The point is, he oversteps. I think he always oversteps. He's so stuffed with pride it's a wonder he doesn't explode. Alan, please try to understand: Annie is dead, Todd is dead, and if you go out chasing Ace Merrill while the town is burning down around your ears-" A hand appeared over Polly's shoulder. A forearm encircled her neck and jerked her roughly backward. Suddenly Ace Merrill was standing behind her, holding her, pointing a gun at her, and grinning over her shoulder at Alan.
"Speak of the devil, lady," Ace said, and overhead -thunder cracked across the sky.
Frank jewett and his good old "friend" George T. Nelson had been facing each other on the courthouse steps like a pair of strange bespectacled gunslingers for almost four minutes now, their nerves twanging like violin strings tuned into the ultimate octave.
"Yig!" said Frank. His hand grabbed for the automatic pistol stuck in the waistband of his pants.
"Awk!" said George T. Nelson, and grabbed for his own.
They drew with identical feverish grins-grins that looked like big, soundless screams-and threw down. Their fingers pressed the triggers. The two reports overlapped so perfectly that they sounded like one. Lightning flashed as the two bullets flew... and nicked each other in mid-flight, deflecting just enough to miss what should have been a pair of point-blank targets.
Frank jewett felt a puff of air beside his left temple.
George T. Nelson felt a sting on the right side of his neck.
They stared at each other unbelievingly over the smoking guns.
"Huh?" said George T. Nelson.
"Wha?" said Frank Jewett.
They began to grin identical, unbelieving grins. George T. Nelson took a hesitant step up toward Frank; Frank took a hesitant step down toward George. In another moment or two they might have been embracing, their quarrel dwarfed by those two small puffs of eternity... but then the Municipal Building blew up with a roar that seemed to split the world in two, vaporizing them both where they stood.
That final explosion dwarfed all the others. Ace and Buster had planted forty sticks of dy***ite in two clusters of twenty at the Municipal Building. One of these bombs had been left sitting on the judge's chair in the courtroom. Buster had insisted that they place the other on Amanda Williams's desk in the Selectmen's Wing.
"Women have no business in politics, anyway," Buster explained to Ace.
The sound of the explosion was shattering, and for a moment every window of the town's biggest building was filled with supernatural violet-orange light. Then the fire lashed out through the windows, through the doors, through the vents and grilles, like merciless, muscular arms. The slate roof lifted off intact like some strange gabled spaceship, rose on a cushion of fire, then shattered into a hundred thousand jagged fragments.
In -the next instant the building itself blew outward in every direction, turning Lower Main Street into a hail of brick and glass where no living thing bigger than a cockroach could survive. Nineteen men and women were killed in the blast, five of them newspeople who had come to cover the escalating weirdness in Castle Rock and became part of the story instead.
State Police cars and news vehicles were thrown end over end through the air like Corgi toys. The yellow van which Mr. Gaunt had provided Ace and Buster cruised serenely up Main Street nine feet above the ground, wheels spinning, rear doors hanging by their mangled hinges, tools and timers spilling out the back. It banked to the left on a hot hurricane thermal and crash-landed in the front office of the Dostie Insurance Agency, snowplowing typewriters and file-cabinets before its mangled grille.
A shudder like an earthquake blundered through the ground.
11
Windows shattered all over town. Weathervanes, which had been pointing steadily northeast in the prevailing wind of the thunderstorm (which was now beginning to abate, as if embarrassed by the entrance of this avatar), began to whirl crazily. Several flew right off their spindles, and the next day one would be found buried deeply in the door of the Baptist Church, like a marauding Indian's arrow.
On Castle Avenue, where the tide of battle was turning decisively in favor of the Catholics, the fighting stopped. Henry Payton stood by his cruiser, his drawn gun dangling by his right knee, and stared toward the fireball in the south. Blood trickled down his cheeks like tears. Rev. William Rose sat up, saw the monstrous glow on the horizon, and began to suspect that the end of the world had come, and that what he was looking at was Star Wormwood.
Father john Brigham wandered down to him in drunken loops and staggers. His nose was bent severely to the left and his mouth was a mass of blood. He considered punting Rev. Rose's head like a football and helped him to his feet instead.