The Face

neck, chest, and abdominal muscles, which he must do in order to force out the stale air condensed like syrup in his lungs. More ability, but not enough. If paper were a sound, it would not be as thin as his wheeze had become, nor a human hair as thin, nor a film of dust.
        He needed to sit up. He couldn’t.
        He needed his inhaler. Gone.
        Although the world was crimson to him, he knew that he must look blue to the world, for this was one of the really bad attacks, worse than any he’d known before, an occasion for the emergency room, for the doctors and nurses with their talk of Manheim movies.
        No breath. No breath. Thirty-five thousand dollars to refurnish his rooms, but no breath.
        Funny thoughts crowded his head. Not funny ha-ha. Funny scary. Red thoughts. So dark red at the edges that the red was really black.

        Currently not in a mood to teach the deconstructionist theory of literature, but in a mood to deconstruct anything in his way, with a wolfish fury howling in his skull, Corky needed to gouge eyes, to chew at the face below him, to tear with teeth, to claw and rip.
        Cracking his jaws for the first bite, he realized that Truman had [587] been stunned when he rapped his head on the pavement, that his resistance was not as strong as expected. In his savage frenzy, Corky dimly realized, too, that if he succumbed to the animalistic urge to finish this by tooth and nail, something would snap in him, some last organizing restraint, and he would be found hours hence, still bent to the savaged body of his victim, his snout and jowls in the fleshy ruins, searching for grisly morsels as a pig for truffles.
        As Robin Goodfellow, who had not actually received training to be a lethal weapon but who had read his share of spy novels, he knew that a sharp blow with the heel of his hand to an enemy’s nose would shatter nasal bones and drive the wicked splinters into the brain, bringing instant death, and so he did this, and cried with delight as Truman’s blood answered the blow with a bright spray.
        He rolled off the useless cop, rose, turned toward the Buick, and went looking for the boy. Corky leaned down at the driver’s door to peer inside, but Fric had apparently gotten out through the sprung door on the passenger’s side.
        The semiparalytic inhalant would not yet have worn off entirely. The brat couldn’t have crawled far.
        Straightening up from the driver’s door, Corky saw a handgun on the roof of the Buick, in front of his eyes.
        Rain gleaming like diamond inlays on the checking of the grip.
        Truman’s weapon.
        Find the boy. Shoot him but only in the leg. To keep him from going anywhere. Then hustle back to the garage for another set of keys, another getaway car.
        Corky could still salvage the plan, for he was the son of chaos as surely as Fric was the son of the biggest movie star in the world, and chaos would not fail its child as the actor had failed his.
        He rounded the car and saw the boy on his side, kicking at the sodden ground, hitching forward like a crippled crab.
        Corky went after him.
        Although Fric proceeded by the strangest form of locomotion that [588] Corky had ever seen, making a thin whistling sound that suggested the stripped-gear-popped-spring protest of a broken windup toy, the kid had gotten off the driveway, onto the grass. He seemed to be trying to reach a stone garden bench that appeared to be an antique. Approaching, Corky raised the pistol.

        William Yorn, diligent groundskeeper, monitored every tree and shrub for disease and treated his green wards at the first sign of mold or blight, or pestilence. Occasionally, however, a plant could not be saved, and a replacement was then ordered from a tree broker.
        Large trees were replaced with the same specimen in the largest available box size. The new beauty was either delivered by truck and then swung into place by a rented crane or flown to the site by a big logging-industry helicopter with dual sets of rotors and positioned from the air.
        Smaller specimens were planted with strategies and tactics less military in nature, and in the case of the smallest of the new trees, a lot of hand labor proved sufficient to get the job done. In some instances, a tree would be small enough to require staking to guide its growth for a year or two and to give it resistance to the