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closed. "This has all been so wearying."
"Wearying? Wearying?" Frank snapped out the words. "What this has been is
fucking insane, is what it's been."
She made a face at him. "Frank -- the children."
"Let 'em hear. I'm fed up."
"I'm sorry to have involved your family," Mouse told him. "Time and
circumstance offered me no other choice."
"Yeah, yeah. So you've been telling us."
"Then if you are intelligent enough to acknowledge the inevitability of what
we are doing, why are you angry?"
"I don't know!" He slammed both hands hard against the wheel. "Can't I
just be mad? Do I have to have a reason? Christ, I don't wanna save the world.
I just want to be able to keep on selling Taiwanese baseball mitts at fifty
percent markup. That's my idea of a reality worth fighting for."
"Want me to drive for a while, Frank?"
As he glanced back at Burnfingers, he subsided. "Naw. Just blowing off steam.
Call you if I need a break."
"Okay. You may think of yourself as ordinary and weak, Frank
Sonderberg, but I think you are one tough son of a bitch."
"Thanks. You got to be to run a business like mine. That's the American way."
"We should have taken some pictures," Alicia pointed out. "After all, we've
had some pretty unique experiences."
"Who'd believe us?" Frank punctuated the rhetorical question with a grunt of
disdain. "I can see it now. We could have the Blockers and the
McIntyres over for a slide show." He raised his voice theatrically.
"Here we are in Hell -- notice the demons at the tables? Observe the stuffed
children mounted on the walls. Here we are on the highway to nowhere, and this
one now, this is the one that takes you off the edge of the world.
This place that looks like Las Vegas? It's really on another planet. You can
tell by the guy with the root growing out of his head and the lady with the
purple fur on her face.
"This dump is Salt Lake City, only it's after they've dropped the Big
One, which is why the streets haven't been swept in a while. Yeah, we
should've taken pictures." He concluded by making a rude noise.
"Well, we could have looked at them," she persisted.
"No, thanks, hon. If we get out of this, the last thing I want is anything to
remind me of it. I'll be real happy to put it behind me. Way behind me."
"But you won't be able to do that, darling."
"No," he grumbled. "I guess I won't."
Burnfingers leaned close, nodding. "Looks like light up ahead."
A patch of sunlight grew in the distance, which was intriguing since there was
no sun in sight. It illuminated an intersection. Frank slowed up as they
approached.
It was a sextupal crossing. Signs littered posts or hung in midair.
There was also a single homey red stop sign. The rest were unrecognizable. A
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few were composed of pure light. Others busily rearranged themselves as they
looked on. The variety of the display was impressive.
Beyond the intersection lay a large parcel of land composed of sand and
gravel. It occupied a circle several hundred yards in diameter. Void abutted
it on all sides. In the middle of this patch of suspended grit stood a simple
frame structure painted dark brown with white trim. Its tin roof sparkled
under the false, sourceless sunshine. A half dozen fuel islands surrounded the
main building. They resembled abstract sculpture more than they did gas pumps.
As the motor home stood idling behind the stop sign, what appeared to be a
metallic flying fish folded its wings and settled down across from one of the
pumps. There was a pause before a small bolt of lightning leaped from pump to
vehicle. A creature that resembled a protozoan with legs hopped out of the
fish-car, did something to the pump, and then climbed back inside its machine.
The filmy wings unfurled, the head of the fish turned, and the streamlined
shape shot down one of the other roads so fast only the shock of its
disappearance echoed in their memories.
As near as Frank had been able to tell, it had never once made contact with
the ground.
A pair of other vehicles stood parked in the lot to the right of the building.
One was a large boulder on treads. The other looked like a cluster of titanium
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