Firestarter

by Stephen King

and it was funny—much funnier than the way the keys had of accumulating, really—how the fact of death kept coming at you from different sides and different angles. You tried to jig and jog, you tried to protect yourself on one side, and the truth of it bored right in on another side. Death is a football player, he thought, one big mother. Death is Franco Harris or Sam Cunningham or Mean Joe Green. And it keeps throwing you down on your ass right there at the line of scrimmage.

Backing them up was a National Guard unit who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing or why they had been ordered out to