Something struck her on the head, the neck, the back. A huge thing that landed on her like a padded coffin.

OH MY GOD OH MY BABY —

Then darkness sucked her down to a nowhere place where not even the dark man could follow.

Birds.

She could hear birds.

Fran lay in darkness, listening to the birds for a long time before she realized the darkness wasn’t really dark. It was reddish, moving, peaceful. It made her think of her childhood. Saturday morning, no school, no church, the day you got to sleep late. The day you could wake up a little at a time, at your leisure. You lay with your eyes shut, and you saw nothing but a red darkness that was Saturday sunshine being filtered through the delicate screen of capillaries in your eyelids. You listened to the birds in the old oaks outside and maybe smelled sea-salt, because your name was Frances Goldsmith and you were eleven years old on a Saturday morning in Ogunquit—

Birds. She could hear birds.

But this wasn’t Ogunquit; it was

(Boulder)

She puzzled over it in the red darkness for a long time, and suddenly she remembered the explosion.

(?Explosion?)

(!Stu!)

Her eyes flashed open. There was sudden terror. “Stu! ”

And Stu was sitting there beside her bed, Stu with a clean white bandage wrapped over one forearm and a nasty-looking cut dried on one cheek and part of his hair burned away, but it was Stu, he was alive, with her, and when she opened her eyes the great relief came on his face and he said, “Frannie. Thank God.”

“The baby,” she said. Her throat was dry. It came out a whisper.

He looked blank, and blind fear stole into her body. It was cold and numbing.

“The baby,” she said, forcing the words up her sandpaper throat. “Did I lose the baby?”

Understanding came over his face then. He hugged her clumsily with his good arm. “No, Frannie, no. You didn’t lose the baby.”

Then she began to cry, scalding tears that flowed down her cheeks, and she hugged him fiercely, not caring that every muscle in her body seemed to cry out in pain. She hugged him. The future was later. Now the things she needed most were here in this sun-washed room.

The sound of birds came through the open window.

Later she said, “Tell me. How bad is it?”

His face was heavy and sorrowful and unwilling. “Fran…”

“Nick?” she whispered. She swallowed and there was a tiny click in her throat. “I saw an arm, a severed arm—”

“It might be better to wait—”

“No. I have to know. How bad was it?”

“Seven dead,” he said in a low, husky voice. “We got off lucky, I figure. It could have been much worse.”

“Who, Stuart?”

He held her hands clumsily. “Nick was one of them, honey. There was a pane of glass, I guess—you know, that iodized glass—and it… it…” He stopped for a moment, looked down at his hands, then up at her again. “He… we were able to make identification by… certain scars…” He turned away from her for a moment. Fran made a harsh sighing noise.

When Stu was able to go on he said, “And Sue. Sue Stern. She was still inside when it went off.”

“That… just doesn’t seem possible, does it?” Fran said. She felt stunned, numbed, bewildered.

“It’s true.”

“Who else?”

“Chad Norris,” he said, and Fran made that harsh sighing noise again. A single tear slipped from the corner of her eye; she brushed it away almost absently.

“Those were the only three from inside. It’s like a miracle. Brad says there must have been eight, nine sticks of dynamite hooked up in that closet. And Nick, he almost… when I think he might have had his hands right on that shoebox…”

“Don’t,” she said. “There was no way to know.”

“That doesn’t help much,” he said.

The other four were people who had come up from town on motorcycles—Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, had been struck and nearly beheaded by a whirling chunk of Glen Bateman’s Wollensak tape recorder.

Fran nodded, and it hurt her neck. When she shifted her body, even a little, her entire back seemed to scream with pain.

Twenty had been wounded in the blast and one of them, Teddy Weizak of the Burial Committee, had no chance to recover. Two others were in critical condition. A man named Lewis Deschamps had lost an eye. Ralph Brentner had lost the third and fourth fingers on his left hand.

“How badly am I hurt?” Fran asked him.

“Why, you have a whiplash and a sprained back and a broken foot,” Stu said. “That’s what George Richardson told me. The blast threw you all the way across the yard. You got the broken foot and the sprained back when the couch landed on you.”

“Couch? ”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I remember something like a coffin… a padded coffin…”

“That was the couch. I yanked it off you myself. I was raving and… pretty hysterical, I guess. Larry came over to help me and I punched him in the mouth. That’s how bad off I was.” She touched his cheek and he put his hand over hers. “I thought you had to be dead. I remember thinking that I didn’t know what I’d do if you were. Go crazy, I guess.”

“I love you,” she said.

He hugged her—gently, because of her back—and they remained that way for some time.

“Harold?” she said at last.

“And Nadine Cross,” he agreed. “They hurt us. They hurt us bad. But they didn’t do anywhere near the damage they wanted to do. And if we catch him before they get too far west…” He held his hands, which were scratched and scabbed over, out in front of him and closed them with a sudden snap that made the joints pop. The hamstrings stood out on the insides of his wrists. A sudden cold grin surfaced on his face that made Fran want to shudder. It was too familiar.

“Don’t smile like that,” she said. “Ever.”

The smile faded. “People have been scouring the hills for them since daybreak,” he went on, no longer smiling. “I don’t think they’ll find them. I told them not to go further than fifty miles west of Boulder no matter what, and I imagine Harold was smart enough to get them further than that. But we know how they did it. They had the explosive hooked up to a walkie-talkie—”

Fran gasped, and Stu looked at her with concern.

“What’s wrong, babe? Is it your back?”

“No.” She was suddenly understanding what Stu had meant about Nick having his hands on the shoebox when the explosive was detonated. Suddenly understanding everything. Speaking slowly, she told him about the snips of wire and the walkie-talkie box under the air-hockey table. “If we’d searched the whole house instead of just taking his damn b-book, we might have found the bomb,” she said, and her voice began to choke and break. “N-Nick and Sue would be a-a-alive and—”

He held her. “Is that why Larry seems so down this morning? I thought it was because I punched him. Frannie, how could you know, huh? How could you possibly know?”

“We should have! We should have known!” She buried her face against the good darkness of his shoulder. More tears, hot and scalding. He held her, bent over awkwardly because the electrically powered hospital bed would not crank up.

“I don’t want you blamin yourself, Frannie. It’s happened. I’m telling you there’s no way anybody—except maybe a bomb-squad detective—could make something out of a few snips of wire and an empty box. If they’d left a couple of sticks of dynamite or a blasting cap around, that would have been a different proposition. But they didn’t. I don’t blame you, and nobody else in the Zone is going to blame you, either.”

As he spoke, two things were combining, slowly and belatedly, in her mind.