Then, before he could even stand up, the body of Charles DeLillo sat up, gasped. The man pulled on his narrow tie, yanking it away from the wounds that covered his neck.

Bill stepped back, the red and gold lending speed to his steps. He felt the occult energies rejoicing within him. It pulsed into his hands, eager to bestow its gift on the other bodies.

"Like Jesus, Bill," shouted his wife. Even though her voice was at full-volume, it seemed muffled. "Jesus was one of us! He could raise the dead! Ha ha ha!"

Charles DeLillo jerked himself to his feet. His skinny legs wobbled. He yanked his tie as if he could keep himself upright, suspending himself away from the pile of bodies all around him. His bald spot, which Bill knew he was considering getting hair transplants to cover, shone in the firelight.

"Fuck!" shouted Charles DeLillo. "Fuck this!"

Bill felt himself floating backwards. He looked down, and saw that he was above the bodies again, the toes of his sneakers barely brushing them.

The red and gold made him reach down, bending sharply at the waist. He brushed the forehead of a familiar facea*the cocktail waitress in the green dress?a*and felt another surge animate her. Her name was Clarice Jones, and she was from Oregon, where she had been arrested twice for growing marijuana in her house. She had been sober for ten years, and was aware of the irony of her job, delivering drinks to drunks in a casino. She'd been composing her resignation speech when the blue knife slid through her neck, killing her instantly.

Now Clarice shrieked, her voice subhuman, and hauled herself to her feet. She ran towards the woods with a wobbly gait, thanks to having one bare foot and the other clad in a three-inch heel.

"Yes," Bill said to the red and gold. "That's it."

Bill watched himself move through the field of the dead. Some woman in a pink blouse jerked into life when his foot brushed her.

And he thought back to hours and long hours ago, when he passed the elderly couple in the truck, and sent out part of himself to wake up the man's ruined brain.

"I don't need to touch them," he reminded the red and gold.

The demon didn't need another hint.

Bill was briefly blinded by a red flash. For a second the light consumed his being, and then as quickly as it came it fled.

He blinked, rubbed his eyes.

And he saw that everyone was standing up.

His entire army. The old and the young and the gamblers and sinners and saints. All of them.

They faced the treeline. Names and stories and lives ran through Bill's brain in blast of energy, like a thousand television sets turned to full volume in a small room. Somehow the red and gold filtered through the noise, turning it into manageable streams of information before it scrambled his brain.

A torn-up directory of names, male and female: Jerusha Hoff, Michael McCain, Ferris Hickey, Delbert Anole, Imogen Zaragoza. He could have picked out any one of these names, and written a full biography. He knew that Michael McCain had a secret fascination for earthworms and other annelids, or that Imogen was for some reason afraid of the color purple. Or that Delbert had just won a modest amount on the slot machinesa*less than five hundred dollars, but it had been inordinately thrilling to him.

He knew all of them. Any one of the formerly-living people, with all their desires and loves and pains and successes. He knew them as well as if he'd lived their lives.

Bill bumped against something rough and unyielding. He reached behind him and realized that it was a tree. He'd spent much of the last couple of days with his back up against a tree, it seemed. At least it was something solid, something from the physical world upon which he could depend utterly.

He clutched at the bark, peeling some of it off with his fingertips.

He gazed downward. The red and gold had taken him halfway up the tree trunk, about ten feet. Of course his feet were not touching anything; not resting against a branch or other foothold.

He felt the red and gold, the demon of his heart and his mind, spread out beneath him like a layer of paint. It had covered the field, reaching out for all of the dead like he'd reached out to the man on the highway.

And now, as per its commands (his commands?), the dead were rushing forward.

"Holy Jesus," said Bill, as he saw the first wave of them break through the forest.

Then something bright caught his eye.

In the night sky, hanging over the tops of the trees like an ornament, he saw his wife's body.

Terris had spread her arms like she was being crucified. She hovered over the treeline, about twenty meters away. The firelight couldn't touch her, but her form was lit up as if she'd swallowed neon.

"Bill," said Terris/Constance. Despite the distance it was as if she whispered into his ear, tickling his earlobe with her breath. Bill shivered.

"It's starting," she said. "Look down."

At the treeline, his army had met with resistance.

They were the shadows standing next to his wife's body. The dark ones in the woods that had watched and waited, with glittering eyes and dead hearts. More people turned into the instruments of this lunatic battle.

The red and gold rejoiced within him and outside of him, its essence surging forward to meet the others. Its joy was as uncomplicated as a child's. To it, this was just another party.

"Party," said Bill.

