"And we don't touch each other. That's over. It got Flagg what he wanted. We wasted their Free Zone Committee. They're washed up. They may get the power on, but as a functioning group, they're washed up. He'll give me a woman who makes you look like a potato sack, Nadine. And you... you get him. Happy days, right? Only if I were wearing your Hush Puppies, I would be shaking in them plenty."
"Harold - please - " She was sick, crying. He could see her face in the dim fireglow, and felt pity for her. He forced it out of his heart like an unwelcome drunk who has tried to enter a cozy little suburban tavern where everybody knows everybody else. The irrevocable fact of murder was in her heart forever - that fact shone sickly in her eyes. But so what? It was in his, as well. In it and on it, weighing it down like stones.
"Get used to it," Harold said brutally. He flung the tent on the back of his cycle and began to tie it down. "It's over for them down there, and it's over for us, and it's over for everybody that died in the plague. God went off on a celestial fishing trip and He's going to be gone a long time. It's totally dark. The dark man's in the driver's seat now. Him. So get used to it."
She made a squeaking, moaning noise in her throat.
"Come on, Nadine. This stopped being a beauty contest two minutes ago. Help me get this shit packed up. I want to do a hundred miles before sunup."
After a moment she turned her back on the destruction below - destruction that seemed almost inconsequential from this height - and helped him pack the rest of the camping gear in his saddlebags and her wire carrier. Fifteen minutes later they had left the fire-rose behind and were riding through the cool and windy dark, heading west.
For Fran Goldsmith, that day's ending was painless and simple. She felt a warm push of air at her back and suddenly she was flying through the night. She had been knocked out of her sandals.
Whafuck? she thought.
She landed on her shoulder, landed hard, but there was still no pain. She was in the ravine that ran north-to-south at the foot of Ralph's back yard.
A chair landed in front of her, neatly, on its legs. Its seat-cushion was a smoldering black snarl.
WhaFUCK?
Something landed on the seat of the chair and rolled off. Something that was dripping. With faint and clinical horror, she saw that it was an arm.
Stu? Stu! What's happening?
A steady, grinding roar of sound engulfed her, and stuff began to rain down everywhere. Rocks. Hunks of wood. Bricks. A glass block spiderwebbed with cracks (hadn't the bookcase in Ralph's living room been made of those blocks?). A motorcycle helmet with a horrible, lethal hole punched through the back of it. She could see everything clearly... much too clearly. It had been dark out only a few seconds ago
Oh Stu, my God, where are you? What's happening? Nick? Larry?
People were screaming. That grinding roar went on and on. It was now brighter than noontime. Every pebble cast a shadow. Stuff still raining down all around her. A board with a six-inch spike protruding from it came down in front of her nose.
-the baby! -
And on the heels of that, another thought came, a reprise of her premonition: Harold did this, Harold did this, Harold -
Something struck her on the head, the neck, the back. A huge thing that landed on her like a padded coffin.
OH MY GOD OH MY BABY -
Then darkness sucked her down to a nowhere place where not even the dark man could follow.
BOOK II ON THE BOARDER Chapter 59
Birds.
She could hear birds.
Fran lay in darkness, listening to the birds for a long time before she realized the darkness wasn't really dark. It was reddish, moving, peaceful. It made her think of her childhood. Saturday morning, no school, no church, the day you got to sleep late. The day you could wake up a little at a time, at your leisure. You lay with your eyes shut, and you saw nothing but a red darkness that was Saturday sunshine being filtered through the delicate screen of capillaries in your eyelids. You listened to the birds in the old oaks outside and maybe smelled sea-salt, because your name was Frances Goldsmith and you were eleven years old on a Saturday morning in Ogunquit -
Birds. She could hear birds.
But this wasn't Ogunquit; it was
(Boulder)
She puzzled over it in the red darkness for a long time, and suddenly she remembered the explosion.
(?Explosion?)
(!Stu!)
Her eyes flashed open. There was sudden terror. "Stu! "
And Stu was sitting there beside her bed, Stu with a clean white bandage wrapped over one forearm and a nasty-looking cut dried on one cheek and part of his hair burned away, but it was Stu, he was alive, with her, and when she opened her eyes the great relief came on his face and he said, "Frannie. Thank God."
"The baby," she said. Her throat was dry. It came out a whisper.
He looked blank, and blind fear stole into her body. It was cold and numbing.
"The baby," she said, forcing the words up her sandpaper throat. "Did I lose the baby?"
Understanding came over his face then. He hugged her clumsily with his good arm. "No, Frannie, no. You didn't lose the baby."