6

   UP GET UP GET UP!
   The thought was a steady beat in Gardener's head. No; not a beat. It was something like a car, only the wheels were glass, they were cutting into his brain as the car motored slowly across it.
   deserves his time of sunlight David Brown GET up David GET David up David Brown! GET UP! DAVID BROWN! GET up! GET UP, DAMMIT!
   'All right!' Gardener muttered through a mouth that was full of blood. 'All right, I hear you, leave me alone!'
   He managed to get to his knees. He tried to get to his feet. The world grayed out. No good. At least the rasping, cutting voice in his head had let
   up a little … he sensed its owner was somehow looking out of his eyes, using them like dirty windows,
   (dreaming through them)
   seeing some of what he saw.
   He tried to get to his feet again and was again unable.
   'My asshole quotient is still very high,' Gardener croaked. He spat out two teeth and began to crawl through the dirt of the dooryard toward the shed.

7

   Haven came after Jim Gardener.
   They came in cars. They came in pickup trucks. They came on tractors. They came on motorcycles. Mrs Eileen Crenshaw, the Avon lady who had been so bored at Hilly Brown's SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW, came driving her son Galen's dune-buggy. The Reverend Goohringer rode behind her, the remaining strands of his graying hair blowing back from his sunburned pate. Vern Jernigan came in a hearse he had been trying to convert into a camper before the 'becoming' got into high gear. They filled the roads. Ashley Ruvall wove between those on foot like a slalom racer, pedaling his bike like a madman. He had returned home long enough to get something he called a Zap Gun. This spring it had only been an outgrown toy, gathering dust in the attic. Now, equipped with a 9-volt battery and the circuit board from his little brother's Speak 'n' Spell, it was a weapon the Pentagon would have found interesting. It blew holes in things. Big holes. This was strapped onto the carrier of his bike, where he had once carried newspapers for delivery. They came in a ripping hurry and there were some accidents. Two people were killed when Early Hutchinson's VW collided with the Fannins' station wagon, but such minor things stopped no one. Their mental chant filled the hollow spaces in the air with a steady, rhythmic cry: Before he can do anything to the ship! Before he can do anything to the ship! It was a fine summer's day, a fine day for a killing, and if anyone needed killing it was James Eric Gardener, and so they came, well over five hundred of them in all, good country people who had learned some new tricks. They came. And they brought their new weapons with them

8

   By the time Gardener got halfway to the shed, he began to feel better – perhaps he was getting a second wind. More likely, he supposed, was the possibility that he really had gotten rid of almost all the Valium and was now starting to get on top of the rest.
   Or maybe the old man was somehow feeding him strength.
   Whatever it was, it was enough to get him on his feet again and start hopping toward the shed. He clutched at the door for a moment, heart galloping wildly in his chest. He happened to glance down, and saw a hole in the door. It was round. The edges stuck out in a jagged bracelet of white splinters. It had a chewed look, that hole.
   The vacuum cleaner that ran the buttons. This is how it got out. It had a New and Improved cutting attachment. Christ, these people really are crazy.
   He worked his way around the building and a cold certainty came to him: the key would be gone.
   Oh Christ, Gard, give it a rest! Why would it
   But it was. It was gone. The nail where it had hung was empty.
   Gardener leaned against the side of the shed, exhausted and trembling, his body sheened with sweat. He looked down and the sun gleamed off something on the ground – the key. The nail slanted down a bit. He had put the key back in a hurry and had probably pulled the nail down a bit in the soft wood himself. It had simply slid off.
   He bent painfully, picked it up, and began to shamble around to the front again. He was exquisitely aware of how fast time was passing. They would arrive soon; how could he possibly get his business done in the shed and then get out to the ship before they did? Since it was impossible, it was probably best to ignore it.
   By the time he got back to the shed door, he could hear the faint sound of motors. He stabbed the key at the lock and missed the keyway. The sun was bright, his shadow little more than a puddle hanging from his heels. Again. This time the key socked home. He turned it, shoved the door open, and lurched into the shed.
   Green light enfolded him.
   It was strong – stronger than it had been the last time he was here. That big piece of cobbled-together equipment
   (the transformer)
   was glowing brightly. It was cycling, as it had been before, but the cycles were faster now. Thin green fire ran across the silvery road maps of circuit boards.
   He looked around. The old man, floating in his green bath, was looking back at Gardener with his one good eye. That gaze was tortured … but sane.
   Use the transformer to save David
   'Old man, they are coming for me,' Gardener croaked. 'I'm out of time.'
   Corner, far corner.
   He looked and saw something that looked a bit like a television antenna, a bit like a large coat-hanger mobile, and a bit like those back-yard devices on which women hang clothes, turning them to do so.
   'That?'
   Take it out into the dooryard.
   Gardener didn't question. There was no time. The thing stood on a small square platform. Gardener supposed its circuits and batteries were in that.
   Close-up, he saw that the things which looked like the bent arms of a TV antenna were really narrow steel tubes. He seized the central pole. The thing wasn't heavy, but it was awkward. He was going to have to put some weight on his shattered ankle, like it or not.
   He looked back at the tank in which Ev Hillman floated.
   You sure about this, old-timer?
   But it was the woman who answered. Her eyes opened. Looking into them was like looking into the witches' caldron in Macbeth. For a moment Gard forgot all his pain and weariness and sickness. He was held in thrall by that poisoned gaze. In that instant he understood all the truth and all the power of the fearsome woman Bobbi had called Sissy, and the reason Bobbi had fled from her, as from a fiend. She was a fiend. She was a witch. And even now, in her fearful agony, her hate held.
   Take it, you stupid man! I'll run it!
   Gardener put his hurt foot down and screamed as a savage hand reached all the way up from his ankle to seize the soft double sac of his testicles.
   The old man:
   wait wait
   It rose on its own. Not far; only an inch or two. The green swamplight brightened even more.
   You'll have to guide it, son.
   This he was able to manage. It wavered across the green shed like the skeleton of a crazy beach umbrella, nodding and dipping, casting weird elongated shadows on the walls and floor. Gardener hopped clumsily after it, not wanting, not daring, to look back into that insane woman's eyes. Over and over his mind played a single thought: Bobbi Anderson's sister was a witch … a witch … a witch . . .
   He guided the bobbing umbrella out into the sunlight.

