The destruction in Bobbi Anderson's dooryard was incredible.
Dick and Newt watched it, fascinated, almost unbelieving. As in the woods that day with the old man and the cop, Dick found himself wondering how things could possibly go so wrong. The two of them-them and all the others who hadn't arrived yet-were well outside the parasol's deadly perimeter, but still Dick didn't get up. He wasn't sure he could.
People were burning in the yard like dry scarecrows. Some ran, flapping and cawing and screeching with their voices and their minds. A few-a fortunate few -managed to back away in time. Frank Spruce walked slowly past where Dick and Newt lay, half of his face burned away so his jaw showed on that side in a half-grin. There were flash-explosions as the weapons some of them carried fused and self-destructed.
Dick's eyes met Newt's.
Send them around! Flank him! Got to
Yes I see but oh Christ there must be ten or twenty of us burning
STOP FUCKING WHINING!
Newt recoiled, lips bared in a toothless snarl. Dick ignored him. The mind-net had fallen apart. Now he could make himself heard.
Go around! Go around! Get him! Get the drunk! Go around!
They began to move, slowly at first, their faces dazed, and then with quickening purpose.
The computer screen imploded. There was a coughing explosion, like a giant clearing a throat thick with phlegm, and thick green fluid poured from the shower cabinet in which Ev Hillman had been kept prisoner. It met the fire and produced a deadly green steam. Ev, mercifully dead at last, washed out like a fish from a burst aquarium. A moment later, Peter followed. Anne Anderson came last, her dead hands still hooked into claws.
The fire-parasol died. Now there was no sound but the screams of the dying and Dick's insistent voice. The summer day was an inferno. Bobbi's dooryard was a dirt pond filled with islands of fire. But the Tommyknockers always brought fire in the end, and they got used to it quickly.
Newt joined his voice with Dick's. Kyle was dead, Adley badly burned. Nevertheless, Ad joined his own mortally wounded voice with theirs:
Get him before he can get to the ship! He's still alive! Get him before he can get to the ship! Before he can get to the ship!
The Tommyknockers had taken a mauling. That fifteen of them had been flash-fried in Bobbi's yard was not very important. But Bobbi was dead; Kyle was dead; Adley soon would be; the transformer had been destroyed just when the border-closing had rendered their need for it critical. And Gardener was still alive. Incredibly, Gardener was still alive.
Perhaps worst of all, the wind was freshening.
Get him, and get him quick.
On the net; the Tommyknockers were on the net.
They came across the fields; came toward the spreading fire.
QUICK!
Dick Allison turned toward town and the net turned with him like a radar dish. He sensed Hazel's dumb amazement at the turn of events.
He
(the net)
brushed that aside.
Whatever you got out that way, Hazel: send it at him.
Dick turned toward Newt.
You didn't have to push me so effing hard, Newt said sulkily, and wiped a drip of blood from his chin.
“Fuck you,” Dick said deliberately. “Let's get that sonofawhore.”
The whirligig, dead now, had started a fire that was spreading out from Bobbi's house in a shape which resembled a lady's fan-a fire-fan. Bobbi's house, now only black bones shimmering in a red pillar of fire, was at its point of origination. The wings were spreading through the obscenely overgrown garden, and as the mutated plants burned, the fire glowed green.
Passing between the flames was Jim Gardener, crowned with burning hair. His shirt was smoldering; one of the sleeves squirted smoke and then burst into flames. He slapped them out. He wanted to scream but he seemed too tired, too woozy.
I have been badly used, Gardener thought, and it is no one's fault but my own.
He reached the far edge of the garden. The Tomcat lurched and waddled down a mild slope and into the woods. The low, scrubby bushes on the sides of the trail were on fire, and low runners of flame were already spreading into Big Injun Woods. Gard cared little for them. The feeling that he was going to be microwaved was passing. He whacked repeatedly at his head. His hair smelled dreadful-like food fried by a child.
Green fire sizzled over his right shoulder as the Tomcat entered the woods.
