CHAPTER 10
1
There could be no telling, Lowell Griner Sr. used to say, where a deep seam of coal might begin. “Sometimes a single chisel’s worth of difference is all there is tween the shit and the Shinola,” was how he put it. This pearl had dropped from the old crank’s lips, around about the time when many of the Tri-Counties’ best miners had been marching through the fucked-up, fucked-over boonies of Southeast Asia, getting jungle rot and smoking heroin-laced fatties. This was a conflict the elder Griner had missed, given a lack of two toes on his right foot and one finger on his left hand.
Few men who ever walked the green earth spoke more nonsense than the late Lowell Griner Sr.—he had also believed in UFOs, vengeful spirits of the woods, and had taken as gold the empty promises of the coal companies. Big Lowell Griner, he was called, perhaps in honor of that old Jimmy Dean song about Big John. Big Low had rested snug in his coffin for ten years now, along with a full bottle of Rebel Yell and a pair of lungs that were as black as the bituminate he mined.
His son Lowell Jr. (naturally known as Little Low) had recalled his father’s words with rueful amusement after Sheriff Lila Norcross nipped him and his older brother Maynard with ten kilos of cocaine, a pharmacy’s worth of speed, and all of their guns. It had certainly appeared that the seam of their luck had come to an abrupt end, the Shinola magically turning to shit the moment the sheriff’s team used the department’s bull-ram on the kitchen door of the old family manse, a creekside farmhouse for which the term tumbledown was too grand.
Though Little Low (who actually stood an inch over six feet and weighed in at two-forty) was not sorry about anything that he had done, he was extremely sorry that it had all not lasted longer. In the weeks that he and Maynard had spent locked up in the county jail in Coughlin awaiting transfer, he had whiled away most of his free time dreaming on the fun they’d had: the sports cars they’d drag-raced, the fine houses they’d crashed in, the girls they’d screwed, and the numerous slobs they’d stomped, outsiders who’d tried horning in on the Griner patch and had ended up buried in the hills. For the better part of five years they’d been serious players, up and down the Blue Ridge. It had been a hell of a hot ride, but now it seemed to have turned cold.
They were, in fact, fucked in every orifice. The cops had the drugs, had the weapons, had Kitty McDavid to say that she had witnessed Lowell exchanging packets of cash for bundles of coke with their cartel connection on multiple occasions, and that she had seen him shoot that Alabama fool who had tried to pass them counterfeit bills. The cops even had the bump of C4 that they had socked away for the Fourth of July. (The plan had been to put it under a silo and see if they could get the motherfucker to lift off like one of those Cape Carnival rockets.) As good as the ride had been, Lowell wasn’t sure how long re-running the memories could sustain him. Thinking of those memories growing thin and then falling apart was a downer.
When they ran out, Little Low thought he would probably just have to kill himself. He wasn’t afraid of that. What he was afraid of was choking on boredom in some cell the way Big Low, confined to a wheelchair and sucking on Yell and bottled oxygen for the last few years of his life, had choked to death on his own snot. Maynard, quarter-wit that he was, would probably be fine for a few decades in prison. That wasn’t Little Lowell Griner Jr., though. He wasn’t interested in playing out a junk hand just to stay in the game.
Then, as they were awaiting a pre-trial conference, the shit had turned back into Shinola. God bless Aurora, the vehicle of their deliverance.
Said deliverance had arrived last Thursday afternoon, the day the sleeping sickness had come to Appalachia. Lowell and Maynard were shackled to a bench outside a meeting room at the Coughlin courthouse. Both the prosecutor and their lawyer should have arrived an hour earlier.
“What the fuck,” announced the prick from the Coughlin Police Department who was keeping an eye on them. “This is stupid. I don’t get paid enough to babysit you murdering peckerwoods all day. I’m going to see what the judge wants to do.”
Through the reinforced glass opposite their bench, Lowell could see that Judge Wainer, the only one of the three officials who had seen fit to show up for the hearing, had lowered her head between her arms and dropped off for a little snooze. Neither of the brothers had, at this point, any idea about Aurora. Nor had the prick cop.
“Hope she bites his head off for wakin her up,” Maynard had remarked.
This was not exactly what happened when the horrified officer tore away the mask of webbing that had grown over the Honorable Judge Regina Alberta Wainer’s face, but it was, as the saying went, close enough for government work.
Lowell and Maynard, chain-locked to the bench, saw it all through the reinforced glass. It was awesome. The judge, no more than five-one in heels, rose up righteous and smote the cop, say hallelujah, in the chest with a gold-tipped fountain pen. That put the bastard on the carpet and she pressed the advantage, scooping up her nearby gavel and beating his face in before he had chance to fart sideways or holler Your Honor, I object. Then Judge Wainer tossed aside her gory gavel, sat down again, lowered her head back to her crossed arms, and resumed snoozing.
“Brother, did you see that?” Maynard asked.
“I did.”
Maynard had shaken his head, making the unwashed clots of his long hair fly. “That was amazin. I be dog.”
“Court is fucking adjourned,” Lowell agreed.
