so the eye stares straight at it as if shooting a beam into it, and it feels almost like it is burning. She flinches, but Glenda has a tight grip. “I suppose people have told you, Bernice, about your head line and your life line and how little luck there is between them, but I wonder if they have showed you the line of escape, sometimes called the line of fancy, running crosstways down here near your wrist?” The children are crowding around to look. They seem quite dangerous. “Not everybody’s got one, but yours is plain to see, like to say it’s a powerful influence on your nature. People with lines like that, they oft-times have arty lives, but when it crosses the health line like this…” she traces a line with a long horny fingernail from Bernice’s fingers to her wrist and the sensation is that of being cut open, “they can lose control and end badly.”

Bernice’s heart is pounding. All she wants is to have her hand back and to leave this fiendish place immediately. “Badly…?”

Glenda turns her eye up to stare it at her, still gripping the hand, her gold tooth glinting in the dusky light. “A fatal confusion of the spirit,” she says, and Bernice feels her knees go wobbly. “Madness.”

“I am sorry to have to tell you, Mr. Suggs, but something evil has got into the Wilderness church camp. It is infested with the ghosts of murdered sinners and a brood of filthy-minded imps and a cannibal witch who is one of them cyplops with just one eye. Wherever she walks a fire breaks out behind her and they’s no more birdsong because she aims her evil eye into the trees and the birds they fall like rain. Even the owls. Murderers are lurking out at the edge, and worse things, too, if you could see them, but there’s like a thick smoky cloud has sunk down over the camp with a rotten smell like the Devil makes. And Sheriff Puller, he’s come back, but he is blind and walks rocking back and forth the way dead people who crawl out of their graves do. Ben Wosznik has been doing all he can, praying and fighting and singing, but he is badly wounded in the thigh and we don’t know if he will live or die. I was able to doctor it, but it is a ugly wound and has got infected and we fret for him in the secret service. Clara and her daughter, they have fell into a kind of coma trance, which is that evil cyplop’s doing, and many people are losing their minds or are in fear of losing their minds. I wisht I had better news, but fear and trembling has got holt of me, and I am glad that we are safe here and far from all that sad desolation.”

As the days pass and Bernice recovers from her scare at the church camp, she repents of the darkness that overtook her history and begins to move it in a happier direction, telling Mr. Suggs that Ben is much better, thanks mainly to her miracle water; that Clara and Elaine have waked up from their deep sleep though they’re still very weak, it being said that it was the spirit of Ely Collins who came back and kissed them both that broke the spell; and that Mr. Puller was only pretending to be a kind of zombie so as to escape his kidnappers. Too late for the birds, though. She is sorry about turning Glenda Oakes into a wicked cyplops, partly because that gives her more power than she deserves, and, hoping Mr. Suggs has forgotten what she said before, speaks of her instead as a cranky old woman who is losing her mind even as everyone else in the camp is getting theirs back. Crazy as she is, you can’t believe a thing she says.

Thinking of Glenda Oakes reminds her of her promise to Calvin Smith. On a day when the theropests come, she walks over to the Smith house to visit Lucy, stopping at the hospital first to fill up her shoulder bag. There she learns that Mr. Thornton has presented Maudie with a handsome little reward on behalf of Mr. Suggs, and also a gift for the hospital to help pay the costs of their emergency generator, and he is also arranging for a free load of coal for it to be delivered from Mr. Suggs’ mine. “He’s a real gentleman,” Maudie says, and they all thank Bernice for her part in it, and she accepts their thanks.

On her way across Main Street to Lucy’s house, she finds huge crowds gathered to watch cranes lift the fallen helicopter down off the bar and grill roof, and she tells Lucy about this when she arrives. “Folks had got climated to it and booed when it come down and cheered when it tipped sideways suddenly and busted one of its fan blades.” She finds Lucy more distracted and nervous than before, and there is a big lump on her forehead, but she says she is feeling better and only needs a few good nights’ sleep. Bernice tells her she has brought her some pills to help with that, and also some miracle water to put on the lump and make it go away; Lucy takes some pills right away and wets some cotton with the miracle water and holds it against her brow and they sit down for some cookies and a chat, Lucy saying that she can already feel the lump going down and apologizing that she only has an electric percolator, so she can’t make coffee.

