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enemies he was protected by the bank of earth. Dirt and pebbles scoured at him, tearing the elegant robe across his shoulders. The horse whinnied its terror and whirled about. Fortunately it didn’t rear, for the screaming shards of masonry would have ripped its lord and master to tat-ters of flesh. With Harvey hanging over its neck, his fin-gers tangled in its flowing mane, the huge horse began to gallop back along the narrow trail toward the ville.
The sergeant had had his mouth open, ready to bellow his warning. He heard the pinging sound of the bullet hitting the door behind him and out of the corner of his eye he noticed the trail of sparks from the contact. But his brain didn’t have time to make the connection, and he died ignorant of his own chilling. The ignition of the gas-oline fumes and then the spilled liquid took a lightning moment. And a quarter heartbeat later the opened drums went up, taking everything and everybody with it.
The sec officer’s skull literally exploded, the fumes gushing into his mouth, tearing apart his sinuses, flam-ing through eyes, ears and nose. His brain boiled in-stantly, and the bones of his head simply disintegrated under the force.
All but a half-dozen men and a couple of the dogs died instantly.
And they were blinded, naked, hideously burned, their bodies thrown forty yards away in every direction.
Ryan, clinging to the living rock for his own life, felt the shock wave pass over him like the beating of the wings of the angel of doom, the heat taking his breath for a mo-ment. The noise drowned out the roaring of the Sorrow, deafening him. The thunder rolled on, diminishing, and then things began to fall around them.
A few large chunks of stone dropped to the ground- edges charred and blackened by the explosion-and sev-
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eral of the twisted drums that had held the gasoline. Ryan looked up, seeing the sky was filled, blotting out the sun. He pointed upward, trying to warn the other three, then shielded his head as best he could. Fortunately the force of the blast carried most of the heavier chunks of granite and metal toward the north loop of the Sorrow.
But smaller lumps of stone, some the size of a base-ball, began to thud on the turf and patter in the river. One big as a hen’s egg hit Ryan on the left shoulder, bringing a sharp dart of pain.
A piece of gray metal he recognized as an old flash suppressor from an M-16 landed in the mud of the bank near his left hand. A jagged butt stock off another blaster dug out a gouge in the grass a yard in front of him.
Then came the meat.
You could hardly describe it as being any functioning part of human bodies, or animal. They fell all over them, covering them in a slick coating of sticky crimson dew, with globs of flesh and glittering white bone. Strings of tendon and fragments of dark blue cloth floated in the gentle breeze like falling leaves. An eye bounced just to the left of Jak, but it wasn’t possible to tell if it was human or canine. A right hand, missing the thumb, hit Krysty on the back of her thigh, lying there like a bleeding hairless spi-der. A whole leg, still attached to part of the hip, thud-ded heavily into the bank by J.B.’s feet, slithering the last few inches and being instantly whirled away by the scyth-ing current of the Sorrow.
Eventually even the bloody mist ceased and a momen-tary quiet descended. Then a dog began to howl, thin and high like a woman in childbirth. Ryan, ears ringing, squinted over the lip of the bank, wiping blood from his face. He saw the animal, smashed against the trunk of one of the tall trees, one of the trees that had been tall sec-
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onds earlier. Now the top fifty feet were gone, torn away, the branches shredded and white from the impact of the gas explosion. The dog, hardly recognizable, was a bro-ken husk of the proud hunting animal that had padded out of the ville. It w as blind and broken and close to death. The howling quickly stopped.