Blind Panic (29 page)

The Thunder Giant lowered his arms and pointed at the soldiers, and the lightning that he had drawn from the sky jagged out of his fingertips and blew them apart. They might have been spirits, but they still had substance, and that substance was blasted into skulls and ribs and bloody rags of ectoplasmic flesh. Even the horses’ legs were blown off, and they lay smoking and disemboweled on their backs, like burned-out canoes.

Now the Thunder Giant turned back toward us, and I
knew that he was coming to finish what he had started. As pockmarked and bullet-ridden as they were, the Eye Killers reassembled outside the café windows. I took hold of Amelia’s hand and said, “This’ll teach us not to meddle with spirits, won’t it?”

She looked at me. Her hair was sticking up, and her eye makeup was blotchy, but I had never seen her look so beautiful.

“I love you, Harry Erskine,” she said.

“And I love you, Amelia Carlsson.”

I looked around at all the people in the café. They all knew that they were going to be blinded—those who hadn’t been blinded already. But they stood facing the Eye Killers with their backs straight and their eyes open, holding hands together in the spirit of the pioneers. I felt proud of them. Even little Peter had stopped crying and was staring out at the Eye Killers and the Thunder Giant.

“
A gah!
” he said.

“Yes, honey,” Auntie Ammy told him. “A gah.”

As I looked from face to face, I saw myself in the mirrors on the back wall of the café. I could see the Eye Killers, too, outside on the sidewalk.

Their weapon is your weapon.
That’s what Nihltak had said. And what was their weapon?
Their eyes.

I turned back. The Eye Killers’ eyes were starting to glimmer. Blue and white light that no man could look at, as no man could look at the sun.

“Down!” I shouted. “Everybody get down on the floor! Shut your eyes and lie as flat as you can!”

For a moment nobody understood what I meant. But then I screamed it again. “
Down! Do it now!
” and everybody dropped to the floor as if they had been struck by simultaneous heart attacks.

Even with my eyes tight shut, I could see the intense light that flooded the café. It seemed to wax brighter and brighter, as if the Eye Killers were determined to pry their way into my brain by the power of light alone.

But then I heard a splintering explosion and a hideous scream. It sounded like a small child being thrown onto a blazing bonfire. Then I heard another explosion, and another scream, just as terrible—then another, and another. The bright light abruptly died away.

I opened my eyes and cautiously lifted my head. Amelia was looking up, too. The interior of the café was lit not only by candles, but by dancing flames. Gradually all of us climbed to our feet and looked out the window. The Eye Killers were alight, every one of them. Some of them were still standing, but their boxlike bodies were engulfed in fire. Most of them were lying on the sidewalk in pieces, their white masks shattered like broken plates. There were no skeletal babies in the coffins that had become their only means of walking through the world. The Eye Killers had been nothing more than dazzling light, and now that light had vanished forever.

“What happened to them?” said Mickey.

“
They
did,” I said, and pointed toward the mirrors.

But without warning, the café windows imploded, and we were blasted by a hailstorm of shattered glass. Men shouted; women screamed. The mirrors were sprayed with blood. Amelia had a deep cut across her chin, and I felt blood running down my left cheek. There was another deafening burst of thunder, and the interior of the café was lashed with wind and rain, as well as a whirl of cinders from the burning Eye Killers.

Standing in the main square, the Thunder Giant looked down at us, its horns crawling with caterpillars of static electricity.

“You have defied me again, little brother,” he said, and his voice was the combined voices of all the wonder-workers who made up his arms and his legs and his body and his head. It was like listening to a hundred people all chanting at once. “You have defied me and you have destroyed my demons. For this, I will punish you with more than darkness. I will give you everlasting agony, and I will give your loved ones
and your children everlasting agony. I will do to you what you did to us—I will give you the pain that never ends, for all eternity.”

“Oh God,” said Charlie. “It’s going to be a massacre, isn’t it? He’s going to throw us all around, just like Tyler’s dad and mom.”

“No such luck,” I told him. “He’s going to do something very much worse than that.”

“Then why are we standing here, man? Let’s make a run for it!”

“There’s absolutely no point. We couldn’t run fast enough.”

