The mob parted long enough for Charles to see Augusta standing by the truck’s rear wheel. By the light of a passing torch, he watched her feed a rag into the gas tank. The cloth darkened, soaking with gasoline. She looked up and caught the eye of the trumpet player. She struck a match and showed it to him. The musician dropped his jaw and nudged the sax man standing next to him, and then all five musicians fell back from the truck. Augusta touched her match to the rag and calmly lit a black cheroot as the flame traveled along the rag and into the tank.
Ray Laurie stood on the bed of the truck, overseeing the mob, while Augusta walked steadily into the enfolding darkness, and a Dixieland band ran across the deserted fairgrounds toward the parking lot.
The explosion rocked the ground. Charles felt the impact of the waves of energy exploding outward in a wide spray of flying bits of metal and flame, leaving a vacuum at the core of the blast. A roar of fire rushed back inward in a ball, then plumed up in a mushroom cloud of bright orange heat. Ray Laurie’s body shot straight out from the truck, and spikes of flame licked him in flight to set his hair and clothes afire. The man stood up and screamed, as the horse had screamed. He ran into the crowd, and the people backed away from the human bonfire. Ray fell to earth and writhed at their feet. The crowd had grown deathly still. A wicked whiff hung in the air, and Charles was stunned to realize that burnt human flesh could initiate hunger.
So this was hell.
While the crowd was in thrall to the spectacle of Ray Laurie burning to death, Charles was on his knees, pulling one of Riker’s limp arms around his neck. He was rising to a stand with one arm circled around the man’s waist, and now he dragged Riker’s unconscious body along with him. The toes of Riker’s shoes made ruts in the dirt behind them, and their progress was slow.
Ray Laurie had ceased to scream, to flail, even to twitch. The crowd turned its attention back on Charles and his heavy burden. He could feel their eyes on him, the heat of the flames at his back, and the tension growing with the sound of slow shuffles as a hundred pairs of feet were set into motion.
Though there was nothing spoken, no signal, they moved in unison, walking toward him, fanning out to form the next stoning ring. One by one, a head bowed down, low to the earth, and a hand shot out to snatch up a rock.
Charles braced himself for the next blow. He was preparing to lower Riker to the ground, to lie across his friend’s body and give him cover.
“Look there!” A woman standing at the fringe of the crowd was pointing to the other end of Owltown’s main road flanked by darkened shabby storefronts.
Only one streetlamp was lit. Standing in the pool of light was a lone figure wearing boots and a horseman’s duster. The face was shaded by the brim of a black hat.
CHAPTER 27
Tom Jessup stood by the nurse’s station in the hospital corridor, holding Ira in his arms. Other cases were rolling by on gurneys, each one an entourage of emergency personnel. Darlene was crying, the public address system was issuing orders, and the harried triage nurse was looking down at Ira’s swollen, bloody face as she checked his pulse and pulled back the lid of one eye.
“I’m sorry, Sheriff. We’re stacking up critical cases in the halls. It’ll be a while before a doctor can see him. The chemical burns are first priority.”
He knew what she really meant. The boy’s breathing was a ragged whistle, and his color was edging toward a blue pallor. He had seen this before in the aftermath of road accidents. Ira was dying, and the nurse was more interested in the patients who might be saved.
She hurried off to examine the next victim coming through the emergency entrance. The new arrival had bubbly skin and blood-soaked clothes. Half of the woman’s long dark hair had been burned away. The sheriff watched the nurse shake her head over this patient too, condemning an unconscious woman to die alone by the wall where the gurney was pushed.
Well, he had not broken the sound barrier getting Ira to the hospital in thirteen minutes flat just to lose him in the waiting line for a doctor. He turned to Lilith. “Get me one of those little bastards with a stethoscope. I don’t care how you do it.”
The sheriff laid his burden down on the long counter of the nurses station. All around him was a desperate energy of noise and motion, blood passing by in plastic bags on metal carts, and more blood on the people wheeling down the hall on the way to the operating rooms at the far end.
Darlene hovered over her son, her head very close to his. She was listening for breath, ready to breathe for Ira if he should stop.
The sheriff looked up to see Lilith walking down the hall with a stalking gait, and he could guess where she was heading. Her father could go directly to that place in the trout stream where the fish gathered to exchange secret handshakes and plan strategies to outwit fishermen, and Guy never came home without a trophy. Apparently, his daughter knew the source pool of doctors.
A door swung open and he could see the cloud of cigarette smoke, the vending machines and furniture a damn sight more comfortable than the plastic junk in the lobby. Lilith was smiling as she snagged a doctor on his way out.
The man was angry at first, but then he smiled, openly appraising the young woman in front of him, taking inventory of her parts and pausing awhile at her breasts, as if he had the right. She leaned in tight to whisper something in the man’s ear. Tom Jessop was certain the doctor meant to cover his balls with one hand, but the motion was aborted as Lilith grabbed his arm and propelled him down the hall.
The sheriff smiled at his deputy and mouthed the words “Nice catch.”
The doctor leaned over Ira, and assessed the damage. “Definitely a collapsed lung. I need a nurse and an OR, but – ”
“You got it, Doc,” said Lilith, slipping away down the hall in search of a nurse to terrify and an operating room she might commandeer.
While Ira was being prepped for surgery, the sheriff was leading Darlene to the waiting room, another kind of bedlam, voices rising in hysteria and tears, shouts and laments for the dead and near-dead. He settled her in the only empty chair. She had been crying softly all this time, but now the fingers of one hand slowly opened, and she was staring down at a tiny cell phone in her hand. Her head snapped up with some new anxiety.
“Kathy,” she said.
And now Darlene had his complete attention.
“Kathy’s gone to Owltown.” She gripped his arm tightly. “I know she means to kill somebody.”
“I might be able to give her a hand with that.” Before Darlene could say any more, he was striding across the lobby. He pushed through the glass door, and crossed the driveway to his car. As he was pulling out of the parking lot, the passenger door flew open and Deputy Beaudare piled into the front seat.
The coffin had been thrown clear in the blast. It lay cracked open in the dirt just short of the paved road. The glass dome had shattered to tumble the corpse of Babe Laurie onto the ground. Flames from the truck had reached across nine feet of strewn rubble to find him. The suit caught fire and Babe’s face was passive as the flames lapped at his head and ate the mortician’s wax from the cracks of his broken skull.
But the mob was oblivious to Babe. They were all staring down the dark road where only one streetlamp was lit. It went out. Farther down the street, another lamp switched on, and there was Mallory again. And so she moved toward them, in and out of the dark. The last lamp at the foot of the road went on, but the pool of light was empty. Yet the crowd was riveted, staring at it, waiting for her.