Niceville

starboard wing the Tulip River looked like a ribbon of golden light as it snaked through the city center. A haze was lying over Niceville, smoke and fumes and mist, but to his eyes it gave the town a soft-focus 1940s look that went very well with his outfit. He was feeling like a fighter pilot, cruising for Nips in the South China Sea, Van Johnson as a wingman and Betty Grable waiting for him back at the field. He banked left, sliding away and down, and flew right along the Tulip for a while, at a very illegal thousand feet, but he didn’t do that for long. He pulled back on the stick and the plane rose again, the lift so strong he could feel it in his cheeks and along his thighs, and now he was heading for Tallulah’s Wall again, the limestone cliff filling up his windshield. He had a picture of his family on the sun visor and he reached up to touch a fingertip to Lucy’s cheek, thinking how lucky she had been to have known him. He dipped the stick a degree, steadied his course, and flew his Cessna straight into the side of Tallulah’s Wall at what they later estimated to be roughly two hundred miles an hour.
    The impact caused the fuel tanks, just topped up an hour earlier, to explode, and a red and black flower of flame blossomed across the face of the cliff, drawing everyone’s attention down in the town. The concussive wave rippled across the rooftops of the city, bouncing people out of their Sunday-morning sleep. It shook the windows of Brandy Gule’s flat over the needle exchange hard enough to wake up Lemon Featherlight, who had just now fallen asleep while she watched over him, and it thumped pretty hard against the glass of the conservatory where Kate and Beth were having a long heart-to-heart about Byron Deitz, and it rattled all the windows in Tony Bock’s flat, briefly distracting Coker and Twyla Littlebasket from the very interesting story Tony Bock was, at that point, only halfway through.
    But the shock wave had faded into a distant rumble by the time it reached Charlie Danziger’s place, where he was sitting on his porch with a glass of Pinot Grigio and a loaded Winchester on his knees, half expecting either Byron Deitz or Boonie Hackendorff or maybe the devil himself to come wheeling up his driveway, guns a-blazing.
    The concussive wave drew people all over Niceville out onto their porches and lawns and balconies to stare up at Tallulah’s Wall, where the roaring fire on the face of the cliff had spooked a large flock of crows that lived there. The flock took flight, a huge black swarm, and headed west across the upper part of the city, their flight followed by almost every citizen in the town.
    The flock, later estimated at maybe three thousand birds, entered the airspace over Mauldar Field about ten minutes after Morgan Littlebasket’s plane, what was left of it, carrying Morgan Littlebasket, what was left of him, went cartwheeling down into the rocky base of the cliffs.
    The black mass of crows, moving in unison like a school of fish, banked to the south-southeast over Mauldar Field, a move that put the flock directly into the path of a Learjet that had just cleared the runway after a short delay caused by a crank call the tower had received a few minutes earlier from an unknown citizen.
    The jet, banking right and rising, reached the same height as the flock of crows, into the midst of which it flew at more than four hundred miles an hour. The twin jets sucked in enough crow meat and bone and blood to lock up the turbines and, since the windscreen was so smeared with crow blood and crow guts that neither of the pilotscould see a damn thing, the plane entered into a death spiral so steep that not even the archangel Michael could have stopped the Learjet from doing what it did sixty-four seconds later, which was to augur fifty feet into the ground at a little more than four hundred miles an hour and turn Mr. Zachary Dak and everything else on board, including the cosmic Frisbee, into a volcanic fireball that exploded outwards all over the fourteenth green of the Anora Mercer Golf and Country Club.
    As the fireball and the molten shrapnel hurtled out in a 360-degree arc the explosion narrowly missed a slender reed of a man with red-rimmed eyes and a large bandage over a badly broken nose who was addressing a ball buried deep in a sand trap sixty yards away from the fourteenth green, but, sadly, in a strange quirk of fate, the fireball caught and utterly incinerated his beloved wife, Inge,