22

6:29 A.M.

FIREWORKS

"If Rex doesn't show up on time, I'll kill him."

Jonathan looked tiredly at Dess, then at his watch. "He's got another minute."

"One minute to live, you mean."

"Not really," Jonathan said. "Either Rex gets here in one minute, in which case he's on time and you don't kill him. Or he's late, which means he won't be here, so you can't kill him. Either way he has more than one minute to live."

Dess cast a cold glance at Flyboy. He was making logical sense, which was totally unfair at this time on a Saturday morning.

"Jess," she said. "Tell Jonathan to stop making sense." Jessica, her head leaning sleepily on Flyboy's shoulder, started to answer, but a yawn consumed her words. She wound up waving her hand noncommittally.

"Wait a second," Jonathan said. "Is that them?"

Jessica sat bolt upright. "What? In that thing?"

Dess felt her jaw dropping. "No way!"

A pink Cadillac was rumbling toward them through the field, its vast frame bobbing across the furrows.

"Rex said he had a new ride," Dess said with quiet awe. "But I didn't think he meant his mom's car." She felt a smile break across her face. Teasing him about this was going to be so much more fun than killing him.

Rex's mother worked selling Mary Kay cosmetics door to door, and in recognition of her millionth facial or whatever, she had received a pink Cadillac. But Dess had never actually seen the fabled machine before; Rex refused to ride to school in it, and she'd never imagined him actually driving it.

Yet there he was, cruising through Jenks at daybreak like he owned the whole town.

It rolled to a stop next to Jonathan's car, and Flyboy barked out a short laugh as the front window came down. "Wow, Rex. Ding-dong!"

"That's Avon, actually," Melissa said as she stepped out of the Cadillac's passenger side. "You're not even trying."

"Oh, right," Jonathan said. "Well, it's not like I have to try that hard. I mean..." He spread his arms to indicate the car. "It's so pink."

Flyboy's voice trailed off as Rex stepped out, looked down at the car, and said, "Hey, yeah, it is. I hadn't noticed."

Then he turned back to them and cracked a smile.

Dess breathed a sigh of relief; that was the first joke he'd made in days. His messed-up morning hair made him look more human than he usually did. Maybe the effects of Maddy unleashing the darklings in his brain had worn off a little.

"How did you get your mom to lend it to you?" she asked. Since his father's accident, Rex's mother hardly ever showed her face in Bixby. Dess couldn't imagine her handing over the keys for an early morning joyride.

"She dropped by for a visit night before last," Rex said. "And I got the idea of pulling her starter cable out."

Dess's eyes widened. "Excuse me?"

"It was easy. I snuck out while she was in the bathroom and pulled out the starter cable." Rex gave his new evil smile. "She was in a hurry to get somewhere else, like always, so I called her a cab. She's already rented another Caddy, so this one's mine until I tell her it's fixed."

Dess and Jonathan exchanged a glance, and she saw that even Jessica had woken up enough to be impressed.

"Rex," Dess said. "That is so cold-blooded."

"True." He nodded. "But I needed a car. We have important things to take care of."

"Like getting us all out of bed at six-thirty on a Saturday morning?" Flyboy asked.

"Exactly." Rex looked at his watch. "Come with me."

He led them across the field toward the rip, and Dess found herself glad that she'd worn a skirt that didn't fall below her knees. At this time of morning the long grass was heavy with dew, and her sneakers got soaked as fast as if she'd been strolling through a car wash.

As they marched, the sun began to crest over the distant tree line, its glaring eye finally putting a dent in the fierce pre-dawn chill.

"This better be good, Rex."

"Don't worry, Dess," he said. "I think you'll find it interesting."

"At six-thirty in the morning I was hoping for better than 'interesting,' Rex."

"I'm sure Jessica won't disappoint us."

Dess looked at Jessica, who just shrugged back at her.

Suddenly Dess noticed that Melissa hadn't walked with them. "Hey, where's the bitch goddess? She's not back at your Caddy sleeping, is she?"

Rex shook his head. "She'll be along in... two minutes."

"Great. More split-second timing." Dess sighed. "Hope this goes better than your last little scheme."

"There's just one thing, guys," Jessica said nervously. "Cassie Flinders lives right over there. What if she sees us?"

"She won't remember us."

"Are you sure about that?"

Rex raised an eyebrow. "Why would she?"

