Frankenstein

out of the house. He shouted, “Go, go, go!” as he grabbed his long gun from where he’d stood it against a wall.
    Nummy hurried out the front door, into the night, across the porch, down the steps, and onto the lawn, where he stopped and turned to see what would happen next.
    Mr. Lyss stopped next to Nummy and faced the house, holding the long gun in two hands.
    Fire swelled bright in the upstairs. A window exploded, glass rained down on the porch roof, and Nummy thought something was coming out after them. But another window exploded, and he thought maybe it was just the heat that did it. Fire crawled on the roof now, and fire came downstairs, too, and there was thick smoke.
    Mr. Lyss lowered the gun and said, “Good riddance to them. Come on, Peaches.”
    Side by side they walked the narrow lane out to the mailbox, which was painted pretty with the words SADDLE UP WITH JESUS , though Nummy couldn’t read them and had to trust Mr. Lyss’s say-so that they were any kind of words at all.
    Mr. Lyss held the long gun at his right side, pointed at the ground, so people in passing cars couldn’t see it. They turned right and followed a sidewalk overhung by pines that smelled better than the smoke.
    The air was cold and clear. Nummy breathed through his open mouth until he blew away the last of the taste of gasoline fumes.
    “I don’t hear no sirens yet,” he said.
    “If the firemen in this hickville are anything like the cops, they’ll let it burn to the ground.”
    Rattling the box in his hand, Nummy said, “I still got them matches. You want me to keep them?”
    “Give them to me,” Mr. Lyss said, and he tucked them away in a pocket of Poor Fred’s coat.
    They walked in silence for a minute or two, and then Nummy said, “We burned down a preacher’s house.”
    “Yes, we did.”
    “Can you go to Hell for that?”
    “Under the circumstances,” Mr. Lyss said, “you shouldn’t even have to go to jail for it.”
    Cars passed in the street, but none of them was a police car. Besides, there were no streetlamps in this block, and it was dark under the pines.
    “Some day, huh?” Nummy said.
    “Quite a day,” Mr. Lyss agreed.
    “I’m never going to jail again for my own protection.”
    “That’s a damn good idea.”
    “I just thought.”
    “Thought what?”
    “We didn’t leave no I-owe-you.”
    “Nowhere to leave it with the house burnt down.”
    “You could leave it on the driveway under a rock.”
    “I’m not going back there tonight,” Mr. Lyss said.
    “I guess not.”
    “Anyway, I don’t have a pen or any notepaper.”
    “We’ll have to buy us some,” Nummy said.
    “I’ll put that on my to-do list for tomorrow.”
    They walked a little farther before Nummy said, “Now what?”
    “We leave this town and never look back.”
    “How do we leave it?”
    “Find some transportation.”
    “How do we do that?”
    “We steal a car.”
    Nummy said, “Here we go again.”

    
chapter
62

    At the unmarked warehouse, the sectional bay door rolled up, and one of the spotless blue-and-white trucks drove out. As before, two men occupied the cab. Exiting the warehouse parking lot, the truck turned left.
    From his position across the street, Deucalion took one step away from the Dumpster. His second step brought him into the enclosed cargo hold of the moving truck, where he stood swaying in harmony with the vehicle.
    To other eyes, this space might have been pitch-black; to Deucalion, it was dim, shadowy, but not a blind hole. He saw at once that nothing had been loaded for delivery. This suggested that the truck must be making pickups along its route and delivering something to the warehouse.
    What appeared to be benches were bolted to both long walls. The implications of this were disturbing.
    He sat on a bench and waited. If the men up front had been talking, he would have heard their muffled voices, but they were quiet. Unlikemost workingmen whose jobs involved a lot of driving, they didn’t listen to music, either, or to talk radio. They might as well have been deaf and mute.
    They braked to a full stop several times, but they didn’t switch off the engine, and after each pause they began to roll again. Stop signs and traffic lights.
    When eventually the truck stopped and the driver killed the engine, Deucalion rose to his feet. He reached with one hand toward the ceiling and, thanks to his gift, was in the next instant lying on his back on the roof, his feet toward the