any speed. It jerked to a stop, jerked forward, stopped, jerked forward again. It rocked drunkenly from side to side. The buzzing grew louder. Runnels of soda fell from the access door in sticky rivulets.
As it came at him, Torgeson pivoted easily away.
'Drop, Andy!' Weems yelled.
Torgeson dropped. Claudell Weems shot the Coke machine three more times, firing as fast as he could work the pump action. On the third shot, something inside it exploded. Black smoke and a brief belch of fire licked out one side of the machine.
Green fire, Torgeson saw. Green.
The Coke machine thumped to the road about twenty feet from Leandro's body. It tottered, then fell forward with a hollow bang. Broken glass jingled. There were three seconds of silence; then a long metallic croaking sound. It stopped. The Coca-Cola machine lay dead across the yellow line in the middle of Route 9. Its red-and-white hide was full of bullet-holes. Smoke poured from it.
'I have just drawn my weapon and killed a Coke machine, sir,' Claudell Weems said hollowly inside his mask.
Andy Torgeson turned toward him. 'And you never even ordered it to a halt, or fired a warning shot. Probably draw a suspension, you dumb shit.'
They stared at each other over the masks, and started to laugh. Claudell Weems laughed so hard he was nearly doubled over.
Green, Torgeson thought, and although he was still laughing, nothing felt very funny inside, where he lived. The fire that came out of that fucker was green.
'Never fired a warning shot,' Weems cackled breathlessly. 'No, I never did. Never did at all.'
'Violated its fucking civil rights,' Torgeson said.
Have to be an investigation!' Weems laughed. 'Yo, baby! I mean mean . . .' He tottered on his feet, and there was a lot of Claudell Weems to totter. Torgeson suddenly realized he was dizzy himself. They were breathing pure oxygen ... hyperventilating.
'Stop laughing!' he shouted, and his voice seemed to come from a long distance away. 'Claudell, stop laughing!'
He somehow crossed the distance to where Weems was swaying woozily on his feet. The distance seemed very wide. When he was almost there, he stumbled. Weems somehow caught him and for a moment they stood swaying drunkenly, arms about each other, like Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed at the end of the first fight.
'You pullin' me down, asshole,' Weems muttered.
'Fuck you, you started it.' The world came into focus, wavered, steadied. Slow breaths, Torgeson told himself. Big slow breaths, easy respiration. Be still, my beating heart. That last made him giggle again, but he got hold of it.
The two of them wavered back toward the cruiser, arms about each other's waists.
'The body,' Weems said.
'Leave it for now. He's dead. We're not. Yet.'
'Look,' Weems said as they passed Leandro's remains. 'The bubs! They're out!'
The blue flashers, called bubbles or bubs by the troopers, on top of the cruiser were dead and dark. That wasn't supposed to be - leaving the flashers on at the scene of the accident was ingrained behavior.
'Did you - ' Torgeson began, and then stopped.
Something in the landscape had changed. The day had darkened, as it does when a large cloud floats over the sun or when an eclipse begins. They looked at each other, then turned. Torgeson saw it first, a great silvery shape emerging from the boil of smoke. Its huge leading edge gleamed.
'Holy Christ!' Weems almost squealed. His large brown hand found Torgeson's arm and bore down upon it.
Torgeson barely felt it, although there would be bruises in the shape of Weems's hand the next day.
Up it came ... and up ... and up. Smoke-hazed sunlight glinted on its silvery-metallic surface. It rose on an angle of roughly forty degrees. It seemed to be wavering slightly, although that could have been an illusion or heat-haze.
Of course the whole thing was an illusion - had to be. No way it could be real, Torgeson thought; it was oxygen rapture.
But how can we both be having the same hallucination?
'Oh my dear God,' Weems groaned, 'it's a flyin' saucer, Andy, it's a fuckin' flyin' saucer!'
But to Torgeson it did not look like a saucer. It looked like the underside of an Army mess-plate - the biggest damn plate in creation. Up it came and up it came; you thought it must end, that a hazy margin of sky must appear between it and the rafters of smoke, but still it came, dwarfing the trees, dwarfing all the landscape. It made the smoke of the forest fire look like a