Bernice fills her in on the rescue of Mr. Suggs and her errand of mercy at the church camp, adding a few details that Lucy might appreciate, and Lucy tells her how the Piccolotti boy went blind saving her life and Calvin’s—“He seemed to fly way up in the air and catch the dynamite and throw it back at the bomber all in one single motion, and that was the last thing I saw!”—and how Junior Baxter apparently murdered the Tebbetts boy and maybe some others as well because he got caught with the gun in his pocket still hot from being fired, and how Calvin, who is the most peaceful and honest person in the world, is being blamed for helping some of the people who are now being charged with murder and may get put in jail himself. “He says that Vince Bonali’s mean boy, who is known more for breaking the law than keeping it, wants his job and is out to get him and that Italian city manager fellow is helping him.”

The strangest story, though, is that of finding two more bodies buried out at the state park, two missing young people whose parents thought they must have eloped, and also a severed head and two feet, though the feet had been mostly eaten up by animals. Naturally, everybody thought the head would be Nat Baxter’s missing one, but it turned out to be his younger brother’s instead. Had both brothers been beheaded? What was going on? Then they remembered that Junior Baxter, when he was arrested, kept saying that the masked biker gan-gleader with “Kid Rivers” on his jacket was really his brother Nat, so now a nationwide manhunt for Kid Rivers alias Nat Baxter has begun. Or anyway that’s what Bernice supposes Lucy meant to say, for what she actually says is “…s’crazy…notion…kid…ers…” and her eyes cross and she falls fast asleep while she’s still talking, such that when Calvin comes home a few moments later, he finds his wife sprawled out on the floor snoring. He smiles and calls Bernice a miracle-worker and a heroine.

Bernice’s first and most enduring life model was Martha, who labored quietly in the kitchen when the Lord came to visit while her flirtatious sister sprawled idly at the Master’s feet to better show off her dinners, as her father’s rude miner friends sometimes called them, and of course Jesus, like all men, couldn’t get enough of her or of them, falling out of her half-buttoned blouse like fruit out of a tipped bowl, and He even scolded Martha when she complained that she could use some help setting the table. Though, yes, Bernice also did sometimes complain, she was a mostly polite and biddable child who always felt she was born to serve. The gratitude of others comforted her, even that of her unloving mother, and she knew before she was twelve years old that she was going to be a nurse. Over time, Bernice grew more interested in Miriam, who saved her baby brother Moses’ life and stood by him faithfully on their long arduous journey but who questioned his absolute authority, especially as she was his big sister, and as punishment got struck down with leprosy and eventually died, the point being, one, that she did question his authority and, two, her lifetime of loving service availed her little when she did. A lesson learned, which led her in turn to other less servile Bible women like Esther and Deborah, Jael and Judith, women of wealth and power, capable of guile and subterfuge but also of bold action like beheadings and driving tent stakes into bad men’s heads, even while pursuing selfless lives of service, and she has stitched a bit of each into the wardrobe by which she presents herself each day to the world.

It is these latter women who have guided her through her most recent trials in her care of Mr. Suggs. When they came to tell her that they were waiving bail and releasing her brother-in-law Lem because all the jails were full, she replied that she was very happy to hear it for she wishes to have him near to care for his needs, hoping only that his time in prison has tempered his violent nature, which he has used so often against her in times past. “Once when he got drunk,” she told them matter-of-factly, “he tried to press hisself on me and I had to fight him off with a skillet, and he said he’d cut me up and have me for dinner. Of course he probably didn’t mean it and things like that don’t happen all the time.” She said that, though he promised to shoot the fire chief and others at the fire station as soon as they let him out of jail, they shouldn’t worry because she has taken the caution to hide his guns and she won’t tell him where they are even if he beats her or tries to strangle her as he has done in the past, so where are the papers, she’ll be glad to sign them. They apologized and said they had decided to delay his release while they looked into his case more closely, and just to make sure she went to see the old sinner and told him she’d done all she could to try to get him set free, even told a few white lies, but there is somebody in the jail who doesn’t like him and is badmouthing him to the authorities and he should find out who it is and stand up for his rights, and she could tell by the expression on his face and the cusswords he used that he would not be coming home for a good while yet. Warrior types are easy pickings for the likes of Jael, Judith, and Bernice.

