From a Buick 8

  Matt started to say something else, took a closer look at Sandy's face and wisely decided to keep his mouth shut. Two minutes later, Sandy saw him headed down the hill, behind the wheel of Unit 17.

  "Good," Sandy muttered. "Stay there awhile, you little backtalking pissant."

  Sandy went out to Shed 13, where there was quite a little crowd. Most of them were Troopers, but some were motor-pool guys in the grease-stained green Dickies that were their unofficial uniform. After four years of living with the Buick, none of them was afraid, exactly, but they were a rather nervy group that day, just the same. When you saw twenty degrees roll off the thermometer on a warm summer day, in a room where the air conditioning consisted of an occasionally opened door, it was hard not to believe that something large was in the works.

  Curt had been back long enough to set up a number of experiments--all he had time to arrange, Sandy guessed. On the Buick's front seat he'd placed a Nike sneaker box with some crickets in it. The frog cage was on the back seat. There was only one frog in it this time, but it was a whopper, one of those marsh bullfrogs with the bulgy yellow-black eyes. He had also taken the windowbox of flowers which had been outside Matt Babicki's office window and stuck them in the Buick's trunk. Last but not least, he took Mister Dillon for a promenade out there, toured him all around the car on his leash, the full three-sixty, just to see what would happen. Orvie Garrett didn't like that much, but Curt talked him into it. In most respects Curt was still a little rough around the edges and a little wet behind the ears, but when it came to the Buick, he could be as smooth as a riverboat gambler.

  Nothing happened during D's walk--not that time--but it was clear the Troop mascot would rather have been just about anywhere else. He hung at the end of his leash so hard it choked him a little, and he walked with his head down and his tail lowered, giving the occasional dry cough. He looked at the Buick, but he looked at everything else out there as well, as if whatever it 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, h
ead 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.

  For the next half hour the Buick put on the lightshow to end all lightshows, turning Shed B into a kind of fireball, shooting parallel lines of light through all the windows, flashing and flashing, a gaudy neon furnace without heat or sound. If anyone from John Q. Public's family had turned up during that time, God knew what they might have thought or who they would have told or how much those they told might have believed, but no outsiders did turn up. And by five-thirty, the D Troopers had started to see individual flashes of light again, as if the power-source driving the phenomenon had begun to wobble. It made Sandy think of the way a motorcycle will lurch and spurt when the gas-tank is almost dry.

  Curt edged up to the windows again, and although he had to duck down each time one of those bolts of light shot out, he could take little peeks in between. Sandy joined him, ducking away from the brighter pulses (We probably look like we're practicing some weird drill routine, he thought), squinting, eyes dazzled in spite of the triple layer of polarized glass in the goggles.

  The Buick was still perfectly intact and apparently unchanged. The tarp lay in its same draped dune, unsinged by any fire. Arky's tools hung undisturbed on their pegs, and the stacks of old County American newspapers were still in the far corner, bundled and tied with twine. A single kitchen match would have been enough to turn those dry piles of old news into pillars of flame, but all that brilliant purple light hadn't charred so much as a single corner of a single Bradlee's circular.

  "Sandy--can you see any of the specimens?"

  Sandy shook his head, stood back, and took off the goggles Curt had loaned him. He passed them on to Andy Colucci, who was wild for a look into the shed. Sandy himself headed back to the barracks. Shed B was not going to blow up after all, it seemed. And, he was the acting SC, with a job to do.

  On the back step, he paused and looked back. Even wearing goggles, Andy Colucci and the others were reluctant to approach the row of windows. There was only one exception, and that was Curtis Wilcox. He stood right there--big as Billy-be-damned, Sandy's mother might have said--as close as he could get and leaning forward to get even closer, goggles actually pressed to the glass, only turning his head aside slightly each time the thing flashed out an especially bright bolt, which it was still doing every twenty seconds or so.

  Sandy thought, He's apt to put his eyes out, or at least go snowblind from it. Except he wouldn't. He seemed to have almost timed the flashes, to have gotten in rhythm with them. From where Sandy was, it looked as if Curtis was actually turning his face aside a second or two before each flash came. And when it did come he would for a moment become his own exclamatory shadow, an exotic frozen dancer caught against a great sheet of purple light. Looking at him that way was scary. To Sandy it was like watching something that was there and not there at the same time, real but not real, both solid and mirage. Sandy would later think that when it came to the Buick 8, Curt was oddly like Mister Dillon. He wasn't howling like the dog was, upstairs in the common room, but he seemed in touch with the thing just the same, in sync with it. Dancing with it: then and later, that was how it would come back to Sandy.

  Dancing with it.

  At ten minutes of six that evening, Sandy radioed down the hill to Matt and asked what was up. Matt said nothing (Nothing, gramma was what Sandy heard in his tone), and Sandy told him to come on back to base. When he did, Sandy said he was free to step across the parking lot and have a look at Old '54, if he still wanted one. Matt was gone like a shot. When he came back a few minutes later, he looked disappointed.

  "I've seen it do that before," he said, leaving Sandy to reflect on how dense and thankless human beings were, for the most part; how quickly their senses dulled, rendering the marvelous mundane. "All the guys said it really blew its stack an hour ago, but none of them could describe it." This was said with a contempt Sandy didn't find surprising. In the world of the police communications officer, everything is describable; the world's cartography must and can be laid out in ten-codes.

