Strange Highways

the church, nothing real. Behind his eyes. Like a darting shadow of wings on rippled, sun-spangled water.
     Everything had changed.
     The fire was gone.
     So was P.J.
     The crucifix hung on the back wall again. The candles were all upright, the makeshift altar cloth unburned.
     Celeste grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him, seized the lapels of his denim jacket.
     He gasped in surprise.
     She said, "You're running out of time, Joey. Not much time left to believe."
     He heard himself say, "I believe-"
     "Not in what matters," she interrupted.
     She let go of him and vaulted over the presbytery balustrade into the choir enclosure, landing solidly on both feet.
     There was as yet no ragged breach in the west wall. The Mustang had not yet exploded into the church.
     Replay.
     Joey had been thrown back in time again. Not twenty years as before. Only a minute. Two minutes at most.
     A chance to save her.
      He's coming.
     "Celeste!"
     Running 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!"
     Joey put a hand on the balustrade, ready to vault across it and go after her.
      No. Do it right this time. Last chance. Do it right.
     Celeste shoved through the sanctuary gate.
     Over the incessant drumming of the rain on the roof, another sound arose. An escalating roar. The Mustang.
      He's coming.
     With a terrifying conviction that he was wasting precious seconds and that this replay was running faster than the original event, Joey snatched the 20-gauge shotgun from the presbytery floor.
     Celeste hurried into the center aisle.
     He shouted frantically - "Get out of the way! The car!" - as he hurtled over the balustrade with the shotgun in one hand.
     She was halfway down the aisle, as she had been the first time. She turned, as before. Her face was slick with sweat. Like a ceramic glaze. Glistening with candlelight. The face of a saint. A martyr.
     The roar of the Mustang swelled.
     Puzzled, she half turned toward the windows, raising her hands.
     In her delicate palms were hideous wounds. Black holes thick with blood.
     "Run!" he shouted, but she froze where she was.
     This time he didn't even reach the sanctuary railing before the Mustang slammed through the west wall of the church. A tidal wave of glass and wood and plaster and broken pews crested before the running-horse hood ornament, washed back along both fenders, until the car was all but hidden in the debris.
     A length of board, spinning like a martial-arts weapon, whistled through the air, hit Celeste, and knocked her to the floor more than halfway down the center aisle - which was something that Joey hadn't been able to see from his previous vantage point, the first time that he had lived through the crash.
     With a double bang of blowing tires, the car came to a halt in steepled rubble, and even above the clatter of the last tumbling pews, Joey heard the curiously separate and distinct clank of the bronze crucifix falling off the back wall of the sanctuary.
     Instead of lying half trapped under the destruction in the nave, as before, he was still in the sanctuary, untouched by anything other than the cloud of pale dust that the incoming wind swept out of the ruins. And this time he was armed.
     Chambering a shell in the 20-gauge Remington, he kicked through the sanctuary gate.
     The wreckage was still settling, and debris was falling from the corner of the roof that had sagged inward when the supports had been knocked from under it. The amount of residual noise was greater than it had seemed to Joey when he had been lying under the ruins, but then he had been half dazed.
     As far as he was able to discern, the destruction had fallen into precisely the same patterns as before. The Mustang still could not be approached easily or directly. He could see only sections of it through gaps in the ruins.
     He had to do it right this time. No mistakes. Finish him off.
     Toting the gun, Joey climbed onto the precariously stacked pews. They creaked and groaned, wobbled and shuddered, treacherous beneath him. Wary of protruding nails and glass daggers, he nevertheless