He laughed so he wouldn't have to weep.

Thirty-Nine.

Constance had floated down closer to the collision of the bodies. Bill saw her smile of unholy joy as her light caught the faces of the dead.

"This is wonderful!" she shouted, waving her arms above her head.

And the came the noise. It was hundreds of voices, all of them shouting at the same time; a combination of male and female, shrill and deep, harsh and smooth. It was a demented hymn to the Devil, discordant and musical at the same time. Bill even felt the red and gold cringe at the sound, as it slammed into his eardrums that he was sharing with the damned thing.

"No," he said again, uselessly.

He saw a woman in a yellow dress rush from the forest, from Terris' army. She was bald, maybe from cancer and maybe by choice. The studs lining the cartilage of each ear made her think that it was probably by choice. And the yellow dress had a giant Misfits skull stenciled onto the skirt.

This girl chose her target: another woman, who had rot-colored hair that flowed down to her waist. Bill knew who it was: Melanie Germain, from San Diego. She had been visiting her parentsa*both of them botanists, both of them working for universities in Connecticuta*when her visit to the casino had been cut short by the blue blade. Melanie's favorite color was yellow, ironically the exact same shade as the dress of the woman who was charging her.

Melanie and miss yellow-dress slammed together as if they'd been ejected out of catapults. Melanie raised her fists and brought them down on her foe's shoulders. He could not hear yellow-dress' shoulder bones break above the din of battle, but imagined it well enough. The sleeves of the yellow dress pulled down over her pale arms, revealing arms with full sleeves of tattoos.

The yellow-dress punk screamed and opened her mouth. Her arms flopped at her sides as she shot forward like a striking cobra, attaching her teeth into Melanie's neck. Then it was Melanie's turn to scream, her voice as high and powerful as the girl in the yellow dress.

"No," said Bill.

His eyes twitched to the right, taking in another scene. As he watched he felt the red and the gold rejoicing, reveling in the carnage of the field.

A man in a blue oxford and black jeans had torn off the sleeves of his shirt, and now glittered in blood. Bill knew that the man's name was Gary Spooner, from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and he was an unemployed carpenter. Gary had gone to the casino that evening courtesy of his unemployment checka*he paid no rent, and lived at home with his parents.

And now Gary's torso glistened with blood, from the light cast by Constance's body. He had made his hands into claws. They were probably strong hands, from doing carpentry, covered with calluses and scars. But the fingernails were bitten down to the quick.

Gary lunged towards a woman wearing a filthy white sweatshirt with flowersa"and Bill recognized her as the woman who'd stood in the forest next to his wife's body. She stood on top of a stump, and had stripped off her glasses. In the light he saw her squinting. Somehow the smallness of her eyes made them conspicuous, if that made any sense.

And it was her eyes that Gary lunged for. The woman slapped at his hands as they reached her face, but she might as well have been trying to slap away a couple of boulders dropped from a great height onto her head.

Gary's thumbs plunged into her eye sockets. She opened her mouth and slapped harder at his hands, which Gary ignored. He jerked her head to one side, pulling her off of the stump.

But somewhere between the stump and the forest floor, her small hands shot up to Gary's face. Gary snapped at them like a rabid dog. But the woman was just as fast as he was, and returned the dubious favor of plunging her thumbs into his eyes. They remained locked this way as they tumbled to the ground, as if giving each other some kind of bizarre encouragement.

Bill looked back to his wife's body. A smile deformed her face, and her tongue stuck out to one side, licking at the corners of her mouth. The white spotlight grew stronger and stronger.

His wife's body looked at him. Terris smiled with his wife's mouth, and blew him a kiss with his wife's lips.

"Let's make this easier to see," she said. Though she was over thirty meters away, he again heard her words as clearly as if she had spoken them right next to his face. "Let's do some clearing. What do you say?"

Bill felt the red and gold surge within him, swelling his nerves like they were cooking sausages. It was celebrating, he knew; as happy as a leech in a lake of blood. And there was nothing he could have done about it.

Bill backed against the tree. The red and gold didn't seem to mind his inactivity; he sensed that it was too busy with the scene below to care much for its host. Some of its power remained at his disposal, but most of it was drained into the fight.

But Terris had power to spare.

"Make it easier to see," he repeated through Constance's mouth.

Bill sat and watched as she looked to her left. Her blonde hair spilled over one shoulder, lit-up like fiber optic strands and floating on the warm air.

She raised one of her arms. Bill winced when he saw something like claw-marks on her wrist.

"Get out of the way," she said.

Then a strand of the white light snaked out of her outstretched fingers.

