“Okay,” he says, speaking not to Jack but to himself. He blinks, settles his feet, clasps his hands in front of his waist. A tiny wrinkle appears between his eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth lift in the suggestion of a smile. “Okay,” Ty whispers.
For a second, nothing happens.
Then a rumble emerges from the bowels of the Big Combination. Its upper portion wavers like a heat mirage. The guards hesitate, and the screams of tortured metal rip through the air. Visibly confused, the toiling children look up, look in all directions. The mechanical screaming intensifies, then divides into a hundred different versions of torture. Gears reverse. Cogs jam smoking to a halt; cogs accelerate and strip their teeth. The whole of the Big Combination shivers and quakes. Deep in the earth, boilers detonate, and columns of fire and steam shoot upward, halting, sometimes shredding belts that have run for thousands of years, powered by billions of bleeding footsies.
It is as if an enormous metal jug has sprung a hundred leaks at once. Jack watches children leap from the lower levels and climb down the exterior of the structure in long, continuous lines. Children pour from the trembling building in dozens of unbroken streams.
Before the green-skinned whipslingers can make an organized attempt to stop their slaves from escaping, the bees assemble massively around the great foundry. When the guards begin to turn on the children, the bees descend in a furious tide of buzzing wings and needling stings. Some of Ty’s power has passed into them, and their stings are fatal. Guards topple and fall from the unmoving belts and trembling girders. Others turn maddened on their own, whipping and being whipped until they tumble through the dark air.
The Sawyer Gang does not linger to see the end of the slaughter. The queen bee sails toward them out of the swarming chaos, floats above their upturned heads, and leads them back toward Black House.
In world upon world—in worlds strung side by side in multiple dimensions throughout infinity—evils shrivel and disperse: despots choke to death on chicken bones; tyrants fall before assassins’ bullets, before the poisoned sweetmeats arrayed by their treacherous mistresses; hooded torturers collapse dying on bloody stone floors. Ty’s deed reverberates through the great, numberless string of universes, revenging evil as it spreads. Three worlds over from ours and in the great city there known as Londinorium, Turner Topham, for two decades a respected member of Parliament and for three a sadistic pedophile, bursts abruptly into flame as he strides along the crowded avenue known as Pick-a-Derry. Two worlds down, a nice-looking young welder named Freddy Garver from the Isle of Irse, another, less seasoned member of Topham’s clan, turns his torch upon his own left hand and incinerates every particle of flesh off his bones.
Up, up in his high, faraway confinement, the Crimson King feels a deep pain in his gut and drops into a chair, grimacing. Something, he knows, something fundamental, has changed in his dreary fiefdom.
In the wake of the queen bee, Tyler Marshall, his eyes alight and his face without fear, sits astride Jack’s shoulders like a boy king. Behind Jack and his friends, hundreds upon hundreds of children who are fleeing from the disintegrating structure of the Big Combination come streaming on to Conger Road and the desolate fields beside it. Some of these children are from our world; many are not. Children move across the dark, empty plains in ragged armies, advancing toward the entrances to their own universes. Limping battalions of children stagger off like columns of drunken ants.
The children following the Sawyer Gang are no less ragged than the rest. Half of them are naked, or as good as naked. These children have faces we have seen on milk cartons and flyers headed MISSING and on child-find Web sites, faces from the dreams of heartbroken mothers and desolate fathers. Some of them are laughing, some are weeping, some are doing both. The stronger ones help the weaker ones along. They do not know where they are going, and they do not care. That they are going is enough for them. All they know is that they are free. The great machine that had stolen their strength and their joy and their hope is behind them, and a silken, protective canopy of bees is above them, and they are free.
At exactly 4:16 P.M., the Sawyer Gang steps out through the front door of Black House. Tyler is now riding on Beezer’s burly shoulders. They descend the steps and stand in front of Dale Gilbertson’s cruiser (there’s a litter of dead bees on the hood and in the well where the windshield wipers hide).
“Look at the house, Hollywood,” Doc murmurs.
Jack does. It’s
“Doc,” Beezer says. “Look yonder.”
A large dog—large but not monstrous—staggers slowly down the lane that leads back to Highway 35. It looks like a cross between a boxer and a Great Dane. The side of its head and one of its rear paws have been blown away.
“It’s your devil dog,” the Beez says.
Doc gapes. “What,
“That,” Beezer confirms. He draws his 9mm, meaning to put the thing out of its misery, but before he can, it collapses on its side, takes a single deep, shuddering breath, and then lies still. Beezer turns to Jack and Dale. “It’s all a lot smaller with the machine turned off, isn’t it?”
“I want to see my mother,” Ty says quietly. “Please, may I?”
“Yes,” Jack says. “Do you mind swinging by your house and picking up your father? I think he might like to go, too.”
Tyler breaks into a tired grin. “Yes,” he says. “Let’s do that.”
“You got it,” Jack tells him.
Dale swings the car carefully around the yard and has reached the beginning of the lane when Ty calls out, “Look! Look, you guys! Here they come!”
Dale stops, peers in the rearview mirror, and whispers: “Oh, Jack. Holy Mother of God.” He puts the cruiser in
