Gretchen raised an eyebrow. "What you mean 'we,' paleface?"

"She's kidding," Pete a.s.sured me.

"Bulls.h.i.t,"Gretchen said.

"Any ideas?" I asked. Pete looked around at the mob. "Nothing on the pavement is moving, so let's go off-road until we get around the jam."

"And give those holy rollers the chance to mob our car and cannibalize us?" Gretchen asked.

"I guess it could work out that way," Pete said. "But if Oliver goes first, and fast, they'll jump out of the way. Then we can come along after, and they'll jump farther. Keep in mind that this is only a theory."

"Hey, you!" a voice bellowed.

I turned and saw that it was the ruddy man in the Jeep. His dull gaze had become a malevolent glare.

"Yeah, you!" he roared. "Ain't that bike an Ariel?"

I rapped out Peggy Sue's engine, skidded around the Kamikaze's front end, and plunged into the crowded ditch.

Pete's plan worked until I had gained about fifty feet, and then I was yanked off my motorcycle and hoisted into the air. I struggled, but could not break free.

"We have him!" someone screamed. "We have Vale the Antichrist! Find a Corps minister!"

"Let him be! He's a prophet!" someone else screamed.

"Satanist!"

"Communist tool!"

"Kill him!"

"But don't let him bleed! You'll get AIDS!"

They pounded on my helmet, ripped the Moonsuit with their fingernails, and flung me into the air over and over again. Peggy Sue disappeared under a sea of flesh.

"Leave my Ariel alone!" I cried.

The Kamikaze was mobbed. A man swung a tire iron against the pa.s.senger window, knocking a hole in the center and cracking the rest into greenish rectangles. Before he could swing again, Gretchen reached through the hole, grabbed his hair, and smacked his head against the roof. As he fell away, she s.n.a.t.c.hed the tire iron from him and pushed her head and shoulders out through the rectangles, yelling, "Don't any of you people havejobs?"

Pete pulled her inside, and the Barracuda's 426 roared. Its rear tires spun, flinging chunks of mud, and it charged the maniacs who were tossing me like pizza dough. They dropped me, and I landed headfirst on the Kamikaze's hood as the car stopped. Dazed, I rose to my hands and knees and found myself gazing through the windshield at Gretchen, who screamed, "Duck!"

The Barracuda lurched, I fell flat, and a metal fence post swept through the s.p.a.ce where my head had been. It hit the windshield, which became a brilliant white spiderweb, and I rolled off the fender to lie onmy back in the mud.

Above me stood the ruddy man who had been in the Jeep. He spat tobacco juice onto the Moonsuit, then raised his fence post over my faceplate. At that moment Gretchen's tire iron thunked him across the bridge of his nose. He stumbled backward, and I scrambled to my feet and tried to dive into the car through the now-gla.s.sless pa.s.senger window. I made it halfway, ending up with my head in Gretchen's lap.

Pete hit the gas, and the Kamikaze slogged forward. Outside, hands grabbed my right foot, and I kicked something soft with my left. The hands let go.

"Dorkhead jerkface!" Gretchen yelled, prodding me with the tire iron. "Get off!"

I floundered into the back seat, and when I faced forward, I saw that the starred windshield was completely opaque. Pete had rolled down his side window and was driving with his head outside. A few of the maniacs were throwing things at him, but most were either diving out of our way or fighting each other. From what I could hear, it seemed that a large number of Bill w.i.l.l.yites were busy beating the h.e.l.l out of a group of fringe cultists who thought I was G.o.d's personal representative on Earth. That battle, I was sure, was all that kept the mob from rushing the Barracuda and stomping it flat. We began to pick up speed, sliding and fishtailing on the mud and flattened gra.s.s, and I saw that other vehicles were now opting for the ditch as well, increasing the chaos and helping to distract the maniacs.

Several hundred yards farther on, we discovered that the traffic jam was the result of three overturned church buses and a number of smaller vehicles (including an Oklahoma Highway Patrol cruiser) that were crammed against them. As soon as we were past that mess, Pete took the Kamikaze up to the pavement and continued north. The car accelerated to almost eighty, but after only a few miles, the right rear tire collapsed. The Barracuda almost flipped, but Pete struggled with the wheel and was able to bring the car to a stop on the shoulder. The three of us clambered out.

Pete had a gash on his forehead, but other than wiping it with the back of his hand, he ignored it. "Break out the windshield so we can see to drive," he said. Gretchen went to work on the gla.s.s with her tire iron while Pete sprinted to open the trunk.

I followed, intending to help, but as he pulled out the spare tire and jack, I looked to the south and saw smoke rising from near the spot where I had lost my bike.

The w.i.l.l.yites were burning Buddy Holly's motorcycle.

Pete tackled me from behind as I ran, and I fell into the ditch. He threw me onto my back, put a knee on my chest, and held a tire cross against the sky as if about to brain me.

"Every religious movement has its martyrs," he said.

Then he dragged me back to the Kamikaze and had Gretchen hold me while he jacked up the car and began removing the flat. I looked away and stared at the smoke.