9

   Freeman Moss arrived first. He swung the pulp-truck in which Gard had once hitched a ride into Bobbi's dooryard and was out almost before the laboring, farting engine had died. And by Christ, chummy, if the cocksucker wasn't right there, front and center, holding onto something that looked like a woman's clothes whirligig. Man looked like a winded runner. He was holding one of his feet – the left – up, like a dog with a thorn in its paw. That sneaker was bright red, dripping blood.
   Looks like Bobbi put at least one good one into you, you snake.
   Her murdering pal apparently heard the thought. He looked up and smiled wearily. He was still holding onto the whirligig with the platform stand on the bottom. He was supporting himself on it.
   Freeman walked toward him, leaving the driver's door of the old truck hanging open. There was something childlike and winning in the man's grin, and in a moment Freeman understood what it was: with his missing teeth, it was the Halloween punkin grin of a little, boy.
   Jesus, I sorta liked you – why'd you have to be such a fuckup?
   'What you doing out here, Freeman?' Gardener asked. 'You should have stuck home. Watched the Red Sox. The fence is all whitewashed.'
   You sonofawhore!
   Moss was wearing a down-filled vest but no shirt beneath; the vest was simply the first thing to come to hand as he rushed out of the house. Now he brushed it aside, revealing not a gimmick or a gadget but a Colt Woodsman, He pulled it out. Gardener stood looking at him, holding the whirligig's post, foot up.
   Close your eyes. I'll make it quick. I can do that, at least.

10

   (GET DOWN ASSHOLE GET DOWN OR YOU'LL LOSE YOUR HEAD WHEN HE LOSES HIS I DON'T GIVE A TIN SHIT WHO GOES SO GET DOWN IF YOU WANT TO LIVE)
   In the tank, Anne Anderson's eyes blazed with stricken hate and fury; her teeth were gone but her bare gums ground together ground together ground together and a trail of small bubbles floated up.
   The light pulsed faster and faster, like a carousel speeding up. It became strobelike. The hum rose to a low electric moan, and there was a rich smell of ozone in the shed's air.
   On the one lit VDT screen the word
   PROGRAM?
   was replaced with
   DESTROY
   It began to flash rapidly, over and over again.
   (GET DOWN ASSHOLE OR STAY UP I DON'T CARE WHICH)