Mr. Thornton is smarter and wilier than Lem or those police people, so a different approach was necessary when the lawyer presented her with the trust documents. She knows that Mr. Suggs is a very rich man and that there is probably a way to get all that money herself, but she’s not smart enough, and the law is like a secret code she’ll never be able to cipher. So she needed the smooth tongue of a Rebecca or an Esther. She looked up a lot of words and memorized them as best she could, and when he came, she told him that Mr. Suggs could not accept such words as “unlimited” and “esclusive” and “perpintuity” and she took Mr. Thornton into the bedroom to show him that this was so, Mr. Suggs behaving admirably, especially the vigorous way he wagged his finger, though what he was saying was not exactly like her translation. Then they sat down in her front room for a frank discussion. She had dressed that morning like Queen Esther, in a fancy white blouse and a long dark satiny dress laced up the front like boots, with her hair braided and pinned up tightly and parted down the middle, drawing her eyebrows with a very slight frown to suggest a certain royal gravity and a troubled affection, and she could see that she had Mr. Thornton’s respect. She said she understood that, as Mr. Suggs had no known heirs, his wealth was being absorbed into Mr. Thornton’s law company so as not to let the bankers have it all. Maybe that’s the best thing, maybe it isn’t, but it was what was happening and she could accept it. If they wanted her help, however, she had two requests. One was that the trust provide a substantious gift to the Brunist church in the name of Mrs. Clara Collins-Wosznik, as this was probably Mr. Suggs’ own intention and it should be honored. Besides, it will help her persuade Mr. Suggs to give his approval. The other is that to care for Mr. Suggs and in such a way as to be useful to Mr. Thornton’s law company is a very difficult thing and she will need to be properly reinpursed. “I got a mortgage on this house. It’s not very big, you will laugh when I tell you, but with the garage burnt down and Lem in jail I am in rears and I may not be able to pay it. You know how cruel Mr. Cavanaugh is and how he is ruining this town and taking people’s houses away where they have lived all their lives. I don’t speak of myself, but if he took my house, where would Mr. Suggs go then? If Mr. Suggs can pay off that mortgage and cover my expenses as long as he lives, I am sure he will find it in his heart to agree to the trust.” “Is this Mr. Suggs’ request, Mrs. Filbert?” “It is my request, Mr. Thornton.” Mr. Thornton gave her a respectful look as though to acknowledge her wisdom and her courage and her acumen and after a moment he smiled. “Your needs will be met, Mrs. Filbert. The trust will continue to provide you a monthly stipend with enough extra to cover your mortgage payments, and when Mr. Suggs passes away, you will receive a lump sum payment of ten times the amount of the remaining mortgage due. My partners and I are very grateful for your kind and valuable assistance.” This was much more than she expected and she had to clench her jaws not to show her excitement. If Judith had shown her emotions, it would have been she who got her head chopped off, not Holofernes. When Mr. Thornton stood to go, he took her bony hand in his plump one and thanked her again; then he glanced tenderly toward Mr. Suggs’ bedroom and sighed. “The poor dear man. It is a terrible agony he is going through. And for what? It would almost be a mercy if he could peacefully pass on.”