Gard flinched to the left and ducked. He looked back and there was Hank Buck, with his own Zap Gun. Hank had ridden a motorcycle out to the farm, had dumped it in the same field where Nancy Voss had come to ruin, had picked himself up and started to run.
Gardener turned around, held the Sonic Space Blaster out straight in his right hand, and gripped his right wrist with his left hand. He pulled the trigger. The pencil-beam stabbed out, and more by good luck than any sort of shooting skill, he struck Hank high up on the left side of the chest. There was the sound of frying bacon. Green death splashed up onto Hank's face and he fell over.
Gardener turned forward again and saw the Tomcat moving toward a large burning spruce at a complacent five miles an hour. He hauled on the wheel with both blistered hands, barely avoiding a head-on collision. One of the Tomcat's pillow tires scraped the trunk of the tree, and for a moment Gardener found himself shoving away blazing, fragrant spruce boughs like a man fighting his way through burning curtains. The little tractor tilted sickeningly, tottered… then thumped back down again. Gardener pushed the throttle-lever as far as it would go and hung on as the Tomcat made its way up the path into the woods.
They came. The Tommyknockers came. They came along the widening wings of that fiery lady's fan, and Dick Allison began to feel a kind of furious desperation, because they weren't going to catch him. Gardener had been able to use the path; that had made all the difference. Three minutes later-maybe even one-and Gardener really would have been cooked. Four of the Tommyknockers (Mrs Eileen Crenshaw and the Reverend Goohringer among them) tried to follow him that way and were burned alive. Two of the gigantic, flaming corn plants toppled onto the Crenshaw woman, who shrieked and let go of the dune-buggy's steering bar. The dune-buggy promptly drove itself into the depths of the flaming garden. Its tires exploded like bombs. Bare seconds later, fire choked the whole path.
Dick's frustration went deeper than the bone. The “becoming” had been thwarted and choked off before-not often, but it had happened-but always as the result of some natural intervention… as a whole generation of mosquito larvae breeding in a quiet, stagnant pond may be killed by a stroke of lightning from a summer storm. But this was no thunderstorm, no natural happening; this was one man, a man they had all regarded with the kind of wary contempt reserved for a stupid dog which may bite; this was one man who had spent most of his time with Bobbi in a drunken stupor, one man who had somehow tricked Bobbi and killed her and who refused to die no matter what they did.
We will not be stopped by one man, Dick thought frenziedly. We Will NOT! But was there any real way to stop just that from happening? The fire-front was now spreading too fast for them to catch him. Gardener had managed to shoot down the center of an alley of fire, but he would be the only one. Hank Buck had had a shot… but somehow the fucking son of a bitch had managed to shoot Hank dead.
Dick was in a perfect ecstasy of fury (Newt sensed it and kept his distance-Dick was twenty pounds heavier and ten years younger), but at the center of his rage was terror, like a cold curdle of rancid cream in the middle of a poisoned chocolate.
The Tommyknockers, Bobbi had told Gardener, were great sky travelers. This was true. But never, anywhere, had they met anyone quite like this one man, who kept going, even with his shattered ankle, his great loss of blood, and his ingestion of a drug that should have rendered him unconscious fifteen minutes ago, in spite of the great lot he had vomited up.
Impossible-but happening.
Somehow the fire that was supposed to keep Gardener from the ship had become Gardener's shield.
Now there were only the automated monitors-the gadgets.
“They'll get him,” Dick whispered. He and Newt were standing on a knoll to the right of the house like a pair of generals, watching people stream into the woods… but doing so on a pair of infuriatingly oblique angles. Dick's hands opened; snapped closed; opened; closed. Green blood beat in his neck. “They'll get him, they'll stop him, he's not going to get to the ship, he's not, he's not.”
Newt Berringer kept prudently silent.
The smoke-detector, very like a flying saucer itself, whickered silently through the woods with the red sensor light on its underside pulsing erratically. Hazel
