Annie opened the matchbook and peeled off the tiny cardboard strip with the sulfur tip. Her hands were shaking.
Sharon crab-walked a few steps out of the sumac thicket that sheltered them and held a bottle at arm's length, back toward Annie. Grace pointed the flashlight like a gun, her thumb on the switch.
The seconds ticked by as their ears hummed in the silence. Then the first bullet in the second skillet did what it was supposed to do, and Annie struck the match and leaned forward to touch it to the cloth wick. It exploded into flames instantly, with a foul stench and an accompanying puff of oily smoke. Grace turned on the flashlight and trained it on the rags as Sharon jumped to her feet and flung the bottle toward the gas station in a panic. It hit the dirt, bounced, then rolled, but it didn't shatter and it didn't explode. Gasoline spilled out through the cloth into a puddle of fire that made a soft whooshing sound, a good ten feet from the pile of rags. It burned merrily on the ground, harmlessly contained by the bare dirt around it. 'Shit,' Sharon hissed, grabbing another bottle.
Annie was scrambling with a second match, trying once, twice, then ripping off a new one, goddamned cheap gas-station matches, and then there was another soft explosion from the house, the third match blossomed, and almost immediately a man's voice from the woods behind them, shouting, and it sounded so close, so damn close. . ..
Sharon let the second bottle fly toward the rags, arcing it upward, a flaming arrow soaring through the air, then coming down. It hit the ground with enough impact to shatter, and the explosion of fire seared the back bumper of an old junked Buick, but it didn't spread to the trail of gas leading into the station.
Her eyes were watering from the smoke and the terror because there were more voices now, closer still. They'd be here in a minute, and then they'd see the bottle flying, they'd seethem, and Grace and Annie would die because the all-star pitcher of the women's Badger softball team choked the one time in her life that it really mattered.
She held out the third bottle for the kiss of flame, tears running from her eyes, then took a breath and turned her back on the woods and gave the bastards a better target.Concentrate, Sharon. Focus. Mencan always do that better than women, so narrow that brain bridge, be a man.Ychromosome, come to Mama. You're Robert Redford in The Natural.You're Kevin Costner in For Love of the Game,and there is nothing else in the world except this single pitch. Bases loaded, two outs, full count, bottom of the ninth, but don't thinly of any of that. Just thinly of the ball and the stride zone, and black out everything else. . ..
The flaming bottle wobbled through the air, end over end, whishing like a huge pendulum, writing with a jagged contrail of black smoke. It shattered on impact within inches of the rags, and instantaneously, the pile exploded in a pillar of fire, sucking oxygen out of the air with the throat-deep woof of the world's biggest Great Dane.
In that first second of combustion, Sharon imagined that she could actually feel the change in air pressure, feel herself being sucked toward the column of black smoke and fire.
Strike three.
Shouts. Lots of them. Much closer now.
'Hurry!' Grace hissed from behind her.
But Sharon hadn't moved. She was standing perfectly still, a paralyzed lawn-ornament woman, grinning fiercely, her gaze fixed hypnotically on the circle of fire.
'Sharon!'
The rags were burning furiously, noisily, but there was no fiery snake rushing toward the station, no fire at all along the trail of gasoline they'd poured from the rags to the inside of the garage, andhowmany soldiers does it take to put out a burning rag pile? Fifty? A hundred? I don't think so.
There would be no trail of fire to the garage. Goddamnit, too much of the gas had soaked into the dirt or evaporated or God knew what, but now there would be no explosions as cans of flammable liquid blew up, no danger at all of a raging conflagration spreading to the pumps and the gas pouring out of the hoses. There was just a little circle of flames now, burning in the dirt-a little girl's campfire, that's all it was.Bring hot dogs.
Grace and Annie were hissing-whispering-squealing at her, panic fragmenting their words into unintelligibility, and now Grace was starting to scramble away from the trees on her hands and knees to come and get her. . . .
Sharon spun and dipped and grabbed another bottle and shoved it at Annie. 'Light the goddamned thing and get out of here!'
Annie lit the rag wick and smiled at her, looking genuinely wicked in the reflected flames. 'KSA, honey.'
Okay, Sharon, here you go, Kicking Some Ass. So throw long-very, very long, all the way to that back door, because if God is great, God is good, then there would still be gasoline on the concrete floor.
She hurled the bottle, and as she dove back into the shelter of the trees, the interior of the garage flashed with a greatwhoosh, a sudden and early sunrise in Four Corners.
Instantly, the shouts in the woods behind them multiplied and increased in volume. The women crowded together, peering out through the spaces between the sumac, their hearts hammering.
Within seconds, a line of men pounded down the cartway less than twenty feet away through the trees. Just as the first of these darted out onto the broken asphalt of the cul-de-sac, dozens of others seemed to materialize magically from every direction, popping from the forest, appearing around buildings, all converging on the fiery furnace still contained within Dale's garage. They seemed to pour into the once-quiet clearing of Four Corners, as if someone were spilling bottomless bottles of men into the town.
Grace stared without blinking at the cartway, waiting for it to clear. Breathing fast, her hand clenched around the Sig, every muscle in her body tensed and ready to run.Hurry up, hurry up, she screamed at the men in her mind. By the time it seemed safe to slip out the back and into the emptying woods, the heat from the fire was rolling over them in palpable waves.
Doubled over their bent knees, their faces running with sweat, the women clambered from their hiding place, dodged from tree to tree until they were on the other side of the cartway, then plunged into the deepest part of the forest.
COLONEL HEMMER and Private Acker were at the back of an old hay field five miles from Four Corners. An overgrown, two-track field road led deep into the property, where a large metal machine shed stood crumbling into its own rust. Meryll Christian had stored some of his farm equipment there, back when the old bachelor had still been alive and farming, but with no heirs to claim the property, the State took possession. Hemmer had picked it up for back taxes five years ago, thinking he'd reseed that field one day, never dreaming of the grand purpose it would eventually serve.
Acker and Hemmer were in a jeep in the middle of a cluster of other vehicles parked in the long grass. Acker had the field radio mike off and held it to his chest, waiting for Colonel Hemmer to speak. He'd been silent for almost thirty seconds-Acker timed such things on his watch-and he'd served the man long enough to dread the silences that almost always meant that the Colonel was quietly seething, mentally busting some heads.
In this case, the heads Hemmer was wishing he could bust belonged to women he'd never met. Jesus. They'd set the goddamn gas station on fire. 'Is it contained?' he asked suddenly, making Acker jump.
'Sounds like it's just in the garage bay at this point, but there are a lot of flammables in there, and the pumps out front were running full blast. The men shut them off, but there's a lot of gasoline everywhere.'
Hemmer puzzled over that for a second, then shook his head in disdain. 'They were trying to set the whole town on fire.'
'Looks that way. They had some half-assed trail running from the garage to the pumps, but the men took care of that. They're using some on-site hoses to keep the fire down in the back so it doesn't hit those dry pines, but as soon as daylight comes, you're going to be able to see the smoke from the garage for miles if they can't get it under control.'
Hemmer's pale eyes rolled skyward. It wasn't exactly light yet, just showing a little indigo in the black, but even that was too close for comfort. They had maybe an hour tops. 'They're certain the gunfire came from the house?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And no one got out?'
'No, sir. They were in sight of the house within seconds, and we've still got men around it.'
Hemmer nodded, pleased and a little troubled, all at the same time. 'So the women are still in there.'
