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Just then we heard the sirens. "Thank God," Eden said and turned in the direction of the mall entrance. But it wasn't ambulances that drove in, it was fire trucks.

"No no no," Eden said.

There were three fire trucks in total, two regular ones and one of those smaller kind that the paramedics drive. They wound their way through the parking lot, honking their horns at the people going in and out of the mall as they tried to find their way to us. They had to circle around us once before they discovered a path through the parked cars. They drove into the exercise area, the lead truck going through the tape as it did so.

"Hey," Eden shouted, running at the truck. "You're breaking the scene integrity."

The trucks stopped, and firemen in full gear climbed out. One of them pushed Eden out of the way and started shouting at a group of others who were unrolling a hose. He pointed at the truck, which was still burning, and they dragged the hose toward it.

"I thought this was an exercise for the ambulance staff," I said to Rachel.

She shrugged. "As long as we get paid," she said. She closed her eyes and started to moan again.

The firemen turned on the hose and began spraying the truck. "No!" Eden cried and put his hands in the air. And now other firemen were kneeling beside the closest victims, looking at their fake wounds and reaching into their first aid kits.

"I don't think these guys know this is an exercise," I said.

Rachel opened her eyes and watched the firemen for a moment. Another group had unrolled a second hose and they began spraying water on the victims closest to the truck. The makeup melted away under the water, and Eden screamed and threw himself in the way.

"Someone else must have called them," Rachel said.

"So should we be playing our parts or not?" I wondered.

"We'd better ask Eden," Rachel said.

"Do you really think we should break the scene?" I asked.

But she was already on her feet and walking over to Eden, so I got up and followed her.

Eden was on his knees when we reached him, staring at the firemen as they started loading people onto stretchers. He held his hands clasped to his chest, like he was praying. There were more sirens in the distance now.

"What should we do?" I asked him.

"Are we still getting paid for this?" Rachel asked at the same time.

"Hospital," Eden said, only it came out more like a gasp.

"What about it?" I asked.

"Take me," he said, making that same gasping noise.

It was only then I realized that he wasn't praying, he was holding his chest. "I think he's having a heart attack," I said to Rachel.

Eden nodded and caught my hand with one of his. "Hospital," he said again. "Take me."

"I don't think so," I said, trying to push his hand off mine. "They'll take care of you here."

"Help," Rachel called, waving her arms at the firemen. "We need some help here." But none of them looked at us, because they were all busy with the other victims.

"Please," Eden said, squeezing my hand just a little.

"We're victims, not ..." I didn't know how to finish.

"I'll pay you," Eden gasped.

WE DRAGGED EDEN through the parking lot, to my car. "How much exactly are we getting paid for this?" I wanted to know as we drove around, looking for an exit.

"Hundred bucks," Eden gasped.

"Each?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Only have hundred," he managed.

"A hundred bucks to save your life?" I shook my head.

"And we're still getting paid for the exercise, too, right?" Rachel asked.

Eden didn't answer, just turned his head and looked out the window at the last bit of smoke rising from the truck. "Would have been perfect," he sighed.

We found the way out and went down the street in the direction of the hospital. More fire trucks drove past us, and I could hear sirens in all directions.

"This is really not a professionally run operation," Rachel said.

"Maybe we should start a union or something," I said.

"Maybe we should look for another job," she said.

"What would we do?" I asked.

"Something with benefits," she said. "In case we ever really get sick."

When we turned into the hospital entrance, I started to head for the parking lot, but Eden stopped me.

"Hey," he moaned from the back seat. "Emergency!"

"But I can't park in Emergency," I said. "It's just for ambulances and stuff."

"Emergency," Eden said again.

"I think you can park long enough to bring someone inside," Rachel said. "You just can't leave it there."

"All right," I said, "but I better not get towed."

None of that mattered, though, because as I drove into the Emergency area, I collided head-on with an ambulance coming the other way.

In the second before we hit, the ambulance driver and I stared at each other through our windshields. He opened his mouth to say something. Rachel screamed. Then the steering wheel came up and hit me in the face, and I couldn't open my eyes for a while.

When I finally managed to force them open once more, I saw Eden staggering through the Emergency doors. In the ambulance, the driver was slumped back in his seat, unconscious or dead, I couldn't tell. The other paramedic was standing in the rear of the ambulance, holding his head with one hand and the inside wall of the ambulance with the other.

"We'd better get out of here," I said, but when I looked over at Rachel, I saw that she was injured too. She was slumped back in her seat, and the windshield was cracked from where her head had hit it.

"Help!" I called out. I tried to undo my seat belt, but it was stuck. "Help!" I called again, this time to the paramedic who was conscious. He was out of the ambulance and stumbling around to the front of the vehicle now. He looked my way, then opened the driver's side door of the ambulance and dragged out the other paramedic. I pounded on the horn, but he didn't look back as he carried the other man through the Emergency doors.

I looked at Rachel again. I couldn't even see if she was still breathing or not. "Don't worry," I said. "I won't let you go." I leaned across as best I could with the seat belt holding me back, and I pinched her nostrils shut, blew air into her mouth. "I'll keep you alive until someone can save you," I told her. I kept it up until the nurses came out and took her away from me.

That was the first time we kissed.

JESUS CURED MY HERPES By Peter Darbyshire

AFTER I GOT KICKED OUT of The Code, I started driving out to the airport at night to watch the planes take off. I'd find an empty side street and sit on the hood of my car for hours. Sometimes the planes passed right over me, so low I could almost touch them. You could watch them for several minutes before they disappeared into the clouds overhead. There were always clouds over the airport.

There were other people out there who watched the planes, too. Most just parked on the street like me, but there was one group of men that met in front of a twenty-four hour garage. They were always there whenever I drove past, no matter what time of night. Five or six of them sitting in a circle of lawn chairs at the edge of the garage's parking lot, staring up at the sky and drinking beer from cans.

