Nos4a2

by Joe Hill

  The child who had been tossed into the doors of Charlie’s Costume Carnival was sitting up now. She bent forward, reaching out for the white plastic sack of ANFO by her feet.

  There was a white flash.

  The explosion caused the air to ripple and warp with heat, and Vic believed for a moment that it would lift the bike off the road and fling it into the air.

  Every window on the street exploded. The white flash became a giant ball of flame. Charlie’s Costume Carnival caved in and slid apart in an avalanche of flaming brickwork and a snowstorm of glittering, pulverized glass. The fire belched out across the street, picked up a dozen children as if they were sticks, and tossed them into the night. Cobblestones erupted from the road and launched themselves into the air.

  The moon opened its mouth to cry out in horror, its one great eye bulging in fury—and then the shockwave hit the false sky and the whole thing wobbled, like an image reflected in a fun-house mirror. The moon and stars and clouds dissolved into a field of white electrical snow. The blast carried down the street. Buildings shuddered. Vic inhaled a lungful of burned air, diesel smoke, and powdered brick. Then the wavering repercussions of the blast faded and the sky flickered back into being.

  The moon screamed and screamed, sounds almost as loud and violent as the explosion itself.

  She sped past a hall of mirrors, past a waxwork, and on to the brightly lit and rotating carousel, where wooden reindeer pranced in place of horses. There she grabbed the brake and brought the bike to a fishtailing halt. Her hair was frizzled from the heat of the explosion. Her heart slugged in her chest.

  She looked back toward the debris field that had been the market square. She needed a moment to register—to accept—what she was seeing. First one child, then another, then a third emerged from the smoke, coming down the road after her. One of them was still smoking, hair charred. Others were sitting up across the street. Vic saw a boy thoughtfully brush glass out of his hair. He should’ve been dead, had been picked up and thrown into a brick wall, every bone in his body should’ve been smashed into chips, but there he was, getting to his feet, and Vic found that her weary mind was not entirely surprised by this development. The children caught in the explosion had been dead even before the bomb detonated, of course. They were not any more dead now—or any less inclined to stop coming after her.

  She swung the backpack off her shoulder and checked its contents. She hadn’t lost any. Lou had wired timers into four of the packs of ANFO, one of which was now gone. There were a couple other sacks of the ANFO, down toward the bottom, that had no timers on them at all.

  Vic slung the bag back over her shoulder and rode, past the Reindeer-Go-Round and on another few hundred yards to the rear of the park and the great Sleighcoaster.

  It was running empty, carts made to look like red sleighs diving and roaring past on the rails, swooping and rising into the night. It was an old-fashioned rollercoaster, of the sort that had been popular in the thirties, made entirely of wood. The entrance was a great glowing face of Santa Claus—you walked in through his mouth.

  Vic pulled out a sack of ANFO, set the timer for five minutes, tossed it in between Santa’s gaping jaws. She was about to take off when she happened to look up at the rollercoaster and saw the mummified bodies: dozens of crucified men and women, their skin blackened and withered, eyes gone, their clothes filthy, frozen rags. A woman in pink leg warmers that screamed 1984 had been stripped to the waist; Christmas ornaments dangled from her pierced breasts. There was a shriveled man in jeans and a thick coat, with a beard that brought to mind Christ, sporting a holly wreath instead of a crown of thorns on his head.

  Vic was still staring up at the corpses when a child came out of the dark and stuck a kitchen knife into the small of her back.

  He could not have been older than ten, and his cheeks were dimpled by a sweet, lovely smile. He was barefoot, wore overalls and a checked shirt, and with his golden bangs and serene eyes he was a perfect little Tom Sawyer. The knife was buried to the hilt, sinking into muscle, the springy tissue beneath, and perhaps perforating an intestine. She felt a pain unlike any she had ever experienced, a sharp and blessed twinge in her bowels, and she thought, with real surprise, He just killed me. I just died.

  Tom Sawyer pulled the knife back out and laughed gaily. Her own son had never laughed with such easy pleasure. She did not know where the boy had come from. He seemed to have simply appeared; the night had thickened and made a child.

  “I want to play with you,” he said. “Stay and play scissors-for-the-drifter.”

