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He stood in snow al street shoes, no boots, and he felt as if he round He looked around the clearing, hoping for inspiration, for a twinge of intuition, but at last he chose a direction at rando for a deer trail or other natural course that would provide hih the forest His entire left side from neck to waist throbbed with pain He hoped that the bullet, in passing through him, had torn no arteries and that the rate of blood loss was slow enough to allow him at least to reach Laura and see her face, the face he loved, one last time before he died
The one-year anniversary of Danny’s death fell on a Tuesday, and although Chris did not nificance of the date, he are of it The boy was unusually quiet He spentsilently with his Masters of the Universe action figures in the family room, which was the kind of play ordinarily characterized by vocal iines Later he sprawled on his bed in his roo comic books He resisted Laura’s every effort to draw him out of his self-imposed isolation, which was probably for the best; any attempt she made to be cheerful would have been transparent, and he would have been further depressed by the perception that she was also struggling rievous loss
Thelood news that she had decided to , just to chat, as if she were unaware of the importance of the date Laura took the call in her office, where she was still struggling with the bile-black book that had occupied her for the past year
"Hey, Shane, guess what? Icontract, and ere at the sa an hors d’oeuvre in his orgeous He said he’d seen ood, and we talked-you believe this?-we est thing happened"
"You discovered that you’d undressed hiood, you know, still that cherub face ooned over twenty years ago but marked now by experience tres sophisticated and with an extre touch of sadness about his eyes, and he was enor At first maybe I did want to tear his clothes off, yeah, and live out the fantasy at last But then the longer we talked, the less he seeod, the more he seemed like a person, and in minutes, Shane, the myth evaporated, and he was just this very nice, attractive, ed man Nohat do you make of that?"
"What am I supposed to make of it?"
"I don’t know," Thel legend continue to awe you longer than twenty minutes after you meet him? I mean, I’ve odlike, but this was McCartney"
"Well, if you want ical stature says nothing negative about him, but it says plenty positive about you You’ve achieved a new ive up watching old Three Stooges es are per of the past for you"
By the ti slightly better, so she switched from the bile-black book to the tale about Sir Tommy Toad She had written only two sentences of the children’s story when the night beyond the as lit by a bolt of lightning bright enough to spark dire thoughts of nuclear holocaust The subsequent thunderclap shook the house from roof to foundation, as if a wrecker’s ball had slammed into one of the walls She came to her feet with a start, so surprised that she did not even hit the "save" key on the co the s as luminous as television screens, and the thunder that folloas louder than the first explosion
"Mo in the doorway "It’s okay," she said He ran to her She sat in the spring-backed arht Don’t be afraid, honey"
"But it’s not raining," he said "Why’s it boo?"
Outside, an incredible series of lightning bolts and overlapping thunderclaps continued for nearly a reat, Laura was able to i about in huge chunks like fragshell
Before he walked fivein which he had arrived, Stefan was forced to pause and lean against the thick trunk of a pine whose branches began just above his head The pain of his wound wrung strea in the bitter January cold, too dizzy to stand up, yet terrified of sitting down and falling into an endless sleep With the drooping boughs :hat mammoth pine overhead and all around, he felt as if he had taken refuge under Death’s black robe, fro Chris to bed for the night, she made sundaes for them with coconut-almond ice cream and Hershey’s syrup They ate at the kitchen table, and the boy’s depression see the end of that sad anniversary with such drama, the bizarre weather phenohts of death and into the conte that had crackled down a kite string and into Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory in the old James Whale filo, and of the lightning that had frightened Donald Duck in a Disney cartoon, and of the stor which Cruella DeVille had posed such a dire threat to the title-role puppies
By the tiht, he was approaching sleep with a smile-a half shed upon his face all day She sat in a chair by the side of his bed until he was fast asleep, though he was no longer afraid and did not require her presence She stayed simply because she needed to look at him for a while
She returned to her office at nine-fifteen, but before going to the word processor, she stopped at aand stared out at the snoathed front lawn, at the black ribbon of the graveled driveway leading to the distant state route, and up at the starless night sky So deeply disturbed her: not that it had been so strange, not that it had been potentially destructive, but that the unprecedented and almost supernatural power of it had been so witnessed a similar stormy display on another occasion, but she could not re, akin to deja vu, and it would not fade
She went into the master bedroom and checked the security-control panel in her closet to be sure the peried From beneath the bed, she withdrew the Uzi, which had an extended ht, alloy-jacketed rounds She took the gun back to her office and put it on the floor by her chair
She was about to sit dohen lightning split the night again, frightening her, and it was followed at once by a crack of thunder she felt in her bones Another bolt and another and another blazed in the s like a series of leering, ghostly faces forht
As the heavens quaked with scintillant shudders, Laura hurried to Chris’s roo and thunder were shockingly more violent than they had been previously, the boy was not awakened, perhaps because the din see about Dalain, no rain fell