Maynard—firstborn but named for an uncle when his parents felt sure the baby would die before the sun went down on his natal day—had a caveman beard and wide dull eyes. Even when he was dropping fists on some poor sonofabitch, he tended to look dumbfounded. “What do we do now?”
What they did was bang around until they broke the arms of the bench they were shackled to, and enter the conference room, laying a trail of shattered wood behind them. Careful not to disturb the sleeping Judge Wainer—the webbing was spinning around her head, thickening again—they nicked the cop’s keys and unlocked themselves. The brothers also requisitioned the dead prick’s gun, his Taser, and the keys to his GMC pickup.
“Look at this spider shit,” Maynard whispered, gesturing at the judge’s new coating.
“No time,” Little Low said.
A door at the end of the hall—opened with the prick’s pass card—led to a second hall. As they passed the open door of a staff room, not a single one of the dozen-plus men and women inside—cops, secretaries, lawyers—paid them any mind. They were all focused on NewsAmerica, where bizarre and horrific footage showed some Amish chick on a table rearing up and biting the nose off a man attending to her.
At the end of this second hall was an exit into the parking lot. Lowell and Maynard strolled out into bright sunshine and free air, big as life and happy as hound dogs in a barking contest. The dead cop’s GMC was parked nearby, and in the center console was a goodly supply of shitkicking music. The Brothers Griner agreed on Brooks and Dunn, followed by Alan Jackson, who was a good old boy for sure.
They boot-scooted their way to a nearby campground and parked the Jimmy-Mac behind a forest ranger outpost that had been closed in a round of cutbacks years before. The lock on the outpost door popped with one shove. A woman’s uniform hung in the closet. Luckily, she had been a large lady, and at Lowell’s command, Maynard squeezed into it. Dressed as such, it was easy to convince the driver of a Chevy Silverado in the campground parking lot to step away for a word.
“Is there something wrong with my camping permit?” Silverado Man asked Maynard. “This disease news has got me all turned around, I’ll tell you what. I mean, whoever heard of such a thing?” Then, with a glance at the tag on Maynard’s chest: “Say, how’d you get the name Susan?”
Little Low gave this question the answer it deserved by stepping out from behind a tree and using a junk of firewood to split Silverado Man’s skull. He was approximately Lowell’s height and weight. After Low dressed in Silverado Man’s clothes, the brothers wrapped the body in a tarp and put it in the back of their new vehicle. They transferred the dead cop’s music and drove to a hunting cabin that they had stocked for a rainy day long before. On the way, they burned through the rest of the CDs, agreeing that this James McMurtry fellow was probably a communist, but Hank III was the total package.
Once at the cabin, they alternated between the radio and the police scanner they kept there, hoping to glean intelligence concerning the police response to their escape.
Initially, Lowell found the complete inattention to said escape unnerving. By the second day, however, the snowballing events of the Aurora phenomenon—which explained the lady judge’s rough treatment of the Coughlin cop and the crap on her face—were so encompassing and cataclysmic that Lowell’s apprehension evaporated. Who had time for two country outlaws amid mass riots, plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns, and people incinerating chicks in their sleep?
2
On Monday, as Frank Geary was planning his assault on the women’s prison, Lowell was reclining on the moldy couch in the hunting cabin, gnawing on deer jerky and visualizing their own next moves. Though the authorities were currently in disarray, they would be reestablished in some form or another before long. Moreover, if things turned out the way they appeared to be headed, those authorities would likely be all-rooster, which meant that it would be the Wild West—hang em now, hang em high, ask questions later. The Griner brothers wouldn’t stay forgotten forever, and when they were remembered, the jackboots would be polished and primed to kick ass.
The news on the radio had initially caused Maynard to fall into gloom. “Is this the end of fuckin, Lowell?” he’d asked.
A little blue at the thought himself, Low had replied that they’d think of something . . . as if there might be some alternative. He was thinking of some old song about how birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.
His older brother’s mood had improved, however, at the discovery of a jigsaw puzzle in a cabinet. Now Maynard, in his camo underwear, on his knees by the coffee table, was drinking a Schlitz and working away on it. The puzzle showed Krazy Kat with his finger in a socket, getting electrocuted. Maynard enjoyed puzzles as long as they weren’t too hard. (This was another reason why Lowell had felt good about his brother’s possible prison future. They had a shit-ton of puzzles in prison.) The picture of Krazy Kat in the center was pretty much done, but the pale green wall surrounding the figure was giving May fits. He complained it all looked the same, which was cheating.
“We need to clean up,” Lowell announced.
“I told you,” Maynard said, “I put that old boy’s head inside a hollow log and dropped the rest of him down a hole.” (Low’s older brother broke down bodies the way other folks broke down turkeys. It was eccentric, but it seemed to bring May satisfaction.)
“That’s a start, May, but it’s not enough. We need to clean up even better while everything is still fucked up. A clean sweep, so to speak.”
Maynard finished his beer, pitched the can away. “How do we do that?”
“We burn down the Dooling Sheriff’s Department to start with. That’ll take care of the evidence,” Lowell explained. “That’s big numero uno.”