  "Well, don't look at me," Sandy said. "I can tell you one thing, though. It was bright."

  "Oh. Bright." Matt gave him a look that said Not just a gramma but a loser gramma. Then he went back inside.

  By seven o'clock, Troop D's TV reception (always an important consideration when you were off the road) had returned to normal. Dispatch communications were back to normal. Mister Dilloii had eaten his usual big bowl of Gravy Train and then hung out in the kitchen, trolling for scraps, so he was back to normal. And when Curt poked his head into the SC's office at seven forty-five to tell Sandy he wanted to go into the shed and check on his specimens, Sandy could think of no way to stop him. Sandy was in charge of Troop D that evening, no argument there, but when it came to the Buick, Curt had as much authority as he did, maybe even a little more. Also, Curt was already wearing the damn yellow rope around his waist. The rest was looped over his forearm in a coil.

  "Not a good idea," Sandy told him. That was about as close to no as he could get.

  "Bosh." It was Curtis's favorite word in 1983. Sandy hated it. He thought it was a snotty word.

  He looked over Curt's shoulder and saw they were alone. "Curtis," he said, "you've got a wife at home, and the last time we talked about her, you said she might be pregnant. Has that changed?"

  "No, but she hasn't been to the--"

  "So you've got a wife for sure and a maybe baby. And if she's not preg this time, she probably will be next time. That's nice. It's just the way it should be. What I don't understand is why you'd put all that on the line for that goddam Buick."

  "Come on, Sandy--I put it on the line every time I get into a cruiser and go out on the road. Every time I step out and approach. It's true of everyone who works the job."

  "This is different and we both know it, so you can quit the high school debate crap. Don't you remember what happened to Ennis?"

  "I remember," Curt said, and Sandy supposed he did, but Ennis Rafferty had been gone almost four years by then. He was, in a way, as out-of-date as the stacks of County Americans in Shed B. And as for more recent developments? Well, the frogs had just been frogs. Jimmy might have been named after a President, but he was really just a gerbil. And Curtis was wearing the rope. The rope was supposed to make everything all right. Sure, Sandy thought, and no toddler wearing a pair of water-wings ever drowned in a swimming pool. If he said that to Curt, would Curtis laugh? No. Because Sandy was sitting in the big chair that night, the acting SC, the visible symbol of the PSP. But Sandy thought he would see laughter in Curt's eyes, just the same. Curtis had forgotten the rope had never been tested, that if the force hiding inside the Buick decided it wanted him, there might be a single last flash of purple light and then nothing but a length of yellow line lying on the cement floor with an empty loop at the end of it; so long, partner, happy trails to you, one more curious cat off hunting satisfaction in the big nowhere. But Sandy couldn't order him to stand down as he'd ordered Matt Babicki to drive down the hill. All he could do was get into an argument with him, and it was no good arguing with a man who had that bright and twirly let's-play-Bingo look in his eyes. You could cause plenty of hard feelings, but you could never convince the other guy that you had the right side of the argument.

  "You want me to hold the other end of the rope?" Sandy asked him. "You came in here wanting something, and it surely wasn't my opinion."

  "Would you?" Curt grinned. "I'd like that."

  Sandy went out with him, and he held the rope with most of the coil snubbed around his elbow and Dicky-D
uck Eliot standing behind him, ready to grab his belt loops if something happened and Sandy started to slide. The acting SC, standing in the side doorway of Shed 13, not braced but ready to brace if something funny happened, biting his lower lip and breathing just a little too fast. His pulse felt like maybe a hundred and twenty beats a minute. He could still feel the chill in the shed even though the thermometer was by then easing its way back up; in Shed B, early summer had been revoked and what one met at the door was the dank cold of a hunting camp when you arrive in November, the stove in the middle of the room as dead as an unchurched god. Time slowed to a crawl. Sandy opened his mouth to ask Curt if he was going to stay in there forever, then glanced down at his watch and saw only forty seconds had passed. He did tell Curt not to go around to the far side of the Buick. Too much chance of snagging the rope.

  "And Curtis? When you open the trunk, stand clear!"

  "Roger that." He sounded almost amused, indulgent, like a kid promising Mother and Dad that no, he won't speed, he won't take a drink at the party, he will watch out for the other guy, oh gosh yes, of course, you bet. Anything to keep them happy long enough to get the Christ out of the house, and then . . . yeeeeeee-HAW!

  He opened the driver's door of the Buick and leaned in past the steering wheel. Sandy braced again for the pull he more than half-expected, the yank. He must have communicated the feeling backward, because he felt Dicky grab his belt loops. Curt reached, reached, and then stood up holding the shoebox with the crickets inside. He peered through the holes. "Looks like they're all still there," he said, sounding a little disappointed.

  "You'd think they'd be roasted," Dicky-Duck said. "All that fire."

  But there had been no fire, just light. There wasn't a single scorch-mark on the shed's walls, they could see the thermometer's needle standing in the fifties, and electing not to believe that number wasn't much of an option, not with the shed's dank chill pushing into their faces. Still, Sandy knew how Dicky Eliot felt. When your head was still pounding from the dazzle and the last of the afterimages still seemed to be dancing in front of your eyes, it was hard to believe that a bunch of crickets sitting on ground zero could come through unscathed.