“Cammie?”
“What?”
“Come here.”
If anyone would know, Cammie would; she had a garden in her backyard, a jungle of potted plants inside her house, and a library’s worth of books on growing things.
Cammie got up from her place by the pantry door, and came over. Susi and her mother joined her; so did Dave Reed.
“What?” Pie Carver asked, turning a wild gaze on Belinda. Pie’s daughter had her arms wrapped around her mother’s leg as if it were a treetrunk, and was still trying to hide her face against the hip of Pie’s denim shorts. “What is it?”
Belinda ignored her and spoke to Cammie. “Look over there. By the swings. Do you see?”
Cammie started to say she didn’t, then Belinda pointed and she did. Thunder mumbled to the east of them, and the breeze kicked up a brief gust. The spider’s web outside the window shivered and shed tiny droplets of rain. The thing Belinda had seen got free of the swing set and rolled partway across the Carvers” backyard, in the direction of the stake fence.
“That’s impossible,” Cammie said flatly. “Russian thistle doesn’t grow in Ohio. Even if it did… this is summer. They root in summer.”
“What’s Russian thistle, Mom?” Dave asked. His arm was around Susi’s waist. “I never heard of it.”
Tumbleweed,” Cammie said in that same flat voice. “Russian thistle is tumbleweed.”
Brad poked his head through Carver’s office door just in time to see Johnny pull a green-and-white box of cartridges out of a desk drawer. In his other hand, the writer had David Carver’s pistol. He had rolled the cylinder out to make sure the chambers were empty; they were, but he was still holding the gun awkwardly, with all of his fingers outside the trigger-guard. To Brad he looked like one of those guys who sold dubious items on high-channel cable TV:
Folks, this little beauty will ventilate any night-time intruder unwise enough to pick your house, yes, of course it will, but wait, there’s more! It slices! It dices! And do you love scalloped potatoes but just never have time to make them at home?
“Johnny.”
He looked up, and for the first time Brad saw clearly how frightened the man was. It made him like Johnny better. He couldn’t think of a reason why that should be, but it was.
“There’s a fool out on Old Doc’s lawn. Jackson, I guess.”
“Shit. That’s not very bright, is it?”
“No. Don’t shoot yourself with that thing.” Brad started out of the room, then turned back. “Are we crazy? Because it feels that way.”
Johnny raised his hands in front of him, palms up, to indicate he didn’t know.
Johnny looked into the chambers of the pistol one more time-as if a bullet might have grown in one of them while he wasn’t looking-then snapped the cylinder back into place. He stuck the pistol in his belt and tucked the box of cartridges into his shirt pocket.
The front hall was a minefield of Ralphie Carver’s boy-toys; the kid had apparently not yet been introduced by his doting parents to the concept of picking up after himself. Brad went into what had to be the little girl’s bedroom. Johnny followed him. Brad pointed out the window.
Johnny looked down. It was Peter Jackson, all right. He was on Doc’s lawn, kneeling beside his wife. He had gotten her into a sitting position again. One arm was around her back. He was working the other under her cocked knees. Her skirt was well up on her thighs, and Johnny thought again about her missing pants. Well, so what? So fucking what? Johnny could see the man’s back shaking as sobs racked him.
Silver light ran across the top of his vision.
He looked up and saw what looked like an old Airstream trailer-or maybe a lunch-wagon-turning left on to Poplar from Hyacinth. Close behind it was the red van that had taken care of the dog and the paperboy, and behind that was the one with the dark blue metal-flake paint. He looked the other way, up toward Bear Street, and saw the van with the Mary Kay paintjob and the Valentine radar-dish, the yellow one that had first rear-ended Mary and then rode her off the street, and the black one with the turret.
Six of them. Six in two converging lines of three. He had seen American LAC vehicles in the same formation a long time ago, in Vietnam.
They were creating a fire-corridor.
For a moment he couldn’t move. His hands seemed to hang at the ends of his arms like plugs of cement. You can’t, he thought with a kind of sick, unbelieving fury. You can’t come back, you bastards, you can’t keep coming back.
Brad didn’t see them; he was looking at the man on the lawn of the house next door, absorbed in Peter’s effort to get up with his wife’s dead weight in his arms. And Peter…
Johnny got his right hand moving. He wanted it to streak; it seemed to float instead. He got it around the handle of the gun and pulled it out of the waistband of his pants. Couldn’t shoot it; no loads in the chambers. Couldn’t load it, either, not in his current state. So he brought it down butt-first, shattering the glass of Ellen’s bedroom window.
“Get inside!” he screamed at Peter, and his voice came out sounding low and strengthless to his own ears. Dear God, what nightmare was this, and how had they stumbled into it? “Get inside! They’re coming again! They’re back! They’re coming again!”
Drawing found folded into an unfitted notebook which apparently served as Audrey Wyler’s journal. Although unsigned, it is almost certainly the work of Seth Garin. If one assumes that its placement in the journal corresponds to the time it was done, then it was made in the summer of 1995, after the death of Herbert Wyler and the Hobart family’s abrupt departure from Poplar Street.
Chapter Seven
POPLAR STREET/4:44 P.M./JULY 15, 1996
They seem to come out of the mist rising off the street like materializing metal dinosaurs. Windows slide down; the porthole on the flank of the pink Dream Floater irises open again; the windshield of Bounty’s blue Freedom van retracts into a smooth darkness from which three grayish shotgun barrels bristle.
Thunder rumbles and somewhere a bird cries harshly. There is a beat of silence, and then the shooting begins.
It’s like the thunderstorm all over again, only worse, because this time it’s personal. And the guns are louder than before; Collie Entragian, lying face-down in the doorway between Billingsley’s kitchen and living room, is the first to notice this, but the others are not long in realizing it for themselves. Each shot is almost like a grenade blast, and each is followed by a low moaning sound, something caught between a buzz and a whistle.
Two shots from the red Tracker Arrow and the top of Collie Entragian’s chimney is nothing but maroon dust in the wind and pebble-sized chunks of brick pattering down on his roof. A shot strikes the plastic spread over Gary Ripton, making it ripple like a parachute, and another tears off the rear wheel of his bike. Ahead of Tracker Arrow is the silver van, the one that looks like an old-fashioned lunch-wagon. Part of its roof rises at an angle, and a silver figure-it appears to be a robot in a Confederate infantryman’s uniform-leans out. It mails three shotgun rounds special express into the burning Hobart house. Each report seems as loud as a dynamite blast.
Coming downhill from Bear Street, Dream Floater and the Justice Wagon pour fire into 251 and 249-the Josephson house and the Soderson house. The windows blow in. The doors blow open. A round that sounds like something thrown from a small anti-aircraft gun hits the back of Gary’s old Saab. The back end crumples in, shards of red taillight glass fly, and there’s a whoomp! as the gas-tank explodes, engulfing the little car in a ball of smoky orange flame. The bumper-stickers-I MAY BE SLOW BUT I’M AHEAD OF YOU on the right, MAFIA STAFF CAR on the left-shimmer in the heat like mirages. The south-moving trio of vans and the trio moving north meet, cross, and stop in front of the stake fences separating the Billingsley place from the Carver house above it and the Jackson house below it.
Audrey Wyler, who was eating a sandwich and drinking a can of lite beer in the kitchen when the shooting started, stands in the living room, staring out at the street with wide eyes, unaware that she’s still holding half of a salami and lettuce on rye in one hand. The firing has merged into one continuous, ear-splitting World War III roar, but she is in no danger; all of it is currently being directed at the two houses across from her.