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Then the patrol car’s damaged battery shorted itself into a spreading pool of gasoline, and it looked as if the sun itself had risen over the rooftops of Beacon Street.
Nicodemus Bourgoint, a line soldier of the Fifth Athabasca Infantry, had been due for shipment to the Mexican front when he was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer and transferred to domestic duty in the otherworldly town of Two Rivers. Given a choice, he would have preferred the front.
There, the dangers were predictable. War didn’t frighten him. Getting shot or blown up, that was a human thing. It was a fate anyone might come to.
But Two Rivers frightened him. It had frightened him from the begi
He longed for home. He had been raised on a cattle ranch in the northern province of Athabasca and he felt confined by these wooded hills, these leafless trees, the alien village. Never more so than tonight. He had been assigned night patrol with Filo Mueller, who liked to torture him with campfire stories about headless corpses and one-legged ghosts, and as much as Nico tried to conceal the uneasiness this caused in him, some evidence of it always showed on his face—much to Mueller’s amusement. Such things simply weren’t fu
Of course, when they turned the corner of Oak and Beacon and saw the figure disappearing down the alleyway, all frivolity ceased. Nico wanted to stop and give chase; but Mueller, a devious sort, argued for calling in reinforcements and circling the block. “Let our trespasser think we gave up. If we chase him, we’ll lose him. You’re not a hunter, are you, Nico?”
“My uncles hunt buck in the mountains,” Nico said defensively.
“But you never went with them. You’re not the type.”
They circled the block. Mueller radioed for another car, and Nico was all in favor of waiting for it to arrive. But Mueller spotted the glint of someone’s flashlight in a store window and fixed his serpentine stare on Nico. “You go in,” he said.
Mueller was Nico’s superior by a degree of rank and technically entitled to give the order, but Nico assumed he was joking. It was the look on Mueller’s face that convinced him otherwise.
The son of Samael was gri
“Take your pistol out of its pouch for once,” Mueller said. “Demonstrate some testicles, Nico.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Good for you. Go on.”
But he was afraid. He hated these shops, with their windows full of incomprehensible goods. One of the stupider infantrymen, a huge man named Seth, was forever proclaiming his idea that Two Rivers was actually a settlement on the outskirts of Hell; that these truncated roads had once run straight to the Temple of the Lord of the Hebdomad, the Father of Grief.
The idea was childish but sometimes a
He drew his pistol. A sense of unreality overtook him as he pushed open the door—thank God, it wasn’t locked—and braced himself in a shooter’s stance, pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left. This might be a dream, he thought. He might be in the barracks sleeping. He hoped he was.
He saw a gaunt figure duck behind a desk, and his attention focused instantly. He stepped closer, wishing someone had come with him, even Mueller, but surely Mueller and his reinforcements would be here soon; he came close enough to see the man huddled on the floor without a weapon, and he was about to order the man to stand when a second figure approached from the rear with a crowbar in his hand. Nico aimed his flashlight at this new apparition. The man blinked and turned.
Nico’s finger tightened on the pistol and it bucked in his hand—he wasn’t even certain he had meant to fire; only that it happened almost without his volition, an event to which he was an accessory but not the main cause. The man was wounded. The man fell. Nico took another bewildered step forward. The shot man was unconscious and his friend huddled over him, eyes wide on Nico.
“Don’t move,” Nico said.
“Don’t shoot,” the other man pleaded. Nico held the pistol trembling but level and wondered where Mueller was. Surely he had heard the shot? What was keeping him?
Then there was a thunderous crash from behind him, and a light so bright it seemed to drain the color out of everything. And the window glass came hurtling inward in a thousand fragments.
Nico Bourgoint felt the glass cut his back and arm. He turned, and dropped his pistol in astonishment at what he saw: the Lord of the Hebdomad rising in a pillar of flame from the opposite side of the street.
Dex did not begin to make sense of events until he was in the alley, his good arm over Howard Poole’s shoulder and his feet moving by some logic of their own.
He looked at Howard, who was breathless and bleeding from what looked like a hundred small cuts. “What,” he said. It was meant to be, What are we doing? But the words evaded his grasp.
Howard gave him a brief look. “Run. If you can run, just do it.”
They jogged together. Each step triggered new fireworks from his shoulder and arm, no longer numb, alas. He didn’t look at the wound. He had never been keen on the sight of blood, his own or anyone else’s, and he couldn’t afford another spell of light-headedness.
He did risk a glance behind him. He saw what appeared to be a large-scale hallucination.
Above the pebbled roofs of the Beacon Street shops, above the rain gutters and the tangled telephone wires, a column of fire had risen into the cloudless night sky. The flames as they ascended became a luminous shade of blue, and in that coruscating substance, it seemed to Dex, there were faces, immense and endlessly shifting.
“God’s sake,” Howard rasped, “don’t stop!”
They crossed Oak and were some yards uphill along the crowded lane when Dex said, “Wait.”
Howard regarded him with a desperate impatience. “We’re leaving a trail,” Dex said. “Look.”
Bright drops of blood had speckled the asphalt. Co
Lights had winked on in all these houses, but there were deep shadows among the alleyside sheds and fences, and all attention must be focused on the fire. They crouched in a tangle of darkness.
“It’s mostly me. Howard, you have to bind this wound. Or apply a tourniquet.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I’ll tell you how. Put down that box, first of all.” Dex squinted at it. The optical reader. “You stole the damn thing after all, didn’t you? In spite of all this?”
“I had it in my hands when the soldier came in. It’s what we went for.”