Eddie set Susannah down and bent to examine the rig holding the chair in the trunk. There were a lot of crisscrossing elastic cords, plus some sort of locking bar. Eddie drew the Ruger Jake had taken from his father’s desk drawer. “Fire in the hole,” he said cheerfully, and before any of them could even think of covering their ears, he pulled the trigger and blew the lock off the security-bar. The sound went rolling into the silence, then echoed back. The warbling sound of the thinny returned with it, as if the gunshot had snapped it awake. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Jake thought, and grimaced with distaste. Half an hour ago, he wouldn’t have believed that a sound could be as physically upsetting, as... well, the smell of rotting meat, say, but he believed it now. He looked up at the turnpike signs. From this angle he could see only their tops, but that was enough to confirm that they were shimmering again. It throws some kind of field, Jake thought. The way mixers and vacuum cleaners make static on the radio or TV, or the way that cyclotron gadget made the hair on my arms stand up when Mr. Kingery brought it to class and then asked for volunteers to come up and stand next to it.

Eddie wrenched the locking bar aside, and used Roland’s knife to cut the elastic cords. Then he drew the wheelchair out of the trunk, examined it, unfolded it, and engaged the support which ran across the back at seat-level. “Voila!” he said.

Susannah had propped herself on one hand—Jake thought she looked a little like the woman in this Andrew Wyeth painting he liked, Christina’s World—and was examining the chair with some wonder.

“God almighty, it looks so little ’n light!”

“Modern technology at its finest, darlin,” Eddie said. “It’s what we fought Vietnam for. Hop in.” He bent to help her. She didn’t resist him, but her face was set and frowning as he lowered her into the seat. Like she expected the chair to collapse under her, Jake thought. As she ran her hands over the arms of her new ride, her face gradually relaxed.

Jake wandered off a little, walking down another row of cars, running his fingers over their hoods, leaving trails of dust. Oy padded after him, pausing once to lift his leg and squirt a tire, as if he had been doing it all his life.

“Make you homesick, honey?” Susannah asked from behind Jake. “Probably thought you’d never see an honest-to-God American automobile again, am I right?”