Click-click-click. Click. Click. And now a sputter, like a snake.
Static. The hairs stood on Luke’s scalp. Mellie’s got a radio, and she’s talking to someone, in code.
Against every particle of good sense, he eased down the hall. The clicks sounded at erratic intervals. His pulse banged in his ears. This was dumb; what could he tell Tom? Well, there was this funky clicking? But if there was a radio and someone spoke—
From beneath his left boot came a loud, high squeal of a fatigued board: a real horror-show CREEEEE that made his brain freeze. A second later, he heard the telltale squall of bedsprings, and …“Hello?” The tone was sharp, the volume growing as Mellie moved for the bedroom door. “Who’s—”
Get out, get out! Whirling for the front door, he stumbled onto the porch at the same moment a door slammed drywall and Mellie shouted, “Who—”
Still running, he took the front steps in three leaping strides and plunged down the slope. What to do, what to do? Tom, Tom, where are you? Tom would know; Tom, he could trust. But Luke was on his own, and all he could think of was to run. He’d automatically headed toward the equipment shed, but now he thought, Wait, I’m safer around other people. He veered toward the cow barn and corral, steaming through the snow. Ahead, there were knots of kids, the bonfire. All the dogs had trotted halfway up the knoll past the far horse barn and were barking their communal yark-yark-yark. In the back of his mind, in that very last second before things fell apart for good, he thought, Wait, what’s got them all …
There was an immense explosion: not a boom but a ker-POW that was so violent, he felt the sound rebound and bounce and barrel its way around and over him. The blast echoed and caromed off the buildings. Gasping, his heart fluttering into his throat, he spun and looked north.
A pillar of smoke, a massive gray-black mushroom cloud, swelled and pillowed above the trees. Downslope, he could hear the other kids’ chatter suddenly cease. For a second, even the dogs fell silent, and he forget all about Mellie and her strange coded clicks.
Because the only thing out there worth blowing was the church.