Life Expectancy

p-pickly k-k-kind." "We have both kinds."
        Another curb almost defeated me. The sidewalk looked soft and inviting.
        "It's too c-c-cold for a picnic," I said, "and too d-dark." An instant later it was also too noisy.
        The four virtually simultaneous explosions-mansion,, bank, courthouse, library-purged confusion from my mind. For a moment I could think too clearly.
        As the ground rocked, as the evergreens in the park swayed and shook off dead needles, as the initial blasts gave way to the mad-gods-bowling clatter of stone structures collapsing, I remembered being shot twice and not enjoying it either time.
        The pain didn't return with the memory, and now I was clearheaded enough to understand that being unable to feel my leg at all was worse than the fiery agony that I had first endured. The utter lack of feeling suggested that the leg was damaged beyond repair, already dead, amputated, gone.
        Exhausted, I stumbled when the ground rocked. Lorrie helped me lower myself to the grass, where I leaned against the trunk of a sycamore, even as the final blasts quaked through the town square.
        With the memory of being shot came a nightmare montage of the three murders that Punchinello had committed in front of me. These bloody images were more vivid in recollection than at the time of the killings, perhaps because then I had been so concerned with my own and Lorrie's survival that I dared not consciously consider the hideous details for fear of being paralyzed by terror.
        Sickened, I tried to repress those memories, but they tormented me. All my life, I had been comfortable inside my own head; but now that interior landscape was bloodstained and darkened by an ominous eclipse.
        When I wished for the comforting return of the haze to which I had earlier succumbed, it came immediately in a great gray wave-drowning the lights of the police car in the street, then seething through the trees as might rich billows of wind-driven fog, which was curious on a windless night.
        Dust.
        The turbulent mass proved to be neither fog nor mental haze but thick clouds of fine dust expelled from Cornelius Snow's mansion as it crashed down from imposing edifice to shattered ruin. Pulverized limestone, powdered brick, crushed plaster: In a thousand scents and flavors, dust rolled over us.
        Pale as it approached, the cloud brought darkness when it fell upon us, a gloom deeper than the lightless night itself. I eased away from the sycamore and rolled onto my right side, closing my eyes, pulling my shirt up to mask my nose and mouth against the choking dust.
        I reached down with one hand to touch my numb left leg, to reassure myself that it was still there. My hand came away slick with warm blood.
        In what seemed but an instant, dust caked the blood and formed a grisly plaster around my hand.
        At first I thought that Lorrie must have dropped to the grass beside me, covering her face against the suffocating pall. Then I heard her voice above me and knew that she remained on her feet. She called for an ambulance, coughing, wheezing, ceaselessly shouting for help, help, a man's been shot.
        I wanted to reach for her, pull her down, but I had no strength to raise my arm. A fearsome weakness had overcome me.
        The comforting mental haze that I had wished for now returned. Frantic about Lorrie, I no longer wanted this escape, but resistance was impossible.
        My thoughts wove an incoherent narrative of hidden doors, candlelit tunnels, dead faces, gunshots, snake handlers, tornadoes, clowns…
        Soon I must have been unconscious and dreaming, for I had become an aerialist, walking the high wire, using a long pole for balance, progressing tentatively and precariously toward a platform on which Lorrie waited.
        When I glanced behind to see what distance I'd already traveled, I found Punchinello Beezo in pursuit of me. He carried a balancing pole, too, but each end of it terminated in a wickedly sharp blade. He was smiling, confident, and faster than I was. He said, "I could have been a star, Jimmy Tock. I could have been a star."
        Occasionally I drifted up from big-top dreams and from secret passageways in my soul, and realized that I was being moved. Carried in a litter. Then strapped on a gurney in a rollicking ambulance.
        When I tried to open my eyes but could not, I told myself that they