His brother’s slack-faced expression of puzzlement suggested elaboration was necessary.
“Our drugs, May. They got everthing in the bust. We burn those up, they got nothing solid.” Lowell could envision it—just wonderful. He had never known how much he wanted to obliterate a police station. “Then, just to make sure we’ve got our t’s crossed, we make a visit to the prison up there and deal with Kitty McDavid.” Low sawed a finger across his unshaven neck to show his brother exactly how that deal would go down.
“Aw, she’s probly asleep.”
Low had considered this. “What if the scientists figure out how to wake them all up?”
“Maybe her memory will be wiped out even if they do. You know, amnesia, like on Days of Our Lives.”
“And what if it’s not, May? When does anything work out as convenient as that? The McDavid cunt can put us away for the rest of our lives. That ain’t even the important thing. She snitched, that’s the important thing. She needs to go for that, wakin or sleepin.”
“You really think we can get to her?” asked Maynard.
In truth, Lowell didn’t know, but he thought they had a shot. Fortune favored the brave—he’d seen that in a movie, or maybe on a TV show. And what better chance would they have? Practically half the world was asleep, and the rest of it was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. “Come on. Clock’s ticking, May. No time like the present. Plus, it’ll be dark soon. Always a better time to move around.”
“Where do we go first?” Maynard asked.
Lowell didn’t hesitate. “To see Fritz.”
Fritz Meshaum had done some engine and detailing work for Lowell Griner, and had also moved some blow. In exchange, Lowell had connected the Kraut with a few gunrunners. Fritz, besides being a stellar mechanic and an excellent detailer, had a bee in his hat about the federal government, so he was always eager for opportunities to enhance his personal arsenal of heavy weaponry. When the inevitable day came that the FBI decided to capture all of the nation’s shanty-dwelling asshole mechanics and ship them off to Guantánamo, Fritz would have to defend himself, and to the death, if need be. Each time Lowell saw him, Fritzie had to show off one cannon or another, and brag about how well it could vaporize someone. (The hilarious part: it was widely rumored that Fritz had been beaten within an inch of his life by a dogcatcher. He was tough, was li’l Fritz.) The last time Lowell had seen him, the bearded gnome had gleefully displayed his latest toy: an actual goddam bazooka. Russian surplus.
Low needed to get into the women’s prison to assassinate a snitch. That was the sort of mission where a bazooka could actually come in handy.
3
Jared and Gerda Holden had not known each other well—Gerda was in her first year of middle school and Jared was in high school—but he knew her from dinners when the two families got together. Sometimes they played video games in the basement, and Jared always let her win a couple. A lot of bad had happened since the Aurora outbreak, but this was the first time Jared had seen a person shot.
“She must be dead, right, Dad?” He and Clint were in the bathroom of the administrative wing. Some of Gerda’s blood had splattered Jared’s face and shirt. “From the fall on top of the shot?”
“I don’t know,” Clint said. He was leaning against the tiled wall.
His son, patting water from his face with a paper towel, found Clint’s eyes in the mirror over the sink.
“Probably,” Clint said. “Yes. Based on what you’ve told me happened, she’s almost certainly dead.”
“And the guy, too? The doctor? Flickinger?”
“Yes. Him, too, probably.”
“All because of this woman? This Evie person?”
“Yes,” Clint said. “Because of her. We have to keep her safe. From the police and from anyone else. I know it seems crazy. She could be the key to understanding what’s happened, the key to turning it around, and—just trust me, okay, Jared?”
“Okay, Dad. But one of the guards, that Rand guy, he said she’s, like—magic?”
“I can’t explain what she is, Jared,” he said.
Although he was trying to sound calm, Clint was livid—with himself, with Geary, with Evie. That bullet could have hit Jared. Could have blinded him. Left him comatose. Killed him. Clint had not beaten up his old friend Jason in the Burtells’ yard so that his own son could die before him; he had not shared beds with kids who pissed themselves in their sleep for that; he had not left behind Marcus and Shannon and all the others for that; and he had not worked his way through college or medical school for it.
Shannon had told him, all those years before, that if he just hung on and kept from killing anyone, he would make it out. But to make it out of the current situation, they might have to kill people. He might have to kill people. The idea did not upset Clint as much as he would have expected. The situation changed, and the prizes changed, but maybe, at bottom, it was the same deal: if you wanted the milkshake, you’d better be ready to fight.
“What?” asked Jared.
Clint cocked his head.
“You look,” his son said, “Sort of tense.”
“Just tired.” He touched Jared’s shoulder and excused himself. He needed to make sure everyone was placed.
4
There was no need to say I told you so.
Terry caught Frank’s eye as they stepped away from the group around the bodies. “You were right,” Terry said. He produced the flask. Frank thought about stopping him, didn’t. The acting sheriff took a healthy swallow. “You were right all the way down the line. We’ll have to take her.”
“You sure?” Frank said it as if he himself wasn’t.
