Harlen screamed something, he and Mike lit their rags and threw, and then the roof was going down with them on it, the sign ripping free and falling onto the scales, Mike's duffel bag and the radio going flying as the south end of the roof folded first, dumping the boys and everything else in a cloud of dust.
Harlen's Molotov cocktail exploded on the hood of the truck; a second later, Kevin's second throw struck the back of the cab and ignited the spilled gasoline already there. Kevin ran to the front of the warehouse porch, readying a third bottle.
The Rendering Truck revved its engine and charged back through the narrow drive, seemingly intent on running down Harlen and Mike, both of whom lay stunned in the dust and rubble and tin of the collapsed roof. The truck rammed tin and wood, folded great sections of the shattered roof in front of it-Mike stared dully at it and thought of a bulldozer pushing its way toward them-but several of the broken support posts were set deep in cement and hindered the truck's advance.
The rubble of the roof was blocking the drive.
Mike staggered to his feet, lifted Harlen under one arm and the duffel bag with the other, and stumbled toward the loading dock as the truck backed off into the front driveway.
The left section of the truck's windshield had shattered and Mike caught a glimpse of the gun rack and muscled arm reaching just as Dale and Lawrence came into sight at the front of the warehouse dock. "Get down!" screamed Mike.
Dale pulled his brother off the bike and leaped behind a pile of wooden skids just as the rifle fired twice… a third time. A dusty windowpane above the skids shattered and dropped glass on the crouching boys.
Mike had dropped the lighter, but he pulled the spare from his pocket, ignited the soaked rags, and threw the Coke bottle at the grille of the truck thirty feet away. It dropped early, rolled under the cab, and exploded, sending flame blossoming up around the engine and both front wheels. He pulled Harlen out of sight just as the rifle came through the broken windshield and fired twice. Wood splintered from the corner molding of the warehouse.
Kevin dropped another bottle on the right running board, still another into the mass of burning bodies behind the cab.
The Rendering Truck backed up, turned around, and roared down the drive, trailing flames, turning left rather than right toward town.
"We got it! We got it!" Harlen was screaming as he jumped up and down.
"Not yet," said Mike, carrying the heavy duffel and running for his bike where it was hidden behind the grain elevator. For the first time he realized that the truck had ignited the wooden side of the elevator and bits of the collapsed roof. The fire was already spreading to the warehouse wall, where a hundred years of sawdust and old wood was catching faster than the gasoline that had started it.
Dale ran out into the front drive and retrieved his bike-which the Rendering Truck miraculously had missed each time it had backed past it-straightened its handlebars, and leaped on while running. Lawrence sped past, in hot pursuit of the truck despite the fact that the boy had no weapon. Mike and Harlen got on their bikes and pedaled out past an elevator already burning to the second story.
"Cut through the woods!" shouted Mike, bouncing left between the trees, taking a shortcut to the overgrown lane that ran from the grain elevator to the Dump Road. He assumed that the truck would turn left on the Dump Road, heading back along the railroad tracks toward the depot and town, but when they came crashing out of the weeds and undergrowth onto the narrow gravel drive, the truck was visible a hundred yards ahead, going north toward the dump. Flame and black smoke still rose from the jouncing vehicle.
The boys put their heads down and concentrated on riding faster than they ever had before, their bikes jostling and bouncing over ruts and stones in the twin lanes.
Mike was out in front, and he caught up to the Rendering Truck just as they reached the widened area where the Cookes and another poor family had lived. Both shacks looked abandoned.
Somehow Mike managed to get a bottle out, hold it in his left hand against the handlebar, and fumble out his lighter as he pulled alongside the truck.
The rifle barrel came out the driver's window.
Mike braked, skidded, pumped hard to get behind the truck, and pulled up on the right side as they both entered the last hundred yards of road to the dump. Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, and Harlen pumped along in single file behind.
Mike caught a second's glimpse of Karl Van Syke's long face-he was grinning maniacally through the flames and smoke curling back from the hood-then the rifle came up again and Mike lobbed the already-flaming Coke bottle through the passenger-side window.