11

   Gardener ducked. His bad foot hit the ground. Pain leaped up his leg again. He dropped into the dust on his hands and knees.
   Over his head, the whirligig began to spin, slowly at first. Moss stared at it, the gun sagging slightly for a moment in his hand. Realization crossed his face during the last instant he still had one. Then the slender pipes spilled green fire into the dooryard. For a moment the beach-umbrella illusion was perfect and complete. It looked exactly like a big green one that has been partially lowered so that its circular hem touches the ground. But this umbrella was made of fire, and Gard crouched below it, eyes squinted, one hand in front of his face, grimacing as if from strong heat … but there was no heat, at least not here, underneath Sissy's poison toadstool.
   Freeman Moss was at the edge of the parasol. His pants blazed up, then the down vest. For a moment the flames were green; then they flared yellow.
   He screamed and staggered backward, dropping the gun. Over Gardener's head, the whirligig spun faster. The skeletal metal arms, which had drooped comically downward, were pulled more and more erect by centrifugal force. The parasol's fire-hem bellied outward, and Moss's shoulders and face were enveloped in sheeting flame as he backed away. In Gard's head, that hideous mental wailing began again. He tried to block it out, but there was no way – simply no way. He caught a wavery glimpse of a face running like warm chocolate, then covered his face like a kid at a scary movie.
   The flames spun around Bobbi's dooryard in a widening gyre, making a black spiral of dooryard dirt fused into a gritty sort of glass. Moss's pulp-truck and Bobbi's blue pickup were both in the thing's final circumference; the shed was barely beyond it, although its shape danced like a demon in the heat-haze. It was very hot at the edge of the circle, if not where Gard crouched; no doubt of that.
   The paint on the hood of Moss's truck and on the sides of the pickup first bubbled, then blackened, then burst into flame, burning down to clean white steel. The litter of bark, sawdust, and woodchips in the back of Moss's truck blazed up like dry kindling in a woodstove. The two big trash-barrels in Bobbi's pickup, made of heavy pressed gypsum, also caught fire and burned like sconces. The dark circle at the edge of the fire-parasol's range became a brand in the shape of a saucer. The army blanket covering the torn seat in the cab of Moss's truck sprang alight, then the seat-covers beneath, then the tindery stuffing; now the entire cab was flickery furnace orange, with the skeletons of springs peering up through the glare.
   Freeman Moss staggered backward, twisting and turning, looking like a movie stuntman who has forgotten his flame-suit. He collapsed.

12

   Even overmastering Moss's dying screams, Anne Anderson's mental cry:
   Eat shit and die! Eat shit and d
   Then, suddenly, something let go in whatever remained of her – there was a final brilliant flare of green light, a sustained pulse that lasted nearly two seconds. The heavy hum of the transformer rose a notch, and every board in the shed picked it up and rattled in sympathetic vibration.
   Then the hum dropped back to its former sleepy drone; Anne's head slumped forward in the liquid, her hair trailing like that of a drowned woman. On the computer screen,
   DESTROY
   winked out like a blown candle and became
   PROGRAM?
   again.

13

   The fiery parasol wavered, then disappeared. The whirligig, which had been spinning at a mad rate, began to slow, squeaking rhythmically, like an unlatched gate in a mild breeze. The pipes sank back to their former angle. It squeaked once more, then stopped.
   The gas tank of Bobbi's truck suddenly exploded. More yellow flames shouted at the sky. Gard felt a piece of metal whiz by him.
   He raised his head and stared stupidly at the blazing truck, thinking: Bobbi and I used to go to the Starlite Drive-In over in Derry in that truck sometimes. I think we even got laid there once during some stupid Ryan O'Neal picture. What happened? Lord, what happened?
   In his mind, the old man's voice, almost exhausted, but somehow imperative:
   Quick! I can power the transformer when the rest come, but you got to be quick! The boy! David! Quick, man!
   Not much time, Gardener thought wearily. Jesus, there never is.
   He started back toward the open door of the shed, sweating, cheeks waxy-pale. He paused at that dark burned ring in the dirt, and then hopped clumsily over it. He somehow didn't want to touch it. He tottered on the edge of balance and then managed to hop on. As he made his way back inside the shed, the twin gas tanks of Moss's truck went up with a furious roar. The cab tore free of the body. The truck flipped over on its side like a tiddlywink. Burning chunks of seat-cover and seat-stuffing began to float out of the open passenger window and floated upward like blazing feathers. Most fell back into the dooryard and went out. A few, however, wafted their way over to the porch, and three or four actually floated through the open door on the first faint puff of the easterly wind which would soon come up. One of these burning cotton puffs alighted on a paperback novel which Gardener had left on the table just inside the door a week ago. The cover caught on fire.
   In the living room, another burning fragment of seat-stuffing lit up a rag rug which Mrs Anderson had made in her bedroom and sent surreptitiously to Bobbi one day when Anne was gone.
   When Jim Gardener came out of the shed again, the entire house was on fire.

