Motion to my right! I snapped a glance.

Jake moved his gun off of Hank toward Dingo and Carpin.

“Get it off me! Kill it-KILL IT!” Carpin screamed as he flailed at Dingo with his other arm. In the night, in the mud and rain, in the orange glow from the stable lights and the blue lightning the two of them looked like one single alien thing suffering its final death throes. Like John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’.

“I cain’t, boss. Ah might hitch’ oo!”

Hank moved, but Jake brought the gun back to cover him.

Hank froze.

At that moment Freddie walked up between us, raised his gun and fired down at the earth.

And then the heavens opened.

Beauty can be many things. For me beauty was the mud and earth moving under my feet and an invisible hand forcing me forward headlong; it was a too-bright eruption of light around from behind me; it was objects moving around me like petals of an unfolding flower.

Beauty was an explosion. And for that briefest of instants I completely understood something-understood it with the perfectness of crystal clarity, so thoroughly got the essence of it that it unraveled before my flight was done. I understood the soul of my friend Hank Sterling. I knew what it looked like.

Then the back of my head encountered mud and the rest of my body flipped over. The air above my eyes was alive with particles. There were long splinters of wood from the inside of support beams and two-by-fours and they were all flying, migrating outward from the center of the blast. There were large nails and shards of glass and whole saddles, moving, drifting away into the night.

My ears weren’t working, by my eyes saw everything, captured it all.

And the lightning dared not strike.

I rolled over.

My hand came to rest on the gun in my waistband. I pulled it out. What good was a gun when the world was going ka-blooey?

I pushed down against the mud. Got up on one knee, shakily.

Somebody else was trying to get up as well.

Freddie.

He turned towards me. Half of his face was gone.

“Freddie,” I said. “You ain’t gonna make it.”

His eyes stared into mine for an instant in the glow of the fire that had once been some horse stables. I thought he was going to say something-he certainly looked for a moment like a fellow who had something on his mind-then he fell over, face first into the mud and never moved again.

I stood up, reeling.

A hand closed around my ankle.

It was almost too much like the dream.

Hank,I thought, but when I looked down, it was Archie Carpin. A long, tapering piece of wood was imbedded in his mouth. The point of it had exited well past his right ear and he was strangling on his own blood. Also, he was trying to talk.

The fingers on my ankle thrummed out a rhythm for a moment and then went still.

Both Hank and Jake were trying to get to their feet.

Jake’s gun came up, pointed right at Hank.

I was cold inside. I’d never known such cold.

Gun up, I pulled the trigger without thinking. Just looked and then-

Crack!

— a spray of blood and bone in another herky-jerky lightning flash.

Jake began to fall amid another flash

Crack!

— and there was fire in the rain, leaping from the muzzle of Jake’s gun, then gone.

Hank jerked like he’d been hit by a charging bull, fell back into the water with a splash.

The hand around my ankle thrummed again, almost as if it was trying to tap out a message in Morse.

I lifted my leg and stomped it, once. Twice.

There were lights, suddenly, cutting across the nightmarish landscape.

A pickup truck. It roared to a stop, slewing mud everywhere.

The front door of the Dodge Ram came open. A cowboy hat with a plastic rain cover emerged. Sheriff Thornton.

I didn’t wait. I got in motion.

Around the manure pile and the concrete chimney, the next lightning flash revealed Jake’s body. I sailed over it, my feet splashing into water.

“Bill!” Sheriff Thornton called out. I ignored it.

Hank was face down in the mud and the runoff. His face was underwater.

I grabbed him by the shirt, took one shoulder and rolled him over.

At least his eyes weren’t staring at me like

—  the nightmare-

like he was maybe dead already.

There was a hole in his side right through his ribcage. I turned him again. No exit wound.

His eyes came open. He smiled. His mouth opened. Water and blood spilled out.

“Nice”- cough-“shootin’,”- cough-“Tex.”

“Goddammit. Shut up, Hank. If you talk you’re likely to die.”

He half-nodded, slowly.

“Bill!” The voice, again. Not as loud. Insistent, though. Trying to reach me. It was Agent Cranford.

I ignored it, pulled Hank over to the Sheriff’s truck. Opened the passenger door.

There was a shape beside me. I didn’t know who. Didn’t care. “See to Julie and the kid,” I said, and gestured in the direction of the house.

By the time I got Hank loaded into the back seat, I noticed that the rain was beginning to slack off.

“You’re not gonna die, you sonuvabitch,” I told him. I guess I was a little loud.

His eyes were following me. I didn’t want to look at them. How things like that almost always seemed to go: if I looked into his eyes, he’d die. Superstitious of me, I knew, but I didn’t care.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

Dock had said that.

I shivered. It was cold and I was shaking.

“What?” I almost screamed it at him.

“I ain’t gonna die,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Hurts…like…hell. But I ain’t gonna give up yet.”

Emergency rooms are possibly my least favorite places to be. Aside from funeral parlors, that is.

It was 12:20 a.m. in Wichita Falls, Texas.

I suppose I’ve been lucky most of my life. I don’t know why. I’d like to think it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t hurt so many people in life, but then again, you never know. My mother used to say I should count my blessings. I suppose if I ever do get back to saying my prayers again like I did as a child, then I’ll include a special thanks for watching over me during that week of hell. And for that night of the storm.

Hank was still in the operating room. I kept my hands clenched the whole time. The young lady doctor with the drab-green scrubs and elongated neck had said that it depended upon whether or not the second lung collapsed, and how much he bled. If he pulled through this one, his life was going to be a little slower for awhile.

I had an eleven-year old on my lap, trying to go to sleep. Her name was Jessica, and I was already smitten with her.

Julie sat up on her E.R. bed. Fortunately she only had a few contusions. Her hair looked like a chopped up sort of butch all the way around where it had to be cut away from the electrical tape. It would grow back. I found myself hoping that if everything with her and me and the law resolved the right way that maybe the two of us would also have a chance to grow back together. Foolish of me, I know.

So there I sat, holding her hand and looking into those enchanting eyes. She had an alcohol-soaked rag in her other hand, doing her best to remove the remaining patches of tape glue that were still there around her cheeks and mouth. The alcohol vapors must have been getting in her eyes because they were tearing up. Or maybe it was something else.

There were the tips of black cowboy boots pacing slowly back and forth just the other side of the privacy curtain. Sheriff Thornton, probably.

Another set of boots walked up and there was a brief, whispered exchange. I caught one bit of a sentence, though, and I liked the sound of it: “…thinks he’s gonna pull through.”