The explosion blew out the remaining windshield glass. The heat forced Mike to drop back behind the truck, and what he saw there almost made him dump his Schwinn into the ditch alongside the road.
The carcass of the cow, or the horse, or both, bloated with methane and the other gasses of decomposition, exploded… showering flames and bits of flaming decayed flesh into the woods on either side.
But that wasn't what made Mike's jaw sag open.
The brown, rotting, once-human things seemed to be writhing and tugging at one another as the flames enclosed them… the denizens of some evacuated cemetery trying to pull themselves to their knees, to their feet, but finding no muscles or tendons or bone with which to do so. The brown things struggled and writhed, falling back into each other's embrace as the entire heap of carcasses began to burn.
The flaming truck did not slow for the wooden gates at the dump entrance. Boards splintered with a sound like more rifle shots and then the large truck was through, bouncing across the ruts and heaps of landfill with five bicycles in pursuit.
The Rendering Truck got as far into the mounds of refuse, old tires, sprung sofas, rusted Model-T's, and moldering organic garbage as it could before it slewed left and slid to a stop on the edge of a forty-foot drop into the part of the ravine here that had not been filled. The boys slid to a stop thirty feet back, waiting for the truck to turn on them.
It did not. The flames had enveloped cab and truckbed now; the wooden slats at the rear were parallel strips of fire.
"Nothing could live through that," whispered Kevin, his mouth open as he stared.
As if the driver had heard, the flaming door on this side slammed open and Karl Van Syke slid out, his one-piece jumpsuit charred and smoking, his face streaked with soot and sweat, arms reddened. He was grinning almost from ear to ear. A scoped rifle was in his huge hands.
All the boys looked around and raised their feet to the bike pedals, but it was sixty or seventy feet to the nearest cover-a cornfield to their left. It was almost a hundred yards to the dump entrance and the line of woods behind them.
"Get down!" shouted Mike, dropping his bike in front of him and scrabbling at the heaped landfill to find cover.
The other four boys threw themselves flat, inching toward any rotted tire or rusted drum that might offer cover. Harlen had his.38 in his hand but did not fire… it was too much distance for the short-barreled gun.
Van Syke took two steps from the flaming vehicle and raised the rifle, taking careful aim at Mike O'Rourke's face.
During the turmoil, a small figure with two dogs had come over the top of the highest heap of garbage. Now she released the thongs and said, "Git 'im!" in a surprisingly soft voice.
Van Syke looked to his left just as the first dog, the Dober-man named Belzybub, covered the last twenty feet of ground. He swiveled his rifle and fired, but the huge brown animal had already leaped, striking his chest and driving both of them back into the flaming cab of the truck. The big dog named Lucifer was next, growling and leaping at Van Syke's kicking legs.
Mike dug Memo's squirrel gun out of the duffel, saw Kevin pull his dad's.45 from his belt, and all five boys rushed forward even as Cordie slid her way down the garbage slope.
One of Van Syke's flailing legs caught in the half-open window of the door and swung it shut on him and the dog. Cordie and Mike rushed forward, but at that sec
ond the gas tank beneath the truck ignited, sending a perfect mushroom of flame eighty feet into the air. Mike and the girl were both lifted off their feet and thrown across the rough ground, the German shepherd-mix named Lucifer landing scorched and howling at their feet. Belzybub was still in the cab; Dale and Lawrence grabbed Mike and Cordie and dragged them back, watching the two dark shapes still struggling in the curling vortex of orange flame.
Then the motion stopped and the truck burned, filling the world with the stench of melting rubber and something far worse.
The six kids stood there, almost a hundred feet away now-driven back by the terrible heat-shielding their watering eyes and staring. A siren sounded back through the woods, somewhere around the grain elevator. Another siren whooped along the Dump Road.
Cordie was weeping and cradling her other dog. The shepherd-mix had lost most of his hair. "Foun' my hideout, didn't you?" said Cordie between sobs. "Couldn't leave me alone, could you?"
