Strange Highways

eternity." Her expressive eyes were glazed, haunted. "He never gives up, never will, nothing to lose, in a perpetual state of hatred and rage ever since the Fall .... "
     Joey glanced toward the spilled water in which P.J. had slipped. The church was hotter than ever, sweltering, but steam had stopped rising from the puddle. Anyway, that wasn't the fall she meant.
     After a hesitation, he said, "Who're we talking about, Celeste?"
     She appeared to be listening to voices that only she could hear. "He's coming," she whispered tremulously.
     "You're not talking about P.J., are you?"
     "He's coming."
     "What? Who?"
     "The companion."
     "Judas? There's no Judas. That's fantasy."
     "Beyond Judas."
     "Celeste, be serious, the devil himself isn't really in P.J."
     As alarmed by his insistence on reason as he was alarmed by her sudden descent into full-blown mysticism, she gripped him by the lapels of his denim jacket. "You're running out of time, Joey. Not much time left to believe."
     "I believe-"
     "Not in what matters."
     She let go of him, vaulted over the presbytery balustrade into the choir enclosure, landing solidly on both feet.
     "Celeste!"
     Rushing to the sanctuary gate, she shouted, "Come touch the floor, Joey, touch where the water spilled, see whether it's hot enough for steam, hurry!"
     Frightened for her, frightened by her, Joey also vaulted the balustrade. "Wait!"
     She shoved through the sanctuary gate.
     Over the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof, another sound arose. An escalating roar. Not from under them. Outside.
     She hurried into the center aisle.
     He looked toward the windows on the left. Toward the windows on the right. Darkness on both sides.
     "Celeste!" he shouted as he pushed through the sanctuary gate. "Show me your hands!"
     She was halfway down the aisle. She turned toward him. Her face was slick with sweat. Like a ceramic glaze. Glistening with candlelight. The face of a saint. A martyr.
     The roar swelled. An engine. Accelerating.
     "Your hands!" Joey shouted desperately.
     She raised her hands.
     In her delicate palms were hideous wounds. Black holes thick with blood.
     From out of the west, shattering windows, smashing through clapboard and wall studs and old wood paneling and stations of the cross, the Mustang exploded into the church, headlights unlit but engine screaming, horn suddenly blaring, tires popping like balloons as the floor splintered under them, driving forward with tremendous power, plowing into the pews, unstoppable. Those benches cracked free of their moorings, tilted up, slammed into one another - pews and kneelers erupting and crashing together and piling one atop the next in a cresting wave of wood, in a geometry of penitence - and still the Mustang surged forward, engine racing, gears grinding, trumpeting as it came.
     Joey fell to the floor in the center aisle and shielded his head with his folded arms, certain that he was going to die in the tsunami of pews. He was even more certain that Celeste would die, whether crushed to death now or, later, after being nailed to the floor or to the wall by P.J. Joey had utterly failed her, failed himself. Following the storm of broken glass, the ,hail of plaster, the avalanche of wood, there would be a rain of blood. Over the roar of the Mustang, over the banshee horn, over the crack-split-shatter of wood, over the ringing of falling glass, over the ominous creak of sagging ceiling beams, he heard one special sound separate and eerily distinct from all others, and instantly he knew what it was: the bronze clatter and thud of the crucifix dropping off the back wall of the sanctuary.

    17

THE COLD WIND WAS IN THE CHURCH NOW, SNIFFING AND PANTING, LIKE a pack of dogs through the ruins.
     Joey lay facedown under a stack of tumbled pews and shattered wall beams, and although he felt no pain, he was afraid that his legs were crushed. When he dared to move, however, he discovered that he was neither injured nor pinned in place.
     The rubble was a multitiered, three-dimensional maze. Joey was forced to crawl, writhe, and squirm through it as though he were a rat-seeking ferret exploring the depths of an ancient timberfall.
     Shingles, laths, and chunks of other debris