Newt joined his voice with Dick's. Kyle was dead, Adley badly burned. Nevertheless, Ad joined his own mortally wounded voice with theirs:
Get him before he can get to the ship! He's still alive! Get him before he can get to the ship! Before he can get to the ship!
The Tommyknockers had taken a mauling. That fifteen of them had been flash-fried in Bobbi's yard was not very important. But Bobbi was dead; Kyle was dead; Adley soon would be; the transformer had been destroyed just when the border-closing had rendered their need for it critical. And Gardener was still alive. Incredibly, Gardener was still alive.
Perhaps worst of all, the wind was freshening.
31
Get him, and get him quick.
On the net; the Tommyknockers were on the net.
They came across the fields; came toward the spreading fire.
QUICK!
Dick Allison turned toward town and the net turned with him like a radar dish. He sensed Hazel's dumb amazement at the turn of events.
He
(the net)
brushed that aside.
Whatever you got out that way, Hazel: send it at him.
Dick turned toward Newt.
You didn't have to push me so effing hard, Newt said sulkily, and wiped a drip of blood from his chin.
'Fuck you,' Dick said deliberately. 'Let's get that sonofawhore.'
32
The whirligig, dead now, had started a fire that was spreading out from Bobbi's house in a shape which resembled a lady's fan - a fire-fan. Bobbi's house, now only black bones shimmering in a red pillar of fire, was at its point of origination. The wings were spreading through the obscenely overgrown garden, and as the mutated plants burned, the fire glowed green.
Passing between the flames was Jim Gardener, crowned with burning hair. His shirt was smoldering; one of the sleeves squirted smoke and then burst into flames. He slapped them out. He wanted to scream but he seemed too tired, too woozy.
I have been badly used, Gardener thought, and it is no one's fault but my own.
He reached the far edge of the garden. The Tomcat lurched and waddled down a mild slope and into the woods. The low, scrubby bushes on the sides of the trail were on fire, and low runners of flame were already spreading into Big Injun Woods. Gard cared little for them. The feeling that he was going to be microwaved was passing. He whacked repeatedly at his head. His hair smelled dreadful - like food fried by a child.
Green fire sizzled over his right shoulder as the Tomcat entered the woods.
Gard flinched to the left and ducked. He looked back and there was Hank Buck, with his own Zap Gun. Hank had ridden a motorcycle out to the farm, had dumped it in the same field where Nancy Voss had come to ruin, had picked himself up and started to run.
Gardener turned around, held the Sonic Space Blaster out straight in his right hand, and gripped his right wrist with his left hand. He pulled the trigger. The pencil-beam stabbed out, and more by good luck than any sort of shooting skill, he struck Hank high up on the left side of the chest. There was the sound of frying bacon. Green death splashed up onto Hank's face and he fell over.
Gardener turned forward again and saw the Tomcat moving toward a large burning spruce at a complacent five miles an hour. He hauled on the wheel with both blistered hands, barely avoiding a head-on collision. One of the Tomcat's pillow tires scraped the trunk of the tree, and for a moment Gardener found himself shoving away blazing, fragrant spruce boughs like a man fighting his way through burning curtains. The little tractor tilted sickeningly, tottered ... then thumped back down again. Gardener pushed the throttle-lever as far as it would go and hung on as the Tomcat made its way up the path into the woods.
33
They came. The Tommyknockers came. They came along the widening wings of that fiery lady's fan, and Dick Allison began to feel a kind of furious desperation, because they weren't going to catch him. Gardener had been able to use the path; that had made all the difference. Three minutes later - maybe even one - and Gardener really would have been cooked. Four of the Tommyknockers (Mrs Eileen Crenshaw and the Reverend Goohringer among them) tried to follow him that way and were burned alive. Two of the gigantic, flaming corn plants toppled onto the Crenshaw woman, who shrieked and let go of the dune-buggy's steering bar. The dune-buggy promptly drove