26

11:49 P.M.

THE BOMB

Rex threw himself at the roof door again, ignoring the horror that trembled through his body at the sharp smell of its bright, unrusted steel. As his shoulder hit, the door pushed outward another few inches.

"Can you fit through there yet?" he asked.

Dess looked at the narrow gap between the door and its frame. "No way."

Rex stepped back and hissed through his teeth. He and Jonathan had been up here just the night before to dump off most of the fireworks, and this door had been unlocked. Now it was secured with a chain an inch wide and a padlock as big as his fist.

Rex hit the door again, his shoulder banging against steel with a dull thud, pulling the chain tauter and winning another inch of space.

"Still too small," Dess said.

Rex cursed. The fireworks show at Jenks wouldn't keep the darklings at bay for a whole twenty-five hours. They couldn't afford for this part of the plan to fail.

They'd chosen an empty building on the west side of town, tall enough that it could be seen from pretty much everywhere in Bixby. Once the rip reached downtown, anyone who was awake would notice that their TVs, radios, and phones weren't working. Hopefully when they stumbled out of their houses and into the blue time, they would spot the shower of rockets shooting up from this roof. Anyone who made it here could shelter under the protection of the flame-bringer until the long midnight ended.

But the first trick was to make sure as many people as possible were awake at midnight. And to do that, they had to get out to the roof, where Dess's makeshift bomb lay hidden.

Thunder rolled overhead, and Rex smelled a change in the air.

"Oh, crap." He thrust his hand out through the crack in the door, and a few drops struck his palm. "Perfect. It's raining."

"You guys covered the fireworks with plastic, didn't you?" Dess asked.

Rex just looked at her. There'd been so much preparing and planning this last week, rain was one thing that had slipped his mind. The fireworks were on the other side of the door, outside, hidden under some old cardboard boxes. They'd be reduced to a soggy, useless mass if they didn't get out there soon.

"Didn't you hear the weather report?" Dess cried. "They've been predicting rain all week!"

"I can't watch TV anymore." Since Madeleine had unleashed the darkling part of his mind, the clever, human flickering box in his father's house gave him fits to look at.

Dess groaned.

Rex took a few steps back, as much of a running start as he could get in the small stairwell shed, and threw himself against the door again. It budged outward another inch against the chain. Still not enough gap between door and frame to squeeze out onto the roof.

The rain outside was falling harder now.

Rex noticed that the metal was bending outward from the center, where the chain held it. Maybe if he focused on pounding the bottom half of the door, he could open up enough room to crawl through.

He drew his foot back and kicked the metal, sending another booming sound echoing down the stairwell.

Dess looked down the stairs. "Jeez, Rex. Make some more noise, why don't you?"

"I didn't smell anyone on the way in."

"But if someone locked that door today, they might still be around."

"So?" he said. "At least they might have the key."

"They might have a gun too."

"Humans don't scare me anymore." He gave the metal another kick; it scraped outward a little farther. Inside his cowboy boot Rex's foot stung, but he ignored the pain, focusing on raising up the darkness inside himself.

Black spots appeared in the corners of his eyes, and he felt his body shifting within his skin. Pain turned to anger, and he began to thrash at the door harder and harder, ignoring the damage it was doing to his foot.

Wild thoughts eclipsed his human mind: the flat metal expanse was his enemy, the clever alloys inside it an abomination. He had to escape this human structure and get out under the open sky.

The door buckled and twisted under his assault, its bottom hinges tearing from the wall. Flakes of paint flew from the battered metal, which cried out dully with every kick. Finally the ring that held the chain snapped off, and the entire door tumbled outward onto the roof, like a drunk passing out cold.

"What the hell, Rex," Dess said softly. "Are you okay?"

Rex got himself under control, letting the darkness fade, taking deep breaths and feeling the pain swell in his right foot.

"Ow," he said softly, turning to the stair rail to peer down. If anyone was in the building, they must have heard that.

But no sound of approaching feet met his ears.

"Come on," she said. "We're behind schedule."

He followed Dess out onto the roof, every limping step pure agony. The cold rain fell on his face and hands, stronger now.

The fireworks were still there under the rain-spattered boxes, still dry. Ignoring his foot, Rex helped Dess drag the whole pile across the black tar and through the door into the shelter of the stairwell.

He checked his watch: four minutes to midnight.

Dess started throwing the boxes down the stairs, clearing some room in the tiny stairwell shed. The bomb sat atop the other fireworks, a paint can with a three-foot fuse protruding from its top.

"There's my baby," Dess said with a smile.

Rex had watched her make the bomb, the terrifying smell of its contents almost panicking him. The soldered-shut paint can was stuffed full of gunpowder emptied from a dozen packages of M-8Os. Its purpose was simple: to create as loud a boom as possible. Dess had calculated that its shock wave would set off car alarms for miles in every direction, waking people up all over this side of town.

