was he didn't like had spread out from the bogus car until it contaminated the whole shed.
When Curt brought him outside again and handed the leash back to Orville, he said, 'There's something going on, he feels it and so do I. But it's not like before.' He saw Sandy and repeated it: not like before.
'No,' Sandy said, then nodded at Mister D. 'At least he's not howling.'
'Not yet,' Orville said. 'Come on, D, let's go back in the barracks. You did good. I'll give you a Bonz.' What Orvie gave Curt was a final reproachful look. Mister Dillon trotted neatly at Trooper Garrett's right knee, no longer needing the leash to keep him at heel.
At four-twenty or so, the TV upstairs in the common room suddenly went goofy. By four-forty, the temperature in Shed B had dropped to forty-nine degrees. At four-fifty, Curtis Wilcox shouted:
'It's starting! I hear it!'
Sandy had been inside to check on dispatch (and what a snafu it was by then, nothing but one big balls-to- the-wall roar of static), and when Curt yelled he was returning across the parking lot, where there were now so many personals you would have thought it was the Police Benefit Rummage Sale or the Muscular Dystrophy Kids' Carnival they put on each July. Sandy broke into a run, cutting through the knot of spectators craning to look in through the side door, which was still, unbelievably, standing wide open. And Curt was there, standing in it. Waves of cold were rolling out, but he seemed not to feel them. His eyes were huge, and when he turned to Sandy he was like a man dreaming. 'Do you see it? Sandy, do you see it?'
Of course he did: a waxing violet glow that was spilling out of the car's windows and seeping up through the crack which outlined the trunk-lid and went spilling down the Buick's sides like some thin radioactive fluid. Inside the car Sandy could clearly see the shapes of the seats and the oversized steering wheel. They were outlines, silhouettes. The rest of the cabin was swallowed in a cold purple glare, brighter than any furnace. The hum was loud and getting louder. It made Sandy's skull ache, made his ears almost wish they were deaf. Not that being deaf would do any good, because you seemed to hear that sound not just with your ears but with your whole body.
Sandy yanked Curt out on to the pavement, then grabbed the knob, meaning to shut the door.
Curt took hold of his wrist. 'No, Sandy, no! I want to see it! I want - '
Sandy peeled his hand off, not gently. 'Are you crazy? There's a procedure we follow on this, a goddam procedure. No one should know that better than you! You helped think it up, for God's sake!'
When Sandy slammed the door shut, cutting off any direct view of the Buick, Curt's eyelids fluttered and he twitched like a man waking out of a deep sleep. 'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, boss. I'm sorry.'
'It's all right.' Not really believing it was. Because the damned fool would have stood right there in the doorway. No question about it in Sandy's mind. Would have stood there and been fried, if frying was on that thing's agenda.
'I need to get my goggles,' Curt said. 'They're in the trunk of my car. I have extras, and they're extra dark. A whole box of them. Do you want a pair?' Sandy still got the feeling that Curt wasn't fully awake, that he was only pretending, like you did when the telephone rang in the middle of the night.
'Sure, why not? But we're going to be cautious, right? Because this is looking like a bad one.'
'Looking like a great one!' Curt said, and the exuberance in his voice, although slightly scary, made Sandy feel a little better. At least Curt didn't sound as if he were sleepwalking any longer. 'But yes, Mother - we'll follow procedure and be as cautious as hell.'
He ran for his car - not his cruiser but his personal, the restored Bel Aire his boy would wind up driving - and opened the trunk. He was still rummaging in the boxes of stuff he kept back there when the Buick exploded.
It did not literally explode, but there seemed to be no other word for what it did do. Those who were there that day never forgot it, but they talked about it remarkably little, even among themselves, because there seemed no way to express the terrifying magnificence of it. The power of it. The best they could say was that it darkened the June sun and seemed to turn the shed transparent, into a ghost of itself. It was impossible to comprehend how mere glass could stand between that light and the outside world. The throbbing brilliance poured through the boards of the shed like water through cheesecloth; the shapes of the nails stood out like the dots in a newspaper photograph or purple beads of blood on top of a fresh tattoo. Sandy heard Carl Brundage shout She's gonna blow this time, she most surely will! From behind him, in the barracks, he could hear Mister Dillon howling in terror.
'But he still wanted to get out and get at it,' Orville told Sandy later. 'I had im in the upstairs lounge, as far from that goddam shed as I could get him, but it didn't make any difference. He knew it was there. Heard it, I imagine - heard it humming. And then he saw the window. Holy Christ! If I hadn't been quick, hadn't grabbed him right off, I think he would have jumped right through it, second story or not. He pissed all over me and I never realized it until half an hour later, that's how scared I was.'
Orville shook his head, his face heavy and thoughtful.
'Never seen a dog like that. Never. His fur was all bushed out, he was foamin at the mouth, and his eyeballs looked like they were poppin right out of his head. Christ.'
Curt, meanwhile, came running back with a dozen pairs of protective goggles. The Troopers put them on but there was still no way of looking in at the Buick; it was impossible to even approach the windows. And again there was that weird silence when they all felt they should have been standing at the center of a cacophony, hearing thunder and landslides and erupting volcanoes. With the shed's doors shut, they (unlike Mister D) couldn't even hear the humming noise. There was the shuffle of feet and someone clearing his throat and Mister Dillon howling in the barracks and Orvie Garrett telling him to calm down and the sound of Matt Babicki's static-drowned radio from dispatch, where the window (now denuded of its flower box, thanks to Curt) had been left open.
Nothing else.
Curt walked to the roll-up door like a man walking into a high wind, head bent and hands raised. Twice he tried to lift his face and look inside Shed B, but he couldn't. It was too bright. Sandy grabbed his shoulder and restrained an urge to shout in his ear. There was no need to shout, but the situation made you want to do it, just the same.
'Quit trying to look. You can't do it. Not yet, anyway. It'll knock the eyes right out of your head.'
'What is it, Sandy?' Curt whispered. 'What in God's name is it?'
Sandy could only shake his head.
