He fumbled and stumbled back to his car, started it with some difficulty (assuming that in his excitement he had probably almost flooded the damned dinosaur), boosted the air-conditioner all the way up, and headed toward Haven again. He was aware this was idiocy of the purest ray serene-he was, after all, not Superman but a forty-five-year-old textbook salesman who was going bald and who was still a bachelor because he was too shy to ask women for dates. He was not just behaving in an idiotic fashion, either. Harsh as that judgment was, it was still a rationalization. The truth was, he was behaving like a lunatic. And yet he could no more stop himself than a junkie can stop himself when he sees his fix cooking in the spoon.

He couldn't fight it…

…but he could still go see it.

And it would really be something to see, wouldn't it? Lester thought. Sweat was already rolling down his face, as if in anticipation of the heat ahead. Something to see, oh yeah. A forest fire that was for some reason being allowed to rage utterly out of control as they had millions of years ago, when men were little more than a small tribe of hairless monkeys cowering in the twin cradles of the Nile and the Euphrates and the great fires themselves were touched off by spontaneous combustion, strokes of lightning, or meteor-falls instead of drunk hunters who didn't give a shit what they did with their cigarette butts. It would be a bright orange furnace, a firewall ninety feet high in the woods; across the clearings and gardens and hayfields it would race like a Kansas prairie fire in the 1840s, gobbling houses so swiftly they would implode from the sudden change in air-pressure, as houses and factories had done during the World War II firebombings. He would be able to see the road he was on, this very road, disappearing into that furnace, like a highway into hell.

The tar itself, he thought, would first begin to run in sticky little rivulets… and then to burn.

He stepped down harder on the gas, and thought: How could you not go on? When you had a chance-a once-in-a-lifetime chance-to see something like that, how could you not?

“I just don't know how I'm going to explain to my dad, is all,” the Maine Med Supplies clerk said. He wished he had never argued four years ago for expanding their business to include rentals in the first place. His father had thrown that in his face after the old guy rented the flat-pack and never returned it, and now all hell was breaking loose in Haven-the radio said it was a forest fire and then went on to hint that even weirder things might be happening there-and he was betting he'd never see the flat-pack he had rented that morning to the reporter with the thick glasses, either. Now here were two more fellows, state troopers no less, demanding not just one flat-pack each, but six of them.

“You can tell your dad we requisitioned them,” Torgeson said. “I mean, you do provide respiration gear for firemen, don't you?”

“Yes, but-”

“And there's a forest fire in Haven, isn't there?”

“Yes, but-”

“Then get them out here. I don't have time to bullshit.”

“My father is gonna kill me!” he wailed. “That's all we got!”

Torgeson had met Claudell Weems pulling into the parking lot of the barracks just as Torgeson himself was pulling out. Claudell Weems, Maine's only black state trooper, was tall-not as tall as the late Monster Dugan, but a very respectable six-four. Claudell Weems had one gold tooth in the front of his mouth, and when Claudell Weems moved very close to people-suspects, for instance, or a reluctant clerk-and smiled, revealing that sparkling gold incisor, they became very nervous. Torgeson once asked Claudell Weems why this was, and Claudell Weems said he b'leeved it was dat ole black magic. And then laughed until the glass in the barracks windows seemed to tremble in its frames.

Weems now leaned very close to the clerk and employed dat ole black magic dat he wove so well.

When they left Maine Med with the flat-packs, the clerk was not really sure what had happened… except that the black fella had the biggest gold tooth he had ever seen in his life.

The toothless old man who had sold Leandro the T-shirt stood on his porch and watched expressionlessly as Torgeson's cruiser blasted by. When it was gone he went inside and made a phone call to a number most people wouldn't have been able to reach; they would have heard the sirening sound which had infuriated Anne Anderson instead. But there was a gadget on the back of the storekeeper's phone, and soon he was talking to an increasingly harried Hazel McCready.

“So!” Claudell Weems said cheerfully after craning his neck to look at the speedometer, “I see we are driving at just over ninety miles an hour! And since the consensus is that you're probably the shittiest motor-vehicle operator in the entire Maine state police-”

“What fucking consensus?” Torgeson asked.

“My fucking consensus,” Claudell Weems said. “Anyway, that leads to a deduction. The deduction is that I will die very soon. I don't know if you believe in that bullshit about granting a doomed man's last request, but if you do, maybe you'd tell me what this is all about. If you can before we receive our engine-block implants, that is.”

Andy opened his mouth, then closed it again. “No,” he said. “I can't. It's too nuts. Just this much. You may start to feel sick. If you do, put some of that canned air to you right away.”

“Oh, Christ,” Weems said. “The air's been poisoned in Haven?”

“I don't know. I think so.”

“Oh Christ,” Weems said again. “Who spilled what beans?”

Andy only shook his head.

“That's why no one's fighting the fire.” The smoke boiled up from the horizon in a widening swath-mostly white so far, thank God.

“I don't know. I think so. Run one of the bands on the radio.”

Weems blinked as if he thought Torgeson might be crazy. “Which band?”

“Any band.”

So Weems began to run the police band, at first getting nothing but the confused, beginning-to-be-frightened babble of cops and firemen who wanted to fight a fire and somehow couldn't get to where it was at. Then, further down, they heard a request for backup units at the scene of a liquor-store robbery. The address given was 117 Mystic Avenue, Medford.

Weems looked at Andy. “Jeepers-creepers, Andy, I didn't know there was any Mystic Avenue in Medford-in fact, I didn't think there was any avenues at all in Medford. Couple of pulproads, maybe.”

“I think,” Andy said, and his voice seemed to be coming to his own ears from very far away, “that particular squeal is coming from Medford, Massachusetts.”

Two hundred yards over the Haven town line, Lester Moran's motor died. It did not cough; it did not hitch; it did not backfire. It just died, quietly and without fanfare. He got out without bothering to switch off the key.

The steady crackle of the fire filled the whole world, it seemed. The air temperature had gone up at least twenty degrees. The wind was carrying the heavy smoke toward him but up, so the air was breathable. It still had a hot, acrid taste.

Here on the left and right were wide fields-Clarendon land on the right, Ruvall land on the left. It rose in a long, undulating slope toward the woods. In those woods, Lester could see steadily brightening winks of red and orange light; smoke poured up from them in a torrent which was steadily darkening. He could hear the thumping explosions of hollow trees imploding as the fire sucked the oxygen out of them like marrow from old bones. The wind was not straight into his face, but close enough; the fire was going to break out of the woods and into the field in minutes… seconds, maybe. Its rush down to where he stood, face red and running with sweat, might be lethally quick. He wanted to be back in his car before that happened-it would start, of course it would, old gal had never failed him yet-and piling up distance between himself and that red, oncoming beast.