arms outstretched in an effort to maintain balance. It had to be Gladys.
This can’t be happening, he thought.
But it was. Front Half rose higher, crunching and snapping as it parted company with the earth. It blotted out the moon, then dipped like the nose of a huge and clumsy helicopter. Gladys went flying. Stackhouse heard her scream as she disappeared into the shadows. On the admin building, Zeke and Dr. Richardson dropped their guns and cringed against the parapet, staring up at something out of a dream: a building that was slowly climbing into the sky, shedding glass and chunks of cinderblock. It pulled most of the playground’s chainlink fence with it. Water from broken pipes poured from the building’s tangled underside.
The cigarette vending machine tumbled from the broken door of the West Wing lounge into the playground. George Iles, gaping at the underside of Front Half as it rose into the sky, would have been crushed by it if Nicky hadn’t yanked him out of the way.
Doug the chef and Chad the caretaker came through the screening trees, their necks craned, their mouths open, their guns hanging from their hands. They might have assumed that anyone in the bullet-riddled Suburban was dead; more likely, they had forgotten it entirely in their wonder and dismay.
Now the bottom of Front Half was above the admin building’s roof. It came on with the stately, cumbersome grace of an eighteenth-century Royal Navy gunship under sail in a light breeze. Insulation and wires, some still sparking, dangled like broken umbilical cords. A jutting piece of pipe scraped off a ventilation housing. Zeke the Greek and Dr. Felicia Richardson saw it coming and ran for the hatch they had come up through. Zeke made it; Dr. Richardson did not. She put her arms over her head in a gesture of protection that was both instinctive and pitiful.
That was when the access tunnel—weakened by years of neglect and the cataclysmic levitation of Front Half—collapsed, crushing children who were already dying of chlorine poisoning and mental overload. They maintained their circle until the end, and as the roof came down, Avery Dixon had one final thought, both clear and calm: I loved having friends.
26
Tim didn’t remember getting out of the Suburban. He was fully occupied with trying to process what he was seeing: a huge building floating in the air and sliding over a smaller building, eclipsing it. He saw a figure on the roof of that smaller building put its hands over its head. Then there was a muffled crumping sound from somewhere behind this incredible David Copperfield illusion, a great cloud of dust arose . . . and the floating building dropped like a rock.
A huge thud shook the ground and made Tim stagger. There was no way the smaller building—offices, Tim supposed—could take the weight. It exploded outward in all directions, spraying wood and concrete and glass. More dust billowed up, enough to obscure the moon. The bus alarm (who knew they had them?) went off, making a WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP sound. The person who had been on the roof was dead, of course, and anyone who had still been inside was now nothing but jelly.
“Tim!” Luke had grabbed his arm. “Tim!” He pointed to the two men who had come out of the trees. One was still staring at the ruins, but the other was raising a large pistol. Very slowly, as if in a dream.
Tim raised his own gun, and a lot faster. “Don’t do it. Put them down.”
They looked at him, dazed, then did as he said.
“Now walk to the flagpole.”
“Is it over?” one of the men asked. “Please tell me it’s over.”
“I think so,” Luke said. “Do what my friend says.”
They plodded through the billowing dust toward the flagpole and the bus. Luke picked up their guns, thought about tossing them into the Suburban, then realized they wouldn’t be driving that bullet-riddled, blood-spattered vehicle anywhere. He kept one of the automatics. The other he threw into the woods.
27
Stackhouse took a moment to watch Chad and Chef Doug walk toward him, then turned to regard the ruins of his life.
But who could have known? he thought. Who could have known they had access to enough power to levitate a building? Not Mrs. Sigsby, not Evans, not Heckle and Jeckle, not Donkey Kong—wherever he is tonight—and certainly not me. We thought we were working with high voltage, when in fact all we tapped was a trickle current. The joke was on us.
There was a