Jessica looked over at the Flinders' double-wide with an unhappy expression on her face. "Well, I wasn't going to mention this, but she and my sister have been... hanging out. I was afraid to tell you guys in case..." She didn't finish.

In case the bitch goddess decided to rip your little sister's brain in half, Dess thought.

She looked at Rex, wondering if he was about to do one of his psycho transformations. But after a pause he only shrugged. "Everyone will know about the blue time soon enough, Jessica. It doesn't matter."

"Wow," Jessica said, looking stunned. "That's actually kind of a relief."

Flyboy put his arm around her, smiling, but the idea of Rex not caring about secrecy sent a minor shudder through Dess. As she turned away to study the rip, the realness of how Samhain would change everything sank in yet another notch.

The rip wasn't glowing red here in normal time, but Dess could see its current shape in the color of the grass, as if the contortion were a giant piece of lawn furniture. Maybe the dark moon was mutating the chlorophyll or something. She noted the rip's geometry: a long, thin oval pointing almost due east and west.

She took out Geostationary and noted the coordinates of its center. Almost exactly on the 36th parallel.

Maybe not worth getting up at six-thirty in the morning for, but interesting.

"Okay, good. No daylighters around," Rex said.

"That's because they're all in bed," Dess pointed out.

Rex ignored her. "I want to do a few experiments here today, and I want all of you to see them. When Samhain comes, all of Bixby - at least - is going to be swallowed by this contortion. And as we've noticed, the rip isn't exactly the same size as the blue time. You've all seen those leaves falling at midnight?"

"Yeah," Dess said. "But what's the point? It's not midnight now."

"Not yet," Rex said.

"No." Dess looked down at Geostationary. "And it won't be for another 62,615 seconds. So why are we here so - ?"

"Whoa!" Jonathan interrupted. "What's up with Melissa?"

Dess turned to see the Cadillac galloping across the field. It climbed up the railway embankment and straddled the tracks, its tires spitting gravel and dust as it bore down on them like a maniacal pink freight train, headlights flicking on.

"Has she gone crazy?" Dess shouted.

"Nope," Rex said, glancing at his watch. "She's right on time. But we might want to get out of the way."

The four of them skidded down the slope of the embankment, and the Cadillac seemed to roar its approval, bolting forward with a burst of acceleration, the spinning tires churning up a giant cloud of dust.

Dess felt a tingling in her fingertips, stronger than she had in the lunchroom, and suddenly knew what was about to happen.

"It's back," she said softly.

"You got it," Rex answered.

Dess looked up at the charging Cadillac with alarm. "But won't she...?"

The inky blue of an eclipse swept in from the east, across the cloudless sky and open fields, stilling the icy wind and blanketing the world in silence. The dark moon shot into the sky, like a huge flying saucer hovering just out of reach.

Yet the Cadillac kept rolling across the red-tinged oval of the rip.

Its engine died, the headlights going dark, but it didn't freeze like it should have. The car continued to coast until it finally skidded to a halt in a shower of dust and gravel.

Dess blinked as she took in the sight: instead of throwing Melissa through the windshield, the pink Cadillac had maintained its momentum.

"Is she okay in there?" Flyboy asked.

Rex nodded. "She's fine. As I suspected, the rip brings everything into the blue time, not just people. I figured if dead leaves could still fall, then dead metal would cross over too."

"It's awfully lucky you figured right." Dess didn't much care for Melissa anymore, but it wasn't like she wanted her back in the hospital. Her current scars were creepy enough.

"She was wearing a seat belt," Rex said calmly.

"Wait a minute, Rex," Dess said. "How did you know there was going to be an eclipse?"

He was silent for a moment, his violet eyes narrowing. "There's a pattern. I can see when they're coming, all of them between now and Samhain. This one should last for a while longer."

"You can see a pattern?" Dess cried. "Then write it down for me."

He shook his head. "I can't express it in numbers, not without my head exploding. But she can give it to you." He pointed toward the Cadillac.

The driver's side door opened, and Melissa got out shakily, grinning from ear to ear. "That was cool!"

Dess shook her head. No way was Melissa touching her again.

"I thought you were afraid of driving fast," Jessica said.

The bitch goddess shrugged. "You have to face your fears to conquer them, Jess. That's what Rex has been telling me lately."

"You two are both nuts," Dess said softly.

