The Servants of Twilight

Behind Sandy, Max yelled, "What's happening?"

Now only one house separated the Dodge from this property.

Chewbacca was barking furiously.

The driver gave the van more gas. It was coming fast, like an express train, like a rocket.

The intent was clear. Crazy as it seemed, the van was going to ram the house in which they'd been hiding.

"Get out!" Sandy shouted back toward Christine and Joey and Max." Out of the house, away from here, fast!"

Max plunged out of the house, and the three of them-and the dog-fled toward the back yard, which was the only way they could go.

Uphill, the Dodge swerved to avoid a jacaranda in the neighboring yard and struck the fence between this property and that one.

Sandy had already turned away from the van. He was already running back along the side of the house.

Behind him, the picket fence gave way with a sound like cracking bones.

Sandy raced through the carport, past the car, leaping over the abandoned suitcases, yelling at the others to hurry, for God's sake hurry, screaming at them to get out of the way, urging them into the rear lawn, and then toward the back fence, beyond which lay a narrow alley.

But they didn't get all the way to the rear of the small lot before the van rammed into the house with a tremendous crash.

A split second later, an ear-pulverizing explosion shook the rainchoked day, and for a moment it sounded as if the sky itself was falling, and the earth rose violently, fell.

The van had been packed full of explosives!

The blast picked Sandy up and pitched him, and he felt a wave of hot air smash over him, and then he was tumbling across the lawn, through a row of azaleas, into the board fence by the alleyway, jarring his right shoulder, and he saw fire where the house had been, fire and smoke, shooting up in a dazzling column, and there was flying debris, a lot of it-chunks of masonry, splintered boards, roofing shingles, lath and plaster, glass, the padded back of an armchair that was leaking stuffing, the cracked lid of a toilet seat, sofa cushions, a piece of carpeting-and he tucked his head down and prayed that he wouldn't be struck by anything heavy or sharp.

As debris pummeled him, he wondered if the driver of the van had leaped out as the man on the passenger's side had done.

Had he jumped free at the last moment-or had he been so committed to murdering Joey Scavello that he had remained behind the wheel, piloting the Dodge all the way into the house?

Maybe he was now sitting in the rubble, flesh stripped from his bones, his skeletal hands still clutching the fire-blackened steering wheel.

The explosion was like a giant hand that slammed Christine in the back.

Briefly deafened by the blast, she was thrown away from Joey, knocked down. In a temporary but eerie silence, she rolled through a muddy flower bed, crushing dense clusters of bright red and purple impatiens, aware of billowing waves of superheated air that seemed to vaporize the falling rain for a moment. She cracked a knee painfully against the low brick edging that ringed the planting area, tasted dirt, and came to rest against the side of the arbor, which was thickly entwined with bougainvillaea. Still in silence, cedar shingles and shattered pieces of stucco and unidentifiable rubble fell on her and on the garden around her. Then her hearing began to return when the toaster, which she had so recently used when making breakfast, clanged onto the grass and noisily hopped along for some distance, as if it were a living thing, trailing its cord like a tail. An enormously heavy object, perhaps a roof beam or a large chunk of masonry, slammed down into the roof of the ten-foot-long, tunnel-like arbor, collapsing it.

The wall against which she was leaning sagged inward, and torn bougainvillaea runners drooped over her, and she realized how close she had come to being killed.

"Joey!" she shouted.

He didn't answer.

She pushed away from the ruined arbor, onto her hands and knees, then staggered to her feet, swaying.

"Joey!”

No answer.

Foul-smelling smoke poured across the lawn from the demolished house; combined with the lingering fog and the windwhipped rain, it reduced visibility to a few feet. She couldn't see her boy, and she didn't know where to look, so she struck off blindly to her left, finding it difficult to breathe because of the acrid smoke and because of her own panic, which was like a vise squeezing her chest. She came upon the scorched and mangled door of the refrigerator, forced her way between two miniature orange trees, one of which was draped in a tangled bed sheet, and walked across the rear door of the house, which was lying flat on the grass, thirty feet from the frame in which it had once stood. She saw Max Steck. He was alive, trying to extricate himself from the thorny trailers of several rose bushes, among which he had been tossed. She moved past him, still

calling Joey, still getting no answer, and then, among all the other rubble, her gaze settled on a strangely unnerving object.