“It doesn’t blow because it’s cold out there. Do you know how cold it is out there? That’s ice on the handrail. You see it? That’s ice.”

“Crosby and Margolies in position, sir. We got a good view of the bus door.”

“Where’s that half-track? I want that half-track across the road. I don’t want anybody entering or leaving unless we say so.”

“Do you think the children are dead?”

“Who knows? Who knows what the hell’s going on?”

Singing Rock lifted his eyes to the thunderous sky. “We won’t see Nepauz-had when she appears,” he said quietly. “How long is it now?”

“Two minutes,” said Neil.

A Marine helicopter appeared from the southwest, and hovered around the bus for a while, taking reconnaissance photographs and trying to see into the iced-up windows. The draft from the helicopter’s rotors washed fiercely around them, and Singing Rock’s ribbons and beads flapped from the fence like the wings of ominous birds. Clouds of dry dust rose from the creek bed, and then gradually settled again as the helicopter sloped away southwest again, and disappeared.

“About a minute,” said Neil.

“Then it’s now,” whispered Singing Rock. “Now is the moment.”

The keening whine from the bus suddenly died away. The police and the troops didn’t notice at first, but then gradually the hubbub from both sides of the creek diminished and sank into silence. Everybody turned and stared at the bus. There was total quiet under the floodlights, as if they were all waiting for the first take of a movie sequence.

Over the radio transmitter, a voice said, “What’s happening now? All of a sudden, it’s like a graveyard around here.”

The school bus, in absolute silence, exploded. An intense ball of fire rolled right out of the middle of it, and pieces of debris flew into the darkness and littered the roadway.

“They’ve killed them! They’ve killed all the children!” yelped an NBC reporter. “The bus just exploded right in front of our eyes, and it must have killed everyone in it!”

A circle of fire still blazed on the roadway, and billows of smoke obscured their view. But then Singing Rock touched Harry’s arm and said, “Look.”

In the flames themselves, standing in a circle, were the tall figures of the twenty-two greatest Red Indian medicine men who had ever lived. They were dressed in their full ceremonial robes of buckskin and buffalo hide and elaborately woven robes, and their headdresses were decorated with horns and feathers and the tails of cougars.