Rex raised an eyebrow. "This experiment wasn't just for kicks, Dess. We had to make sure that when midnight falls on Samhain, it won't kill everyone who happens to be in a car. Which is one less thing to worry about."

Everyone was quiet for a second, and Dess realized she hadn't even thought about that. If the rip really did expand to consume a million people, and only one percent of them were driving at midnight, that would have been ten thousand Melissas going through their windshields all at once.

She swallowed. This thing just got bigger and bigger the more she thought about it.

"So cars are okay," Flyboy said, pushing himself up into the air. "But what about planes?"

Rex thought for a moment. "Small aircraft can do dead-stick landings. But the big airliners will be a problem."

"We could phone in bomb threats to all the airports on Halloween," Jonathan suggested from above.

"Bomb threats?" Jessica cried. "Wait a second, Rex. Why are we even talking about all this? Didn't you say we were going to try to prevent Samhain? I thought the point was to make sure that half of Oklahoma doesn't get sucked into the blue time."

Rex took a slow breath, then shook his head. "We can try to stop some of what's going happen - the worst accidents, some of the panic. We can prevent most of the unnecessary deaths."

"The 'unnecessary' deaths, Rex?" Dess said. "Are you saying that some deaths are necessary?"

He fixed her with a cold stare. "The predators are coming back, Dess. We have to get used to the fact that we can't save everyone."

She stared back at him. This new darkling-infected Rex seemed perfectly happy thinking the unthinkable. The old Rex would have been appalled by the thought of one death, but here he was, talking about thousands like it was just the Bixby Tigers losing again.

"All we can do is follow the old traditions," Melissa said. She was leaning against Rex, her legs still unsteady after her maniacal ride.

"Like what?" Dess asked. "Dressing up in costumes?"

"Be my guest," Rex said. "But that's not the tradition I was thinking about. We have to organize people, bring them together and teach them how to protect themselves. In the meantime we have to keep the darklings away as long as we can." He looked at Jessica. "Maybe that's why you're here."

"Why I'm where?" said Jessica.

Rex's eyes narrowed. "Here in Bixby, Jessica. Here on earth. You're the flame-bringer, after all, and we're going to need a really big bonfire."

Rex had brought three experiments for the rip.

First he had Jessica light a candle and step away from it. Normally it would have sputtered out when she took her hand away - without the flame-bringer, fire couldn't exist in the blue time.

Yet as Jessica stepped back, first one yard, then a few more, then finally walking to the other side of the glowing red boundary, the candle stayed alight. Her eyes widened. The rip really did have different rules. Like the pink Cadillac, a fire would keep going once it was started.

"That's the price the darklings pay for making the blue time weaker," Rex said. "If normal people can move through the rip, so can flame."

"So anyone can start a fire?" Dess asked.

"I doubt that." Rex flicked his lighter a few times; it didn't even make a spark. But when he held down its button and placed its jet of gas to the candle, it came back alight. He smiled, lifting the tiny yet blinding flame. "But once Jessica's started it, a fire can spread on its own. People can pass it to each other."

"Whoa, Jess," Jonathan said. "See if your flashlight works the same way."

Jessica waited until all their eyes were covered, then whispered Enlightenment's name and switched it on. Squinting through her fingers, Dess saw its white beam cut through the blue time in a blinding wedge.

But when Jess put it on the tracks and stepped away from it, the light sputtered and died.

"I didn't think so," Rex said. "The chemical reaction in a battery is too complicated to sustain itself - like a car engine. But if Jessica lights a bunch of torches, we can protect a lot of people at once."

"Yeah, eventually. But this happens at midnight, Rex," Jonathan said. "People will be scattered all over Bixby or however far the rip spreads. So how do we organize everyone without radio or phones?"

"We don't organize everyone, Jonathan. We save who we can."

They were all silent for a moment.

Dess realized that an awful feeling was growing in her stomach. For the first time she was starting to take this end-of-the-world thing seriously. This wasn't like saving one little kid. The lives of uncountable strangers depended on the five of them.

How many people could one darkling eat in a night? How many darklings were there altogether? The math almost made her head spin. Numbers were one thing when they were abstract: coordinates or computer bits or seconds between now and midnight. But when they represented human lives, the thought of all those numerals in a row suddenly became obscene.

Yet Rex stood there, calmly planning the long midnight.

"First we'll need a way to get the maximum number of people awake," he was saying. "Then we should create some sort of signal that's visible from all over town. Hopefully that will gather people together. And finally, we'll need a way to defend them all from the darklings."

Rex produced a bottle rocket. "I was thinking fireworks might do all three things at once."

Dess nodded. Rex might be cold-blooded about this, but at least he was making sense. When Jessica had first discovered her talent, she'd tried to shoot Roman candles in the blue time out of curiosity, but the flaming balls always sputtered out after flying a few feet. Inside the rip, though, they would keep burning - an instant antidarkling flamethrower.

Jessica was just standing there, looking stunned by what they were talking about. But when Rex stuck the rocket's stick into the gravel, she got herself together. Kneeling, she lit the fuse, then stepped back as the blinding sparkles made their way up into its tail....

With a whoosh it shot into the sky, rising twenty feet or so before its flaming trail choked off suddenly.

"Was that a dud?" Jonathan asked.

"No." Dess shook her head. "The rip is three-dimensional. It extends only so far up." She could see the rocket frozen at the edge of the rip above them, waiting for the eclipse to end before resuming its flight.

Rex started talking about airliners again, how they would be too high to be caught by the rip on Samhain.

Dess had heard enough about airplane crashes. She turned away and walked to the edge of the rip, wondering if it was still growing.

What she really wanted Rex to do was get over his darkling number phobia and write down the exact dates and times of all the coming eclipses. If he could glimpse a pattern with his math-impaired brain, Dess knew she could analyze what was happening. Then maybe the five of them could do something more useful for Bixby than setting off bottle rockets.

Like finding a way to stop this thing.

Suddenly Dess heard the scrape of gravel behind her. She whirled around - it was Melissa.

"Don't touch me," she spat.

Melissa held up her hands. "Relax. I'm not going to force you."

"Force me? You're not going to anything me."

"Listen, Dess, I was there when Madeleine opened up Rex's mind. I saw what he knows. I can give it to you."

Dess shook her head.

"I'm sorry for what I did to you, all right, Dess? But we need you now. I know you see how serious this is."

Dess looked away. Of course, the mindcaster had tasted her nausea.

"There might be a way to stop this, Dess. But only you can find it."

The image of darklings rampaging through Bixby came into Dess's mind, and she wondered for a moment if Melissa had placed it there. Of course, even if the mindcaster was manipulating her, the awful picture would become a reality in thirteen days unless they found a solution.

"The answer might be waiting for you right here, all around us," Melissa said. "But this eclipse is ending soon."

Dess took a slow breath, realizing that she had the choice of facing the mindcaster's touch or of going along with Rex's dire calculations. She could either open her mind now or watch the slaughter.

It wasn't fair, having to save thousands of people. Not fair at all.

"Make it quick," she said through gritted teeth, and held out her hand.

Melissa closed her eyes.

At the first contact of their fingers something massive and dark came into Dess. Images swept through her, a wire frame of the earth, red fire spreading along its lines of longitude and latitude. She saw the days between now and Samhain midnight, a steady beat of eclipses until the blue time shattered, the rip streaking across the earth for thousands of miles. She saw how long it would last, twenty-five hours of frozen time - humans within struggling to survive while everyone outside stood frozen and unaware.

Then she saw the rip's true shape... and the beginnings of a solution.

Dess pulled her hand away from Melissa's touch, realizing that she was hearing a sound in the distance. It was a soft spattering noise, like a light rain on a steel roof.

She turned away without a word and walked down the tracks to where the Cadillac had roared up onto the embankment. At the glowing-red edge of the rip, a dark curtain of something was falling lightly through the air.

Dess held out an open palm....

Dust gradually collected on her skin. Then a hard ping came from the metal rail next to her - the fallen piece of gravel skittered across the tracks.

She stepped back a few yards and looked up, her eyes making out a smudge against the dark moon. Like the arrested bottle rocket, the dirt and gravel churned up by the huge pink car still hung overhead, suspended in frozen time. But carved into the dust cloud was a long, oval shape....

Dess nodded; suddenly it all made perfect sense. The Cadillac's tires had put a lot of debris into the air just as the eclipse had arrived, flash-freezing it up there until normal time started again. But the dust inside the rip had swirled down to the ground, falling in regular gravity. So now Dess could see the whole thing in three dimensions. Its blimplike shape had been cut into the cloud, like a long, oval space carved into a mountain.