By the time the lights come on again and the phones finally work, Bernice’s account of recent history has taken a more nightmarish turn. For one thing, she has blamed the need for candles on the Baxters’ use of Leviathan to drink up all the power, putting the whole world, and certainly West Condon, at their mercy, and as she is rather proud of this development, she continues to use candles long after it is necessary. The candles, moreover, cast wavery shadows around the bedroom which she characterizes as demonical spirits, pointing them out to Mr. Suggs in a harsh frightened whisper—“Over there! in that corner!”— knowing he can’t bend his neck to look, can only glimpse the flickering light and dark. Sometimes she even frightens herself. She has introduced into the motorcycle gang the oldest Baxter boy, the one with the Mark of the Beast on his forehead whom everybody astigmatizes, and, remembering something that blond boy once said about the Horsemen of the Acropalypse. she has given them all individual motorcycle colors and specific woes and plagues to distribute. What they all did to Clara’s poor daughter has now become a legend of horrific proportions that continues to happen night after night, as if it were some eternal punishment in Hell. She has even brought back the middle Baxter boy, the one who got blown up: “They took his head off but now he’s riding round with that gruesome thing tucked under his arm, still yelping curses out its bloody lips and demanding everbody what to do! I wouldn’t of believed it myself if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes!” She told how Sheriff Puller was seducted into his car by the naked Baxter girl and handcuffed to the steering wheel and how the biker boys set his car afire, and how they stuffed an innocent boy in the trunk as extra fuel. Mr. Suggs seemed very upset by this story, so when he asked the pointed question if Sheriff Puller was alive or dead, she said he was alive but he was so melted down to his blackened bones you wouldn’t hardly recognize him. She looks into Mr. Suggs’ heavy-lidded eyes, and sometimes she sees seething anger there and sometimes confusion and sometimes even fear. As Holofernes in his drunken stupor might have felt looking up at sober sword-bearing Judith, or Sisera foggily seeing Jael enter with her hammer and tent stakes.

Of course, Bernice has no such tools, nor would she likely be treated as a national heroine, as those women were, if she had them and used them as they did. There are, true, the subtler weapons of her own profession — the feeding routines, the medications — but Mr. Suggs is being monitored constantly by Maudie and the doctors, and they would not appreciate any creative tamperings with his regime, nor would it feel the right thing to do. For she is not Judith or Jael, she is only Bernice Filbert, LPN, of West Condon, the kindly long-suffering public servant and at heart a good person intent only on helping others, even Mr. Suggs, whose own life is a great burden to him and to her, and who fails to appreciate all that she has done for him. He could have blinked out at least one thank you. It is a harsh world, governed at least partly by malevolent forces, not all visible, and Bernice has only her nursing skills and her faith with which to defend herself. And her stories. Which are not always understood by others, though they are her chief remedy against the desolation. She is reminded of something Ludie Belle once said about her prayer meeting confessions: that by being partly true and partly made up, they were more true than if they had been completely true, because the plain truth hides a lot of things.

By coincidence, as she is thinking about this, the telephone rings in the kitchen, and it is Ludie Belle herself calling from out east somewhere, almost as though by thinking about her Bernice has conjured her up, the sort of coincidence that happens often in Bernice’s life. And they both have so much to tell each other! Right off, Bernice asks about Clara and Elaine and all the others, where did they go, she looked everywhere for them and was scared they’d all been kidnapped, and Ludie Belle tells her how — for Clara’s sake, and little Elaine’s — they took off before all the troubles. They agreed on a meeting place near the state line, and they were waiting there for Cecil and Corinne and Hovis and Uriah and Billy Don to catch up, but somebody noticed the bumper stickers they’d forgot to remove, and they all got arrested. Ludie Belle was able to convince them that those stickers got pasted on without their acknowledge while they were passing through from out west, and she showed them Clara and Elaine in their sickbeds and said they were rushing them to a hospital in the east where specialist doctors were waiting for them, and the police got nervous not to have somebody die on them and let them go, provided they immediately crossed the state line. But that made them miss the others and she still doesn’t know what happened to them but supposes the three fellows are back home by now and the Applebys and their bees are probably off chasing the pollens. Bernice says she hasn’t seen the Applebys, but she’s sorry to say that the two West Virginia coalminers were apparently blown up on the Mount of Redemption, though there’s not much remains of them to tell for sure, and as for Billy Don Tebbett, he got murdered by Young Abner Baxter. Ludie Belle lets out a little cry and says she is wholly destroyed by this news, for Billy Don was one of her favorites, and she asks for all the details and Bernice provides her with all she knows, and then some.