Harlen started to protest that they hadn't known she was living in the goddamn dump, for Chrissakes, but Mike hushed him with a hand on his chest and said, "Is there another way out of here? We've got to get going before the fire trucks arrive."
Cordie gestured toward the corn. "They'd see ya if you took the railroad tracks back, but cut across the Meehans' field there for about half a mile, an' you'll get to Oak Hill Road about a quarter of a mile above the Grange Hall. You can take it to the Hard Road."
Mike nodded, seeing the map in his mind. They rushed to the barbed-wire fence, tossed their bikes across, and started to climb. "Aren't you coming with us?" Dale called to Cordie.
The sirens were closer now. The girl in her dumpy, soiled dress had climbed the hill of garbage, still carrying the large dog. "Uh-uh. Y'all go on." She turned and spat in the direction of the huge pyre that had been the Rendering Truck. "At least that fuck's dead." She disappeared over the mound of refuse and old tires.
The boys pulled their bikes into the corn just as the first fire truck and its retinue of rushing pickups came through the shattered gate.
It wasn't easy pushing their bikes through half a mile of soft soil between seven-foot-high rows of corn only nine inches apart, but they did it.
When they reached Oak Hill Road and turned south, pedaling past the Old Grange Hall, where Mike and Dale had gone to Boy Scout meetings in another lifetime, the cloud of black smoke was still rising thick and heavy from the dump far to the northeast.
THIRTY-FOUR
It was just after sunset on Friday evening and Mike was half-dozing in the chair in Memo's room when his sister Margaret came in to tell him that Father Cavanaugh was at the door.
The boys had spent the better part of an hour taking the long way home from the dump. They'd stopped at Harlen's to wet each other down with a garden hose, soaking their clothes to get the stench of burned rubber and flesh off them. Mike's eyebrows had been all but burned off by the last explosion, and he'd shrugged and said he couldn't do anything about that, but Harlen had taken him in the empty house and drawn eyebrows back on with his mother's eyebrow pencil. Kevin had tried making a joke about Jim's skill with the makeup, but none of them were in the mood to laugh.
After the first few minutes of euphoria over their triumph at the dump, the reality of the morning's events had hit the boys hard. All of them had had the shakes-even Law rence-and Kevin had walked into the weeds to vomit twice on the way into town.
The cars and trucks still rushing out toward the grain coop and the dump did nothing to relieve their tension. But mostly it was the shock of the images that continued to shake them up through the long afternoon: the man and dog still wrestling, still moving in the flaming pyre that was the cab of the truck; the sounds of man and animal screaming in pain, their cries intermingled and indistinguishable, the smell of burning flesh…
"Let's not wait," said Harlen, his lips pale. "Let's burn the fucking school this afternoon."
"We can't," said Kevin. His freckles were very clear against the sudden pallor of his face. "Dad's got the milk truck at the bulk plant until after six on Fridays. They do inventory."
"Burn it this evening then," insisted Harlen.
Mike was looking into the mirror above the sink in Jim's kitchen, trying to wiggle his painted-on eyebrows. "You guys really want to do this when it's getting dark?" he said.
The thought silenced them.
"Tomorrow then," said Harlen. "During the day."
Kevin had his father's.45 service automatic spread out on the kitchen table as he cleaned and oiled it. Now he looked up, holding the empty magazine clip in one hand and a small spring in the other. "Dad will be out on his route until about four. But I have to wash it and gas it afterwards."
Harlen had pounded the table. "Fuck the milk truck then. Let's use these Whatchamacallem cocktails."
"Molotov cocktails," Mike said from the sink. He turned back toward the others. "You guys know how thick those I stone walls of Old Central are?"
"At least a foot," said Dale. He sat limply at the table, too tired to raise his glass of Squirt. His wet sneakers made squeegee sounds as he wiggled his toes.
"Try two feet thick," said Mike. "The damned place is like a fort, more brick and stone than wood. With the windows boarded, we'd have to go inside to throw the Molotov cocktails. You want to do that… go inside… even in the daytime?"
No one said anything.
"We do it Sunday morning," said Mike, sitting on the edge of Harlen's counter. "After first light but before people start coming in to town for church. We use the tanker and the hoses, just as we planned."
