Roland held the round firework as long as he dared, then lobbed it into the overflow pipe. He winced as he turned away, half-expecting what Bert was afraid of: that the very air would explode. It didn’t. He ran down the short aisle, came into the clear, and saw Cuthbert standing just outside the broken bit of fencing.
Roland flapped both hands at him— Go, you idiot, go!— and then the world blew up behind him.
The sound was a deep, belching thud that seemed to shove his eardrums inward and suck the breath out of his throat. The ground rolled under his feet like a wave under a boat, and a large, warm hand planted itself in the center of his back and shoved him forward. He thought he ran with it for a step—maybe even two or three steps—and then he was lifted off his feet and hurled at the fence, where Cuthbert was no longer standing; Cuthbert was sprawled on his back, staring up at something behind Roland. The boy’s eyes were wide and wondering; his mouth hung open. Roland could see all this very well, because Citgo was now as bright as in full daylight. They had lit their own Reaping bonfire, it seemed, a night early and much brighter than the one in town could ever hope to be.
He went skidding on his knees to where Cuthbert lay, and grabbed him under one arm. From behind them came a vast, ripping roar, and now chunks of metal began to fall around them. They got up and ran toward where Alain stood in front of Susan and Sheemie, trying to protect them.
Roland took a quick look back over his shoulder and saw that the remains of the derrick—about half of it still stood—were glowing blackish red, like a heated horseshoe, around a flaring yellow torch that ran perhaps a hundred and fifty feet into the sky. It was a start. He didn’t know how many other derricks they could fire before folk began arriving from town, but he was determined to do as many as possible, no matter what the risks might be. Blowing up the tankers at Hanging Rock was only half the job. Farson’s source had to be wiped out.
Further firecrackers dropped down further overflow pipes turned out not to be necessary. There was a network of interconnected pipes under the oilpatch, most filled with natural gas that had leaked in through ancient, decaying seals. Roland and Cuthbert had no more than reached the others when there was a fresh explosion, and a fresh tower of flame erupted from a derrick to the right of the one they had set afire. A moment later, a third derrick—this one sixty full yards away from the first two— exploded with a dragon’s roar. The ironwork tore free of its anchoring concrete pillars like a tooth pulled from a decayed gum. It rose on a cushion of blazing blue and yellow, attained a height of perhaps seventy feet, then heeled over and came crashing back down, spewing sparks in every direction.
Another. Another. And yet another.
The five young people stood in their comer, stunned, holding their hands up to shield their eyes from the glare. Now the oilpatch flared like a birthday cake, and
the heat baking toward them was enormous.
“Gods be kind,” Alain whispered.
If they lingered here much longer, Roland realized, they would be popped like corn. There were the horses to consider, too; they were well away from the main focus of the explosions, but there was no guarantee that the focus would stay where it was; already he saw two derricks that hadn’t even been working engulfed in flames. The horses would be terrified.
Hell, he was terrified.
“Come on!” he shouted.
They ran for the horses through shifting yellow-orange brilliance.
3
At first Jonas thought it was going on in his own head—that the explosions were part of their lovemaking.
Lovemaking, yar. Lovemaking, horseshit. He and Coral made love no more than donkeys did sums. But it was something. Oh yes indeed it was.
He’d been with passionate women before, ones who took you into a kind of oven-place and then held you there, staring with greedy intensity as they pumped their hips, but until Coral he’d never been with a woman that sparked such a powerfully harmonic chord in himself. With sex, he had always been the kind of man who took it when it came and forgot it when it didn’t. But with Coral he only wanted to take it, take it, and take it some more. When they were together they made love like cats or ferrets, twisting and hissing and clawing; they bit at each other and cursed at each other, and so far none of it was even close to enough. When he was with her, Jonas sometimes felt as if he were being fried in sweet oil.
Tonight there had been a meeting with the Horsemen’s Association, which had pretty much become the Farson Association in these latter days. Jonas had brought them up to date, had answered their idiotic questions, and had made sure they understood what they’d be doing the next day. With that done, he had checked on Rhea, who had been installed in Kimba Rimer’s old suite. She hadn’t even noticed Jonas peering in at her. She sat in Rimer’s high-ceilinged, book-lined study—behind Rimer’s ironwood desk, in Rimer’s upholstered chair, looking as out of place as a whore’s bloomers on a church altar. On Rimer’s desk was the
Wizard’s Rainbow. She was passing her hands back and forth above it and muttering rapidly under her breath, but the ball remained dark.
Jonas had locked her in and had gone to Coral. She had been waiting for him in the parlor where tomorrow’s Conversational would have been held. There were plenty of bedrooms in that wing, but it was to her dead brother’s that she had led him … and not by accident, either, Jonas was sure. There they made love in the canopied bed Hart Thorin would never share with his gilly.
It was fierce, as it had always been, and Jonas was approaching his orgasm when the first oil derrick blew. Christ, she’s something, he thought. There’s never in the whole damned world been a woman like—
Then two more explosions, in rapid succession, and Coral froze for a moment beneath him before beginning to thrust her hips again. “Citgo,” she said in a hoarse, panting voice.
“Yar,” he growled, and began to thrust with her. He had lost all interest in making love, but they had reached the point where it was impossible to stop, even under threat of death or dismemberment.
Two minutes later he was striding, naked, toward Thorin’s little lick of a balcony, his half-erect penis wagging from side to side ahead of him like some halfwit’s idea of a magic wand. Coral was a step behind him, as naked as he was.
“Why now?” she burst out as Jonas thrust open the balcony door. “I could have come three more times!”
Jonas ignored her. The countryside looking northwest was a moon-gilded darkness
. . . except where the oilpatch was. There he saw a fierce yellow core of light. It was spreading and brightening even as he watched; one thudding explosion after another hammered across the intervening miles.
He felt a curious darkening in his mind—that feeling had been there ever since the brat, Dearborn, by the some febrile leap of intuition, had recognized him for who and what he was. Making love to the energetic Coral melted that feeling a little, but now, looking at the burning tangle of fire which had five minutes ago been the Good Man’s oil reserves, it came back with debilitating intensity, like a swamp-fever that sometimes quits the flesh but hides in the bones and never really leaves.
You ‘re in the west, Dearborn had said. The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west. Of course it was true, and he hadn’t needed any such titmonkey as Will Dearborn to tell him … but now that it had been said, there was a part of his
mind that couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Fucking Will Dearborn. Where, exactly, was he now, him and his pair of good-mannered mates? In Avery’s culabozo? Jonas didn’t think so. Not anymore.
Fresh explosions ripped the night. Down below, men who had run and shouted in the wake of the early morning’s assassinations were running and shouting again.
“It’s the biggest Reaping firework that ever was,” Coral said in a low voice.
Before Jonas could reply, there was a hard hammering on the bedroom door. It was thrown open a second later, and Clay Reynolds came clumping across the room, wearing a pair of blue jeans and nothing else. His hair was wild; his eyes were wilder.
“Bad news from town, Eldred,” he said. “Dearborn and the other two In-World brats”