Ludie Belle in turn tells her that her Wayne and the Halls are doing fine and have been telling their stories to the Eastern churches, and Elaine seems to have resigned to accept the baby she is carrying and isn’t trying to kill herself or it anymore, “though I did ketch her a-swoppin’ her belly with a flyswat as like to get the baby customed to what’s in store for it, but, come grass, Clara’s grandchild should be safely borned.” Bernice wants to say that she hopes it will be completely human, but decides better of it for it might bring bad luck. Ludie Belle goes on to say she hopes Clara is still around for that occasion, for the poor woman is calamitously ill with a cancer in her chest that has mettasted to other places and there is not much confidence. Bernice says this is the worst news she has heard since all these troubles began but that, somehow, she already knew it. She is thinking about what she told Mr. Suggs about Clara’s strange coma, and she worries that her stories might be invading the world. “I guess I had some apperhension.” At least out here, Ludie Belle says, Clara is well cared for. “They give her a lotta reception and dote upon her like the saint she is.” Bernice urges her to sprinkle some miracle water on Clara every day, but Ludie Belle says she has used it all up and that Bernice should send her some more. Ludie Belle likes to wear a drop of Bernice’s water behind her ear like perfume, because she believes it might help her hear what people are thinking.

Ludie Belle has been following all the news on the car radio and now TV, plus what all the brothers and sisters in the Eastern churches have been able to fill in, but it’s like news from the sky and she needs to get it from on the ground, so Bernice tells her all about how when she was out at the Mount looking for everybody she had a forenotion about Mr. Suggs being in trouble and raced off to the hospital just in time to hide him from the motorbikers who were coming after him, and how she has been privately caring for him ever since. “I am now receiving a special salary from the government.”

“The government?”

“I can’t say no more.”

In fact, Mr. Thornton has been true to his word and he has got the wicked banker’s lawsuit thrown out and she has been able to catch up her mortgage. When she received the statement, she multiplied the remaining amount due by ten to see what she would receive if Mr. Suggs were to expire that day, and it was quite thrilling, but he isn’t likely to pass away for some time yet. When Maudie was last here, she noticed that Mr. Suggs had lost some weight and musculature, and Bernice acknowledged that he was getting easier to turn because there was less of him, but Maudie said this was normal, she shouldn’t worry, Mr. Suggs could live on for years and he might even get better. Meaning more and more of the principle will be paid off and the final sum will be smaller. Something to think about, and she has been thinking about it. She goes on now to tell Ludie Belle how the Baxter motorbikers went roaring through town blowing up everything and shooting everybody and setting the whole town on fire. “That’s when the heliocopter fell and Linda Catter got sent to glory along with all those other poor people in the bank, and the one they say was Carl Dean Palmers got rocketed clean off the hotel roof.”

“I got a inkle a all that on the tellyvision replays later on. They kept showin’ that red injun’s execution for days after. He didn’t look a dot like Carl Dean.”

“Well, them evil sorts, Ludie Belle, they don’t always keep to their same shape. Meanwhile, out at the Mount of Redemption, they was all this killing going on. I nearly got squashed when that crazy backhoe come somersaulting down at me, like something from straight outa the Book a Relevations — you must of seen that!”

“I thought you was at the hospital.”

“I was, but by happen-chance they had a TV on at the nurse’s station and I seen what was happening and knew I was needed out there, so while we was waiting for a ambulance to move Mr. Suggs, I went running out to help. If you look close, you can see me off to the left scrambling on all fours towards that ravine out there, just as that back-hoe goes wheels up.”

“Well, you’re a better person than me, Bernice. Me, I see trouble like that a-comin’, I’m hikin’ my skirts’n skedaddlin’ the other way at full pelt. Which is what we done, and why you’re there and I’m here. I did hear on the news young Darren got hisself arrested, so what’s become a Colin?”

“I think he must of run away or they took him in. He wasn’t at the camp.”

“The camp? I thought it got burnt down and closed off.”