  She could’ve hit him, elbowed him, kicked him, anything. Instead she gave the bike throttle and simply roared away from him. He stepped aside and watched her go, still holding the blade, wet and shiny with her blood. He was still smiling, but his eyes were puzzled, brow furrowed with confusion, as if he were wondering, Did I do something wrong?

  The timers were imprecise. The first sack of ANFO had been set to go off in what she estimated was five minutes but had taken closer to ten. She had set the timer on the Sleighcoaster ANFO just exactly the same and should’ve had plenty of time to reach safe distance. But when she was less than a hundred yards away, it erupted. The ground buckled beneath her, seemed to roll like a wave. It felt as if the air itself were cooking. She drew a breath that was hot enough to sear her lungs. The bike staggered forward, the baking wind hammering at her shoulders, at her back. She felt a fresh, sharp twinge of pain in her abdomen, as if she were being stabbed all over again.

  The Sleighcoaster collapsed in on itself like a shattering, roaring heap of kindling. One of the carts came free of the tracks and blazed through the night, a flaming missile that soared through the darkness and slammed into the Reindeer-Go-Round, smashing the white steeds to flinders. Steel screamed. She looked back just in time to see a rising mushroom cloud of flame and black smoke as the Sleighcoaster toppled.

  She looked away, got the bike going again, weaving around the smoking head of a wooden reindeer, a rack of shattered antlers. She cut down another side street, one she believed would lead her back to the rotary. There was a bad taste in her mouth. She spit blood.

  I am dying, she thought, with surprising calm.

  She hardly slowed at the foot of the grand Ferris wheel. It was a beautiful thing, a thousand blue will-o’-the-wisp lights aligned along its hundred-foot spokes. Cabins roomy enough for a dozen people each, with black-tinted windows and gaslights glowing inside, rotated dreamily.

  Vic fished out another sack of ANFO, set the timer for five minutes, more or less, and hooked it upward. It caught in one of the spokes, close to the central hub. Vic thought of her Raleigh Tuff Burner, the way the wheels had whirred and how she loved the autumn light in New England. She was not going back. She was never going to see that light again. Her mouth kept filling with blood. She was sitting in blood now. The stabbing sensation came in the small of her back again and again. Only it didn’t hurt in any conventional sense. She recognized what she was feeling as pain, but it was also, like childbirth, an experience bigger than pain, a feeling that something impossible was being made possible, that she was about to complete some enormous undertaking.

  She rode on and soon arrived back at the central rotary.

  Charlie’s Costume Carnival—a solid cube of flame, barely recognizable as a building—stood on the corner sixty or seventy yards away. On the other side of the great Christmas tree was the parked Rolls-Royce. She could see the glow of its high headlights beneath the branches. She did not slow but rode straight at the tree. Vic slipped the backpack off her left shoulder. She reached into it, her other hand on the throttle, found the last sack of ANFO with a timer, twisted the dial, and pushed the button to start it running.

  The front tire skipped over a low stone curb, and she thumped up onto snow-dusted grass. The darkness congealed into shapes, children rising up before her. She was not sure they would move, thought they would hold their ground and force her to plow through them.

&
nbsp; Light rose around her, a great flash of reddish brilliance, and for an instant she could see her own shadow, impossibly long, rushing ahead of her. The children were illuminated in a ragged, uneven line, cold dolls in bloodstained pajamas, creatures armed with broken boards, knives, hammers, scissors.

  The world filled with a roar and the shriek of tortured metal. Snow whipped around, and children were knocked to the dirt by the shockwave. Behind her the Ferris wheel erupted outward in two jets of flame, and the great circle crashed straight down, dropping from its struts. The impact shook the world and knocked the sky over Christmasland back into an agitation of static. The branches of the immense fir tree clawed at the night with a kind of hysteria, a giant fighting for its life.

  Vic sailed beneath the wild and flailing boughs. She flipped the backpack out of her lap, chucked it in against the trunk—her Christmas gift for Charles Talent Manx.

  Behind her the Ferris wheel rolled into town with a great reverberating sound of iron grinding against stone. Then, like a penny that has rolled along a table and lost its momentum, it tilted to one side and fell upon a pair of buildings.