"That's two nights away," Lawrence had whispered, speaking to himself but speaking for all of them.
The gray day had faded to a pale twilight, the air thick with humidity unleavened by breezes, when Mike had dozed off in Memo's room. His father was working his last night on the graveyard shift and his mother was in bed with one of her migraines. Kathleen and Bonnie had bathed in the copper tub in the kitchen and were upstairs getting ready for bed. Mary had gone out on a date and Peggy was in the front room reading a magazine when the knock on the door made Mike stir in his sleep.
Peg leaned on the doorframe, frowning. "Mike… Father Cavanaugh's here. He said that he had to talk to you… that it's important."
Mike lurched awake, grabbing the sides of the armchair to keep from falling. Memo's eyes were closed. He could barely make out the soft pulse at the base of her throat. "Father Cavanaugh?" For a second he was so disoriented that he was ready to believe that everything had been a dream. "Father C?" he repeated, coming awake now with a shock. "Did he… did he talk to you?"
Peg made a face. "I told you what he said."
Mike looked around in a sudden panic. The squirrel gun was in the duffel bag at his feet along with a water pistol, two of the remaining Molotov cocktails, and pieces of the Host carefully wrapped in clean linen. A vial of holy water sat on the windowsill next to one of Memo's small jewel cases, which held another segment of the Eucharist.
"You didn't invite him in…" began Mike.
"He said he'd wait on the porch," said his sister. "What's wrong with you?"
"Father C."s been sick," said Mike, glancing out at the yard and field across the road. It was dark, the last of the twilight having bled away while he slept.
"And you're afraid of catching it?" Peg's voice sounded scornful.
"How'd he look?" asked Mike, moving to the doorway of the bedroom. He could see the living room from here, one lamp burning there, but not the front-porch screen door. No one came to the front door except salesmen.
"Look?" Peggy chewed a nail. "Sort of pale, I guess. The porch light's out and it was sort of dark. Look, shall I go tell him that Mother has one of her headaches?"
"No," said Mike, pulling her into Memo's room with a rough jerk. "Stay here. Watch Memo. Don't come out no matter what you hear."
"Michael…" began his sister, voice rising.
"I mean it," said Mike in tones that eve
n an older sister could not argue with. He pushed her into the chair. "Don't leave until I come back. Got it?"
Peg was rubbing her arm. Her voice was shaky. "Yeah, but…"
But Mike had scooped up the squirt gun, tucked it into his waistband under his shirt, set the linen-wrapped Host on Memo's bed, and was out the door.
"Hello, Michael," said Father Cavanaugh. He was sitting on the wicker chair at the end of the porch. He extended an arm toward the porch swing. "Come… be seated."
Mike let the screen door close behind him, but he did not move to the swing. That would put Father Cavanaugh between him and the house.
It's not Father Cavanaugh!
It looked like Father C. He was wearing his black coat and Roman collar. The only light out here was the lamplight coming through curtains, but while Father C."s face was pale-almost haggard-there was no sign of the scars Mike had seen the night before. He was hanging outside Michelle's garage window. Hanging by what?
"I thought you were sick," Mike said. His voice was very tight.
"No longer, Michael," said the priest, smiling slightly. "I have never been so well."
Mike felt the hair rising on the back of his neck and he realized that it was the priest's voice. It sounded something like the real Father C, but at the same time, the voice was wrong-as if someone had buried a tape recording of the priest's voice in the man's stomach and was playing it through a speaker deep in his throat.
"Go away," whispered Mike. He wished by all the saints and the Virgin that he hadn't told Dale to take the second walkie-talkie when Harlen wanted the other one. It had made sense at the time.
Father Cavanaugh shook his head. "No, not until we talk, Michael… come to some agreement."
Mike set his lips and said nothing. He glanced over his shoulder at the front lawn near Memo's window; the rectangle of yellow light fell on an empty lawn there.
Father Cavanaugh sighed and moved to the porch swing, patting the now-empty wicker chair. "Come, sit down, Michael my lad. We must talk."