"If your mother's aliens are going to rescue their prophet," Pete said, kicking the flat away, "they might want to show up now."

I heard the whine of approaching engines, looked down from the smoke, and saw cars and pickup trucks speeding toward us. Wild-eyed men and women leaned out of the windows waving ax handles,shovels, baseball bats, Bibles, and shotguns.

The first three cars were moving so fast that they were a quarter mile past us before they came to a stop.

The fourth one, though, was approaching more slowly. It was a four-wheel-drive pickup that had men in camouflage fatigues hanging all over it. They aimed rifles at us and, although they were still two hundred yards away, started firing. Gretchen yelled a garbled obscenity, released me, and ran for the Barracuda's driver's seat.

Pete was spinning the fourth of five lug nuts onto the new wheel. It was enough. I leaned down and grabbed the tire cross from him, then whirled like a discus thrower and flung it at the approaching truck.

It spun toward the windshield like a giant shurakin, and the truck swerved into the gra.s.sy median, dropping paramilitary goons like dead leaves. The cross bounced off the pavement with a triumphant clang and buried itself in the grill of the next car, which also headed for the median, causing more problems for the goons.

I hoped that none of them were hurt, but if any were, better them than me. That wasn't an appropriate att.i.tude for a prophet and potential martyr, I suppose, but screw that. I'm a consumer electronics salesman, and consumer electronics salesmen don't make good martyrs. We've seen too many replays of The Terminator on the big-screen Mitsubishis in the showroom.

As the second vehicle hit the median, Pete grasped my wrist and pulled me toward the Barracuda's pa.s.senger door, leaving the jack up and the trunk open. Gretchen was already in the driver's seat, so I dove into the back while Pete jumped in beside her. The left rear tire squealed, and we whanged off the jack, heading toward the three cars that had overshot us. They had turned around and were coming at us head-on in a V formation.

"You're going south in the northbound lane!" Gretchen yelled at them. "Peabrains!" She put the Kamikaze on the dotted line, closed her eyes, and punched it.

I closed my eyes as well and experienced a stomach-knotting sensation of deja vu. I felt as I had when I'd pa.s.sed the SkyVue Drive-In Theater and Satellite Dish Emporium in El Dorado-as if there were something important going on, something that I should know about. That struck me as weird, because what I should have been feeling was abject fear at my impending death.

Several seconds past the moment when I should have been crushed by compacting metal, I opened my eyes. The highway ahead was clear, and when I looked back past the bobbing trunk lid, I saw the three cars far behind us. They were blocking the road in front of the rest of our pursuers.

I pulled off my helmet. "How'd you do that?" I asked Gretchen, shouting to be heard over the blast of air that was the result of no longer having a windshield.

"I don't know," she answered. "I wasn't looking."

"I was," Pete said, blotting his forehead with a handkerchief, "but I've had a nasty blow to the head, so what I saw didn't make sense."

I would have been surprised if it had. "What did you see?"

He put the bloodstained handkerchief into his jacket pocket. "A silver blob of light appeared between us and them," he said. "Sort of like a fluorescent spoon the size of a boxcar. When it disappeared, they were behind us." He grinned at me. "Guess those aliens showed up in the nick of time after all. Just likeJohn Wayne and the cavalry."

Maybe not just like. But close enough.

Traffic reappeared as we pa.s.sed the next three exits, and by the time we reached Guthrie, the streams of vehicles were as thick and single-minded as ants. Without the usual soap operas and game shows to watch, everyone who was normally at home on Monday afternoons had decided to go for a drive. No one seemed to be pursuing us, though, so instead of trying to force our way through, we accepted the traffic as natural cover. The Kamikaze was banged up and windshieldless, but it didn't look much worse than some of the cars around us. And without Peggy Sue, we weren't as conspicuous as we had been.

I didn't want to think about Peggy Sue.

"I think we're rid of the Bald Avenger," Gretchen said. "I haven't seen that Jag since before Oklahoma City."

Pete chuckled. "Those w.i.l.l.yites probably tore it to bits. I doubt that they care much for machines made in England."

I bit my lip.

Pete turned on the dash radio, and the first words out of it were that the stock market was crashing. No one in the investment community was able to think about anything except what had happened to their TV sets, and Wall Street was going to h.e.l.l. By the end of the day, the Dow would be down by anywhere from six hundred to seventeen hundred points.

"Whatever that means," I said.

Gretchen began to explain the Dow and the implications of such a drop, but I tuned her out. How it was happening and what it meant didn't matter; all that mattered was that it would be blamed on me. Buddy had named me as the person to contact "for a.s.sistance," and now the ma.s.s-communication-based American and world economies were in flames. The Authorities would hang me from a flagpole and play tetherball.

Well, they could go ahead and do it for all I cared. Buddy Holly, Ready Teddy, and Mother were all dead; Julie "Eat s.h.i.t and die, Oliver" Calloway had left me and wasn't coming back; any chance I might have had with Sharon Sharpston had been fantasy; my home was probably splinters on the ground; and my beloved Ariel had been burned by religious zealots. I'd had enough. I didn't even want to go back to Topeka. Pete had to be wrong about my SkyVue dish being a possible key-and even if he wasn't, the odds were good that the dish didn't even exist anymore.

