CHAPTER 30

Just before the explosion came, Susan Day, standing in a hot white spotlight at the front of the Civic Center and now living through the last few seconds of her fabulous, provocative life, was saying: “I haven’t come to Derry to heal you, hector you, or to incite you, but to mourn with you-this is a situation which has passed far beyond political considerations. There is no right in violence, nor refuge in self-righteousness. I am here to ask that you put your positions and your rhetoric aside and help each other find a way to help each other.

To turn away from the attractions of-” The high windows lining the south side of the auditorium suddenly lit up with a brilliant white glare and then blew inward.

The Cherokee missed the Hoodsie wagon, but that didn’t save it.

The plane took one final half-turn in the air and then screwed itself into the parking lot about twenty-five feet from the fence where, earlier that day, Lois had paused to yank up her troublesome halfslip. The wings snapped off. The cockpit made a quick and violent journey back through the passenger section. The fuselage blew out with the fury of a bottle of champagne in a microwave oven. Glass flew.

The tail bent over the Cherokee’s body like the stinger of a dying scorpion and impaled itself in the roof of a Dodge van with the words PROTECT WOMEN’s IPJGHT TO CHOOSE! stencilled on the side. There was a bright and bitter crunch-clang that sounded like a dropped pile of scrap iron.

“Holy shi-” one of the cops posted on the edge of the parking lot began, and then the C-4 inside the cardboard box flew free like a big gray glob of phlegm and struck the remains of the instrument panel where several “hot” wires rammed into it like hypo needles.

The plastique exploded with an ear-crunching thud, flash-frying the Bassey Park racetrack and turning the parking lot into a hurricane of white light and shrapnel. John Leydecker, who had been standing under the Civic Center’s cement canopy-and talking to a State cop, was thrown through one of the open doors and all the way across the lobby.

He struck the far wall and fell unconscious into the shattered glass from the harness-racing trophy case. At that, he was luckier than the man with whom he had been standing; the State cop was thrown into the post between two of the open doors and chopped in half.

The ranks of cars actually shielded the Civic Center from the worst of the hammering, concussive blow, but that blessing would only be counted later. Inside, over two thousand people at first sat stunned, unsure of what they should do and even more unsure of what most of them had just seen: America’s most famous feminist decapitated by a jagged chunk of flying glass. Her head went flying into the sixth row like some strange white bowling ball with a blonde wig pasted on it.

They didn’t erupt into panic until the lights went out.

Seventy-one people were killed in the trampling, panicked rush to the exits, and the next day’s Derry News would trumpet the event with a forty-eight-point scare headline, calling it a terrible tragedy.

Ralph Roberts could have told them that, all things considered, they had gotten off lucky. Very lucky, indeed.

Halfway up the north balcony, a woman named Sonia Danville-a woman with the bruises of the last beating any man would ever give her still fading from her face-sat with her arms around the shoulders of her son, Patrick. Patrick’s McDonald’s poster, showing Ronald and Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar dancing the BootScootin’ Boogie just outside a drive-thru window, was on his lap, but he had hardly done more than color the golden arches before turning the poster over to the blank side. It wasn’t that he had lost interest; it was just that he’d had an idea for a picture of his own, and it had come, as such ideas often did to him, with the force of a compulsion.

He had spent most of the day thinking about what had happened in the cellar at High Ridge-the smoke, the heat, the frightened women, and the two angels that had come to save them-but his splendid idea banished these disturbing thoughts, and he fell to work with silent enthusiasm. Soon Patrick felt almost as if he were living in the world he was drawing with his Crayolas.

He was an amazingly competent artist already, only four years old or not (“My little genius,” Sonia sometimes called him), and his picture was much better than the color-it-in poster on the other side of the sheet. What he had managed before the lights went out was work a gifted first-year art student might have been proud of. In the middle of the poster-sheet, a tower of dark, soot-colored stone rose into a blue sky dotted with fat white clouds. Surrounding it was a field of roses so red they almost seemed to clamor aloud. Standing off to one side was a man dressed in faded bluejeans. A pair of gunbelts crossed his flat middle; a holster hung below each hip. At the very top of the tower, a man in a red robe was looking down at the gunfighter with an expression of mingled hate and fear. His hands, which were curled over the parapet, also appeared to be red.

Sonia had been mesmerized by the presence of Susan Day, who was sitting behind the lectern and listening to her introduction, but she had happened to glance down at her son’s picture just before the introduction ended. She had known for two years that Patrick was what the child psychologists called a prodigy, and she sometimes told herself she had gotten used to his sophisticated drawings and the Play-Doli sculptures he called the Clay Family. Perhaps she even had, to some degree, but this particular picture gave her a strange, deep chill that she could not entirely dismiss as emotional fallout from her long and stressful day.

“Who’s that?” she asked, tapping the tiny figure peering jealously down from the top of the dark tower.

“Him’s the Red King,” Patrick said.

“Oh, the Red King, I see. And who’s this man with the guns?”

As he opened his mouth to answer, Roberta Harper, the woman at the podium, lifted her left arm (there was a black mourning band on it) toward the woman sitting behind her. “My friends, His. Susan Day.i” she cried, and Patrick Danville’s answer to his mother’s second question was lost in the rising storm of applause: Him’s name is Roland, Mama. I dream about him, sometimes.

He’s a King, too.

Now the two of them sat in the dark with their ears ringing, and two thoughts ran through Sonia’s mind like rats chasing each other on a treadmill: Won’t this day ever end, I knew I shouldn’t have brought him, won’t this day ever end, I knew I shouldn’t have brought him, won’t this day"Mommy, you’re scrunching my picture!” Patrick said. He sounded a little out of breath, and Sonia realized she must be scrunching him, too. She eased up a little. A tattered skein of screams, shouts, and babbled questions came from the dark pit below them, where the people rich enough to pony up fifteen-dollar “donations” had been seated in folding chairs. A rough howl of pain cut through this babble, making Sonia jump in her seat.

The thudding crump which had followed the initial explosion had pressed in painfully on their ears and shaken the building. The blasts which were still going on-cars exploding like firecrackers in the parking lot-sounded small and inconsequential in comparison, but Sonia felt Patrick flinch against her with each one.

“Stay calm, Pat,” she told him. “Something bad’s happened, but I think it happened outside.” Because her eyes had been drawn to the bright glare in the windows, Sonia had mercifully missed seeing her heroine’s head leaving her shoulders, but she knew that somehow lightning had struck in the same place.

(shouldn’t have brought him, shouldn’t have brought him) and that at least some of the people below them were panicking.