It separated into branches, like it was a birch tree placed on its side. It wove through the madness of the combat beneath it, touching the bodies of the combatants but never interfering with their actions.

Constance's body wriggled its fingers, as if waving to the armies underneath her. This sent a shiver through the white pathways, turning them into flowing ribbons.

"I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay, I sleep all night and I work all day," said Constance's body. Still, the voice was close to him, like a confession whispered into his ear at midnight.

For a moment, another scene drew Bill's attention. Three men, all of them from Terris' army, had ganged up on one man from his. The three men all wore black tuxedo jackets and blue jeans with white sneakers. Their victim, Dennis Cooper from Agawam, Massachusetts, collapsed under their weight, flinging his feet up into the air. He wore purple Doc Martens, which his girlfriend had bought for him. Bill knew that Dennis was colorblind, and thought the shoes were blue, and that his girlfriend had bought them because it was her idea of a joke.

But these men all fell into a pile, like players in some Satanic football game. They fell into a tree, a huge pine, and shook it until the needles rustled and pine cones dropped onto their dead heads. Somebody's arm flew into the air like a stick tossed for a dog, every one of its fingers chewed off except for the pinky. On the pinky was a ring with three opals, polished to a dark shine. Bill knew that the arm belonged to Dennis Cooper, and that the ring had been a birthday present from his grandmother, who thought he was a girl. Lots of confusion in that boy's life, that was for sure.

"Well, I'm a lumberjack," chanted Constance. "Look at the tree."

The white ribbon had solidified, now looking like a silk scarf insinuating itself between the ravenous revenants and the bark of the tree. For a moment it sat relatively still, with only a slight ripple pulsing through it.

Bill saw other strands of the white light gently alighting in the foresta*hundreds of them, it seemed. Each one wrapped around the trunk of a different tree.

On the trees, the area of the trunks near the white strands of energy were becoming luminous, as if they were under and intense spotlight.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Bill wanted to know.

"I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay," repeated his wife. "Got to clear the fields."

And then another noise roared out of the woods. The demon drew its attention away from the battle for an instant, focusing on the forest. For a moment Bill felt the energies available to his armies ebb, sliding back down into the forest floor or into his nervous system.

Bill covered his ears.

The noise was like a million chainsaws.

The red and gold demon turned down the volume on his hearing, turning the noise into a more manageable racket.

Down in the fields, none of the combatants paid the slightest heed to the noise. They fought, chewed, flailed, and were dismembered as if nothing was happening. And they were oblivious to the sandstorm that now raged around their heads, blowing in khaki-colored fountains from the forest.

But it wasn't a sandstorm. Bill blinked again, and for some reason he felt the red and gold give a little hoot of mirth from somewhere deep in his subconscious.

It wasn't a sandstorm.

It was sawdust.

Forty.

"Shouldn't we be doing something?" Bill asked the red and gold. "What the fuck is she doing?"

Bill watched as the storm of sawdust became a blizzard. It fountained from the trunk of every tree, swirling around the forest in insanely powerful gusts. The dead, both armies of them, continued their fight, but they were rapidly becoming obscured in the fountain of dust. Each figure became a sexless lump of dust, vaguely human shape. Only flashes of color distinguished them from one anothera*a glimpse of silk here, a piece of cloth-of-gold there, and the omnipresent red of blood, staining all of them irrevocably. Both figuratively and literally, Bill thought.

And the noise grew louder and louder, until even the red and gold had trouble keeping it from damaging Bill's ears. Terris didn't have to make it that louda*Bill knew he was doing it out of spite. And for a poetic effect, probably.

Bill grabbed the trunk of the tree tighter, his fingers scrabbling on the bark, making clumps of it rain down onto the forest floor.

"Shouldn't we be doing something?" he repeated to the red and gold. Again no response.

Somewhere in the seething storm, a gout of sawdust gained enough momentum to burst out and fly toward him.

Bill reacted before he could think. He threw up his arm, covering his face. He felt the red and gold surge through his body and into his bones and out from his skin.

Then heat. Bill knew it was boiling, raging, burning heat, coming right from the demon's body, as if it had decided to embody an archaic idea of Hell and spew it out into the world.

A noise derailed Bill's thoughts. It came quietly over the the din of the saws, but distinctive nonetheless: a FWUMP that Bill had heard once before, when his dad had drenched the charcoals in too much lighter fluid and tossed in a match. The resulting fireball had been about a hundred feet high, shooting toward the top of their house and crisping the leaves of the near-dead oak tree standing in the side yard.

Now Bill peeked out from around his arm.