of Ed's Adam's apple. Ed fell back against the cockpit wall, eyes bulging with pain and dismay and bewilderment, hands going to his throat. A thick gagging noise came from somewhere deep inside him. It sounded like some heavy piece of machinery in the process of stripping its gears.
Ralph shoved himself forward over Ed's lap and saw the Civic Center now leaping up toward the airplane. He turned the wheel all the way to the left again and below him-directly below him-the Civic Center again began to rotate toward the side of the Cherokee's soon-to-be-defunct windshield... but it moved with agonizing slowness.
Ralph realized he could smell something in the cockpit-some faint aroma both sweet and familiar. Before he could think what it might be, he saw something that distracted him completely. It was the Hoodsie Ice Cream wagon that sometimes cruised along Harris Avenue, tinkling its cheery little bell.
My God, Ralph thought, more in awe than in fear. I think I'm going to wind up in the deep freeze along with the Creamsicles and Hoodsie Rockets.
That sweet smell was stronger, and as hands suddenly seized his shoulders, Ralph realized it was Lois Chasse's perfume.
"Come up!" she screamed. "Ralph, you dummy, you have to-" He didn't think about it; he just did it. The thing in his mind clenched, the blink happened, and he heard the rest of what she had to say in that eerie, penetrating way that was more thought than speech.
["-come up! Push with your feet." Too late, he thought, but he did as she said nevertheless, planting his feet against the base of the radically canted instrument panel and shoving as hard as he could. He felt Lois rising up through the column of existence with him as the Cherokee shot through the last hundred feet between it and the ground, and as they zoomed upward, he felt a sudden blast of Lois-power wrap itself around him and yank him backward like a bungee cord. There was a brief, nauseating sensation of flying in two directions at the same time.
Ralph caught a final glimpse of Ed Deepneau slumped against the sidewall of the cockpit, but in a very real sense he did not see him at all. The thunderstruck yellow-gray aura was gone. Ed was also gone, buried in a deathbag as black as midnight in hell.
Then he and Lois were falling as well as flying.
Part III THE CRIMSON KING CHAPTER 30
Just before the explosion came, Susan Day, standing in a hot white spotlight at the front of the Civic Center and now living through the last few seconds of her fabulous, provocative life, was saying: "I haven't come to Derry to heal you, hector you, or to incite you, but to mourn with you-this is a situation which has passed far beyond political considerations. There is no right in violence, nor refuge in self-righteousness. I am here to ask that you put your positions and your rhetoric aside and help each other find a way to help each other.
To turn away from the attractions of-" The high windows lining the south side of the auditorium suddenly lit up with a brilliant white glare and then blew inward.
The Cherokee missed the Hoodsie wagon, but that didn't save it.
The plane took one final half-turn in the air and then screwed itself into the parking lot about twenty-five feet from the fence where, earlier that day, Lois had paused to yank up her troublesome halfslip. The wings snapped off. The cockpit made a quick and violent journey back through the passenger section. The fuselage blew out with the fury of a bottle of champagne in a microwave oven. Glass flew.
The tail bent over the Cherokee's body like the stinger of a dying scorpion and impaled itself in the roof of a Dodge van with the words PROTECT WOMEN's IPJGHT TO CHOOSE! stencilled on the side. There was a bright and bitter crunch-clang that sounded like a dropped pile of scrap iron.
"Holy shi-" one of the cops posted on the edge of the parking lot began, and then the C-4 inside the cardboard box flew free like a big gray glob of phlegm and struck the remains of the instrument panel where several "hot" wires rammed into it like hypo needles.
The plastique exploded with an ear-crunching thud, flash-frying the Bassey Park racetrack and turning the parking lot into a hurricane of white light and shrapnel. John Leydecker, who had been standing under the Civic Center's cement canopy-and talking to a