The air was thick with gasoline fumes. Breathing was difficult. She reached to Ariel 
and said, “Come on, baby, out through the windshield, quickly now."
  When the girl failed to look at her but clung to the door and stared out the side 
window at the night sky, Chyna took her by the shoulder and pulled.
  “Come on, honey, come on, come on, come on,” she urged. “It's damn stupid if we die 
now, after getting this far. If you die now, won't the dolls laugh? Won't they laugh and 
laugb?”
  Here, now, comes Sheriff Edgler Vess, battered and bleeding but sprightly in his step, 
past the roof of the motor home, which is now essentially the vehicle's port flank as it 
lies half capsized on this sea of blacktop and spilled gasoline. He glances curiously at 
the broken-out skylight but proceeds without hesitation to the front of the vehiclewhere 
he discovers Chyna and Ariel, naughty girls, who have just come out through the 
windshield.
  Their backs are to him, and they are moving away, heading toward the west side of the 
highway, where a sheltering grove of pines stands not far beyond the pavement, surely 
hoping to scuttle out of sight before he finds them. The woman is hobbling, urging the 
girl along with a hand in the small of her back.
  Though the sheriff was unable to find his revolver, he has the 20gauge, which he holds 
in both hands by the barrel. He comes in fast behind them. The woman hears the odd squish 
that he makes limping on one bad boot heel across the reeking wet pavement, but she 
doesn't have a chance to turn fully and confront him. Vess swings the shotgun like a 
club, putting everything he has into it, smashing the flat of the stock across her 
shoulder blades.
  The woman is knocked off her feet, the breath hammered from her, unab4* to cry out. She 
pitches forward and sprawls facedown on the pavement, perhaps unconscious but certainly 
stunned immobile.
  Ariel totters forward in the direction that she was headed, as though she knows nothing 
of what happened to Chyna, and perhaps she doesn't. Maybe she is desperate for freedom, 
but more likely she is stumbling across the blacktop with no more awareness than a windup 
doll.
  The woman rolls onto her back, looking up at him, not dazed but white and wild-eyed 
with rage.
  “God fears me,” he says, which are words that can be formed from the letters of his 
name.
  But the woman seems unimpressed. Wheezing, because of either the fumes or the blow to 
the back, she says, “Fuck you."
  When he kills her, he will have to eat a piece of her, as he ate the spider, because in 
the difficult days ahead, he may need a measure of her extraordinary strength.
  Ariel is fifty or sixty feet away, and the sheriff considers going after her. He 
decides to finish the woman first, because the girl can't get far in her condition.
  When Vess looks down again, the woman is withdrawing a small object from a pocket of 
her jeans.
  Chyna held the butane lighter that she'd been carrying since the service station where 
Vess had murdered the clerks. She released the childproof lock on the gas lever and slid 
her thumb onto the striker wheel. She was terrified to ignite it. She lay in gasoline, 
and her clothes, her hair, were soaked with it. She could barely draw breath through the 
suffocating fumes. Her trembling hand was damp with gasoline too, and she figured that 
the flame would leap immediately to her thumb, travel down her hand, her arm, enshrouding 
her entire body in only seconds.
  But she had to trust that there was justice in the universe and meaning in the redwood 
mists, for without that trust, she would be no better than Edgler Vess, no better than a 
mindlessly seeking palmetto beetle.
  She was lying at Vess's feet. Even if the worst happened, she would take him with her.
  “Forever,” she said, because that was another word that could be formed from the 
letters of his name, and she thumbed the striker wheel.
  A pure flame spurted from the Bic but didn't instantly leap to her thumb, so she thrust 
the lighter against Vess's boot, dropped it, and the flame went out at once but not 
before igniting the gasoline-soaked leather.
  Even as Chyna let go of the lighter, she rolled away from Vess, arms tucked against her 
breast, spinning across the blacktop, shocked by how quickly fire exploded high into the 
night behind her with a wboosb and a sudden wave of heat. Ethereally beautiful blue 
flames must be streaking toward her across the saturated pavement, and she steeled 
herself for the killing rapture of fire-but then she was out of the gasoline, rolling 
across dry highway.
  Gasping for air, she shoved onto her feet, backing farther from the burning pavement 
and from the beast in the conflagration.
  Edgler Vess was wearing boots of fire, screaming and stamping his feet as great sheets 
of flame were flung up from the blacktop around him.
  Chyna saw his hair ignite, and she looked away. Ariel was well beyond the gasoline-wet 
pavement and out of danger, though she seemed oblivious of the blaze. She was stopped 
with her back to the fire, gazing up at the stars.
  Chyna hurried to the girl and led her another twenty feet south on the highway, just to 
be safe.
  Vess's screaming was shrill and terrible and louder now, louder because, as Chyna 
discovered when she turned to look back, the freak was coming after them, a pillar of 
fire, totally engulfed. Yet he was on his feet, slogging through the boiling tar that 
bubbled out of the softening blacktop. His bright arms stretched in front of him, 
blue-white tongues of fire seething off his fingertips. A tornado of blood-red fire 
whirled in his open mouth, dragon fire spouted from his nostrils, his face vanished 
behind an orange mask of flames, yet he came onward, stubborn as a sunset, screaming.
  Chyna pushed the girl behind her, but then Vess abruptly veered away from them, and it 
became clear to her that he hadn't seen them. He was seared blind, chasing neither her 
nor Ariel but an undeserved mercy.
  In the middle of the highway, he fell across the yellow lines and lay there, jerking 
and twitching, writhing and kicking, gradually turning on his side' pulling his knees up 
to his chest, folding his blackened hands under his chin. His head curled down to his 
hands as though his neck were melting and unable to support it. Soon he was silent in his 
burning.
  _V On one level, Vess knew the fading scream was his own, but his suffering was so 
intense that bizarre thoughts flared through his mind in a blaze of delirium. On another 
level, he believed that this eerie cry was not his own, after all, but issued from the 
unborn twin of the service-station clerk, which had left its image as a raw pink 
birthmark on the forehead of its brother. At the end, Vess was very afraid in the 
strangeness of the consuming fire, and then he was not a man any more but only an 
enduring darkness.
  Pulling Ariel with her, Chyna backed farther from the fire, but at last she was unable 
to stand one moment longer. She sat on the highway, shaking uncontrollably, pain-racked, 
sick with relief She began to cry, sobbing like a child, like an eight-year-old girl, 
loosing all of the tears never spent under beds or in mice-infested barn lofts or on 
lightningscorched beaches.