“Ki… get Ki… away…” A hoarse, whispering voice.

Mattie was crawling toward me. One side of her head—the right side—still looked all right, but the left side was a ruin. One dazed blue eye peered out from between clumps of bloody hair. Skull-fragments littered her tanned shoulder like bits of broken crockery. How I would love to tell you I don’t remember any of this, how I would love to have someone else tell you that Michael Noonan died before he saw that, but I cannot. Alas is the word for it in the crossword puzzles, a four-letter word meaning to express great sorrow.

“Ki… Mike, get Ki…”

I knelt and put my arms around her. She struggled against me. She was young and strong, and even with the gray matter of her brain bulging through the broken wall of her skull she struggled against me, crying for her daughter, wanting to reach her and protect her and get her to safety.

“Mattie, it’s all right,” I said. Down at the Grace Baptist Church, at the far end of the zone I was in, they were singing “Blessed Assurance’’… but most of their eyes were as blank as the eye now peering at me through the tangle of bloody hair. “Mattie, stop, rest, it’s all right.”

“Ki… get Ki… don’t let them…”

“They won’t hurt her, Mattie, I promise.”

She slid against me, slippery as a fish, and screamed her daughter’s name, holding out her bloody hands toward the trailer. The rose-colored shorts and top had gone bright red. Blood spattered the grass as she thrashed and pulled. From down the hill there was a guttural explosion as the Ford’s gas-tank exploded. Black smoke rose toward a black sky.

Thunder roared long and loud, as if the sky were saying You want noise?

I3ah? I’ll give you noise.

“Say Mattie’s all right, Mike!” John cried in a wavering voice. “Oh for God’s sake say she’s—”

He dropped to his knees beside me, his eyes rolling up until nothing showed but the whites. He reached for me, grabbed my shoulder, then tore damned near half my shirt off as he lost his battle to stay conscious and fell on his side next to Mattie. A curd of white goo bubbled from one corner of his mouth. Twelve feet away, near the overturned barbecue, Rommie was trying to get on his feet, his teeth clenched in pain. George was standing in the middle of Wasp Hill Road, reloading his gun from a pouch he’d apparently had in his coat pocket and watching as the shooter worked to get clear of the overturned car before it was engulfed. The entire right leg of George’s pants was red now. He may live but he’ll never wear that suit again, I thought. I held Mattie. I put my face down to hers, put my mouth to the ear that was still there and said: “Kyra’s okay. She’s sleeping. She’s fine, I promise.” Mattie seemed to understand. She stopped straining against me and collapsed to the grass, trembling all over. “Ki… Ki…” This was the last of her talking on earth. One of her hands reached out blindly, groped at a tuft of grass, and yanked it out. “Over here,” I heard George saying. “Get over here, motherfuck, don’t you even think about turning your back on me.”

“How bad is she?” Rommie asked, hobbling over. His face was as white as paper. And before I could reply: “Oh Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Blessed be the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Oh Mary born without sin, pray for us who have recourse to Thee. Oh no, oh Mike, no.” He began again, this time lapsing into Lewiston street-French, what the old folks call La Parle. “Quit it,” I said, and he did. It was as if he had only been waiting to be told. “Go inside and check on Kyra. Can you?”

“Yes.” He started toward the trailer, holding his leg and lurching along. With each lurch he gave a high yip of pain, but somehow he kept going. I could smell burning tufts of grass. I could smell electric rain on a rising wind. And under my hands I could feel the light spin of the drei-del slowing down as she went. I turned her over, held her in my arms, and rocked her back and forth. At Grace Baptist the minister was now reading Psalm 139 for Royce: If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light. The minister was reading and the Martians were listening. I rocked her back and forth in my arms under the black thunderheads. I was supposed to come to her that night, use the key under the pot and come to her. She had danced with the toes of her white sneakers on the red Frisbee, had danced like a wave on the ocean, and now she was dying in my arms while the grass burned in little clumps and the man who had fancied her as much as I had lay unconscious beside her, his right arm painted red from the short sleeve of his WE are THE CHAMPIONS tee-shirt all the way down to his bony, freckled wrist.

“Mattie,” I said. “Mattie, Mattie, Mattie.” I rocked her and smoothed my hand across her forehead, which on the right side was miraculously unsplattered by the blood that had drenched her. Her hair fell over the ruined left side of her face. “Mattie,” I said. “Mattie, Mattie, oh Mattie.” Lightning flashed—the first stroke I had seen. It lit the western sky in a bright blue arc. Mattie trembled strongly in my arms—all the way from neck to toes she trembled. Her lips pressed together. Her brow furrowed, as if in concentration. Her hand came up and seemed to grab for the back of my neck, as a person falling from a cliff may grasp blindly at anything to hold on just a little longer.

Then it fell away and lay limply on the grass, palm up. She trembled once more—the whole delicate weight of her trembled in my arms—and then she was still.

CHAPTER 5

After that I was mostly in the zone. I came out a few times—when that scratched-out scrap of genealogy fell from inside one of my old steno books, for instance—but those interludes were brief. In a way it was like my dream of Mattie, Jo, and Sara; in a way it was like the terrible fever I’d had as a child, when I’d almost died of the measles; mostly it was like nothing but itself. It was just the zone. I was feeling it. I wish to God I hadn’t been. George came over, herding the man in the blue mask ahead of him. George was limping now, and badly. I could smell hot oil and gasoline and burning tires. “Is she dead?” George asked.

“Mattie?”

“Yes.”

“John?”

“Don’t know,” I said, and then John twitched and groaned. He was alive, but there was a lot of blood. “Mike, listen,” George began, but before he could say more, a terrible liquid screaming began from the burning car in the ditch. It was the driver. He was cooking in there. The shooter started to turn that way, and George raised his gun. “Move and I’ll kill you.”

“You can’t let him die like that,” the shooter said from behind his mask. “You couldn’t let a dog die like that.”

“He’s dead already,” George said. “You couldn’t get within ten feet of that car unless you were in an asbestos suit.” He reeled on his feet. His face was as white as the spot of whipped cream I’d wiped off the end of Ki’s nose. The shooter made as if to go for him and George brought the gun up higher.

“The next time you move, don’t stop,” George said, “because I won’t.

Guaranteed. Now take that mask off.”

“I’m done fucking with you, Jesse. Say hello to God.” George pulled back the hammer of his revolver. The shooter said, “Jesus Christ,” and yanked off his mask. It was George Footman. Not much surprise there. From behind him, the driver gave one more shriek from within the Ford fireball and then was silent. Smoke rose in black billows. More thunder roared. “Mike, go inside and find something to tie him with,” George Kennedy said. “I can hold him another minute—two, if I have to—but I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. Look for strapping tape. That shit would hold Houdini.” Footman stood where he was, looking from Kennedy to me and back to Kennedy again. Then he peered down at Highway 68, which was eerily deserted. Or perhaps it wasn’t so eerie, at that—the coming storms had been well forecast. The tourists and summer folk would be under cover. As for the locals… The locals were… sort of listening.