  Beyond the toppled Ferris wheel, beyond the ruin of the Sleighcoaster, an enormous shelf of snow, loosed from the peaks of the high, dark mountain, began to crash down upon the back of Christmasland. For all the deafening roars of explosions and collapsing buildings, there had been no sound yet like this. It was somehow more than sound, was a vibration felt as deep as bone. A blast of snow hit the towers and quaint shops at the back of the park. They were annihilated. Walls of colored rock blew outward before the oncoming avalanche and were promptly covered over. The rear of the town collapsed into itself and vanished in a roiling surf of snow, a tidal wave deep enough and broad enough to swallow Christmasland whole. The ledge beneath shook so hard that Vic wondered if it might snap off the side of the mountain, drop the whole park into . . . what? The emptiness that waited beyond Charlie Manx’s pinched little imaginings. The narrow canyons of the roads filled with a flash flood of snow, high enough to consume everything before it. The avalanche did not fall upon Christmasland so much as erase it.

  As the Triumph carried her across the rotary, the Wraith came into sight. It stood covered in a fine film of brick dust, engine rumbling and headlights glowing through air filled with fine particulate matter, a billion grains of ash, snow, and rock swirling on the hot, spark-filled wind. Vic glimpsed Charlie Manx’s little girl, the one named Lorrie, in the passenger seat of his car, peering out the side window into the sudden darkness. The lights of Christmasland had, in the last few moments, blinked out, all of them, and the only illumination that remained was the hissing white static above.

  Wayne was by the open trunk of the car, twisting himself this way and that to be free of the girl, the one named Millie. Millie clutched him from behind, one arm reaching around his chest to hold a fistful of his filthy white T-shirt. In her other hand was that curious hooked knife. She was trying to pull it up to stick it through his throat, but he had her wrist, kept the blade down and his face turned away from its questing edge.

  “You need to do what Daddy wants!” she was screaming at him. “You need to get in the trunk! You have fussed long enough!”

  And Manx. Manx was moving. He had been at the driver’s-side door, shoveling his precious Lorrie into the car, but now he strode across the uneven ground, swinging his silver hammer, looking soldierly in his legionnaire’s coat, which was buttoned to the neck. Muscles bunched at the corners of his jaw.

  “Leave him, Millie! There isn’t time!” Manx hollered at her. “Leave him and let’s go!”

  Millie sank her flukeworm teeth into Wayne’s ear. Wayne screamed and thrashed and snapped his head, and the lobe of his ear parted company with the rest of his face. He ducked and made a funny corkscrewing motion in the same instant and came right out of his T-shirt, leaving Millie holding an empty, blood-streaked rag.

  “Oh, Mom! Oh, Mom! Oh—” Wayne shouted, which was the same thing backward as it was forward. He took two running steps, slipped in the snow, went down on all fours in the road.

  And dust swirled in the air. And the darkness shook with cannonades, blocks of stone falling into more stone, a hundred fifty thousand tons of snow, all the snow Charlie Manx had ever seen and ever imagined, came crashing toward them, flattening everything before it.

  Manx stalked on, six strides from Wayne, already lifting his arm back to drop his silver hammer on Wayne’s lowered head. It had been designed for crushing skulls, and Wayne’s would be child’s play.

  “Get out of my way, Charlie!” Vic hollered.

  Manx half turned as she blew past him. Her slipstream grabbed and spun him, sent him staggering back on his heels.

  Then the last of the ANFO, the backpack of it, exploded beneath the tree and seemed to take the entire world with it.

  Gumdrop Lane

  HIGH-PITCHED WHINE.

  A confusion of dust and drifting motes of flame.

  The world slid itself into an envelope of silence, in which the only sound was a soft droning, not unlike the emergency broadcasting signal.

  Time softened, ran with the sweet drag of syrup trickling down the side of a bottle.

  Vic glided through the atmosphere of ruin and watched a chunk of burning tree the size of a Cadillac bounce in front of her, appearing to move at less than a fifth of its actual speed.

