his pocket—his billfold already bulged with more than three hundred dollars—then headed back out into the Texas sun. As he climbed into the Bel Air he looked around again. Not a house or building in sight. Just the pastures and the two lonely roads and the trickle of cars. He drove about a quarter mile south until he reached a small field that seemed to serve as a used-car lot, then stopped the car.
For a long time he just sat there, gripping the wheel as though it were the bar of a roller coaster and if he let go he would go flying into space. Then, abruptly, he reached for the vial he’d taken from Keller’s lab. He’d dipped into it sparingly over the past six days. Among other things, he’d noticed that using more than a few drops seemed to burn up all the energy in his body, and one time, after he’d spilled a dollop of the clear liquid on his palm and licked it up, he’d tripped for just under three hours, then slept for more than twenty. He thought he might be able to counteract the latter effect with a jolt of something—Benzedrine, cocaine, or just a lot of caffeine. Hence the NoDoz.
He took the caffeine pills first. A whole package, washed down three at a time with half a bottle of flat Coca- Cola. After a few minutes he felt a little jittery, but that could’ve just been nerves. After a quarter of an hour he started to twitch. His breath came fast and hollow, his chest felt tight.
He looked down at the vial in his shaking hand. He’d caught glimpses of it in Keller’s mind, knew it contained about ten thousand doses of acid. It was still more than half-full.
He took a deep breath.
“Down the hatch,” he muttered aloud, and tossed back the contents of the vial like a shot of whiskey.
He closed his eyes, as best he could anyway. There was so much caffeine coursing through his bloodstream that his eyelids were spasming, and he could feel his heart pounding against his ribs.
It happened fast now. Less than five minutes after he swallowed the acid he was hallucinating behind his closed eyes, and less than five minutes after that he’d moved past the hallucination stage as his body did the extra thing it did, turned the acid into some new chemical that in turn turned his brain into a giant radio antenna.
When he opened his eyes, there was the by-now familiar scrim, faint objects—today it was mostly ribbons of color, vivid but translucent—wafting over the real world, but if he concentrated on something—say, the modernist wedge of the gas station in the rearview mirror—it emerged in sharp relief. There were faint whispers, too, so real that he even turned and looked in the backseat until he realized they were coming from the minds of the people back at the station.
He got out of the car and walked down the center of the road like a gunslinger in an old Western, getting ready to push through the swinging doors of a saloon and shoot the place up.
The gas jockey was back outside, moving slowly but efficiently between the vehicles. Joe Gonzalez, Chandler learned now, the information absorbed as effortlessy as sight and sound. That was the gas jockey’s name.
There were four cars in the station. Chandler could see five, possibly six shadows in the cars. But if he ignored the evidence of his eyes, he could tell that the four vehicles held seven occupants—there was a baby in the backseat of the Chrysler driven by Mae Watson and her spinster sister Emily. The baby’s dreams were little flickering flashes of color, and it was these Chandler let out first. Orange and yellow lights began to pulse across the empty fields.
“Fireflies,” Dan Karnovsky, sitting alone in the Buick behind Mae and Emily, mused to himself. “Nice tits,” he added when Mae leaned out of the car to tell Joe Gonzalez to check the air pressure in the tires.
But Chandler didn’t just want to pull images from other people’s minds. He wanted to see if he could make something himself. It was hard to isolate. Between the hallucinations and the bits and pieces of other minds, his own thoughts were hard to find.
Mae turned to her sister.
“Did you say something, sis?” About my breasts, she added, but silently.
“Huh?” Emily said, but Mae didn’t hear her.
Neither did Chandler.
In the Watsons’ Chrysler, Baby Leo woke up crying.
Joe Gonzalez, pulling the nozzle from Jared Steinke’s Dodge, stopped dead in his tracks. Fortunately, the handle he was holding was closed, and only a few drops of gasoline spilled on the stained concrete. But Joe didn’t see them because he was staring at the sky.
A flash of light was tearing a hole in the air above the crosshairs of the intersection. Silent, smokeless flames belched skyward, but instead of dissipating into the atmosphere they remained tightly knitted together like bolts of lightning emanating from a single dense thunder-head. In a moment the figure had taken shape. The legs, the arms, the head. The open eyes and mouth. He wasn’t a boy now. Not anymore. He was a warrior. A messenger from God. A roiling, fiery seraph more than a hundred feet high.
A Ford on the highway veered sharply to the left and bucked through the shallow drainage ditch and through a barbed-wire fence.
Chandler opened his eyes, looked at the figure in the sky with as much disbelief as the eight people in the gas station (and Wally O’Shea, the driver of the Ford, which had skidded to a stop in the middle of a fallow pasture). First Millbrook, then San Francisco, now Texas. It was as if the seraph was following him, as if he was trying to tell him something.
“Who
But the figure lingered on, the flames of its body so bright they cast shadows for what seemed like miles in every direction. An arm lifted from its side, raised up, pointed. As if to make sure there was no mistake, it reached