Of course, for that to work, they had to set it off in the next four minutes, before the long midnight fell.

"I'll take it from here," he said.

"No way. My toy."

She lifted it with both hands and carefully carried it out into the rain. Still limping, Rex followed her to one corner of the roof, where a cell phone repeater sat, a five-foot-tall antenna that faced out toward the suburbs. Dess balanced the bomb atop it. She'd explained to Rex that it had to go up high so the roof wouldn't muffle the shock wave before it could travel out across Bixby.

"Okay. Let me do this part," he said.

Dess looked at the bomb for a long moment, then nodded. "Fine by me. But if that fuse starts to burn too fast, run like hell." She paused. "You know what? Run like hell no matter what." She stepped back.

Rex took a deep breath and pulled out his lighter. His foot was throbbing dully now, keeping time with his quickening heartbeat.

He reached down and lit the long, dangling fuse. It sputtered to life and began crawling slowly upward toward the paint can.

"Okay, let's go," Dess said.

He watched the fire climb for a long moment to be sure the rain wouldn't put it out, finding himself fascinated by the shower of sparks that were carried off in a little trail by the wind.

"Rex!" she called from the other end of the roof. "Come on!"

Then thunder boomed overhead, and for a split second Rex thought the bomb had gone off. He stumbled backward onto his bad foot and, swearing at the pain, turned to limp after Dess. They huddled against the far side of the stairwell shed.

"Are you sure we'll be okay back here?" he asked.

"According to my research, Rex, bombs can kill you in two ways. Stray bits of flying stuff, which this shed is solid enough to protect us from, and the shock wave. My little baby isn't strong enough to crush our heads, but make sure you cover your ears unless you want to go deaf." To reinforce this point, she placed her own palms flat against her head.

Rex checked his watch. Only a little more than one minute left.

Then a terrible thought occurred to him. They'd used the slowest-burning fuse they could find, three feet of it for the maximum amount of time. But kicking through the door had already put them behind schedule....

"How long did you say that fuse would take?" he asked.

"About two and a half minutes."

"Good. There's just about a minute to go before midnight."

"Really?" She looked at Geostationary. "Sixty seconds? Crap, Rex, we took too long!"

"But the bomb will go off before midnight."

Dess shook her head. "Shock waves travel at the speed of sound, Rex, which is slow - almost eight seconds to go one mile. The shock waves have to get out to the suburbs, and then car alarms have to go off long enough to wake people up. That'll all take extra seconds we don't have!"

Rex took a breath, then peeked around the corner of the shed.

About a third of the fuse had burned. Dess was right; he'd lit it too late.

After a second of panicked deliberation Rex swore loudly, then hobbled back toward the bomb, pulling out his lighter.

"Rex, what the hell are you doing?"

"Dealing with it!"

He stumbled up to the bomb just as the fuse reached the halfway mark. Thrusting his lighter out, he aimed its flame at a point only a few inches from the top of the can. The lighter sputtered out once, a direct hit from a big raindrop extinguishing it.

"Come on," he muttered, flicking it back to life.

"Get back here!" Dess cried.

Finally the flame caught. A foot-long section of fuse dropped to the roof, lit at both ends now. The shorter piece attached to the can sparked and hissed in the rain, then steadied and began to crawl its last few inches.

Rex didn't stick around to watch. He spun on his left heel and ran back toward the stairwell shed, his hands already over his ears.

Just as he rounded the corner, his boot skidded on the rain-slick roof, sending him sprawling painfully to the tar. He crawled the last few feet and huddled beside Dess against the side of the shed, eyes closed and ears still covered.

"Rex, you moron!" Dess shouted. "You almost gave me a heart atta - "

The bomb exploded with a vast noise - a physical blow more than a sound, like a sack of potatoes hitting Rex in the chest. Even his closed eyelids felt the concussion, and a single, awesome flash of light shot through them.

For a moment all other noises disappeared, as if the bomb's roar had sucked sound itself from the rest of the world. But slowly the murmur of the rain returned, and Rex dared to open his eyes.

He glanced at his watch: twenty seconds to midnight.

Rising to their feet, he and Dess peered around the corner. Nothing was left of the paint can, of course, and the cell phone antenna was a blackened wreckage, bent and twisted metal sticking out in all directions.

"Whoa, cool!" Dess said.

Rex limped after her to the edge of the roof, training his darkling hearing on the city below....

The sweet sound of car alarms rang out across Bixby, a hundred whoops and screams and buzzes all mingled in a great, untidy chorus. Rex imagined people turning over in their sleep, glaring accusingly at their alarm clocks and wondering what all the noise was about. Even the sleepiest would still be awake in ten seconds when midnight fell. Perfect timing.