  In the silent snowstorm of debris—a whirling pink smoke—Vic lost sight of Charlie Manx and his car. She only dimly apprehended Wayne pushing himself up off all fours, like a runner coming out of the blocks. The girl with the long red hair was behind him with the knife, clutching it in both hands now. The ground shuddered and tipped her off balance, sent her reeling back into the stone wall at the edge of the drop.

  Vic weaved around the girl. The child, Millie, turned her head to watch Vic go, her flukeworm mouth open in a sickened look of rage, the rows of teeth churning inside her throat hole. The girl pushed off the wall, and as she did, it gave way and took her along with it. Vic saw her lurch back into nothing and drop into that white storm of light.

  Vic’s ears whined. She believed she was calling Wayne’s name. He ran from her—running blind and deaf—and did not look back.

  The Triumph carried her up alongside him. She twisted at the waist and reached and caught him by the back of his shorts and hauled him onto the bike behind her, without slowing. There was plenty of time to manage this. Everything was moving so quietly and slowly, she could have counted each individual ember floating in the air. Her perforated kidney twanged in shock at this abrupt movement from the waist, but Vic, who was dying quickly now, did not let it trouble her.

  Fire flurried from the sky.

  Somewhere behind her, the snow of a hundred winters smothered Christmasland, a pillow pressed over the face of a terminally ill man.

  It had felt good, to be held by Lou Carmody, to smell his odor of pines and of the garage, and even better to have her own son’s arms around her again, cinching her waist.

  In the droning, apocalyptic darkness, there was at least no Christmas music. How she hated Christmas music. She always had.

  Another burning lump of tree fell to her right, hit the cobbles, and exploded, throwing coals the size of dinner plates. A fiery arrow, as long as Vic’s forearm, whizzed through the air and sliced her forehead open above her right eyebrow. She did not feel it, although she saw it pass by before her eyes.

  She clicked the Triumph effortlessly into fourth gear.

  Her son squeezed her tighter. Her kidney twanged again. He was squeezing the life out of her, and it felt good.

  She put her left hand over his two hands, knotted together at her navel. She stroked his small white knuckles. He was still hers. She knew because his skin was warm, not frozen and dead, like Charlie Manx’s pint-size vampires. He would always be hers. He was gold, and gold didn’t come off.

  NOS4A2 erupted from the billowing smoke behind her. Through the dead, droning silence,
she heard it, heard an inhuman growl, a precision-engineered, perfectly articulated roar of hate. Its tires carried it juddering and crashing over a field of smashed rock. Its headlights made the storm of dust—that blizzard of grit—shine like a flurry of diamonds. Manx was bent to the wheel, and he had his window down.

  “I’LL SLAUGHTER YOU, YOU MISERABLE BITCH!” he screamed, and she heard that, too, though distantly, like the hush heard in a seashell. “I’M GOING TO RUN YOU DOWN, THE BOTH OF YOU! YOU KILLED ALL OF MINE, AND I’M GOING TO KILL YOURS!”

  The bumper struck her rear tire, gave the Triumph a hard jolt. The handlebars jerked, trying to pull out of her grip. She held on. If she didn’t, the front tire would turn sharply to one side or the other, and the bike would dump them, and the Wraith would thud right over them.

  The bumper of the Wraith slammed into them again. She was shoved forward, hard, head almost striking the handlebars.

  When she lifted her chin and looked up, the Shorter Way Bridge was there, its mouth black in the cotton-candy-colored haze. She exhaled, a long rush of breath, and almost shivered with relief. The bridge was there and would take her out of this place, back to where she needed to go. The shadows that waited within were, in their way, as comforting as her mother’s cool hand on her fevered forehead. She missed her mother, and her father, and Lou, and was sorry they had not all had more time together. It seemed to her that all of them, not just Louis, would be waiting for her on the other side of the bridge, waiting for her to climb off the bike and fall into their arms.

  The Triumph banged up onto the bridge, over the wooden sill, and began to rattle over the boards. To her left she saw the old familiar green spray paint, three sloppy letters: LOU →.

  The Wraith boomed up into the bridge behind her, struck the rusted old Raleigh, and sent it flying through the air. It whistled past Vic on her right. The snow came roaring behind, an obliterating blast of it, choking the far end of the bridge, filling it like a cork jammed into a bottle.