Strange Highways

of opportunity was narrower than ever, giving him less time to think; his chances of altering their fate were poor, because now he didn't have leeway for even a small error in judgment. The Mustang had already rammed into the church, the high altar was burning, and Joey was already scrambling across the steepled rubble, jumping down onto the hood of the car, squeezing the trigger on the Remington.
     He checked himself just in time to avoid his previous mistake, whirled, and instead fired up at the jumbled pews behind him, from which P.J. had attacked him with the two-by-four. The buckshot shredded empty air. P.J. wasn't there.
     Confused, Joey turned to the car and blasted out the windshield, as he had done before, but no scream came from inside, so he whipped around to cover his back again. P.J. still wasn't coming at him with the two-by-four.
      Jesus! Screwing up again, screwing up, doing the wrong thing again. Think. Think!
     Celeste. She was all that mattered.
      Forget about taking P.J. Just get to Celeste before he does.
     Carrying the shotgun with him even though it inhibited movement, Joey scrambled up the tilted pews and kneelers, across the rubble, toward the rear of the nave, down again into the center aisle where he'd seen Celeste knocked unconscious by the spinning chunk of wood. She wasn't there.
     "Celeste!"
     In the sanctuary at the front of the church, a slouching figure hunched along the ambulatory, through the dervish reflections of the altar fire above. It was P.J. He was carrying Celeste.
     The center aisle was blocked. Joey ran between two rows of pews to the side aisle along the east wall of the church, and then raced forward along the unbroken panes of rain-beaten glass toward the sanctuary railing.
     Rather than proceed to the altar as before, P.J. disappeared with Celeste through the door to the sacristy.
     Joey leaped over the sanctuary railing, as though too eager to accept a proffered sacrament, and edged swiftly but warily along the wall to the sacristy. He hesitated at the doorway, fearful of stepping face-first into a hard-swung two-by-four or a gun blast, but then he did what must be done - the right thing - and stepped up to the threshold.
     The sacristy door was closed, locked.
     He stepped back, aimed the shotgun. One round trashed the lock and blew the door open.
     The sacristy was deserted - except for Beverly Korshak's body, which lay in a corner, a pale mound in a plastic shroud.
     Joey went to the exterior door. It was secured with a deadbolt from the inside, as he had left it.
     The cellar door. He opened it.
     In the moon-yellow light below, a serpentine shadow slithered into a coil and rolled out of sight around a corner.
     The stairs were unpainted wood, and in spite of every effort he made at stealth, his boots met every tread with a hollow knock like the deliberative countdown of a doomsday clock.
     Heat rose in parching currents, in torrid waves, in scorching tides, and by the time he reached the basement floor, he felt as if he had descended into a primal furnace. The air was redolent of superheated wood ceiling beams on the brink of charting, hot stone from the masonry walls, hot lime from the concrete floor - and a trace of sulfur from the mine fires below.
     When he stepped off the final wooden tread, Joey would not have been surprised if the rubber heels of his boots had melted on contact with the cellar floor. Sweat streamed from him, and his hair fell across his face in lank, dripping strands.
     The cellar appeared to be divided into several chambers that were separated by deep, offset archways, so it was impossible to see into one room from another. The first was illuminated only by a single, bare, dust-caked bulb seated in a coffer between two beams that severely limited the spread of the light.
     A fat black spider, as if driven mad by the heat and sulfurous fumes, circled frenziedly around and around and around the crystal-glittering strands of its enormous web, in the same coffer as the lightbulb. Its exaggerated shadow jittered and stilted across the floor in a spiral that made Joey nauseous and dizzied him when he trod upon it as he headed toward the archway to the next room.
     Aboveground, the structure had been a plain coal-country church, but its masonry underpinnings