“Are you kidding? Look at this goddam mess! Vern dead, girl there did it, she’s shot to pieces and dead, too. Lawyer’s skull caved in. Think he might have lived for awhile, but he’s sure dead now. Other guy, driver’s license says he’s an MD named Flickinger—”
“Him too? Really?” If so, it was too bad. Flickinger had been a mess, but he’d had enough soul left in him to try to help Nana.
“And that’s not the worst part. Norcross and the Black woman and the rest of them have got serious armaments now, most everything high-powered that we could have used to make them stand down.”
“Do we know who was with them?” Frank asked. “Who was behind the wheel of that RV when they hauled ass out of here?”
Terry tipped the flask again, but there was nothing left inside. He swore and kicked a chunk of broken macadam.
Frank waited.
“Codger named Willy Burke.” Terry Coombs breathed out between his teeth. “Cleaned up his act in the last fifteen or twenty years, does a lot of community stuff, but he’s still a poacher. Used to be a moonshiner, too, back when he was young. Maybe he still is. Vet. Can handle himself. Lila always gave him the right-of-way, felt like it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to try and get him for something. And I guess she liked him.” He inhaled. “I felt the same.”
“All right.” Frank had decided to keep Black’s phone call to himself. It had infuriated him so much, in fact, that he would have been hardpressed to recount the details of the conversation. One part had stayed with him, though, and tugged at his sleeve: how the woman had praised him for protecting his daughter at the hospital. How could she have known about that? Eve Black had been in the jail that morning. It kept coming back to him and he kept pushing it away. As with the moths that had burst from the lit fragment of Nana’s cocoon, Frank could not fathom an explanation. He could only see that Eve Black had meant to tweak him—and she had succeeded. But he didn’t believe she understood what tweaking him meant.
In any case, Terry was back on track—he didn’t need any extra motivation. “You want me to start putting together a group? I’m willing, if that’s your pleasure.”
Although pleasure had nothing to do with it, Terry seconded the motion.
5
The prison defenders hurriedly removed the tires from the various cars and trucks in the parking lot. There were about forty vehicles altogether, counting the prison vans. Billy Wettermore and Rand Quigley rolled the tires out and arranged them in pyramids of three in the dead space between the inner and outer fences, then doused them in gasoline. The petrol stench quickly overwhelmed the ambient odor of damp, charred wood from the still-smoldering fire in the woods. They left the tires on Scott Hughes’s truck but parked it crossways right behind the interior gate, as an extra barrier.
“Scott loves that truck,” Rand said to Tig.
“You want to put yours there instead?” Tig asked.
“Hell no,” said Rand. “Are you crazy?”
The only vehicle they left untouched was Barry Holden’s RV, situated in the handicap space by the cement path to the Intake doors.
6
Minus Vern Rangle, Roger Elway, and the department’s female officers, all of whom had been confirmed as asleep during Frank’s cataloging operation, seven deputies remained from Sheriff Lila Norcross’s duty roster: Terry Coombs, Pete Ordway, Elmore Pearl, Dan “Treater” Treat, Rupe Wittstock, Will Wittstock, and Reed Barrows. It was a solid group, in Terry’s opinion. They were all force veterans of at least a year, and Pearl and Treater had both served in Afghanistan.
The three retired deputies—Jack Albertson, Mick Napolitano, and Nate McGee—made ten.
Don Peters, Eric Blass, and Frank Geary made lucky thirteen.
Frank quickly martialed a half-dozen other volunteers including Coach JT Wittstock, father of the deputies who shared his surname, and the defense-first coach of the Dooling High School varsity football team; Pudge Marone, bartender at the Squeaky Wheel, who brought along his Remington shotgun from beneath the bar; Drew T. Barry of Drew T. Barry Indemnity Company, by-the-book insurance agent and prize-winning deer hunter; Carson “Country Strong” Struthers, Pudge’s brother-in-law, who had fought to a 10-1 Golden Gloves record before his doctor told him he had to quit while he still had some brain left; and two town board members, Bert Miller and Steve Pickering, both of whom, like Drew T. Barry, knew their way around a deer stand. That was nineteen, and once they were informed that the woman inside the prison might have information related to the sleeping sickness, maybe even knowledge of a cure, every single one was eager to serve.
7
Terry was pleased, but wanted an even twenty. The sight of Vern Rangle’s bleached-out face and torn neck was something he would never be able to forget. He could feel it the way he could feel Geary, silent as a shadow, following everything he did, judging every choice he made.
But never mind. The only way out was through: through Norcross to Eve Black, and through the Black woman to the end of this nightmare. Terry didn’t know what would happen when they got to her, but he knew it would be the end. Once the end came, he could work at blurring the memory of Vern Rangle’s bloodless face. Not to mention the faces of his wife and daughter, which no longer exactly existed. Seriously drinking his brain into submission, in other words. He was aware that Frank had been encouraging him to use the booze, and so what? So fucking what?
Don Peters had been tasked with calling around to the male officers on Dooling Correctional’s roll, and it didn’t take him long to figure out that Norcross had four officers on duty, max. One of those, Wettermore, was a swish, and another, Murphy, had been a history teacher. Throw in the Black woman and the old coot, Burke, plus maybe a couple or three others they didn’t know about just to be generous, and that meant they were up against less than a dozen, few if any of whom could be expected to stand fast if things got hot, no matter how much armament they had acquired.