Little Peter lifted both hands toward the Thunder Giant. He didn’t seem to be afraid of him at all. “
A gah!
” he shouted. “
A mm-mm!
”

Again I looked at Amelia, but both of us shook our heads. Whatever Misquamacus was threatening to do to us, however much we were all going to suffer, little Peter’s life was sacrosanct.

The Thunder Giant lifted his arms again, and again lightning leaped from the clouds and into his fingertips. But even above the spitting of the lightning and the rumbling of the thunderand the shrieking of the wind, I heard the harsh, buzz saw sound of a motorcycle engine.

I looked around. At first I couldn’t see where the sound was coming from. But I heard the motorcycle rev, and rev, and rev again, and then it appeared from the parking lot beside the café—a big black Kawasaki with Tyler sitting astride it.

He came burbling up to us and stopped.

“What are you doing?” I shouted at him. “How the hell did you get that started?”

“I was taught by the best motorcycle booster in the business!" Tyler yelled back. “He was a great stuntman, too!”

“Look—if you’re making a break for it, how about taking Amelia with you, and baby Peter?”

“I’m not making a break for it!” He pointed up to the Thunder Giant. “I’m going to stop him!”

“What?”

“You said we could stop him if we gave him an orphan!”

“
What?
”

“An orphan—that’s what you said! Well,
I’m
an orphan now!”

“I don’t understand!”

“Just watch me!”

He didn’t give me the chance to say anything else. He revved up the Kawasaki again and ripped away, circling around the main square faster and faster, as if he were riding the wall of death. In the center of the square, the Thunder Giant was slowly bringing down his arms. I put my arm around Amelia and held her tight, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to her—not even good-bye.

The Thunder Giant took a step toward us. We could feel the ground shake, but we all lifted our heads and looked back at him defiantly.

“
Misquamacus!
” I screamed at him. “
Whatever hell you believe in, you bastard, may you rot in it forever!
”

At that moment Tyler came tearing across the main square, with the Kawasaki’s dazzling quartz headlight on high beam. He was standing up in the saddle, and he was shouting something, although I couldn’t hear what it was. He roared straight toward the Thunder Giant, and he must have been touching seventy by the time he reached him. Then he suddenly braked, and the motorcycle’s rear wheel kicked up like a bucking bronco. Tyler let go of the handlebars, and he flew upward, with his arms held out in front of him, like some superhero.

“Take
me!
” I heard him shouting. “Take
me!
”

For a split second I thought that he was going to tumble back down to the ground, and that the Thunder Giant would toss him bodily across the square like his parents and his sister. But Tyler grabbed two of the wonder-workers who were linked together to make up the Thunder Giant’s torso, catching hold of their blankets and their buckskin jerkins to stop himself from falling backward, and as he hung there, he
found himself a precarious foothold on the shoulders of the wonder-workers in the next tier below. All of the wonder-workers had their arms intertwined, as if dancers in
Zorba the Greek,
so there was nothing they could do to stop Tyler from forcing his way in between them. He disappeared in-side the Thunder Giant’s chest like a man plunging into a cave. It was the most incredible display of gymnastics I had ever seen.

There was a long pause—ten seconds, twenty. The Thunder Giant stood very still, and then he swayed slightly. He stared down at us with those eyes that were actually human faces, as if he were confused. Then very slowly he raised his arms again.

With a coarse spitting noise, all of the lightning that he had drawn down from the clouds came pouring out of his fingertips and back up into the sky. At the same time, he let out a deep, frustrated roar. A hundred voices, all roaring at once.

Asingle wonder-worker began to disengage himself from the Thunder Giant’s right shoulder and spread his arms wide. At first I thought that he was going to climb back down to the ground. But he hesitated for only a moment, and then he stepped off into the air.

“Oh my God,” said Amelia. From the Thunder Giant’s shoulder to the sidewalk, it was at least an eighty-foot drop.

Instead of falling, however, the wonder-worker rose up vertically into the low-hanging clouds and disappeared. Another wonder-worker freed himself from the Thunder Giant’s arm, and he rose upward, too. Then another, and another. We stood and watched in silence as the entire Thunder Giant disassembled itself. His head gradually broke apart, and then his shoulders, the rest of his arms, and the wonder-workers floated up into the sky as silently as balloons.