14

   The light in the shed was at its lowest level ever – a dim and watery green the color of stagnant pond-water.
   Gardener looked cautiously toward Anne, afraid of those blazing eyes. But there was nothing to be afraid of. She only floated, head bent forward as if in deep thought, her hair trailing upward.
   She's dead, son. If you're going to get the boy, it has to be now. I don't know how long I can provide the power. And I can't be divided, with half of myself looking out for them and half running the transformer.
   He stared out at Gardener, and Gard felt deep pity … and admiration for the old bastard's brute courage. Could he have done half as much, gone half as far, if their positions had been reversed? He doubted it.
   You're in a lot of pain, aren't you?
   I ain't exactly feeling in the pink, son, if that's what you mean. But I'll get through it … if you get going, that is.
   Get going. Yes. He had dilly-dallied too long, far too long.
   His mouth popped open in another wrenching yawn, and then he stepped toward the equipment in and around that orange crate – what the old man called the transformer.
   PROGRAM?
   the keyless computer screen beckoned.
   Hillman could have told Gardener what to do, but Gardener didn't need to be told. He knew. He also remembered the nosebleed and the blast of sound he'd taken as a result of his single experiment with Moss's levitation gadget. This made that thing look like a box of Lincoln Logs. Still, he had gone quite a ways down the path to 'becoming' himself since then, like it or not. He would just have to hope it was enou
   Oh shit, son, hold the phone, we got company
   Then a louder voice overrode Hillman's, a voice Gard vaguely recognized but could not put a name to.
   (BACK OFF BACK OFF HOLD ON ALL OF YOU)
   Just 1 think just one or maybe two
   That was the old man's exhausted mental voice again. Gardener felt his concentration go out to the whirligig in the dooryard. In the shed, the light began to grow bright once more, and the killing pulses began.

15

   Dick Allison and Newt Berringer were still two miles from Bobbi's place when Freeman Moss's mental shrieks began. Moments before, they had swerved past Elt Barker. Now Dick looked up into the rearview mirror and saw Elt's Harley swerve across the road and go leaping through the air. For a moment Elt looked like Evel Knievel, white hair or no. Then he separated from the bike and landed in the scrub.
   Newt hit the brakes with both feet and his truck screamed to a stop in the middle of the road. He looked at Dick with large eyes that were both frightened and furious.
   Son of a bitch has got a gadget!
   Yeah. Fire. Some kind of
   Abruptly Dick raised his mental voice to a shout. Newt picked it up, amplified it. From Kyle Archinbourg's Cadillac, Kyle and Hazel McCready joined in.
   (BACK OFF BACK OFF HOLD ON ALL OF YOU)
   They stopped, holding their positions. They were not great takers of orders as a rule, these Tommyknockers, but Moss's hideous screams, fading now, were great persuaders. All stopped, that was, except for a blue Oldsmobile Delta 88 with a bumper-sticker on the back reading REALTORS SELL IT BY THE ACRE.
   When the command came to back off and hold position, Andy Bozeman was already in sight of the Anderson place. His hate had grown exponentially – Gardener lying bleeding and dead was all he could think of. He came slewing into Bobbi's driveway in a wild power turn. The Olds's rear end broke free when Bozeman stamped the brake; the big car nearly tipped over.
   I'll whitewash your fence, you fucking asshole – I'll give you a dead rat and a string to swing it on, oh you bastard.
   His wife pulled the molecule-exciter out of her purse. It looked like a Buck Rogers blaster which had been created by a fairly bright lunatic. Its frame had once been part of a garden tool marketed under the trade name of Weed Eater. She leaned out the car window and pulled the trigger utterly at random. The east end of Bobbi's farmhouse exploded into a caldron of fire. Ida Bozeman grinned a cheerful, reptilian grin.
   As the Bozemans began to get out of the Olds, the whirligig started to spin. A moment later the green parasol of flame began to form. Ida Bozeman tried to aim what she called her 'molecule disco' at it, but too late. If her first shot had hit the whirligig instead of the house, everything might have been different … but it didn't.
   The two of them went up like firetrees. A moment later the Olds exploded with three payments still due on it.