Terry and Frank stopped at the liquor store on Main Street. It was open, and busy.
“She didn’t love me anyway!” one fool announced to the entire store, waving a bottle of gin. He smelled like a polecat.
The shelves were largely empty, but Terry found two pints of gin, and paid with money that would soon be worthless, he supposed, if this terrible fuck-up went on. He filled the flask with one pint, carried the other in a paper bag, and walked with Frank to a nearby alley. It opened into a courtyard piled with garbage bags and rain-softened cardboard boxes. Johnny Lee Kronsky’s scuffed apartment door was here, at ground level, between two windows with plastic sheeting for glass.
Kronsky, a mythic figure in this part of West Virginia, answered and spied the bottle in the bag. “Those who come bearing gifts may enter,” he said and took the bottle.
There was only one chair in the living room. Kronsky claimed it for himself. He drank half the pint in two ginormous swallows, his Adam’s apple rolling like a bobber at the end of a hooked line, paying no attention to Terry or Frank. A muted television sat on a stand, showing footage of several cocooned women floating on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. They looked like weird life rafts.
What if a shark decided to bite one? Terry wondered. He guessed that if that happened, the shark might be in for a surprise.
What did any of it mean? What was the point?
Terry decided the point might be gin. He got out Frank’s flask and had a tug.
“Those women are from the big plane that crashed,” Johnny Lee said. “Interesting that they float like that, isn’t it? The stuff must be mighty light. Like kapok, or something.”
“Look at them all,” Terry marveled.
“Yes, yes, quite a sight.” Johnny Lee smacked his lips. He was a licensed private investigator, but not the kind that checked up on cheating spouses or solved mysteries. Until 2014, he had worked for Ulysses Energy Solutions, the coal company, cycling through their various operations, posing as a miner and listening for rumors of union organizing, working to undercut leaders who seemed particularly effective. A company dog, in other words.
Then had come trouble. A right smart of trouble, one could say. There was a cave-in. Kronsky had been the man handling the explosives. The three miners who had been buried under the rock had been talking loudly about holding a vote. Almost as damning, one had been wearing a tee-shirt with the face of Woody Guthrie on it. Lawyers hired by Ulysses had prevented the levying of charges—a tragic accident, they successfully argued before the grand jury—but Kronsky had been forced into retirement.
That was why Johnny Lee had come home to Dooling, where he had been born. Now, in his ideally located apartment—right around the corner from the liquor store—he was in the process of drinking himself to death. Each month, a check from UES arrived via Federal Express. A woman Terry knew at the bank told him that the notation on the stub was always the same: FEES. Whatever his FEES amounted to wasn’t a fortune, as the crummy apartment proved, but Kronsky managed on it. The whole story was familiar to Terry because hardly a month passed that the police weren’t called out to the man’s apartment by a neighbor who had heard breaking glass—a rock or a brick thrown through one of Kronsky’s windows, undoubtedly by union spooks. Johnny Lee never called himself. He had let it be known that he was not overly concerned—J. L. Kronsky didn’t give Shit One about the union.
One afternoon not long before the Aurora outbreak, when Terry had been partnered with Lila in Unit One, the conversation had turned to Kronsky. She said, “Eventually some disaffected miner—probably a relative of one of the guys Kronsky got killed—is going to blow his head off, and the miserable son of a bitch will probably be glad to go.”
8
“There’s a situation at the prison,” Terry said.
“There’s a situation everywhere, Mister Man.” Kronsky had a beaten face, pouched and haggard, and dark eyes.
“Forget everywhere,” Frank said. “We’re here.”
“I don’t give a tin shit where you are,” Johnny Lee said, and polished off the pint.
“We might need to blow something up,” Terry said.
Barry Holden and his station-robbing friends had taken a lot of firepower, but had missed the Griner brothers’ bump of C4. “You know how to work with plastic, don’t you?”
“Could be I do,” Kronsky said. “What’s in it for me, Mister Man?”
Terry calculated. “I tell you what. Pudge Marone from the Squeak is with us, and I think he’ll let you run an endless tab for the rest of your life.” Which Terry guessed wouldn’t be long.
“Hm,” Johnny Lee said.
“And of course, it’s also a chance to do your town a great service.”
“Dooling can go fuck itself,” Johnny Lee Kronsky said, “but still—why not? Just why the fuck not?”
That gave them twenty.
9
Dooling Correctional did not have guard towers. It had a flat tarpaper roof, piped with vents, ducts, and exhaust stems. There wasn’t much in the way of cover beyond a half-foot of brick edging. After assessing this roof, Willy Burke told Clint he liked the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perspective of the entire perimeter, but he liked his balls even more. “Nothing up here that could stop a bullet, see. How about that shed there?” The old man pointed down below.