We crossed the street and looked up at the Thunder Giant in awe.

“They is all spirits,” said Auntie Ammy, shaking her head.
“They is all spirits, an’ they is returnin’ to the world of the spirits, which is where they belongs.”

As the Thunder Giant’s torso started to break up, however, we heard the beginnings of a deep, soft rumbling sound. It grew louder and more vibrant as the last of the wonder-workers rose up into the clouds. Within seconds the ground beneath our feet was quaking, as if a monstrous locomotive were approaching, a hundred times larger than life, and we were almost deafened. More lightning flickered all around us, and on the other side of the main square an oak tree abruptly burst into flames. I felt drizzle in the wind, but it was
warm
drizzle.

“Holy shit,” said Remo, right behind me.

I looked up. At first I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. But then a crackling fork of lightning lit up the sky and in a thousandth of a second I saw where the drizzle was coming from. Where the Thunder Giant’s chest had been, a huge mass of bloody debris was suspended high above us. It was like some grisly airship, made up of a tangled mass of human and animal body parts, as well as twisted metal and saplings and pieces of fencing. Even in that thousandth of a second, I could see decapitated men and women, and cattle carcasses, and disemboweled dogs. They were all parceled together by crisscrossed lengths of barbed wire and telephone cable, and skewered with iron railings.

The warm drizzle that was sifting across the main square was
blood,
which was falling from this floating abattoir and drenching the grass all around us. It even began to drift across the road, until the sidewalks were glistening red, and it spattered the windshields of the cars parked all around the main square, and slid along the gutters.

“What
is
that thing?” I yelled at Amelia. “Look at it—it’s
beating,
like somebody’s heart!”

“That’s exactly what that is!” Amelia shouted back at me. “It’s the Thunder Giant’s! His body has gone, but his heart is still here! All of the cruel deeds that Misquamacus has ever done, in all of his lifetimes, all wrapped up into one! Dead,
but still living and still beating, and still pumping blood, like a
real
heart!”

We looked at one another in horror and disgust. All of us were soaked in blood now: our hair, our faces, our clothes. It looked rusty-colored, and it
smelled
rusty, too.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” I yelled, and reached out for Amelia’s hand. But then Amelia said, “
Look!
”

I turned around. Walking through the steady torrent of blood to ward us was Misquamacus. He was much taller than I remembered him, and he was wearing his buffalo-horn headdress, decorated with beads and feathers and birds’ skulls, all of which were dripping with blood. Around his neck hung six or seven necklaces, as well as the silver medallion that depicted the tentacles that grew from the face of the greatest of the Great Old Ones. He wore bracelets, too, and anklets, and he was carrying his silver-skull medicine stick. Apart from these ornaments, he was completely naked, although when he came closer I saw that a mummified rat dangled from his penis, its teeth embedded in his glans. His skin gleamed like polished copper.

He came within twenty feet of us, and then stopped. More lightning danced across the square, and three or four times it struck the huge, slowly beating heart which hung above our heads, obviously attracted by the barbed wire that was wrapped around it. Sparks came spraying down on top of us, so that we were all standing in a shower of blood and fireworks. There was a strong smell of charred wood in the air, as well as burned, bad meat.

Misquamacus stood there for a long time, saying nothing. Amelia tugged at my hand, trying to pull me away, but I knew that Misquamacus couldn’t hurt me, not anymore. At least I
hoped
that he couldn’t.

“
You!
” he called out, pointing his medicine stick at me. “You think that you have defeated us, little brother!” His voice was deep and echoing, as if he were shouting at me down a long tunnel.

Lightning spat and sizzled around the heart yet again,
following the crisscross pattern of the barbed wire that held it all together. This time the sparks fell down on us so thickly that it was almost as if we were standing under a blowtorch. One of the wires snapped, and four or five heavy pieces of timber and fencing dropped to the ground only a few yards away from us. They were followed by two mangled bodies—a headless, armless man, and a torn-open goat’s carcass.