Dale shook his head.

"I do," said Harlen.

"OK," said Mike. "Start in the basement. I'll try to meet you there. If I can't, search the place on your own."

"Who has the radios?" asked Harlen. He had taken his sling off so both arms were free, although the light cast still made his left arm clumsy.

Mike handed his radio to Harlen. "You and Kev. Kev, you know what you're supposed to do?"

The thin boy nodded but then shook his head. "But instead of a couple of hundred gallons like we'd planned, you want it all pumped?"

Mike nodded. He was tucking squirt guns in the waistband on his back, filling his pockets with .410 shells.

Kev made a fist. "Why? You just wanted a bit of it pumped onto the doors and windows."

"That plan's not going to work," said Mike. He clicked open his grandmother's squirrel gun, checked the cartridge, slammed it shut. "I want that thing full. If we have to, we'll drive it right through the north door there.'' He pointed across the schoolyard. The wind had come up, the lightning was ripping the sky, and the sentinel elms were waving yard-thick limbs like palsied arms.

Kevin stared at Mike. "How the heck do we do that? There are four or five steps on that front porch. Even if the thing is wide enough for the truck, it'd never get up those steps."

Mike pointed at Dale and Harlen. "You guys know those thick old boards they stacked up by the dumpster when they ripped the old porch off the west end of the school last year?''

Harlen nodded. "I know 'em. I almost fell onto them a few weeks ago."

"OK-we'll stick those on the front porch of the school before you go in. Like a ramp, sort of."

"Like a ramp . . . sort of," mimicked Kevin, looking in at his father's four-ton bulk tanker. Every time the lightning rippled across the sky-which was almost constant now-the huge stainless-steel tank reflected the flash. "You've got to be shitting me," he said to no one in particular.

"Let's go," said Dale. He was already starting down the hill toward the school, leaving the others behind. "Let's go!" There was no sign of his mother's car. All the lights were out in this part of town. Only Old Central seemed to glow with the same sick light that illuminated the interior of the clouds.

Mike clapped Harlen on the back, did the same with Kevin, and jogged down the slope toward Dale's house. Dale had paused across the street, looking back at his friend. Mike heard the edge of a shout but the words were drowned by the next roll of thunder from the storm. It might have been "Good luck." Or possibly "Good-bye."

Mike waved and went down into the Stewarts' basement.

Dale waited an impatient thirty seconds for Jim Harlen and then ran back up the gravel drive. "Are you coming or not?"

Harlen was poking around in the Grumbacher truck shed. "Kev said that there's some rope in here . . .ah, here." He pulled two thick coils of rope from nails on the rafters. "I bet this's twenty-five feet each, easy." He fitted the bulky coils over his shoulders and chest like bandoliers.

Dale turned around, disgusted. He started to jog across the dark playground, not worrying if Harlen could keep up.

Lawrence was in there somewhere. Like Duane. . . . "What the hell do you want rope for anyhow?" snapped Dale as Harlen caught up, already panting from the short run.

"If we're going in that fucking school, I'm going to have a way to get out that's softer than the last time."

Dale shook his head.

Branches were tearing off and falling around them as they passed under the sentinel elms. The short grass of the playing field was rippling and flattening under the wind, as if a huge, invisible hand were stroking it.

"Look," whispered Harlen.

The ridges of the burrowing things were everywhere now, humps of raw soil that curved and wound and intersected, carving the six acres of playground into a wild geometry of wakes.

Dale reached into his belt and pulled out a squirt gun, feeling how foolish that was even as he did so. But he clipped the Boy Scout flashlight onto his belt and kept the squirt gun in his left hand, the Savage over-and-under in his right.

"You got some of Mike's magic water?" whispered Harlen.

"Holy water."

"Whatever."

"Come on," Dale whispered. They leaned into the rising wind. The sky was a mass of boiling black clouds silhouetted by the greenish lightning. Thunder rolled like cannon fire.

"If it rains, that'll really fuck up what Kevin's planning to do."

Dale said nothing. They passed the north porch, went under the boarded windows . . . Dale noticed that the wind had torn the boards off the stained-glass window above the entrance, but that was far too high to reach . . . and they jogged around the northwest corner, past the dumpster where Jim had lain unconscious for ten hours, into the shadow on the north side of the immense building.

"Here are the boards," gasped Harlen. "Grab one and we'll dump it on the front steps like Mike said."

"Screw that,'' said Dale. "Show me that entrance you said you knew about."

Harlen stopped cold. "Look, it may be important ..."

"Show me!" Without planning to, Dale had raised the shotgun so that the barrel was pointing in Jim Harlen's general direction. Harlen's small pistol was tucked in his belt, under the absurd coils of rope. "Listen, Dale ... I know you're half nuts about your brother . . . and I usually don't give a shit about orders from somebody else, but Mike probably had a reason. Now help me with a couple of these boards and I'll show you the way in."

Dale wanted to scream with frustration. Instead, he lowered the shotgun, set it against the wall, and lifted one end of the long, heavy plank. They'd stacked several dozen of these old boards here when they had demolished the west porch of the school last fall; now they still lay there, waterlogged and rotting.

It took the boys five minutes to carry eight of the damn things around to the north porch and to dump them on the stairs. "These things wouldn't even hold up a bicycle if they're supposed to be a ramp," said Dale. "Mike's crazy."

Harlen shrugged. "We said we'd do it. Now we've done it. Let's get going."

Dale hadn't liked leaving the shotgun and he was pleased to find it still leaning against the wall when he got back.. Except when the lightning illuminated everything in its flashbulb explosion of glare, it was quite dark along this wall of the school. All of the schoolyard pole lamps and streetlights were off, but the upper floors of the building itself appeared to be wreathed by a greenish glow.

"This way," whispered Harlen. All of the basement windows had wire-mesh coverings as well as the plywood boards. Harlen stopped at the window closest to the southwest corner of the school, ripped back the long, loose board, and kicked at the rusty mesh. It swung free. "Gerry Daysinger and me kicked the shit out of this thing one dull recess last April," said Harlen. "Give me a hand."

Dale propped the shotgun against the wall and helped to pry the mesh away from the wall. Rusted metal and brick dust sifted into the window well below the sidewalk level.

"Hold it," said Harlen, the words almost drowned by the rising wind and a roll of thunder. He sat on the ground, leaned into the well, pulled the mesh loose, and kicked the pane of glass out with his right sneaker, smashing the wooden mounting while he was at it. He kicked a second pane out, then a third. Half the small window lay open into darkness, the shards of glass reflecting the mad sky.

Harlen scooted back on his rump, extended an arm, palm up. "After you, my dear Gaston."

Dale grabbed the shotgun and lowered himself in, legs scrabbling in the darkness, his left foot finding a pipe, setting the gun in to use both hands to keep himself away from the broken glass. He jumped from the pipe to the floor five feet below, found the shotgun and held it across his chest.