Although labeled EQUIPMENT SHED on the prison blueprints, it was your basic catch-all, containing the riding lawnmower that inmates (trustworthy ones) used to groom the softball field, plus gardening tools, sports equipment, and stacks of moldering newspapers and magazines bound with twine. Most importantly, it was built of cement blocks.
They had a closer look. Clint dragged a chair out behind the shed and Willy had a seat there beneath the overhang of the shed’s roof.
From this position, a man would be sheltered from the view of anyone at the fence, but would still be visible at either end of a firing line that stretched between the shed and the prison. If they’re just on one side, I should be all right,” said Willy. “I’ll see em from the corner of my eye and take cover.”
“Both sides at the same time?” Clint asked.
“If they do that, I’ll be for it.”
“You need help. Backup.”
“When you say that, Doc, it makes me wish I’d done more churchin in the days of my youth.”
The old fellow regarded him amiably. Upon arriving at the prison, the only explanation that he had required of Clint was a further assurance that the stand they were making was what Lila would have wanted. Clint had readily given it to Willy, although at this stage he was no longer sure what Lila would have wanted. It seemed like Lila had been gone for years.
Clint tried to reflect the same amiability—a bit of lighthearted savoir faire in the face of the enemy—but what remained of his sense of humor seemed to have fallen out of the back of Barry Holden’s RV along with Gerda Holden and Garth Flickinger. “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Willy?”
Willy held up his left hand. The meat of his palm was gouged with scar tissue. “As it happens, a few bits of me are still there.”
“How did it feel?” Clint asked. “When you were there? You must have lost friends.”
“Oh, yes,” Willy said. “I lost friends. As to how I felt, mostly just scared. Confused. All the time. Is that how you feel right now?”
“It is,” Clint admitted. “I never trained for this.”
They stood there in the milky afternoon light. Clint wondered if Willy sensed what Clint was really feeling—some fear and confusion, that was true, but also excitement. A certain euphoria infused the preparations, the prospect of pouring the frustration and dismay and loss and impossibility of everything into action. Clint could observe it happening to himself, a rush of aggressive adrenalin that was as old as apes.
He told himself he shouldn’t be thinking that way, and maybe not, but it felt good. It was as if some guy who looked exactly like him, driving a coupe with the top down, had pulled up beside the old Clint at a stoplight, nodded once in recognition, then, at the flip of the green, his doppelganger had planted the accelerator, and the old Clint was watching him roar off. The new Clint had to hurry, because he was on a mission, and being on a mission was good.
While they were making their way to the rear of the prison, Willy told him about the moths and the fairy footprints he’d seen near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. Millions of moths, it seemed, coating the branches of trees, rolling above the canopy of the woods in swarms. “Was it from her?” Like everyone else, Willy had heard the rumors. “That woman you got?”
“Yes,” Clint said. “And that’s not even the half of it.”
Willy said he didn’t doubt it.
They dragged out a second chair and issued an auto to Billy Wettermore. It had been converted (legally or not Clint didn’t know, nor did he care) to full auto. That put a man on each end of the shed. It wasn’t perfect, just the best they could do.
10
Behind the front desk at the sheriff’s station, the body of Linny Mars lay cocooned on the floor with her laptop beside her and still broadcasting that Vine of the falling London Eye. It appeared to Terry that she had slid out of her chair when she finally drifted off to sleep. She was in a heap, partly blocking the hallway that led to the official areas of the facility.
Kronsky stepped over her and walked down the hallway, in search of the evidence locker. Terry didn’t like that. He called after him, “Hey, you notice the fucking person here? On the floor?”
“It’s okay, Terry,” Frank said. “We’ll take care of her.”
They carried Linny to a holding cell and lowered her gently to the mattress. She hadn’t been out for long. The webs were thin across her eyes and mouth. Her lips were twisted up in an expression of delirious happiness—who knew why, maybe just because her struggle to stay awake was over.
Terry had another drink. He lowered the flask and the wall of the cell rushed at him and he stuck out his hand to stop it. After a moment he was able to push up straight again.
“I’m worried about you,” Frank said. “You’re—overmedicating.”
“I’m perfecto.” Terry waved his hand at a moth that was bothering his ear. “Are you happy we’re arming up, Frank? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Frank gave Terry a long look. It was totally unthreatening, totally blank. He stared at Terry the way that kids looked at television screens—as if they were gone from their bodies.
“No,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t say I’m too happy. It’s the job, that’s all. The one in front of us.”
“Do you always tell yourself that before you kick somebody’s ass?” Terry asked, genuinely interested, and was surprised when Frank recoiled, as if from a slap.
Kronsky was in the waiting room when they came out. He’d found the plastic explosive, also a bundle of dynamite someone had found in a gravel pit near the Griner property and turned in for disposal. Johnny Lee looked disapproving. “This dyno had no business back there, folksies. It gets old and cranky. The C4, now—” He shook it, making Frank wince. “You could run it over with a truck and nothing would happen.”
“So you want to leave the dynamite?” Terry asked.
