fully automatic machine guns in five minutes if they work quickly. Jack watches from the open double doors long enough to be sure they’re both occupied, and then he walks to the pile of ammonium nitrate against the wall. There’s a box of kitchen matches on the worktable, next to an oil lamp. Jack lights the fuse on his improvised pipe bomb, constructed just exactly the way Connor taught him.
Jack walks back to the big double doors of the barn like a sleepwalker, but he isn’t sleepwalking—he’s got his eyes wide open, and the morning is bright and blue and clear. He swings the doors shut and locks them with the big Yale padlock. The two men won’t be able to get out the side door either. He has already backed his father’s Ford F-150 against it, so it can’t be forced open.
He strolls down the gravel lane, a thirteen-year-old American boy in Converse All-Stars, with dirt on his nose and blood on his hands. A child of the land that grew him.
Behind him someone shouts in surprise. Connor? One of them throws himself into the double doors, which shudder and quake and remain closed. His father yells Jack’s name. Now both of them hit the double doors, with a splintering crunch. A few pieces of wood go flying, but the lock holds. Jack turns back, halfway down the drive, to see if they will kick their way out—and that’s when he sees ropy greenish vines, slithering up out of the soil, long cables of root that crawl up the sides of the barn, run across the double doors in trembling threads, binding them shut. The next time the two men hit the doors, the panels barely move. The cords draw tight around the base of the barn, a net around a fish. Jack smiles and rubs at the queer feeling in the left side of his head. She promised she’d help.
The barn disappears in a silent, obliterating flash. A gust of wind picks Jack up like a leaf and flings him weightlessly into the sky.
22.
When Jack McCourt comes to, he is lying in a great feather bed of violet blooms. He has wound up in one of Beth’s flower beds, out in front of the cottage she shared with Connor. Sweet green fronds stroke his cheeks, and a fuzzy flower kisses his left temple. He can’t hear a thing, and there’s a trickle of blood running from one ear. He can taste blood in his mouth.
The barn is gone. It is hard to even look at the place where it stood. There is an orchid of light rising there, a stem of fire, with petals of flame spreading out from the top. The F-150 has been tossed a hundred feet to the east, a black charred wreck flipped on its side. One half of the farmhouse has collapsed in on itself, a balsa-wood dollhouse that has been kicked by a giant. Blackened beams stick out of the ruin, trickling smoke into the brightness of the day.
A part of Jack doesn’t want to get up. He has not felt so at peace since the morning he left the house with Bloom to go and see her family. There among the flowers, he feels as happy and comfortable as a child curled up beside his mother on a lazy summer morning. When he forces himself up at last, it’s with a lazy sigh of regret.
His balance is screwy. He reels halfway across the little dirt drive and then catches himself against the hood of Connor’s sweet ’71 Road Runner, the car he’s always wanted. Well. It’s his now. He can’t have Connor’s cool carbon-fiber leg, and he doesn’t yearn for Beth anymore, but the car is all his. He may only be thirteen, but he’s tall enough to reach the pedals and is already a perfectly competent driver.
Jack steers the Road Runner down the drive and onto the lane, away from the collapsing farmhouse and the ruin of the barn. The barn isn’t a barn at all anymore. It’s a crater: a dish filled with flames. Shingles are still falling, along with sparks.
He rolls down his window and swings out onto the highway. Warm air rushes in, carrying a blast of the fresh, fragrant summer, every tree in full green flourish. Sunlight embraces him, as warm and gentle and kind as a mother’s touch.
Jack McCourt has not been behind the wheel long, though, when he sees a woman in a wide-brimmed