“Well, it did get seriously delapidated by that murdrous biker gang, but — I gotta swear you to secrecy, Ludie Belle, cause if it was to get out, more lives’d be in desprit danger — but people are still living out there. That mad Glenda woman and her passel of wild orphan kids, them audacious Blaurocks, and a whole bunch of poor people who come looking for redemption, women mostly whose husbands are in jail or worse. A lot of them was badly wounded, and I have had to doctor them on the sly. The camp is haunted by them two murdered adulterers and who knows how many other homeless spirits, and Glenda she says she seen the murderer hisself hanging round back under the burnt trees like he still had more work to do, though Glenda herself is suspected of those murders and of bewitching Hazel’s husband and binding him up in a hollow tree. Old Hunk Rumpel, he died fighting off the bikers and got his throat slit like you butcher a pig, but he don’t seem the haunting kind. Them two little Cravens kids who got bombed by the heliocopters, though, are probly still looking for their mother.”

“Wanda’s younguns? You don’t mean little Davey?”

“Him and his sister. Glenda has the rest of them. Wanda she got kidnapped, or else she was raptured. They’s different opinions.”

“Little Davey! The sadness is just about more’n I can sustain. The most thing I recollect about little Davey is that pearl a snot always a-glistenin’ on his upper lip. Like a kinder jewel a innocence. Lordy! I feel half-haunted myself!”

“The new sickbay is gone, so the Meeting Hall has been set up for bedding the wounded. It’s all burnt out inside and they’s a bad charred smell, but at least it’s still standing. So is that old upright pianner, though it’d probly crumble to ash if you touched it. Looks like made of coal. When I passed it by, I heard sounds coming from it, but nothing like music, not real music — more like the strings were whimpering and falling gainst each other. It made me think of what you said about that old player pianner in that place you was once in employment, how it seemed habitated, not by the dead so much, but by their miseries and their lost gaieties, and I thought, this old pianner, it is lamentating about when everbody was here and praying together and was full of hope and happiness and now see what it has come to.”

“‘The Lamentatin’ Pianner,’ it sounds like a Duke’n Patti Jo song. You should oughter tell ’em the story, maybe you’ll get famous like they are.”

“Patti Jo and Duke? They’re famous?”

“Sure, where you been? That song about the little girl who was overloved by her own daddy has been toppa the charts since they first let it out, and right behind it is a song about a crazy cowboy shootin’ up a jukebox and a unusual cemetery lovesong which has something of the Prophet’s dead sister in it. And they got other big hits, too. They’re the hottest thing in country since Hank Williams died. They even been on Grand Ole Opry.”

“I guess I missed all that. We don’t have a radio station here no more.” Ludie Belle asks her about the things hanging on the fireplace because Clara was asking about her husband Ely’s final message, and Bernice says all that got burnt up, nothing left but ashes, and while she’s telling her that, she hears someone at the front door. Maudie bringing that venal feeding apparatus, or else the exercise people. Maudie was complaining that Mr. Suggs did not seem to be digesting his food properly and was losing weight. “Come on in!” she hollers out, covering the mouthpiece. “I’ll be there in just a breath!” She hears the screen door slap and turns back to Ludie Belle. “I have to go, Ludie Belle, the theropests is here. But call again soon! They’s tons more to tell!”

In the bedroom, she pulls up short. It is not Maudie. It is the Antichrist. The one in female form. Right here in her own house. Wearing a T-shirt that says IT’S THE SADNESS. Face on face to Mr. Suggs, staring hard, like she means to suck his hidden story out of him. Or to snatch his soul like she did to that old lady out on the Mount that day. Bernice feels like she has just been struck in the heart and she can’t move a muscle.

“Hi, Mrs. Filbert. I’m Sally Elliott. You may know my folks. Isn’t this Mr. Suggs, the man who was bankrolling the cult?”

“It’s not a cult,” Bernice says icily with what whispery breath she has left, meeting the Dark One’s challenge. It’s almost as though she — or he (which is it?) — is changing shape before her very eyes. “It’s a church.”

“Sorry. I meant to say church. But I’m not here about that. I really hate to bother you, Mrs. Filbert, but there aren’t many people left around here still alive and not in jail who can help. I have already talked with Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Franny Baxter and Mrs. Coates — who said to thank you if I saw you, by the way, for helping to get the charges against her boy reduced. She says there’s even some hope now of getting him released altogether on compassionate grounds. I gather that’s your doing.”

“Well, yes, I know some people.” Bernice has not heard this news, having lost touch with Thelma after she moved back in with her mother. It eases somewhat her anxiety. Her power is being acknowledged. She is able to take a deep breath, wondering if this has been a disarming tactic by the Dark One or if this is really just only a girl.

