How long had her friends been gone?

She looked downstreet at the flashing clock. It said 8:42, but she wasn’t sure she could trust it. It felt longer than that. Much longer. Maybe she should call to them. Just give a halloo. How y’all doin in there?

No. No such thing. You’re a gunslinger, girl. At least that’s whathe says. What he thinks. And you’re not going to change what he thinks by hollering like a schoolgirl just seen a garter snake under a bush. You’re just going to sit here and wait. You can do it. You’ve got Oy for company and you —

Then she saw the man standing on the other side of the street. Just standing there beside a newsstand. He was naked. A ragged Y-cut, sewn up with large black industrial stitches, began at his groin, rose, and branched at his sternum. His empty eyes gazed at her. Through her. Through the world.

Any possibility that this might only have been a hallucination ended when Oy began to bark. He was staring directly across at the naked dead man.

Susannah gave up her silence and began to scream for Eddie.

Fourteen

When the rose opened, disclosing the scarlet furnace within its petals and the yellow sun burning at the center, Eddie saw everything that mattered.

“Oh my Lord,” Jake sighed from beside him, but he might have been a thousand miles away.

Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a runaway milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s french fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye.