By the light of the moon

saw the dragon's breath of
fire in the east-southeast, toward the front of the motel.
    'Show time,' said Jillian Jackson.

10
    Even as the dragon turned over deep in the earth and
as the echo of its roar continued to wake motel guests, Dylan
returned Jillian Jackson's two pieces of luggage to the cargo space
in the Expedition. Before he quite realized what he was doing, he'd
closed the tailgate.
    By the time he climbed in behind the steering wheel, his feisty
passenger was in the seat beside him, holding Fred on her lap. They
slammed their doors in unison.
    He started the engine and glanced over his shoulder to be sure
that his brother was wearing a seat belt. Shep sat with his right
hand flat on top of his head and his left hand atop his right, as
though this ten-finger helmet would protect him from the next
explosion and from falling debris. His stare matched Dylan's for an
instant, but the connection proved too intense for the boy. When
Shep closed his eyes and found insufficient privacy in self-imposed
blindness, he turned his head toward the window beside him and
faced the night, with his eyes still squeezed shut.
    'Go, go ,' Jilly urged, suddenly eager to commit herself
to a road trip with a man who might be a cannibalistic
sociopath.
    Too law-abiding to jump curbs and destroy landscaping, Dylan
drove to the front of the sprawling motel to reach the exit lane.
Not far from the portico that overhung the entrance to the
registration office, he discovered the source of the fire. A car
had exploded.
    This was not your typical aesthetically pleasing motion-picture
kind of exploded car: not dressed by a set designer, not carefully
positioned according to the artistic sensibilities of a director,
the pattern and size and color of the flames not calculated for
maximum prettiness by a pyrotechnics specialist collaborating with
a stunt coordinator. These less than cinematic flames were a sour
muddy orange as dark as bloodied tongues, and out of the many
mouths of the blaze spewed a vomitus of greasy black smoke. The
trunk lid had blown off, crumpling into a snarled mass as ugly as
any example of modern sculpture, and had landed on the roof of one
of the three black Suburbans that surrounded the burning wreckage
at a distance of twenty feet. Having been pitched partway through
the windshield by the force of the blast, the dead driver lay half
in and half out of the vehicle. His clothes must have been reduced
to ashes by a storm of fire during the few seconds following the
explosion. Now his very substance fueled the pyre, and the seething
flames that he produced by sacrifice of fat and flesh, of marrow,
were unnervingly different from those that consumed the automobile:
rancid yellow veined with red as dark as vinegary Cabernet, with
somber green reminiscent of things putrescent.
    Unable to look away from this horror, Dylan was ashamed of his
inability to break free of the grip of grisly curiosity. Truth
resided in ugliness as well as in beauty, and he blamed his macabre
fascination on the curse of the artist's eye, although he
recognized that this excuse was self-serving. Setting aside
self-deception, the ugly truth might be that an enduring fault in
the human heart made death perversely attractive.
    'That's my Coupe DeVille,' Jilly said, sounding more shocked
than angry, visibly stunned by the realization that her life had so
abruptly gone wrong in a sleepy Arizona town that was little more
than an interstate-highway rest stop.
    Ten or twelve men had gotten out of the matched Suburbans, which
stood with all the doors flung open. Instead of being dressed in
dark suits or in paramilitary gear, these guys wore desert-resort
clothes: white or tan shoes, white or cream-yellow pants, regular
shirts and polo shirts in a variety of pastels. They appeared to
have spent a relaxing day on a golf course and the early evening in
a clubhouse bar, cooked by a day of sun and stewed in gin, but not
one of them exhibited the alarm or even the surprise that you would
expect of average duffers who had just witnessed a catastrophe.
    Although Dylan didn't have to drive past the burning Cadillac to
reach the exit lane from the motel, a few of these sporty types
turned from the fire to stare at the Expedition. They didn't look
like accountants or business executives, or like doctors or
real-estate developers: They looked rougher and even more dangerous
than attorneys. Their faces were expressionless, hard masks as
lacking in animation as