Mike was out in front, and he caught up to the Rendering Truck just as they reached the widened area where the Cookes and another poor family had lived. Both shacks looked abandoned.

Somehow Mike managed to get a bottle out, hold it in his left hand against the handlebar, and fumble out his lighter as he pulled alongside the truck.

The rifle barrel came out the driver's window.

Mike braked, skidded, pumped hard to get behind the truck, and pulled up on the right side as they both entered the last hundred yards of road to the dump. Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, and Harlen pumped along in single file behind.

Mike caught a second's glimpse of Karl Van Syke's long face-he was grinning maniacally through the flames and smoke curling back from the hood-then the rifle came up again and Mike lobbed the already-flaming Coke bottle through the passenger-side window.

The explosion blew out the remaining windshield glass. The heat forced Mike to drop back behind the truck, and what he saw there almost made him dump his Schwinn into the ditch alongside the road.

The carcass of the cow, or the horse, or both, bloated with methane and the other gasses of decomposition, exploded . . . showering flames and bits of flaming decayed flesh into the woods on either side.

But that wasn't what made Mike's jaw sag open.

The brown, rotting, once-human things seemed to be writhing and tugging at one another as the flames enclosed them . . . the denizens of some evacuated cemetery trying to pull themselves to their knees, to their feet, but finding no muscles or tendons or bone with which to do so. The brown things struggled and writhed, falling back into each other's embrace as the entire heap of carcasses began to burn.

The flaming truck did not slow for the wooden gates at the dump entrance. Boards splintered with a sound like more rifle shots and then the large truck was through, bouncing across the ruts and heaps of landfill with five bicycles in pursuit.

The Rendering Truck got as far into the mounds of refuse, old tires, sprung sofas, rusted Model-T's, and moldering organic garbage as it could before it slewed left and slid to a stop on the edge of a forty-foot drop into the part of the ravine here that had not been filled. The boys slid to a stop thirty feet back, waiting for the truck to turn on them.

It did not. The flames had enveloped cab and truckbed now; the wooden slats at the rear were parallel strips of fire.

"Nothing could live through that," whispered Kevin, his mouth open as he stared.

As if the driver had heard, the flaming door on this side slammed open and Karl Van Syke slid out, his one-piece jumpsuit charred and smoking, his face streaked with soot and sweat, arms reddened. He was grinning almost from ear to ear. A scoped rifle was in his huge hands.

All the boys looked around and raised their feet to the bike pedals, but it was sixty or seventy feet to the nearest cover-a cornfield to their left. It was almost a hundred yards to the dump entrance and the line of woods behind them.

"Get down!" shouted Mike, dropping his bike in front of him and scrabbling at the heaped landfill to find cover.

The other four boys threw themselves flat, inching toward any rotted tire or rusted drum that might offer cover. Harlen had his .38 in his hand but did not fire ... it was too much distance for the short-barreled gun.

Van Syke took two steps from the flaming vehicle and raised the rifle, taking careful aim at Mike O'Rourke's face.

During the turmoil, a small figure with two dogs had come over the top of the highest heap of garbage. Now she released the thongs and said, "Git 'im!" in a surprisingly soft voice.

Van Syke looked to his left just as the first dog, the Dober-man named Belzybub, covered the last twenty feet of ground. He swiveled his rifle and fired, but the huge brown animal had already leaped, striking his chest and driving both of them back into the flaming cab of the truck. The big dog named Lucifer was next, growling and leaping at Van Syke's kicking legs.

Mike dug Memo's squirrel gun out of the duffel, saw Kevin pull his dad's .45 from his belt, and all five boys rushed forward even as Cordie slid her way down the garbage slope.

One of Van Syke's flailing legs caught in the half-open window of the door and swung it shut on him and the dog. Cordie and Mike rushed forward, but at that second the gas tank beneath the truck ignited, sending a perfect mushroom of flame eighty feet into the air. Mike and the girl were both lifted off their feet and thrown across the rough ground, the German shepherd-mix named Lucifer landing scorched and howling at their feet. Belzybub was still in the cab; Dale and Lawrence grabbed Mike and Cordie and dragged them back, watching the two dark shapes still struggling in the curling vortex of orange flame.

Then the motion stopped and the truck burned, filling the world with the stench of melting rubber and something far worse.

The six kids stood there, almost a hundred feet away now-driven back by the terrible heat-shielding their watering eyes and staring. A siren sounded back through the woods, somewhere around the grain elevator. Another siren whooped along the Dump Road.

Cordie was weeping and cradling her other dog. The shepherd-mix had lost most of his hair. "Foun' my hideout, didn't you?" said Cordie between sobs. "Couldn't leave me alone, could you?"

Harlen started to protest that they hadn't known she was living in the goddamn dump, for Chrissakes, but Mike hushed him with a hand on his chest and said, "Is there another way out of here? We've got to get going before the fire trucks arrive."

Cordie gestured toward the corn. "They'd see ya if you took the railroad tracks back, but cut across the Meehans' field there for about half a mile, an' you'll get to Oak Hill Road about a quarter of a mile above the Grange Hall. You can take it to the Hard Road."

Mike nodded, seeing the map in his mind. They rushed to the barbed-wire fence, tossed their bikes across, and started to climb. "Aren't you coming with us?" Dale called to Cordie.

The sirens were closer now. The girl in her dumpy, soiled dress had climbed the hill of garbage, still carrying the large dog. "Uh-uh. Y'all go on." She turned and spat in the direction of the huge pyre that had been the Rendering Truck. "At least that fuck's dead." She disappeared over the mound of refuse and old tires.

The boys pulled their bikes into the corn just as the first fire truck and its retinue of rushing pickups came through the shattered gate.

It wasn't easy pushing their bikes through half a mile of soft soil between seven-foot-high rows of corn only nine inches apart, but they did it.

When they reached Oak Hill Road and turned south, pedaling past the Old Grange Hall, where Mike and Dale had gone to Boy Scout meetings in another lifetime, the cloud of black smoke was still rising thick and heavy from the dump far to the northeast.