The Stand

Down and down, circling, wondering how long until the vapor hanging around the mouth of the outflow pipe would catch, how long before heat great enough for ignition would rush down the pipe’s throat and into the tank’s belly.

Hair flying back from his forehead, a terrified grin pasted to his face, the wind roaring in his ears, he rushed down. Now he was halfway, racing past the letters CH, letters twenty feet high and lime green against the white of the tank. Down and down, and if his flying feet stuttered or caught on anything, he would tumble like the gascan had tumbled, his bones breaking like dead branches.

The ground came closer, the white gravel circles around the tanks, the green grass beyond the gravel. The cars in the parking lot began to regain their normal size. And still he seemed to be floating, floating in a dream, and he would never reach the bottom, only run and run and get nowhere. He was next to a bomb and the fuse was lit.

From far overhead there came a sudden bang, like a five-inch Fourth of July firecracker. There was a dim clang, and then something whirred past him. It was part of the outflow pipe, he saw with a sharp and almost delicious fear. It was totally black and twisted into a new and excitingly senseless shape by the heat.

He placed one hand on the railing and vaulted over, hearing something snap in his wrist. Sickening pain flowed up his arm to the elbow. He dropped the last twenty-five feet, landed on the gravel, and went sprawling. The gravel scraped skin from his forearms, but he hardly felt it. He was full of moaning, gri

Trashcan Man scrambled up, craning his head around and back, sending his gaze up even as he began to run again. The top of this middle tank had grown yellow hair, and the hair was growing at an amazing rate. The whole thing could blow at any second.

He ran, his right hand flopping on its broken wrist. He leaped over the parking lot curb, and his feet slapped on asphalt. Now he was across the parking lot, his shadow trailing at his feet, and now he was ru

The oil tank blew. Not WHAMM! but KA-WHAP!, a sound so huge, yet at the same time so short and guttural, that he felt his eardrums actually press in and his eyeballs press out as the air somehow changed. A second explosion followed, then a third, and Trashcan writhed on the dead leaves and gri

The young saplings behind him bent over backward and their leaves made a frantic whirring sound, like the pe

KA-WHAMMM!

Trashcan sat up again and saw a gigantic firetree beyond the Cheery Oil parking lot. Black smoke was billowing from its top, rising straight to an amazing height before the wind could disrupt it and rafter it away. You couldn’t look at it without squinting your eyes almost shut and now there was radiant heat baking across the road at him, tightening his skin, making it feel shiny. His eyes were gushing water in protest. Another burning chunk of metal, this one better than seven feet across at its widest and shaped like a diamond, fell out of the sky, landed in the ditch twenty feet to his left, and the dry leaves on top of the wet moss were instantly ablaze.

KA-WHAMM-KA-WHAMM!

If he stayed here he would go up in a jigging, screaming blaze of spontaneous combustion. He scrambled to his feet and began to run along the shoulder of the highway in the direction of Gary, the breath getting hotter and hotter in his lungs. The air had begun to taste like heavy metal. Presently he began to feel his hair to see if he had started burning. The sweet stench of gasoline filled the air, seeming to coat him. Hot wind ripped his clothes. He felt like something trying to escape from a microwave oven. The road doubled before his watering eyes, then trebled.

There was another coughing roar as rising air pressure caused the Cheery Oil Company office building to implode. Scimitars of glass whickered through the air. Chunks of concrete and cinderblock rained out of the sky and hailed on the road. A whizzing piece of steel about the size of a and the thickness of a Mars Bar sliced through trashcan’s shirtsleeve and made a thin scrape on his skin. A piece big enough to have turned his head to guava jelly struck in front of his feet and then bounded away, leaving a good-sized crater behind. Then he was beyond the fallout zone, still ru

KA-WHAMM!

That was another one of the tanks, and the air resistance in front of him seemed to disappear and a large warm hand pushed him firmly from behind, a hand that fitted every contour of his body from heels to head; it shoved him forward with his toes barely touching the road, and now his face bore the terrified, pants-wetting grin of someone who has been attached to the world’s biggest kite in a high cap of wind and let loose to fly, fly, baby, up into the sky until the wind goes somewhere else, leaving him to scream all the way down in a helpless power-dive.

From behind a perfect fusillade of explosions, God’s ammunition dump going up in the flames of righteousness, Satan storming heaven, his artillery captain a fiercely gri

Sights jittering by: cars wrecked off the road, Mr. Strang’s blue mailbox with the flag up, a dead dog with its legs up, a powerline down in a cornfield.

The hand was not pushing him quite so hard now. Resistance had come back in front. Trash risked a glance back over his shoulder and saw that the knoll where the oil tanks had stood was a mass of fire. Everything was burning. The road itself seemed to be on fire back there, and he could see the summer trees going up like torches.

He ran another quarter mile, then dropped into a puffing, blowing, shambling walk. A mile farther on he rested, looking back, smelling the glad smell of burning. With no firetrucks and firefighters to put it out, it would go whatever way the wind took it. It might burn for months. Powtanville would go and the fireline would march south, destroying houses, villages, farms, crops, meadows, forests. It might get as far south as Terre Haute, and it would burn that place he had been in. It might burn farther! In fact—

His eyes turned north again, toward Gary. He could see the town now, its great stacks standing quiet and blameless, like strokes of chalk on a light blue blackboard. Chicago beyond that. How many oil tanks? How many gas stations? How many trains standing silent on sidings, full of LP gas and flammable fertilizer? How many slums, as dry as kindling? How many cities beyond Gary and Chicago?

There was a whole country ripe for burning under the summer sun.

Gri