The outbound gull struck the barrier and fell directly into the largest chunk of the burning plane.

'Stops em both ways,' Sea Dogs said. He spoke in the tone of a man who has gotten confirmation of a strongly held but previously unproved conviction. 'It's some kind of force-field, like in a Star Trick movie.'

'Trek,' Barbie said.

'Huh?'

'Oh shit,' Barbie said. He was looking over Sea Dogs's shoulder.

'Huh?' Sea Dogs looked over his own shoulder. 'Blue-fuck?'

A pulp-truck was coming. A big one, loaded well past the legal weight limit with huge logs. It was also rolling well above the legal limit. Barbie tried to calculate what the stopping-speed on such a behemoth might be and couldn't even guess.

Sea Dogs sprinted for his Toyota, which he'd left parked askew on the highway's broken white line. The guy behind the wheel of the pulper — maybe high on pills, maybe smoked up on meth, maybe just young, in a big hurry, and feeling immortal — saw him and laid on his horn. He wasn't slowing.

'Fuck me sideways!' Sea Dogs cried as he threw himself behind the wheel. He keyed the engine and backed the Toyota out of the road with the driver's door flapping. The little SUV thumped into the ditch with its square nose canted up to the sky. Sea Dogs was out the next moment. He stumbled, landed on one knee, and then took off running into the field.

Barbie, thinking of the plane and the birds — thinking of that weird black smutch that might have been the plane's point of impact — also ran into the grazeland, at first sprinting through low, unenthusiastic flames and sending up puffs of black ash. He saw a man's sneaker — it was too big to be a woman's — with the man's foot still in it.

Pilot, he thought. And then: I have to stop running around like this.