So I wouldn't go home. I would give myself up.

But first, I would go to El Dorado. I had to know why the SkyVue Drive-in Theater had seemed so important to me when Peggy Sue and I had pa.s.sed by.

"Highway patrol," Pete said, pointing at the southbound lanes. "He's slowing down. Must've gotten word on us from the Oklahoma City jam." Gretchen looked at the mirror. "s.h.i.t! There go his lights!" The Kamikaze accelerated.

I scanned the blurring road signs. "Exit for State 33 East coming up," I said. "Take it."

"Who died and made you G.o.d?" Gretchen snapped.

I had an answer, but I kept it to myself.

"It's a good idea," Pete said, looking back. "The hypo's having trouble getting across, so we might be able to exit without his seeing it."

Gretchen scooted the car in front of a semi and took the exit. As we sped down the ramp, the semi blocked our view of the hypo, and thus his view of us. Three miles later, we were sure that we had lost him.

"We'll swing north again soon," Pete said, opening the glove box and digging out a map. "Maybe U.S.

177 or something near it."

"I want to go through El Dorado, Kansas," I said.

"How come?"

"That's where Mother bought our satellite dish. I have a feeling about the place." I didn't tell him that I was planning to give myself up there.

He looked at the map. "It's on the way. Want me to drive yet, Gretchen?"

She smiled at him. "I'm okay. Except for my hands, which are freezing."

I pulled off my gloves and handed them up. Now that my Ariel was gone, I wouldn't be needing them.

"Thanks," she said grudgingly, letting Pete steer as she put them on. She glanced at me in the rearview mirror. "Hey, are you crying?"

I looked out the window and murmured, "Peggy Sue." Like everything else that mattered, she was gone.

SHARON.

Notes, continued...

We entered Oklahoma City on I-40 early Monday afternoon. Bruce was driving, and he switched to I-35 to head north despite what we had encountered there the day before. I tried to convince him to go another way, but he argued that the ma.s.s revival that had slowed traffic to a crawl on Sunday could not still be in existence on Monday. In a way, he was right. The revival had metamorphosed into an ongoing mob riot and pileup. Bruce made some headway by driving on the shoulder for a half mile, but then even the shoulder was blocked.

"Why don't the police do something?" Bruce fumed. "They wouldn't have any more luck penetrating this than we've had," I said. "Nor would the National Guard."

Bruce steered the car off the road into the shallow ditch, honking for people to get out of the way.

"What are you trying to do?" I shouted. "You're going to hit somebody and be sued!"

"I'd like to see 'em try! I'm a f.u.c.kin'lawyer!"

I stared at him. His eyes were wide, his nostrils were flared, and his mouth was set in a crooked smile.

This was not the same Bruce who had left Topeka with me, or even who had been held by the Texas Rangers with me. I was strangely attracted to him even as I was enraged by his recklessness.

Our Chevrolet churned along the slope at eight or nine miles per hour and was pelted with beer cans and curses from the televisionless hordes who scrambled out of its path. Up on the pavement, a number of other drivers were also steering their automobiles into the ditch. I began to fear that instead of escaping the traffic jam, we were expanding its boundaries. In addition, the a.s.sembled Willard worshipers were furious at us. I even saw one car overturned by the mob.

Then I spotted the motorcycle. It was lying on its side, and the crowd was piling sticks, paper, cardboard, and brush on a ring of bare earth surrounding it.

It was Oliver's Ariel.

I grabbed Bruce's arm. Startled, he hit the brakes. A car that had come into the ditch behind us began honking, and there was the sound of a backfire.

"Look!" I cried, pointing at the motorcycle. We were some distance past it already, but what was happening was still obvious. "They're going to burn it!"

"So?"

"So it's Oliver's, and if it's here, so is he!They'll burn him too!"

I had no doubt that it was true. After all, that's what you do with witches, or with the Antichrist, or with extraterrestrials: You burn them. At least, that's what you do if you're a follower of the Reverend William Willard.

I reached for my door handle, intending to rush out and find Oliver, but stopped at the sound of another backfire-which I now realized was not a backfire at all, but a gunshot. Immediately following that sound, a bald-headed man appeared beside the motorcycle, waving a pistol at the crowd. They backed away a few steps, and he kicked some of the trash away from the cycle. Then, with surprising strength, he grasped a handlebar with his free hand and pulled the machine upright.

A burning sc.r.a.p arced from the mob, hit the trash, and set it ablaze. The bald man put his gun in his jacket, then jumped onto the motorcycle, started it, and plowed into the crowd, carrying sparks and flames with him. He disappeared in the swarming ma.s.s.

"Was that Vale?" Bruce asked. "Did he shave his head?" "How should I know? Follow him and let's find out!"

Bruce drove on. I didn't think that Oliver was the sort to shave his head or to brandish a gun... but I hadn't seen the bald man's face, so itcould have been him. He might have shaved his head to disguise himself, and almost anyone would start carrying a weapon if an entire nation called him a monster. Who knew what he'd been through the past three days?