But why was the dust still raining down?

Dess walked back to the edge, put her palm out again, and found that now the dirt was falling a bit farther along the tracks.

Of course... The rip was growing, tearing the blue time in half. And as its edges traveled outward, more of the suspended dust fell to earth.

Dess looked up, her heart beating harder. She was actually watching the rip expand. She peered into the vague blur of suspended dust, trying to see its exact dimensions and cursing the dim blue light. If Rex was going to perform dramatic experiments, why hadn't he released a cloud of Ping-Pong balls right before the eclipse so they could see what was really going on? Then Dess could calculate how fast the tear in the blue time was spreading and in exactly what direction.

She scrambled down the embankment to the longer edge of the rip and put out her hand. Hardly any dust was falling here.

"Dess?" Rex called.

"Hang on." She climbed back up to the tracks. Yes, the rip was spreading much faster at the oval's narrow end.

She ran by the four of them, all the way past the Cadillac to the other end of the rip. Glancing up, she got an eyeful of dirt. The dust fall was harder here too. But why would it follow the direction of the railroad tracks?

She closed her eyes, letting the knowledge that Melissa had given her take shape.

"Of course," she said aloud.

"Of course what?" Rex called.

Dess waved him silent. She could see it now - so obvious that she wanted to thump herself on the head for not realizing it before. Until now she had imagined the rip expanding like the universe - a great big bubble, a sphere. But what if it were long and narrow instead?

The rip was heading in two directions, stretching along a single axis, just like a real tear in a piece of fabric. But what was at either end?

Dess visualized the map of the county she carried in her head and instantly knew exactly what was going on and why this godforsaken spot lay right in the middle of the rip. Jenks was halfway to nowhere, precisely poised between the center of town and the deepest desert.

The blue time was opening up long and straight, like some sort of darkling highway, a conduit between predators and prey. It was reaching west out into the mountains, where the oldest minds lived, the ones who hadn't had a decent meal in thousands of years. And at the same moment the rip was traveling east, directly toward the populated center of downtown Bixby.

"Dess?" Rex said, frustration creeping into his voice.

She still didn't answer. If he wanted to get all scary, let him.

Her eyes closed, Dess let her mind follow the direction of the tracks, recalling the images of wire frame globes that Melissa had given her.

What if the rip just kept growing year after year, shooting across the country like a lit fuse every Halloween?

It was tearing along Bixby's ill-fated latitude: 36 degrees. That line led east through Broken Arrow, which was why the Grayfoots were evacuating. Then it whipped through a lot of small and medium towns after that... until eventually reaching Nashville, which sat at exactly 36.10 degrees. From there, it would go on to swallow Charlotte, North Carolina, at 35.14. Westward, the rip would cruise straight through downtown Las Vegas, which was centered at exactly 36.11. And it would pass a hundred miles north of Grandpa Grayfoot's new digs in LA.

"Dess?" Rex called. "What is it?"

"We might be able to save more people than you think, Rex. Or at least delay the darklings long enough to get Bixby organized."

He walked over, his violet eyes flashing, a smile on his face. Suddenly Dess knew he'd planned the whole thing to work this way - Dess too tired from getting up so early to resist Melissa touching her.

Well, it had worked.

"How do we do it?" he said.

"We need to build two big bonfires - or better yet, fireworks displays. The one out here will bottle them up for as long as we can."

"Bottle them up?"

"Yeah. The rip will open up long and narrow, Rex, like a road. It leads right through here, straight from the mountains to downtown. If we stop them in Jenks for a while, make them go around us, we may have time to organize people back in Bixby."

As Rex's eyes followed the path of the tracks back toward the mountains, a thoughtful look crossed his face, as if he was accessing the numberless darkling math stored in his mind. "Yeah. You could be right."

The world shuddered then - the dark moon falling like a rock, the red-tinged blue time fading - and the cold wrapped itself around Dess, driving its way into her bones. She shivered with excitement.

They had a way to stop the darklings... for a while, at least. Maybe they could give the people of Bixby time to understand what was going on and a fighting chance to survive their night in hell. Maybe thousands didn't have to die.

Above Dess's head the bottle rocket was suddenly released from frozen time. It shot farther into the sky, where it exploded with a tiny bang.