23.

The sound of the explosion receded, leaving behind a ringing in my ears. The cloud continued to spread out upward, and as I got to my feet the rain abruptly stopped, replaced by eddies of warm air brushing past my wet skin. I began to trudge resentfully along the canyon's edge toward the blast site, where I could begin to make out a darkened section of desert and a thick pillar of black smoke rising up where the mushroom cloud had cleared. The rain-soaked sand poured slowly into my shoes and dust coated the outside of my clothing as I trudged, making my steps increasingly heavier and infinitely less pleasant. I realized that I didn't really care what Grod had done now, I just wanted to be home, or at a bar, or anywhere I wasn't in this kind of sustained mortal danger. But I couldn't stop walking.

My mind drifted into numbness as the rythmic patting of my feet filled my mind. Did I walk minutes, hours, days? I don't remember, but when I came upon the wreckage my expression turned to awe. Directly in front of me laid the van, upside down and burnt out. Part of a charred skeleton laid half on the ground and half in the window, as if it couldn't quite get out fast enough.

Maybe fifty yards beyond that was the Cadillac, still on fire. The driver was dead, and slumped over the steering column, but the passenger seemed to be struggling to get out. By his loud moans, he seemed also to be in a great deal of pain.

I heard a shotgun cock behind me and jumped aside. Grod, whose robe was now burnt around the edges, paid no attention to me. He walked past me and without a stagger in his step, paced straight toward the lone survivor who was dressed in those familiar red robes. I watched silently, without expectation as Grod grabbed the door of the car and easily pulled it off. I barely felt interested in the proceedings, like I was watching a movie I'd already seen before on TV and beginning to doze off.

Grod grabbed the passenger's red robes with both hands and pulled him out across the seat and onto the ground. The man tried feebly to stand up, but Grod brought a fist down on top of his head, sending him into a slumped heap. He then gathered the cloth around the bishop's collar in his hand, and at first I thought he was trying to tear the garment off. But he jerked his arm upward suddenly, his entire body swinging back with the effort as he lifted the man off the ground and hurled him into the air. I stared in awe as the body rose higher and higher, till it reached the apex of its journey. Grod shouldered his shotgun and fired, and the bishop's head disappeared, replaced with a spreading cloud of blood and other bits I didn't want to think about. The body crashed down onto the Cadillac's trunk, and I covered my head ineffectively with my hands as droplets of blood rained down on everything around me. Grod slung his shotgun back over his shoulder and slogged slowly past me again, his eyes not meeting mine.

"Let's go, Paul," he said as he passed by. "We've got a long walk ahead of us."

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