the world and noise fell in to replace it: the crackle of fire, no longer muffled but sharp and close; the crump of a shotgun blast; the crack of pistol-shots fired in rapid succession.
The air tasted of soot, and the room was sweltering. Something that sounded like an insect droned past Ralph's ear. He had an idea it was a.45-caliber bug.
Better hurry up, sweetheart, Carolyn advised. When bullets hit you on this level they kill you, remember?
He remembered.
Ralph ran bent-over toward Pickering's turned back. His feet crunched on slivers of glass and scatters of splinters, but Pickering did not turn. In addition to the automatic weapon in his hands, there was a revolver on his hip and a small green duffel-bag by his left foot. The bag was unzipped, and Ralph saw a number of wine bottles' inside. Their open mouths had been stuffed with wet rags.
"Kill the bitches!" Pickering screamed, spraying the yard with another burst of fire. He popped the clip and rased his sweatshirt, exposing three or four more tucked under his belt.
Ralph reached into the open duffel-bag, seized one of the gasoline-filled wine bottles by the neck, and swung it at the side of Pickering's head. As he did, he saw the reason Pickering hadn't heard his approach: the man was wearing shooter's plugs. Before Ralph had time to reflect upon the irony of a man on a suicide mission taking pains to protect his hearing, the bottle shattered against Pickering's temple, dousing him with amber liquid and green glass. He staggered backward, one hand going to his scalp, which was cut open in two places. Blood poured through his long fingers-fingers that should have belonged to a pianist or a painter, Ralph thought-and down his neck.
He turned, his eyes wide and shocked behind the smeary lenses of his spectacles, his hair reaching for the sky and making him look like a cartoon of a man who has just received a huge jolt of electricity.
"You." he cried. "Devil-sent Centurion! Godless baby-killer!"
Ralph thought of the two women in the other room and was once more overwhelmed with anger... except that anger was too mild a word, much too mild. He felt as if his nerves were burning inside his skin.
And the thought that drummed at his mind was one of them was pregnant so who's the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who's the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who's the baby-killer.
Another high-caliber bug droned past his face. Ralph didn't notice. Pickering was trying to lift the rifle with which he had undoubtedly killed Gretchen Tillbury and her pregnant friend. Ralph snatched it from his hands and turned it on him. Pickering shrieked with fear. The sound of it maddened Ralph even more, and he forgot the promise he had made to Lois. He raised the rifle, fully meanin to empty it into the man who was now cringing abjectly against the wall (in the heat of the moment it occurred to neither of them that there was currently no clip in the gun), but before he could pull the trigger he was distracted by a brilliant swarm of light bleeding into the air beside him. At first it was without shape, a fabulous kaleidoscope whose colors had somehow escaped the tube which was supposed to contain them, and then it took on the form of a woman with a long, gauzy gray ribbon rising from her head.
["Don't kill him! Ralph, please don't kill him!
For a moment he could see the blackboard and read the quote chalked on it right through her, and then the colors became her clothes and hair and skin as she came all the way down. Pickering stared at her in cross-eyed terror. He shrieked again, and the crotch of his army fatigue pants darkened. He stuck his fingers into his mouth, as if to stifle the sound he was making. "A ghose!" he screamed through his mouthful of fingers. "A Hennurt'on anna ghose." Lois ignored him and grabbed the barrel of the rifle. "Don't kill him, Ralph! Don't!"
Ralph was suddenly furious with her, too. "Don't you understand, Lois? Don't you get it? He understood what he was doing! On some level, he did understand-I saw it in his goddam aura."
"It doesn't matter," she said, still holding the barrel of the rifle down so it pointed at the floor. "It doesn't matter what he did or didn't understand. We mustn't do what they do. We mustn't be what they are."