UNLESS YOU WANT HIM TO TREAT YOU LIKE ONE, the poster advised). Both had been shot in the head at point-blank range; brains, ragged flaps of scalp, and bits of bone were splattered across the flowered wallpaper and Susan Day's fancy-stitched cowgirl boots. One of the women had been pregnant. The other had been Gretchen Tillbury.
Ralph remembered the day she had come to his home with Helen to warn him and to give him a can of something called Bodyguard; on that day he had thought her beautiful... but of course on that day her finely made head had still been intact and half of her pretty blonde hair hadn't been roasted off by a close-range rifle-blast. Fifteen years after she had narrowly escaped being killed by her abusive husband, another man had put a gun to Gretchen Tillbury's head and blown her right out of the world. She would never tell another woman about how she had gotten the scar on her left thigh.
For one horrible moment Ralph thought he was going to faint.
He concentrated and pulled himself back by thinking of Lois. Her aura had gone a dark, shocked red. jagged black lines raced across it and through it. They looked like the E.K.G readout of someone suffering a fatal heart-attack.
["Oh Ralph Oh Ralph, dear God."'] Something exploded at the south end of the house with force enough to blow open the door they had just walked through. Ralph guessed it might have been a propane tank or tanks.
... not that it mattered much at this point. Flaming scraps of wallpaper came wafting in from the hall, and he saw both the room's curtains and the remaining hair on Gretchen Tillbury's head ripple toward the doorway as the fire sucked the air out of the room to feed itself. how long would it take for the fire to turn the women and children down cellar into crispy critters? Ralph didn't know, and suspected that didn't matter much, either; the people trapped down there would be dead of suffocation or smoke inhalation long before they began to burn.
Lois was staring at the dead women in horror. Tears slipped down her cheeks. The spectral gray light which rose from the tracks they left behind looked like vapor rising from dry ice. Ralph walked her across the parlor toward the closed double doors on the far side, paused before them long enough to take a deep breath, then put his arm around Lois's waist and stepped into the wood.
There was a moment of darkness in which not just his nose but his entire body seemed suffused with the sweet aroma of sawdust, and then they were in the room beyond, the northernmost room in the house. It had perhaps once been a study, but had since been converted into a group therapy room. In the center, a dozen or so folding chairs had been set up in a circle. The walls were hung with plaques saying things like I CANNOT EXPECT RESPECT FROM ANYONE' ELSE UNTIL I RESPECT MYSELF. On a blackboard at one end of the room someone had printed WE ARE FAMILY, I've GOT ALL MY SISTERS WITH ME in capital letters.
Crouched beside it at one of the east-facing windows that overlooked the porch, wearing his own Kevlar vest over a Snoopy sweatshirt Ralph would have recognized anywhere, was Charlie Pickering.
"Barbecue all Godless women!" he screamed. A bullet whined past his shoulder; another buried itself in the windowframe to his right and flicked a splinter against one of the lenses of his hornrimmed glasses.
The idea that he was being protected returned to Ralph, this time with the force of a conviction. "Lesbian cookout! Give em a taste of their own medicine! Teach em how it feels!"
["Stay up, Lois-right up where you are now."] ["What are you going to do?"] ["Take care of him."] ["Don't kill him, Ralph! Please don't kill him!"] Why not? Ralph thought bitterly. I'd be doing the world a favor.
That was undoubtedly true, but this was no time to argue.
["All right, I won't kill him! Now stay put, Lois-there's too many goddam bullets flying around for both of us to risk going down."] Before she could reply, Ralph concentrated, summoned the blink, and dropped back to the Short-Time level. It happened so fast and hard this time that it left him feeling winded, as if he had jumped out of a second-storey window onto a hard patch of concrete. Some of the color drained out of