Strange Highways

still dropped out of the demolished wall and from the damaged ceiling, clattering into the wreckage. The wind played the narrow twisting passages in the destruction as though they were flutes, piping an eerie, tuneless music. But the car engine had died.
     After wriggling through an especially cramped space between slabs of prayer-polished oak, Joey came to the front wheel of the Mustang. The tire was flat, and the fender had crumpled around it like paper.
     From the undercarriage, greenish antifreeze drizzled like dragon's blood. The radiator had burst.
     He squeezed farther along the side of the car. Just past the driver's door, he reached a place where he was able to stand up between the vehicle and the surrounding rubble.
     He hoped to see his brother dead in the Mustang, the shaft of the steering wheel driven through his chest by the impact or his body pitched halfway through the windshield. But the driver's door was open just wide enough to allow escape, and P.J. was gone.
     "Celeste!" Joey shouted.
     No answer.
     PT would be looking for her.
      "Celeste!"
     He smelled gasoline. The fuel tank had burst.
     The surrounding pews and slabs of wood paneling and sheared-off two-by-fours had tilted up higher than the car. He couldn't see much of the church.
     Joey levered himself onto the roof of the Mustang. He rose to his feet, turning his back to the damaged wall and the rain-slashed night.
     St. Thomas's was filled with strange light and swarming shadows. Some ceiling bulbs were still on, but others were out. Toward the rear of the church, showers of white-gold-blue sparks cascaded from a damaged overhead fixture.
     In the sanctuary, the candles had toppled when the building had been shaken by the impact of the hurtling car. The sheets on the altar platform were afire.
     Shuttling, weaving shadows made a fabric of confusion, but one among them moved with a linear purpose that snapped Joey's attention to it. Coming off the ambulatory onto the presbytery was P.J. He was carrying Celeste. She was unconscious, cradled in his arms, head tilted back, tender throat exposed, black hair trailing almost to the floor.
      Christ, no!
     For an instant, Joey couldn't breathe.
     Then he was gasping.
     He plunged off the roof of the Mustang onto the crumpled hood and clambered up from the car onto the surrounding jumble of pews and beams and buckled wallboard. The wreckage shifted under him, threatening to open and swallow him in a maw of wickedly splintered boards and twisted nails, but he kept moving, wobbling and lurching, arms spread like those of a lumberjack trying to maintain his balance in a logrolling contest.
     At the three altar steps, P.J. ascended.
     The back wall of the sanctuary, without crucifix, crawled with images of fire.
     Joey jumped down from the pile of rubble into an open space in front of the sanctuary railing.
     On the altar, P.J. dropped Celeste onto the burning sheets, as though she were not a persona special and needed person - but only an armful of trash.
     "No!" Joey shouted, leaping across the sanctuary railing, stumbling into the curving ambulatory that would take him around the choir and up to the high altar.
     Her raincoat caught fire. He saw the flames leap hungrily from that new fuel.
     Her hair. Her hair!
     Stung by the flames, she regained consciousness and screamed.
     Rounding the ambulatory, reaching the presbytery walkway, Joey saw P.J. standing over Celeste, on the burning sheets, oblivious of the fire around his feet, hunched like some round-backed beast, the hammer in one hand and raised high to strike.
     With his heart knocking as loud as Death's fist on a door, Joey crossed the presbytery, toward the altar steps.
     The hammer arced down.
     Her cry of terror. Heart piercing. Cut off by the sound of the steel hammer crushing her skull.
     A bleat of misery tore free of Joey as he reached the foot of the altar steps.
     P.J. whipped around. "Little brother." He was grinning. Eyes adance with reflections of fire. Face blistered by water burns. He triumphantly raised the blood-wet hammer. "Now let's nail her down."
      "Noooooooo!"
     Something fluttered across Joey's vision. No. Nor across. The flutter wasn't anything in