Once, I parked behind their row of trucks and wandered over to the edge of their circle. "Mind if I join you?" I asked. They all looked at me for a moment and then made noises like this was okay with them. One of them reached into a cooler at his feet and pulled out a beer, tossed it to me.

They didn't say anything at all as they waited for the next plane to pass, just kept staring up at the empty sky. I looked over at the garage. The doors were open, and inside I could see two men in grease-stained overalls bent over the engine of a car. One man would touch a part of the engine and shake his head, then the other man would do the same with another part of the engine. In the doorway of the garage, a woman was talking on a cell phone. "You don't understand," I heard her say, "I'm stuck here. I can't go anywhere."

A plane passed a couple of hundred feet over us just then. Over the noise of its engines, the man beside me shouted, "DC-10. Series 10. General Electric CF6-6 engines. 40,000 pounds takeoff thrust. Two hundred and fifty passengers, three cockpit crew. First flight made in 1970." The other men nodded and lifted their beer cans to their lips. Nobody said anything else until the next plane came. Then the man next to the first one who had spoken said, "737. 800 model. General Electric CFM56-7B engines. 27,300 pounds thrust. 189 passengers. First launched in 1965." They all nodded again and drank some more.

One of the mechanics got behind the wheel of the car and tried to start it up. The engine turned over and over but didn't catch. The other mechanic looked at the woman and shook his head. "I don't even know where I am," she shouted into her phone.

The men went around the circle until it was my turn. When the next plane passed overhead, they all looked at me. I looked up at the plane. "United Airlines," I said. "Probably going to New York." They kept staring at me until the next plane came, but even then they didn't say anything. They didn't speak again the whole time I was there, and they didn't offer me another beer after I finished the first one.

In the garage, one of the mechanics closed the hood of the car. The other one went over to a coffeemaker in the corner and poured himself a cup. The woman put her cell phone in her purse and looked up and down the street. Then she went over to the car and sat behind the wheel, started turning over the engine herself. It made a slow grinding noise, like the engine was tearing itself apart underneath the hood. I could hear it all the way back to my car.

AND ONCE I SAW a plane struck by lightning. It was only a hundred feet or so off the ground when the lightning hit it, so quickly that all I really saw was the afterimage. There were two bolts - one came down from the clouds, while the other rose up from the wet ground - and they met somewhere in the fuselage. I couldn't see anything but white for a moment because of the lightning, but I felt the vibration from the thunder where I sat on the car.

I waited for the plane to fall from the sky but it didn't. Instead, it kept on rising into the sky, until it disappeared in the clouds. It was as if the lightning had never happened, or I had imagined it. For a moment I thought that perhaps everyone on board was dead, that the lightning had electrocuted them all in their seats, and that the plane was flying on its own now. I had a vision of it continuing to rise up into the sky, perhaps all the way out of the atmosphere and into orbit, everyone inside melted into their seats.

When I went home later that night, I turned on the television and watched for any stories about the plane. There was nothing, though, just a few brief sound bites about the salvage operation of a different plane that had gone down in the ocean a few days earlier. Nothing at all about any planes being struck by lightning. It was as if I were the only person in the world who even knew it had happened.

ANOTHER TIME I STOPPED at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop by the airport. It was surrounded by overgrown grass fields, and empty coffee cups and plastic bags filled the ditches at the side of the road. There was a tractor trailer with a cargo of live cows in the parking lot. A couple of them turned their heads to look at me through the slats of the trailer as I went inside, but the others just kept on staring at each other.

The driver of the truck was inside, looking at a road map spread out across the counter. He was following lines on it with a yellowed finger and shaking his head. "I just have no idea how I got here," he kept saying to the woman behind the counter, who wasn't paying him any attention at all.

I sat down with a coffee by the window, where I could still see the lights of the planes taking off from one of the runways. Every now and then one of the cows outside made a long, low noise, like the sound of a car horn slowed down. The truck driver pushed his hat around on his head each time he heard the noise, but he didn't look up from the map.

After a while, two women and a man all wearing the same kind of T-shirt came in. The T-shirt was black with the word BLESSING in red across their breasts. I watched their reflections in the glass as they went up to the counter.

"Last night I started shaking all over in bed," one of the women was saying. "It went on for ten minutes. I know because I was looking right at the clock the whole time. But I couldn't stop it."

"I had that electrical feeling myself," the other woman said. "You know, all the hair on my body was standing on end."

"It was like someone else had taken me over."

"It actually gave my cat a shock when he came over to see what was going on. He ran into the other room and wouldn't come near me all day today."

"I never felt a thing," the man said. "Haven't for a long time." He was going bald, and the whole time they were in there he kept pushing the hair he had over the bald spot.

"Stanley tried to climb on top of me during the middle of it," the first woman said, shaking her head. "He pretended he was in a rapture and couldn't control himself."

"That man," the other woman laughed.

The first woman bought an eclair and bit off one end, began sucking the cream out from inside. "But don't you worry," she said through a mouthful of cream, "I put a stop to that soon enough."

"I'd like to feel it again," the man said, frowning into his coffee. "Just one more time."

Both women laid their hands on him. "Maybe tonight."

"Yes, maybe tonight."

"Maybe," the man said, but he kept on staring into his coffee.

"Jesus Christ," the truck driver said, slamming his hand down on the map. "This doesn't make any sense at all." He stared out at his truck and sighed.

The people in the T-shirts looked away from him and didn't say anything else until they were on their way out. One of the women stopped at my table and bent over me. "I saw you watching us," she said.

"I wasn't," I told her.

"Would you like to talk about God?" she asked me.

"I don't think so," I said.