As big as silver dollars, ashes like enormous gray snowflakes spiraled to the ground around me. A storm of burning embers rained down, too, carried by thermal currents from the ferocious blaze, dropping out as the currents weakened with distance. Each ember was a potential new fire if by chance it fell upon fuel. I winced as one of them glanced off my face, shook another off my jacket sleeve, and brushed yet another out of my hair, blistering my left thumb in the process.
Behind the last two buildings, at the east end of the complex, the gravel gave way to bare earth. Here, the night lay in deeper darkness than the territory that I’d just left, although still somewhat revealed by firelight. I could see just well enough to discern a series of large troughs, maybe twelve feet long, six feet wide, four deep, elevated on concrete pads, each with a swan-neck spout and a spigot at one end. I couldn’t imagine a purpose for them, but they looked as if they were public baths for a race of giants.
Beyond the troughs and the board-and-wire fence lay twenty feet of bare ground and then, to the east, a shadowy vista of chaparral. On a warm evening like this, it was the kind of land that teemed with nightlife, though not the kind that required a dance band and adult beverages. Tarantulas as big as my fist. Lizards and rabbits that wouldn’t hurt you, rattlesnakes that would. Coyotes. A bobcat or three.
I needed to get back to the fairgrounds. I still believed that the cultists had some intention there, other than to use the Sombra Brothers carnival as their cover and headquarters for this operation.
As something inside the burning building exploded and shrapnel banged and thudded off all manner of surfaces in the conflagration, I headed south, using the line of troughs for cover until there were no more of them. Low and bent-backed. Hurrying but not running. I hastened into a secondary orchard much smaller than the first.
The heat of the fire and the flurries of ashes and smoke were far behind me. In the distance I heard sirens once more, sirens combined with stentorian horn blasts that identified the vehicles as fire engines.
As before, I stayed close to one row of trees, pausing at the sixth, the twelfth, the eighteenth, to scope the orchard ahead and to keep my breathing as slow and quiet as possible. I was too far from the burning building for the racket of its piecemeal collapse to provide much cover now.
I resisted the temptation to glance back at the blaze. My eyes were not yet fully dark-adapted again, and I needed them to adjust to the gloom as quickly as possible.
Although lacking headstones and monuments, the orchard at night reminded me of a graveyard, perhaps because of the regimented rows, perhaps because I believed that black-clad figures, as faceless as Death, would at any moment step out of cover and loom before me.
At the twenty-fourth tree, six from the end of the orchard, I stood with my back to the trunk, held my breath, listened. I thought I heard a voice. Two voices. I drew a breath or two, listened again, but heard nothing except a tree rat or a raccoon scratching its way along a branch overhead. Then the voices again. They were speaking low, but they weren’t as quiet as they should have been if they were cultists on the lookout for me.
I needed to locate them. In as low a crouch as I could get without proceeding in a duck-walk, I moved from the twenty-fourth tree to the twenty-fifth, leaning to the left, to the right, trying to tune in to their conversation.
They fell silent. Back pressed to the almond tree, I waited, hoping that they hadn’t gone quiet because they’d seen or heard me.
My eyes were well adjusted to the dark again, which meant only that now I was merely half blind. If money could buy anything, I would have called Mrs. Fischer and asked her to buy off the cloud cover and bring back the moon.
Judging by the tone of their voices, when they spoke again, the unseen men were irritated.
I eased forward to the twenty-sixth tree, to the twenty-seventh.
Halfway to the twenty-eighth, I saw them. On the right. Two figures dressed in black. Ahead of me, at the end of the alley between this row and the next. So close.
They evidently were supposed to be scanning the ten feet of open ground that separated the almond trees from the fence that marked the southern perimeter of Maravilla Valley Orchards. They didn’t seem to be deeply committed to the task.
I kept moving, afraid one of them would look toward me at any moment. I put my back to the twenty-eighth tree, two from the end, and found that I was now close enough to hear what they said.
“Damn it, Emory, that freak never come this way.”
“Yeah,” Emory said, “but this is where they want us.”
“You’d break your own neck tryin’ to kiss your own ass if one of the inner circle said so.”
“I’m not afraid of the inner circle.”
“Hell you ain’t. Come on. I wanna be where the action is.”
“Me, too, Carl. Who doesn’t?”
“Well,” Carl said, “it ain’t here.”
Emory didn’t respond.
“Five or six minutes till maybe they blow that church.”
“They’ll blow whatever they find.”
“If it’s the church, I gotta see it.”
“You don’t care about the church.”
“Don’t tell me what I don’t care about.”
Emory said, “It’s the farmhouse that has you hot.”
“You, too. You seen the pictures—them two girls, their mother.”
“They aren’t for us, anyway.”
“But we can watch it bein’ done.”
“I’ve already seen it done. Lots of times.”
“This is bullshit, man.”
“We don’t want to get in trouble.”
“All we do want is trouble.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, you’re a chickenshit.”
Emory didn’t reply.
Frustrated, Carl said, “Ain’t we anarchyists?”
“It’s pronounced an-are-kists. And no, we aren’t.”
“I thought we was.”
“We rule through chaos. That’s different.”
Carl sounded like a pouting child. “We need to be doin’ some anarchyism.”
Intellectual arguments between satanists were less witty than I had expected.
“You hear them sirens?” Carl asked.
“Of course I hear them. Fire trucks.”
“And cops close behind.”
“Shouldn’t be here for the cops,” Emory said.
“Finally you said a smart thing.”
“It’s maybe ten minutes before the farmhouse.”
“So let’s go, let’s get in the action.”
“All right. You’re right.”
“Bet your ass I’m right.”
I heard footsteps, the rustle of clothing. Looking past the tree behind which I sheltered, I saw them moving away, toward the fence.
Prudence suggested that I should let them go. There were two of them, and they were heavily armed. The element of surprise might not be sufficient to get me into a confrontation and out the other side alive.
This was the night of nights, however, and too much prudence might result in the forfeiture of the game.