“Barbecue!” Pickering cried out the window in his screaming, laughing voice. “Barbecue! Barbecue. Holy cookout. Burn the bitches God’s fire.” God’s holy fire!”
There were more screams now, seemingly from right under Ralph’s feet, and when he looked down he saw a terrible thing: a medley of auras was seeping up from between the porch boards like steam, the variety of their colors muted by the scarlet blood-glow which was rising with them… and surrounding them. This blood red shape wasn’t quite the same as the thunderhead which had formed above the fight between Green Boy and Orange Boy outside the Red Apple, but Ralph thought it was closely related; the only difference was that this one had been born of fear instead of anger and aggression.
“Barbecue!” Charlie Pickering was screaming, and then something about killing the devil-cunts. Suddenly Ralph hated him more than he had ever hated anyone in his life.
[“Come on, Lois-let’s go get that asshole.”
He took her by the hand and pulled her into the burning house.
CHAPTER 22
The porch door opened on a central hallway that ran from the front of the house to the back, and the whole length of it was now engulfed in flames. To Ralph’s eyes they were a bright green, and when he and Lois passed through them, they were cool-it was like passing through gauzy membranes which had been infused with Mentholatum. The crackle of the burning house was muffled; the gunfire had become as faint and unimportant as the sound of thunder to someone who is swimming underwater… and that was what this felt like more than anything, Ralph decided-being underwater. He and Lois were unseen beings swimming through a river of fire.
He pointed to a doorway on the right and looked questioningly at Lois. She nodded. He reached for the knob and grimaced with disgust as his fingers passed right through it. just as well, of course; if he had actually been able to grab the damned thing, he would have left the top two layers of his fingers hanging off the brass knob in charbroiled strips.
[“We have to go through it, Ralph."’] He looked at her assessingly, saw a great deal of fear and worry in her eyes but no panic, and nodded. They went through the door together just as the chandelier half-\way down the hall fell to the floor with an unmusical crash of glass pendants and iron chain.
There was a parlor on the other side, and what they saw there made Ralph’s stomach clench in horror. Two women were propped against the wall below a large poster of Susan Day in jeans and a Western-style shirt (DON’T LET HIM CALL YOU BABY UNLESS YOU WANT HIM TO TREAT YOU LIKE ONE, the poster advised). Both had been shot in the head at point-blank range; brains, ragged flaps of scalp, and bits of bone were splattered across the flowered wallpaper and Susan Day’s fancy-stitched cowgirl boots. One of the women had been pregnant. The other had been Gretchen Tillbury.
Ralph remembered the day she had come to his home with Helen to warn him and to give him a can of something called Bodyguard; on that day he had thought her beautiful… but of course on that day her finely made head had still been intact and half of her pretty blonde hair hadn’t been roasted off by a close-range rifle-blast. Fifteen years after she had narrowly escaped being killed by her abusive husband, another man had put a gun to Gretchen Tillbury’s head and blown her right out of the world. She would never tell another woman about how she had gotten the scar on her left thigh.
For one horrible moment Ralph thought he was going to faint.
He concentrated and pulled himself back by thinking of Lois. Her aura had gone a dark, shocked red. jagged black lines raced across it and through it. They looked like the E.K.G readout of someone suffering a fatal heart-attack.
[“Oh Ralph Oh Ralph, dear God."’] Something exploded at the south end of the house with force enough to blow open the door they had just walked through. Ralph guessed it might have been a propane tank or tanks.
… not that it mattered much at this point. Flaming scraps of wallpaper came wafting in from the hall, and he saw both the room’s curtains and the remaining hair on Gretchen Tillbury’s head ripple toward the doorway as the fire sucked the air out of the room to feed itself. how long would it take for the fire to turn the women and children down cellar into crispy critters? Ralph didn’t know, and suspected that didn’t matter much, either; the people trapped down there would be dead of suffocation or smoke inhalation long before they began to burn.
Lois was staring at the dead women in horror. Tears slipped down her cheeks. The spectral gray light which rose from the tracks they left behind looked like vapor rising from dry ice. Ralph walked her across the parlor toward the closed double doors on the far side, paused before them long enough to take a deep breath, then put his arm around Lois’s waist and stepped into the wood.
There was a moment of darkness in which not just his nose but his entire body seemed suffused with the sweet aroma of sawdust, and then they were in the room beyond, the northernmost room in the house. It had perhaps once been a study, but had since been converted into a group therapy room. In the center, a dozen or so folding chairs had been set up in a circle. The walls were hung with plaques saying things like I CANNOT EXPECT RESPECT FROM ANYONE’ ELSE UNTIL I RESPECT MYSELF. On a blackboard at one end of the room someone had printed WE ARE FAMILY, I’ve GOT ALL MY SISTERS WITH ME in capital letters.
Crouched beside it at one of the east-facing windows that overlooked the porch, wearing his own Kevlar vest over a Snoopy sweatshirt Ralph would have recognized anywhere, was Charlie Pickering.
“Barbecue all Godless women!” he screamed. A bullet whined past his shoulder; another buried itself in the windowframe to his right and flicked a splinter against one of the lenses of his hornrimmed glasses.
The idea that he was being protected returned to Ralph, this time with the force of a conviction. “Lesbian cookout! Give em a taste of their own medicine! Teach em how it feels!”
[“Stay up, Lois-right up where you are now.”] [“What are you going to do?”] [“Take care of him.”] [“Don’t kill him, Ralph! Please don’t kill him!”] Why not? Ralph thought bitterly. I’d be doing the world a favor.
That was undoubtedly true, but this was no time to argue.
[“All right, I won’t kill him! Now stay put, Lois-there’s too many goddam bullets flying around for both of us to risk going down.”] Before she could reply, Ralph concentrated, summoned the blink, and dropped back to the Short-Time level. It happened so fast and hard this time that it left him feeling winded, as if he had jumped out of a second-storey window onto a hard patch of concrete. Some of the color drained out of the world and noise fell in to replace it: the crackle of fire, no longer muffled but sharp and close; the crump of a shotgun blast; the crack of pistol-shots fired in rapid succession.
The air tasted of soot, and the room was sweltering. Something that sounded like an insect droned past Ralph’s ear. He had an idea it was a.45-caliber bug.
Better hurry up, sweetheart, Carolyn advised. When bullets hit you on this level they kill you, remember?
He remembered.
Ralph ran bent-over toward Pickering’s turned back. His feet crunched on slivers of glass and scatters of splinters, but Pickering did not turn. In addition to the automatic weapon in his hands, there was a revolver on his hip and a small green duffel-bag by his left foot. The bag was unzipped, and Ralph saw a number of wine bottles’ inside. Their open mouths had been stuffed with wet rags.
“Kill the bitches!” Pickering screamed, spraying the yard with another burst of fire. He popped the clip and rased his sweatshirt, exposing three or four more tucked under his belt.