“Can you get up?” Harper asked. “We’re in trouble.”
“What elf is new?” he said, blood spitting from his mouth. He glanced from woman to woman with a kind of blurred dismay. “Don’t boffer with me. Go.”
“Oh, will you shut up,” Harper said, yanking him to his feet.
But he wasn’t listening anymore. The Fireman squeezed Harper’s shoulder and pointed, his mouth opening wide into a blood-rimmed ring and his eyes straining in his sockets. He pointed into the sky.
“The hand of God!” someone was screaming. “It’s the hand of God!”
Harper looked up and saw a great flaming hand, the size of a falling station wagon. It dropped into the center of the ring of stones and fell upon the granite bench where Carol had been standing only a moment before. Now Carol was underneath it and Michael was holding her in his arms.
That enormous burning hand struck the ground hard enough to make the earth shudder. It exploded into vast wings of flame, which billowed up across the inner circle of standing stones and scorched the granite black. Grass sizzled, turned to orange threads, and burned away. A blast of hot air boomed out from the center of the circle, hard enough to knock Harper into John’s lap, hard enough to stagger the crowd, to send the front row of people reeling back into the line behind them.
There were screams of anguish and cries of terror. Emily Waterman was knocked down by the scattering, stumbling adults around her, and a 212-pound former plumber named Josh Martingale stepped on her left wrist. Her arm broke with an audible crack.
The burning hand from the sky went out almost the moment it slammed into the ground, leaving behind only burning grass and the smoking stone bench, Carol and Michael cowering beneath it in each other’s arms.
“How?” Harper asked. “Who—”
“Nick,” the Fireman said.
For a few moments the congregation of Carol Storey had all been shining together, in a bright harmony of rage and triumph, but no one was lit up anymore, and they blundered into one another with all the grace of panicked steers. To the north, looking back toward the infirmary, a gap opened in the crowd. People glanced around, saw what was approaching, and fled. Bill Hetworth, a twenty-two-year-old former engineering stu dent who had been in camp for four months, saw what was marching toward them and his bladder let go, darkening the front of his jeans. Carrie Smalls, a fourteen-year-old who had been in Camp Wyndham for just three weeks, fell to her knees and began babbling to “my Lord in heaving, owls be thy name.”
Nick crossed the ground toward them, his head on fire, his eyes like coals, his hands claws of flame, trailing a long black gown of smoke.
6
They parted, a human sea before a Moses wrapped in a robe of flame. As he stalked toward them, he was already letting himself go out. The blue corona of fire that surrounded his head guttered, flickered through different hues—emerald, then palest yellow—before dying in a puff of white smoke. His eyes continued to burn, however, remained hot, blind embers.
“Come on,” the Fireman said. “Thiff is our cue to go.” When he attempted a fricative, his busted lips blew a fine spray of blood.
Harper and Allie pulled the Fireman to his feet, each of them taking one of his hands. He had no balance, no strength in his legs, and almost immediately started to plunge forward. Harper and Allie steadied him and he put his arms over their shoulders.
“Get us behind Nick,” the Fireman said. “They’re terrified of him. They’re at least as terrified of him as they’ff ever been of me.”
They only got two steps, though, Harper and Allie helping the Fireman along, when they heard the blast of an air horn, a bellowing bronk-bronk that seemed to go right through Harper’s chest. She froze and glanced wildly around, staring up the road, toward the crest of the hill.
A pair of headlights came on, bright blue xenon headlights casting an arctic glare above an enormous snow-wing plow.
They shone upon a man, standing eight feet before the truck, a guy in a filthy sweater with reindeer leaping across a green background. This man had a noose around his neck, the hairy rope leading back to the grille beyond the snowplow. His hands were tied behind his back. The headlights turned his wispy white hair to filaments of steel.
Those headlights also fell upon Mark Mazzuchelli. The Mazz was almost fifty yards away, moving up the middle of the dirt road, had apparently decided he had spent enough time luxuriating in the pleasures of Camp Wyndham and was on his way to greener pastures. But when the lights blinked on he took a last staggering step and then went still.
“The fuck is this?” the Mazz said, his voice carrying in the sudden hush.
Another pair of headlights blinked on, and then a third. One set belonged to an open-top Humvee. The other lights blazed from the front of a Chevy Silverado Intimidator, on six jacked-up tires. Blinding floodlights flashed on above the cab. There were at least two other pickup trucks down the road behind them.
Nelson Heinrich, the limping man in the noose, looked over his shoulder into the lights.
“See!” he screamed. “See, I told you! I told you they’d be here! All of ’em! Two hundred infected at least! I told you I could help you! Now you have to let me go! You promised! You promised you’d be done with me!”
An amplified voice—there were speakers mounted on top of the Intimidator, along with floodlights—boomed into the night. Harper knew it. They all knew it. The Marlboro Man was famous up and down the seacoast.
“A promise is a promise,” the Marlboro Man said. “And ain’t no one can say the Marlboro Man don’t keep his word. Someone cut Mr. Heinrich loose.”
A man in fatigues stood up from the passenger seat of the Humvee. He had a Bushmaster and he steadied the barrel on the top edge of the windshield before he began to fire.
7
Nelson Heinrich arched his spine, as if he had been struck across the small of the back with a steel rod. Red smoke burst from his chest in puffs, made a crimson mist in the air around him. He tried to run, got two steps, and then the rope circling his neck jerked him off his feet and he hit the dirt.
The Mazz turned and ran, too. He took one step, and a second, and then bullets shredded his legs. Other bullets hit his back with a sound like rain falling on a drum. The last slug caught a shoulder as he fell and spun him around as he dropped into the road, so he landed faceup to the smoky night sky.
The Humvee took off, banging over the rutted road, raising a cloud of white chalk. It accelerated into the darkness between the church and the cafeteria, cutting off the path of escape in that direction. The headlights lurched across the muddy ground and fell upon Nick. The Hummer did not slow, but accelerated, rushing toward him. Harper screamed his name. He didn’t hear, of course.
The Humvee went over the Mazz with a crunch and a pop and jolted as if it had slammed into a deep pothole. Nick turned, almost casually, as in a dream. He raised his right hand. Sparks whirled up off it, rising in a funnel into the night, into the stars, a thousand hot stars flying up off his hand. Only instead of winking out as they climbed, in the usual manner of sparks, they brightened and swelled. They rose into a flock of burning sparrows, not one of them any bigger than a golf ball, a hundred darting birds of flame, and then they dived.