Chapter 39 #2
Oh God. Oh God.
Joel’s hands shake as he lifts the broken bow. He’s fighting with all his strength against the force of the command. But he can’t stop.
“Wake up,” I whisper, grabbing the woman’s shoulder.
My fingers hardly work. I trip backward.
I hit someone else, an older woman, maybe in her mid-seventies.
“Wake up!” I order directly into her face.
Her eyes, intelligent beneath the film of Dick Face’s spell, meet mine, and surprise flares in them.
I hear Joel at the same moment—the quick, strangled release of his breath in a groaning rush. It is the sound of the end of a fight, of no longer being able to continue.
“Wake up!” I shout, the words like lava spewing out of me as my throat collapses around them. “All of you wake up now!”
Dick Face spins toward me. “Are you kidding me?” He’s ready to laugh again, to swat me away, but the people are responding. They’re moving; someone calls out, “What the hell is going on?”
“Stop him!” I cry. I sink to my knees and Dick Face towers over me.
“You have it.” There’s an ember of pride in his voice as he looks down at me. “You can do it, too. That’s never happened before.”
Joel opens his fingers and the bow falls from his hands. He’s gasping, blood blossoming across his chest, stark against the white of his shirt. I have to distract Dick Face for long enough to let him escape. I have to.
“Stop him!” I’m pointing at Dick Face and my hand feels only tenuously attached, my arm feels like it will drop off my body, a dead branch.
They move toward him at my will. I can hardly believe it. They are moving tentatively, though. I’m not powerful enough.
“Listen to me!” he bellows, lifting his arms.
“No!” I scream. “Listen to me!”
People are bumping into one another. There is mild chaos as neighbors stumble through Joel’s yard, some mumbling, many still eerily silent.
One of the teenage girls puts her hand on her mother’s face and pushes—either to stop or misguidedly protect her, it isn’t clear.
I notice the long green highlights in her hair with strange clarity, the dark mud soaking her pale gray socks.
And now, in the midst of the disorientation, Joel leaps down the steps and throws himself at Dick Face.
He’s too far away. Dick Face dodges. But I see it happen—I see Joel’s fingertips graze his shoulder.
I see my father unbalance, and Joel surges forward, and now he’s holding on to him with both hands.
“Get off me!” Dick Face shrieks, his voice shredded, frantic, and Joel stumbles back as though he’s been shoved.
Dick Face wavers only slightly. Fear beats its feathers across his face for a moment, and then he laughs, flinging it off.
“I can’t believe I was worried!” he spits.
“That’s all you got?” Joel struggles forward again, the muscles in his arms and chest urgently clarified, and Dick Face hisses, “Don’t move.
” And Joel is frozen in place, all his strength for nothing, as helpless as Dee and Ella and Mom where I left them in the house.
“Anyone here have a weapon?” Dick Face calls, sounding lighthearted again, glancing around.
No one responds.
“No? Safe town! That’s okay! We’ll figure it out.”
I push against the ground with my twig hands, trying to get myself to my feet again, but the strength has drained from my muscles and I am vibrating with pain, wrung limp.
I was already too weak when Dick Face burst into the house.
Now I can tell I have hardly any time at all.
But I have to stop him. It has to be the last thing I do.
I’m faintly relieved, somewhere in the crush of my swollen brain, for the inability to think about my impending death.
At least I’m not panicking. And then even that thought is too much work as I try to focus.
Joel is paralyzed near the sidewalk; he’s ended up closer to the road than the house. Dick Face is pivoting to face him. He’ll think of a new way to kill Joel. It will only take him a second.
“Stop him,” I whisper. I tug on the leg of the green-haired girl, who has ended up next to me. “Stop him, please.”
She looks down at me, her eyes dull, then curious. I have smeared mud on her pants.
I lift my voice a final time, putting all my remaining strength into it. “Stop him!”
And they move, the crowd of them, in a confused daze.
Some of them are turning the wrong way, but most of them move toward Dick Face.
They’re so close, it only takes seconds for them to reach him, and he’s shouting at them, now he’s singing again, but it only seems to add to the confusion.
Some of them are listening to him, and some of them turn in circles, and some of them are jostling him toward the street; they seem to be converging in that direction.
“What the fuck— ” I hear him say. He expects his power to work, to work better than it is. “What the fuck is this?” And there’s fear in his voice.
I know why it isn’t working.
Joel may not be able to kill him, but he did manage to touch Dick Face, and the same terrible, numinous healing that killed Grub is at work. Dick Face’s darkness is failing him, turning against him.
I am falling. The ground is hurrying to meet me, and then I am lying on it and the grass presses its prickling kisses into my cheek.
But I see Dick Face decide. I see him break for the street, in the direction of his car.
He’s still too physically strong to be restrained, and he pushes through the crowd without much trouble, getting only slightly turned around by grabbing hands as he goes.
He weaves around the front of the SUV that’s been abandoned at an angle.
He doesn’t see the car on the other side of it—the minivan that is coming too fast up the street, that swerves to avoid the SUV.
He steps out past the bumper of the SUV, and there’s a heavy, wet crack as the big gray van hits him.
He’s borne briefly through the air, plummets, vanishes underneath the wheels.
In the next moment, there is a huge and dangerous silence.
Or maybe it’s a beautiful silence.
The world is enormously still.
My exhausted heart lies down on its side in my chest, it shudders, it falls still, too.
And then there is a terrible flash of all-encompassing light. Light that floods every cell, every atom, every particle.
And then everything disappears.