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Show Acting Alone Page 363 rang them all up on his brain's inflamed cash register. He imagined that he could get the Army-issue gas stove in Shanny's trailer hot enough to melt the ornate objects into unidentifiable ingots. Yeah, boiling pots of holy bullion in the kitchenette, the clear fuzz on Shanny's naked arms beading up in the heavy yellow steam - A blast of rank wind suddenly hit. It caught the double armload of garage-door-sized Poes like a sail and sped him away from the chapel doors. Sam scrambled across the parking lot, trying to keep up, being pulled along in a direction not necessarily his of his own choosing. Something greenish and crawly about the air out here, as it thrashed around the fake medieval turrets overhead, convinced him that the sirens were heralding some kind of real event, after all. A Utah boy, Sam feared earthquakes more than tornadoes, and tornadoes more than Soviets. He'd always had a hunch that Physical Nature was out to get him, Sam, personally. Nature horrified Sam. People merely repelled him. So, to keep his knees and heart from buckling in horror before he could reach his new, wind-selected goal, he forced his ears to select out certain sounds from among the general roar and scream, to concentrate on those. He tried only to hear those noises that could make all this seem a mere man-made, as opposed to natural, catastrophe: the unnaturally rhythmic firecracker-like bursts from up the hill, for example; and, beneath the thickest, topmost layer of sound, something that sounded encouragingly like human screams and war-whoops, far away, diminished by the distance to a chillingly gentle sigh. Sam's basketball shoes scrubbed along through the gravel, his eyes |
