At first, Vance thought that the radio must be receiving not a public broadcast, but instead a private communication between two people who were engaged in a vicious argument. That delusion lasted only a moment.
“You go to church and pretend to believe what it teaches, but you cheated on your wife with a barmaid.”
The only illumination issued from the instrument panel, but Vance Potter felt as if he were pinned in the fierce light of Judgment. “Who . . . who is this?”
“You are like all the others—selfish, greedy, capable of any outrage.”
Crazily, Vance sought to justify himself. “That was twenty-five years ago. It happened once. It—”
“Three times,” the accuser thundered. “It happened three times with the barmaid.”
Three times Vance had broken his vows, all within two weeks. In a fit of remorse and shame, he had put an end to it. He had walked a righteous path ever since—and had found it so fulfilling that he could not explain to himself why he had done what he’d done back in the day.
As a Christian, Vance thought of himself as a child of God, but he was no less the son of Norbert Potter, who set high standards for his children, the same that he set for himself and lived by. Norbert was a much-honored US Marine, an inspiring English teacher, and a winning football coach, much loved not only by his family but by the many students and athletes whose lives he had enriched. When Vance had cheated on Edna, he had at the same time failed his father, and the double betrayal, though unknown to them, so mortified him that he could not go on doing as he had done.
“You are of less value to the ecosystem than a cockroach, a worthless specimen like all the others, better off dead.”
In the stalled truck, surrounded by the rush of rain and the night as deep as eternity, Vance sought the words to explain his transgressions, not to defend his behavior, not even to apologize for it because apology was insufficient, but to ask what penance he must pay and plead for mercy. As rattled as he had been by the voice and by the knowledge it possessed （the breaking of vows that even Edna had never known about）， Vance nonetheless realized that it was absurd that God should speak to him from a truck radio and with such ungodly viciousness. Even as he was filled with a painful sense of humiliation, anger began to rise in him. He knew about hackers, how they took over your computer, but he didn’t know if one of them could seize your pickup and kill its engine and mock you through the radio, or why anyone would want to do that.
The menacing voice reverberated through the cab of the truck. “How soon will the day come when you want the barmaid again, when you want what your wife owns, when you strike her in the head and hold her underwater in the boathouse darkness and drown her? Who will you enslave, rape, murder? How many will you machine-gun and bury in mass graves? How many millions will you gas and incinerate?”
Boathouse, drown, enslave, rape, murder, incinerate?
Although for a moment it seemed that Jehovah had come to judge Vance Potter, his accuser now ranted like a demon that escaped from Hell.
“Who are you?” Vance asked. “What do you want?”
“I want all of you to die before you destroy the Earth—I want all of you, every rotten one of you, reduced to fertilizer, so you at last serve a useful purpose.”
The lightning had for the moment retreated to distant chambers of the night, leaving Rustling Willows in spectral darkness. Unrelenting rain shattered against the windshield, blurring everything beyond the glass. When Vance thought he saw something moving through the storm, something big, he locked the doors and leaned over the steering wheel, squinting, unable to be sure that his imagination wasn’t playing tricks on him.
He traveled with a rifle. Who didn’t in rural Montana? But it was racked behind him. He released his safety harness and turned in his seat and reached for the weapon.
Something tore the locked door off the truck as if it were only a loose lid on a cardboard box, threw it away, seized Vance Potter, extracted him from the vehicle. He tried to scream as he was lifted out and up, but a hand as large as a serving tray, with long fingers more intricately articulated than human fingers, clutched his face and clamped his mouth shut. Between those cold and bone-hard digits, he saw an array of radiant red eyes regarding him as if he were a squirming, repulsive thing found under a rock. His captor possessed tremendous strength, disabling him. The hand closed tighter around Vance’s head, tighter and tighter, until he felt his cheekbones fracture and heard his skull begin to crack. His executioner said something like, “The Restoration begins.” Hot, excruciating pain seemed to melt Vance Potter’s skeleton, and he felt as though his flesh was liquefying. He was cast into blindness and felt a gravity, like that of a black hole, pulling him into oblivion, a descent of pure terror that, mercifully, lasted only a moment.