Dean Koontz - Strange Highways

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 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.