Here in town they wouldn't feel the blue time strike right away, of course: the rip still had to travel to downtown from Jenks. But for those the bomb had awakened - and all the others already up watching late-night TV or reading in bed - that delay would only seem like an instant. Suddenly at midnight the world would turn blue, everything flickering with the red tinge of the rip, TVs, radios, and car alarms all silenced at once.

Those who went out to investigate would find the dark moon risen overhead, the last few seconds of rain settling to earth. And soon they would see the fireworks display downtown, the only movement visible on the frozen horizon.

Hopefully many of them would start to make their way downtown then, searching for some kind of explanation. By that time Jonathan would be flying among them, telling everyone to get to this building as fast as possible. And as long as the midnighters' defenses at Jenks had held off the main darkling force long enough, they'd have time to get here.

As he and Dess waited for the last few seconds of normal time to elapse, Rex took a deep breath. For the next twenty-five hours humanity would be a hunted species, dispossessed of all its clever toys and machines, toppled from the summit of the food chain. Those who understood that quickly enough would run and would live; those who refused to believe would perish.

In the darkling part of his mind, Rex thought for a moment that perhaps this wasn't such a bad thing. Without predators to cull the herd, humanity had spread across the earth unchecked, crowding the planet beyond its resources, prideful and arrogant.

Maybe one night a year of being hunted would do them good.

He shook his head then, shivering in the cold rain. Darkling notions had teased his mind all week, but he knew he couldn't let himself think that way - he had a job to do. The people of Bixby didn't deserve to be slaughtered just because the world was overpopulated. No one did.

He listened to the car alarms and forced himself to hope that everyone down there was listening too.

Just before midnight fell, a peal of thunder started to roll, sounding directly over their heads. And then the earth shuddered, the blue time descending over everything, freezing the rain into a million hovering diamonds around him, cutting off the thunder, the car alarms, everything.

"Can you see it from here?" Dess asked.

Rex looked toward Jenks, and his seer's vision picked out the slim red glimmer of the rip. It was starting to swell.

"Yep. The red time is on its way."

"Good going on that fuse." Dess breathed out a slow sigh. "Guess now we just sit back until the fireworks start."

As per the plan, the other three midnighters were out in Jenks. Soon they would light the first fireworks display to forestall the main force of darklings. Once that was going strong and before the darklings started to flow around them and into town, Jonathan would fly Jessica and Melissa back here, where the five of them would make their stand.

At least, that was the way it was supposed to work.

"Whoa, Rex! Look at that!"

Dess was pointing back toward downtown. Rex turned, following her gaze to the Mobil Building, the tallest in Bixby. The neon winged horse at its summit hunkered just under the low ceiling of heavy clouds, strangely illuminated against their dark bulk.

Rex's heart began to pound. "Oh my God."

"Have you ever seen anything like that?"

"No, but I've always wanted to. Melissa and I have been looking for one of those since... forever."

A frozen bolt of lightning reached down from the cloud, its motionless fire forking into a hundred tendrils that caressed the metal framework of the neon horse. In Rex's midnight vision the arrested lightning was mind-bogglingly complex, every inch of it divided into a million burning zigzags.

He remembered all the times he and Melissa had set off on their bicycles as kids, tunneling through the rain toward some frozen flicker of light on the horizon. They'd never made it before the secret hour finished, always having to plow back through the resumed storm empty-handed.

But they'd kept trying; one of the first fragments of lore Rex had discovered was all about frozen lightning, though it had never explained what you were supposed to do when you found it.

Still, there was something in his mind....

He felt the fissures that Madeleine had made, the still-tender wounds of her attack, begin to throb. He saw it now, thrown whole into his mind by the sight of the frozen lightning. This was the last remnant of what the darklings had hidden from him.

Rex blinked. "Oh, no."

"What?"

He couldn't answer, a shudder passing through him. Suddenly he knew what tonight was really all about and what had to happen before the rip reached downtown and set the lightning free again. He knew the instructions that the Grayfoots had never received before their halfling had died.

And finally he understood the real reason why the darklings were so afraid of Jessica - why they had always wanted her dead.

He looked out at Jenks; the glowing red of the rip was still moving toward them. "We can stop this."

"What, Rex?"

"We need Jessica here."

"But they haven't even lit the - "

"Shhh." Rex dropped to his knees and let his head fall into his hands. In planning tonight he'd put Melissa on the front line for two reasons. She could guide Jessica and Jonathan safely there and back, through cops or darkling invasions as needed. And Rex had also known that if anything went wrong, she could taste his thoughts for miles across the secret hour, just as she had when they were eight years old, when she'd made her way across Bixby wearing only pajamas covered in pictures of cowgirls.

Now he needed her to hear him again.

"Rex?" Dess said softly.

He waved her silent and focused himself, setting all of his will to the task of summoning his oldest friend.

Cowgirl... he thought. I need you now.

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