“Jesus, no.” Kronsky looked offended. “I love me some dyno. Always have. Dyno’s what you call old-school. Need to wrap it in a blanket, is all. Or maybe Sleeping Beauty there’s got a nice thick sweater in the closet. Oh, and I’ll need to get some items from the hardware store. I trust the sheriff’s department has an open account?”
Before Terry and Frank left, they packed a duffel bag with the handguns and ammo that hadn’t been looted, and carried out all the vests and helmets they could rustle up. There wasn’t much, but their posse—really no sense calling it anything else—would bring plenty of armament from home.
Linny hadn’t left a sweater in the closet, so Johnny Lee had wrapped the dynamite in a couple of towels from the bathroom. He held it to his chest as if carrying an infant.
“Getting late in the day for any kind of assault,” Frank observed. “If that’s what it comes to.”
Terry said, “I know. We’ll get the boys out there tonight, make sure everyone knows what’s what and who’s in charge.” He looked pointedly at Frank as he said this. “Requisition a couple schoolbuses from the town motor pool and park them at the intersection of Route 31 and West Lavin, where the roadblock was, so the fellas don’t have to sleep raw. Keep six or eight of em on watch, in a . . . you know . . .” He made a circle in the air.
Frank helped him out. “A perimeter.”
“Yeah, that. If we have to go in, we’ll do it tomorrow morning, from the east. We’ll need a couple of bulldozers to bust through. Send Pearl and Treater to pick out a couple from the public works yard. Keys are in the office trailer there.”
“Good,” Frank said, because it was. He wouldn’t have thought of bulldozers.
“First thing tomorrow morning, we bulldoze the fences and come at the main building across the parking lot. That way the sun will be in their eyes. Step one, push em deep, away from the doors and windows. Step two, Johnny Lee blows the front doors and we’re inside. Press em to throw down their weapons. At that point, I think they will. Send a few around the far side to make sure they can’t bolt for it.”
“Makes sense,” Frank said.
“But first . . .”
“First?”
“We talk to Norcross. Tonight. Face to face, if he’s man enough. Offer him a chance to give the woman up before something happens that can’t be taken back.”
Frank’s eyes expressed what he felt.
“I know what you’re thinking, Frank, but if he’s a reasonable man, he’ll see it’s the right thing. He’s responsible for more lives than just hers, after all.”
“And if he still says no?”
Terry shrugged. “Then we go in and take her.”
“No matter what?”
“That’s right, no matter what.” They went out, and Terry locked the glass double doors of the station behind him.
11
Rand Quigley got his toolbox and spent two hours chiseling and hammering out the small wire-reinforced window that was embedded in the concrete wall of the visitors’ room.
Tig Murphy sat nearby, drinking Coke and smoking a cigarette. The no-smoking reg had been lifted. “If you were an inmate,” he said, “that’d get about five years added to your sentence.”
“Good thing I’m not an inmate, then, isn’t it?”
Tig tapped ash on the floor and decided not to say what he was thinking: if being locked in meant you were an inmate, that’s what they were now. “Man, they really built this place, didn’t they?”
“Uh-huh. Like it was a prison, or something,” Rand said.
“Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck.”
When the glass finally fell out, Tig clapped.
“Thank ya, ladies and gentlemen,” Rand said, doing Elvis. “Thank ya very much.”
With the window removed, Rand could stand on top of the table they had pulled below as a shooting platform, and stick his weapon through. This was his spot, with clean angles on the parking lot and the front gate.
“They think we are pussies,” Rand said. “But we are not.”
“Got that right, Rand-o.”
Clint poked his head in. “Tig. With me.”
The two of them walked up the stairs to the raised level of B Wing. This was the prison’s highest point, the only second floor in the structure. There were windows in the cells that faced out on West Lavin. These were stronger even than the window in the visitors’ room—thick, reinforced, and sandwiched between layers of concrete. It was hard to imagine Rand knocking one out of the wall with just hand tools.
“We can’t defend this end,” Tig said.
“No,” Clint said, “but it makes a helluva lookout post, and we don’t need to defend it, right? There’s no way through here.”
That seemed inarguable to Clint, and to Scott Hughes, too, who was relaxing a few cells down the line and listening in. “I’m sure you guys are going to get yourselves killed one way or another, and I won’t be crying any tears when it happens,” he called, “but Shrink Boy’s right. It’d take a bazooka to blow a hole in this wall.”
12
On the day two opposing groups of Dooling men armed up, preparing to make war, less than a hundred women were still awake in the Tri-Counties. One was Eve Black; one was Angel Fitzroy; one was Jeanette Sorley.
Vanessa Lampley was a fourth. Earlier that day, her husband finally nodded off in his armchair, allowing Van to do what she had decided to do. Since she had returned home from the prison after shooting and killing Ree Dempster, Tommy Lampley had tried to stay awake with her as long as he could. Van had been glad for the company. A cooking competition show had done him in, though, lulling him to dreamland with a tutorial on molecular gastronomy. Van waited to make sure he was soundly out before she left. She wasn’t about to assign her husband, ten years her senior, with titanium hips and afflicted by angina, the thankless task of somehow taking care of her body for however many years remained to him. Nor did Van have any interest in becoming the world’s most dismal piece of furniture.
