It

popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail — and then a round red something came over the fence and he flinched instinctively away as the cherry-bomb exploded to his left, kicking up dust.
The bang silenced them all for a moment — Mike stared unbelievingly at them through the fence, and they stared back. Peter Gordon looked utterly shocked, and even Belch looked stunned.
They’re ascared of him now, Mike thought suddenly, and a new voice spoke inside of him, perhaps for the first time, a voice that was disturbingly adult. They’re ascared, but that won’tstop them. You got to get away, Mikey, or something’s going to happen. Not all of them will want it to happen, maybe — not Victor and maybe not Peter Gordon — but it will happen anyway because Henry will make it ‘ happen. So get away. Get away fast.
He backed up another two or three steps and then Henry Bowers said: ‘I was the one killed your dog, nigger.’
Mike froze, feeling as if he had been hit in the belly with a bowling ball. He stared into Henry Bowers’s eyes and understood that Henry was telling the simple truth: he had killed Mr Chips.
That moment of understanding seemed nearly eternal to Mike — looking into Henry’s crazed sweat-ringed eyes and his rage-blackened face, it seemed to him that he understood a great many things for the first time, and the fact that Henry was far crazier than Mike had ever dreamed was only the least of them. He realized above all that the world was no t kind, and it was more this than the news itself that forced the cry from him: ‘You honky chickenshit bastard! ‘
Henry uttered a shriek of rage and attacked the fence, monkeying his way toward the top with a brute strength that was terrifying. Mike paused a moment longer, wanting to see if that adult voice that had spoken inside had been a true voice, and yes, it had been true: after the slightest hesitation, the others spread out and also began to climb.
Mike turned and ran again, sprinting across the trainyards, his shadow trailing squat at his feet. The freight which the Losers had seen crossing the Barrens was long gone now, and there was no sound but Mike’s own breathing in his ears and the musical jingle of chainlink as Henry and the others climbed the fence.
Mike ran across one triple set of tracks, his sneakers kicking back cinders as he ran across the space between. He stumbled crossing the second set of tracks, and felt pain flare briefly in
his ankle. He got up and ran on again. He heard a thud as Henry jumped down from the top of the fence behind him. ‘Here I come for your ass, nigger!’ Henry bawled.
Mike’s reasoning self had decided that the Barrens were his only chance now. If he could get down there he could hide in the tangles of underbrush, in the bamboo . . . or, if things became really desperate, he could climb into one of the drainpipes and wait it out.
He could do those things, maybe . . . but there was a hot spark of fury in his chest that had nothing to do with his reasoning self. He could understand Henry chasing after him when he got the chance, but Mr Chips? . . . killing Mr Chips? My DOG wasn’t a nigger, you cheapshitbastard, Mike thought as he ran, and the bewildered anger grew.
Now he heard another voice, this one his father’s. I don’t want you to make a career out ofrunning away . . . and what it all comes down to is that you have to be careful where you take your stand. You have to ask yourself if Henry Bowers is worth the trouble . . .
Mike had been running a straight line across the trainyards toward the storage quonsets. Beyond them another chainlink fence divided the trainyards from the Barrens. He had been planning to scale that fence and jump over to the other side. Instead he veered hard right, toward the gravel-pit.
This gravel-pit had been used as a coalpit until 1935 or so — it had been a ‘ stoking-point for the trains which ran through the Derry yards. Then the diesels came, and the electrics. For a number of years after the coal was gone (much of the remainder stolen by people