The thrumming grows louder. On Main Street, the Power Wagons are rolling again. Dream Floater, Tracker Arrow, and Freedom are closer to the Carver house and reach it first. They park in line, the red Tracker Arrow with Snake Hunter behind the wheel in the middle, blocking the driveway where the lord of the manor is lying dead (and looking much the worse for wear by this time). The other three-Rooty-Toot, Justice, and Meatwagon-come up from the south end of the street and lengthen the line of vehicles.

The Carver house (it is, perhaps ironically, a ranch-style home) is now entirely blocked off by Power Wagons. From the firing pit of Dream Floater, Laura DeMott trains her shotgun on the smashed picture window; from the firing pit of Tracker Arrow, Hoss Cartwright and a very young Glint Eastwood-he is Rowdy Yates of Rawhide in this incarnation, as a matter of fact-have also got the house covered. Jeb Murdock stands in the Doom Turret of the Meatwagon with two shotguns, each sawed off four inches above the cocked triggers, the butts propped against the wishbones of his hips. He is grinning widely, his face that of Rory Calhoun in his prime.

Roof trapdoors bang open. Cowboys and aliens fill the remaining shooting-points.

“Gosh, Paw, looks like a damn turkey-shoot!” Mark McCain cries, and then utters a shrill laugh.

“Root-root-root!”

“SHUT UP, ROOTY!” they all chorus, and the laugh becomes general.

At the sound of that laughter, something inside of Kim Geller, something which has only been badly bent up to now, finally snaps. She gets to her feet in the living room and marches to the screen door beyond which Debbie Ross still lies. Kirn’s sneakers grit through the broken china shards of Pie Carver’s prized Hummels. The sound of the cycling motors out front-that weird beat-beat-beat, like some sort of electric heart-is driving her insane. Still, it’s easier to focus on that than it is to think about how that uppity nigger woman first almost broke her arm and then threw her into the other room as if she were a sack of laundry, or something.

The others are unaware she’s left until they hear her voice, querulous and shrill: “You get out of here! You just stop it and get out of here right now\ The police are already on their way, you know!”

At the sound of that voice, Susi forgets all about how nice it is to have Dave Reed touching her breast, and how she’d like to help him forget the death of his brother by taking him upstairs and balling him until his liver explodes. “Mummy!” she gasps, and starts to get up.

Dave hauls her back down, then clamps an arm around her waist to make completely sure she doesn’t get up again. He has lost his brother, and he feels like that’s enough for one day.

Come on, come on, come on, Audrey thinks… except she guesses it’s actually a prayer. Her eyes are squeezed so tightly shut she can see exploding red dots behind the lids, and her hands are clamped into fists, the ragged remains of her nails digging into her palms. Come on, go to work the way you’re supposed to, do your job, get started-

“Kick in,” she whispers, unaware she’s speaking out loud. Johnny, who has raised his head at the sound of Kirn’s voice, now looks at Audrey. “Kick in, can’t you? For Christ’s sake, kick in!”

What are you talking about?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer.

Outside, Kim moves down the walk toward the Power Wagons, which are parked at the curb. This is the only place along the former Poplar Street where there is any curb left.

“I’m giving you a chance,” she says, her eyes drifting from one weirdo to the next. Some are dressed in ridiculous outer-space masks, and the one behind the wheel of the lunch-wagon thingy is actually wearing a whole-body robot costume. It makes him look like an oversized version of R2D2 in the Star Wars movies. Others look like refugees from a class in Western line-dancing. A few even seem familiar… but this is no time to be distracted by such foolish ideas.

“I’m giving you a chance,” she repeats, coming to a stop just above the place where the Carvers” cement walk joins the remaining strip of Poplar Street sidewalk. “Go while you still can. Otherwise-”

The slide door of the Freedom van opens, and Sheriff Streeter steps out. His star gleams a dull moonlit silver on the left flap of his vest. He looks up at Jeb Murdock-old enemy, new ally-in the Doom Turret of the Meatwagon.

“Well, Streeter?” Murdock says. “What do you think?”

“I think you should take the yappy bitch,” Streeter says with a smile, and both of Murdock’s sawed-offs explode with noise and white fire. At one moment Kim Geller is standing at the end of the Carvers” walk; at the next she’s entirely gone. No; not quite gone. Her sneakers are still there, and her feet are still inside them.

A split-second later, something that could be a bucket of dark, silty water but isn’t hits the front of the Carver house. Then, with the sound of the twin shotgun blasts still rolling away, Streeter screams: “Shoot! Shoot, goddammit! Wipe them off the map!”

“Get down!” Johnny shouts again, knowing it will do no good; the house is going to disappear like a child’s sand-castle before a tidal wave, and they are going to disappear with it.

The regulators begin firing, and it’s like nothing Johnny ever heard in Vietnam. This, he thinks, is what it must have been like to be in the trenches at Ypres, or in Dresden thirty years or so later. The noise is incredible, a ground-zero concatenation of KA-POW and KA-BAM, and although he feels he should be immediately deafened (or perhaps killed outright by raw decibels alone), Johnny is still able to hear the sounds of the house being blown apart all around them: bursting boards, breaking windows, china figurines exploding like targets in a shooting gallery, the brittle spatter of thrown laths. Very faintly, he can also hear people screaming. The bitter tang of gunsmoke fills his nostrils. Something unseen but huge passes through the kitchen above them, screaming as it goes, and suddenly much of the kitchen’s rear wall is just rubble fanned across the backyard and floating on the surface of the Kmart pool.

Yes, Johnny thinks. This is it, this is the end. And maybe that is just as well.

But then a strange thing begins to happen. The shooting doesn’t stop, but it begins to diminish, as if someone is turning down the volume control. This isn’t just true of the gunshots themselves, but of the screaming sound the shells make as they pass overhead. And it happens fast. Less than ten seconds after he first notices the diminution-and it might be more like five-the sounds are gone entirely. So is the queer, humming beat of the Power Wagons” engines.

They raise their heads and look around at each other. In the pantry, Cynthia sees that she and Steve are both as white as ghosts. She raises her arm and blows. Powder puffs up from her skin.

“Flour,” she says.

Steve rakes through his long hair and holds an unsteady hand out to her. There’s a cluster of shiny black things in the palm. “Flour’s not so bad,” he says. “I got olives.”

She thinks she’ll begin to laugh, but before she can, an amazing and totally unexpected thing happens.

Seth’s Place/Seth’s Time

Of all the passages he has dug for himself during the reign of Tak-Tak the Thief, Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot-this is the longest. He has, in a way, re-created his own version of Rattlesnake Number One. The shaft goes deep into some black earth which he supposes is himself, then rises again toward the surface like a hope. At the end of it is a door of iron bands. He doesn’t try to open it, but not for fear he will find it locked. Quite the opposite. This is a door he must not touch until he is completely ready; once through it, there will never be any coming back.