“You’ve done a good thing, Mrs. Filbert. There’s too much hysteria out there right now. It’s like people are caught up in a dangerously insane story and they don’t know how to get out of it.”

“Dangerous? Just only stories?”

“Most dangerous things there are.”

“Do you mean…? Can they, you know, kill somebody?”

“Sure they can. What’s the toll now from all this madness? You might say story has killed them all.” The girl glances down at Mr. Suggs. He is in his alert phase and is taking all this in, wagging his finger for attention, but the girl ignores him, turns away. “But the story I’m interested in, Mrs. Filbert, is how Billy Don Tebbett died.”

“Young Abner Baxter shot him.”

“That’s what they say. Did you see it?”

“No, but everbody knows.”

“He told the police when they arrested him that he didn’t do it, and I also have my doubts.”

“How do you know what he told the police?”

“I was there at the camp. I heard him.”

“Well, maybe it was you done it, then.”

“Billy Don was my friend. I was hiding. Someone was shooting at me. I think it was Junior Baxter himself.”

“Well, then…”

“But Billy Don was already dead. Had been for some time, I think. Looked like he’d been shot by someone up close. So many guns. Could have been anyone, I suppose. But, tell me, Mrs. Filbert, did Darren Rector ever carry a gun?”

“No, he wouldn’t touch one. Wouldn’t even do guard duty on that account.”

The girl pauses to think about this, staring down at Mr. Suggs again. “What if there were an afterlife and that was what it was like?” she says, more to herself than to Bernice. “A kind of unending nightmare. And you can’t die, not even if you want to…” Bernice feels a shiver run up her spine. Because she has thought this, too, or something near it. It’s like the girl, who probably isn’t a girl after all, is reading her mind. “Do you think Mr. Suggs would know anything helpful?”

“He’s had a bad stroke. He can’t talk. Probly can’t think neither.”

Mr. Suggs is wagging his finger vigorously and the girl sees this. “Do you hear me, Mr. Suggs?” He blinks. “Is your name Yankee Doodle?” He wags his finger. “That’s usually a sign for saying no.”

“No, he’s just trying to wave at you and say goodbye because your questions is confounding him.” The anxiety is back. The sense of imminent danger. A demonic presence.

“Is your name Mr. Suggs?” He blinks. “I think I’m getting somewhere. Are you being well cared for, Mr. Suggs?”

He wags his finger urgently and Bernice, gathering up her courage for this may be the last thing she does in life, interposes herself between the two of them and orders the fiendish intruder out of the house. “Now!” she screams, and she crosses herself in the Romanist way to further shield herself against the Evil One. “Or I’ll call the police!”

When she has gone, vanishing as if she were never there, Bernice turns on her patient, her heart pounding. His ingratitude! Not well cared for? She feels utterly betrayed — after all she has done for him! But the secret’s out. Scary’s not enough. It has to be something worse than scary. And fast! “You shouldn’t of done that, Mr. Suggs. What you got is you got me and you shouldn’t do nothing to make me mad. Up to now I been nice to you, telling you the truth, most of the time, but not all of it. I still haven’t told you, for example, that Clara and all them have turned the church camp into a casino full of wicked women. That’s right. I was afraid you wouldn’t like that, so I was holding back. Nothing you can do about it. Your money’s all gone. That fat lawyer with the slicked-down hair has took it all. You won’t see him no more. He don’t need you now. You are a pauper, Mr. Suggs, and you will get buried thataway.” Maudie will be here soon. She prepares a hypodermic. “You’ve not paid your taxes, so the banker, he’s got your coalmine now. They say he’s struck oil, worth zillions, but it’s his, not yours. He’s laughing at you all over town.” She thinks of her new stories like tent stakes driven into the brain. Rebecca at the well: tying her visitors down and pouring buckets of water down their throats. She stabs the needle into his belly. “And Ben Wosznik? Well, he run off with another woman, a half-nekkid young thing who can sing a mite, and now they’re out in the bars singing dirty songs, and it has just broke Clara up and she has took to drink…”