INTENSITY

“God fears me,” he says, which are words that can be formed from the letters of his name.

But the woman seems unimpressed. Wheezing, because of either the fumes or the blow to the back, she says, “Fuck you.”

When he kills her, he will have to eat a piece of her, as he ate the spider, because in the difficult days ahead, he may need a measure of her extraordinary strength.

Ariel is fifty or sixty feet away, and the sheriff considers going after her. He decides to finish the woman first, because the girl can’t get far in her condition.

When Vess looks down again, the woman is withdrawing a small object from a pocket of her jeans.

*

Chyna held the butane lighter that she’d been carrying since the service station where Vess had murdered the clerks. She released the childproof lock on the gas lever and slid her thumb onto the striker wheel. She was terrified to ignite it. She lay in gasoline, and her clothes, her hair, were soaked with it. She could barely draw breath through the suffocating fumes. Her trembling hand was damp with gasoline too, and she figured that the flame would leap immediately to her thumb, travel down her hand, her arm, enshrouding her entire body in only seconds.

But she had to trust that there was justice in the universe and meaning in the redwood mists, for without that trust, she would be no better than Edgler Vess, no better than a mindlessly seeking palmetto beetle.

She was lying at Vess’s feet. Even if the worst happened, she would take him with her.

“Forever,” she said, because that was another word that could be formed from the letters of his name, and she thumbed the striker wheel.

A pure flame spurted from the Bic but didn’t instantly leap to her thumb, so she thrust the lighter against Vess’s boot, dropped it, and the flame went out at once but not before igniting the gasoline-soaked leather.

Even as Chyna let go of the lighter, she rolled away from Vess, arms tucked against her breast, spinning across the blacktop, shocked by how quickly fire exploded high into the night behind her with a whoosh and a sudden wave of heat. Ethereally beautiful blue flames must be streaking toward her across the saturated pavement, and she steeled herself for the killing rapture of fire—but then she was out of the gasoline, rolling across dry highway.

Gasping for air, she shoved onto her feet, backing farther from the burning pavement and from the beast in the conflagration.

Edgler Vess was wearing boots of fire, screaming and stamping his feet as great sheets of flame were flung up from the blacktop around him.

Chyna saw his hair ignite, and she looked away.

Ariel was well beyond the gasoline-wet pavement and out of danger, though she seemed oblivious of the blaze. She was stopped with her back to the fire, gazing up at the stars.

Chyna hurried to the girl and led her another twenty feet south on the highway, just to be safe.

Vess’s screaming was shrill and terrible and louder now, louder because, as Chyna discovered when she turned to look back, the freak was coming after them, a pillar of fire, totally engulfed. Yet he was on his feet, slogging through the boiling tar that bubbled out of the softening blacktop. His bright arms stretched in front of him, blue-white tongues of fire seething off his fingertips. A tornado of blood-red fire whirled in his open mouth, dragon fire spouted from his nostrils, his face vanished behind an orange mask of flames, yet he came onward, stubborn as a sunset, screaming.

Chyna pushed the girl behind her, but then Vess abruptly veered away from them, and it became clear to her that he hadn’t seen them. He was seared blind, chasing neither her nor Ariel but an undeserved mercy.

In the middle of the highway, he fell across the yellow lines and lay there, jerking and twitching, writhing and kicking, gradually turning on his side, pulling his knees up to his chest, folding his blackened hands under his chin. His head curled down to his hands as though his neck were melting and unable to support it. Soon he was silent in his burning.

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