Tired as she was, she was still light on her feet, and crept from the room without disturbing his thin sleep. In the garage she got her hunting rifle and loaded it. She yanked up the door, fired up the ATV, and rolled out.
Her plan was simple: cut through the woods to the ridge above the road, breathe in the fresh air, take in the view, jot a note to her husband, and put the barrel under her chin. Goodnight. At least there were no kids to worry about.
She went slow because she was afraid, weary as she was, of crashing. The ATV’s heavy tires sent every root and rock jolting up her thick arms and deep into her bones. Van didn’t mind. The thin rain was all right, too. Despite the exhaustion—her thoughts crawled—she was intensely aware of every physical sensation. Would it have been better to die without knowing you were going to, like Ree? Van could ask the question, but her brain could not break it down in a way that allowed a satisfactory answer. Any response dissolved before it could form. Why did it feel so bad, that she had shot an inmate who would have killed another inmate if she hadn’t? Why did it feel so bad, just to have done her job? Those answers wouldn’t coalesce, either, couldn’t even begin to.
Van arrived at the top of the ridge. She shut off the ATV and dismounted. Far away, in the direction of the prison, a haze of black hovered over the dying day, damp residue from the forest fire that had burned itself out. Directly below, the land descended in a long, easy grade. At the base of the grade was a muddy stream, fattening in the rain. Above the stream a few hundred feet away was a hunting cabin with a mossy roof. Smoke scribbles pumped from the stovepipe chimney.
She patted her pockets and realized that she had completely forgotten paper and something to write with. Van wanted to laugh—suicide really wasn’t that complex, was it?—but a sigh was the best she could manage.
There was no help for it, and her reasoning ought not to be that hard to figure out. If she were found at all, that was. And if anyone cared. Van unstrapped the rifle from her back.
The door of the cabin banged open just as she located the barrel against the shelf of her chin.
“He just better still have that fucking boom-tube,” said a man, his voice carrying crisp and clear, “or he’ll wish that dogcatcher had finished the job on him. Oh, and bring along the scanner. I want to keep up on what the cops are doing.”
Van lowered her rifle and watched as two men climbed into a shiny Silverado truck and drove away. She was sure she knew them, and looking like they did—a couple of rode-hard and put-away wet woods-rats—it wasn’t from any chamber of commerce awards ceremony. Their names would have come to her immediately if she hadn’t been so sleep-deprived. Her mind felt full of mud. She could still feel the jouncing ATV, even though it was no longer moving. Phantom dots of light went zooming across her vision.
When the truck was gone, she decided to visit the cabin. There would be something to write on inside, if only the back of a calendar years out of date. “And I’ll need something to pin it to my shirt,” she said.
Her voice sounded foggy and foreign. The voice of someone else. And there was someone else, standing just beside her. Only when she turned her head, the someone was gone. That was happening more and more: watchers lurking at the farthest reach of her vision. Hallucinations. How long could you stay awake before all rational thought broke down and you lost your mind completely?
Van remounted her ATV and drove it along the ridge until the land descended and she could switchback along the rutted track that led to the cabin.
The cabin smelled of beans, beer, fried deermeat, and man-farts. Dishes cluttered the table, the sink was filled with more, and there were clotted pots on the woodburning stove. On the mantel was a picture of a fiercely grinning man with a pick over his shoulder and a countryman’s battered fedora pulled so low on his head that the brim bent the tops of his ears. Looking at the sepia-toned photo, Vanessa realized exactly who it was she had seen, because her father had pointed out the man in that picture to her when she had been no more than twelve. He had been going into the Squeaky Wheel.
“That is Big Lowell Griner,” Daddy had said, “and I want you to keep clear of him, honey. If he should ever say hello to you, say hello back, ain’t it a nice day, and keep walking.”
So that’s who those two were: Big Lowell’s no-account boys. Maynard and Little Low Griner, big as life and driving a new pickup when they were supposed to be jugged over in Coughlin, awaiting trial for, among other things, a murder Kitty McDavid had witnessed, and agreed to testify about.
On a pine-paneled wall of the short corridor that probably led to the cabin’s bedrooms, Van saw a battered notebook hanging from a piece of string. A sheet from that would do just fine for a suicide note, but she suddenly decided she wanted to stay awake and alive at least a little longer.
She left, glad to escape the stink, and drove her ATV away from the cabin as fast as she dared. After a mile or so, the track emptied into one of Dooling County’s many dirt roads. Dust hung on the left—not much, on account of the drizzle, but enough to tell her which way the fugitives had turned. They had a good lead on her by the time she reached Route 7, but the land here was downsloping and open, which made it easy to see the truck, diminished by distance but clearly headed for town.
Van slapped herself briskly across each cheek and followed. She was wet through now, but the cold would help her stay awake a little while longer. If she were on the lam from a murder charge, she’d be halfway to Georgia by now. Not these two; they were headed back to town, no doubt to do something nasty, as was their wont. She wanted to know what it was, and maybe stop it.
Atonement for what she’d had to do to Ree was not out of the question.