CHAPTER 13
1
As the rim of the sun appeared over the woods behind Dooling Correctional, a line of bulldozers clanked up West Lavin, end-to-end. All three were Caterpillars, two D9s and a big D11. The assault team was eighteen men in total. Fifteen of them were with the bulldozers, headed for the front gate; three of them were advancing around the backside of the prison fence. (They’d left Selectman Miller at the roadblock with a bottle of Vicodin and his bandaged leg propped on a camp chair.)
Frank had organized twelve in the forward group—his dirty dozen—into three quartets. Each quartet, in vests and masks, hunkered behind a bulldozer, using it for cover. The windows and grills of the dozers had been jury-rigged with scrap steel. Retired Deputy Jack Albertson drove the first in line, Coach JT Wittstock drove the second, and the former Golden Gloves boxer, Carson Struthers, drove the third. Frank was with Albertson’s bulldozer.
The men in the woods were Deputy Elmore Pearl, the deer hunter Drew T. Barry (his office now in ruins), and Don Peters.
2
Clint spotted the bulldozers from the high window on B Wing and bolted for the stairs, pulling on his bulletproof vest as he went. “Have fun gettin fucked, Doc,” Scott Hughes called cheerfully as he ran past.
“Like they’ll give you a pass if they get in,” Clint said. This wiped the smile from Scott’s face.
Clint hurried down Broadway, stopping to put his head in the visitors’ room. “Rand, they’re coming. Lay down the teargas.”
“Okay,” said Rand from the family alcove at the end of the room, and calmly donned the gas mask he had at the ready.
Clint continued to the security station at the main door.
The station was your basic bulletproof tollbooth where visitors were required to check in. The little room had a long facing window and a drawer for passing IDs and valuables through to the officer on duty. There was a communications board like the ones in the Booth and the gatehouse, with monitors that could flip through views of the various inner and outer areas of the prison. Tig was at the board.
Clint rapped on the door and Tig opened it.
“What have you got on the monitors?”
“Sunrise is flaring the lenses. If there’s men behind the bulldozers, I can’t see them yet.”
They had eight or nine gas grenades to go with the launcher. On the central monitor, below the spirals of glare, Clint saw several of these strike the parking lot and spew white fumes to mix with the tarry smoke still leaking from the tires. He told Tig to keep watching and ran on.
His next destination was the break room. Jared and Michaela were at a table with a deck of cards and cups of coffee.
“Make yourselves scarce. It’s starting.”
Michaela toasted him with her cup. “Sorry, Doc. I’m legal to vote and everything. I think I’ll stick around. Who knows, there might be a Pulitzer in my future.”
Jared’s color was chalky. He looked from Michaela to his father.
“Fine,” Clint said. “Far be it for me to abridge the freedom of the press. Jared, hide, and don’t tell me where.”
He jogged on before his son could respond. His breath was short by the time he reached the rear door that opened near the shed and the fields. The reason that, until the morning of Aurora, he’d never before suggested to Lila that they should go running was because he hadn’t wanted her to have to limit her pace for him; it would have been embarrassing. What was the root here, vanity or laziness? Clint promised himself to give the question real consideration when he had a free second and, if he should be so lucky as to live through the morning, and ever get to speak to his wife again, possibly to repeat his proposal that they take up jogging together.
“Three bulldozers on the road,” Clint announced as he emerged outside.
“We know,” Willy Burke said. He walked over to Clint from his spot behind the shed. There was a weird contrast between his bulletproof vest and his festive red suspenders, now lolling in loops at his hips. “Tig radioed. Billy’s going to hold tight here, watch the north fence. I’m gonna sidle on up along this wall to the corner and see if I can get a few clean shots. You’re welcome to join me, but you’ll need one of these.” He handed Clint a gas mask and put on his own.
3
At the ninety-degree turn from the road to the gate, Frank pounded the metal plate over the door, a signal to Albertson to hang a right. Jack did so—slowly and carefully. The men slipped back further, keeping the mass of metal in front of them at all times as it swung around. Frank was wearing a vest, and he had a Glock in his right hand. He could see licks of smoke spilling down the road. This was expected: he’d heard the pops of the gas grenades being fired. They couldn’t have too many. There had been a lot more masks than grenades in the armaments room of the sheriff’s station.
The first bulldozer completed its adjustment and the four men climbed on the back, pressed together shoulder to shoulder.
In the bulldozer cockpit Jack Albertson was safe behind the steel blade, which was raised to the upper position, therefore blocking the window. He gave it plenty of gas as it headed for the gate.
Frank used his walkie, although not everyone in his attack force had them; all of this had been done on the fly. “Get ready, everyone. This is going to happen.” And please, he thought, with as little bloodshed as possible. He was already two men down, and the attack hadn’t even started.
4
“What do you think?” Clint asked Willy.
On the other side of the double fences, the first bulldozer, blade high, was crunching forward. For a half-second there’d been a glimpse of movement slipping around to the back of the machine.
Willy didn’t respond. The old moonshiner was revisiting an unnamed square meter of hell in Southeast Asia in ’68. Everything had been still, swamp water up to his Adam’s apple, a layer of smoke closing out the sky, him sandwiched in the middle; everything had been so still, and a bird, red and blue and yellow and massive, eagle-sized, had floated up beside him, dead, its eye clouded. The creature was so vivid and so incongruous in the strange light. Its glorious feathers had grazed Willy’s shoulder, and the faint current had drawn it away, and it had vanished back into the smoke.
(Once, he had told his sister about that. “Never saw a bird like that before. Not the whole time I was there. Never saw one since, either, of course. I wonder sometimes if it was the last of its kind.” The Alzheimer’s had taken most of what made her herself by then, but there had been a small piece left, and she had said, “Maybe it was just—hurt, Willy,” and Willy had said to her, “I sure love you, you know.” His sister had blushed.)
The dozer blade hit the middle of the fence with a rattling crash. The links bowed inward before the whole section tore free of the ground and flopped back against the second layer of fence across the median. Ghosts of teargas broke across the front of the bulldozer as it ground forward, bashing against the second fence with the tangled fragment of the first. The inner fence buckled and collapsed, the bulldozer jouncing over the debris. It continued across the smoke-filled parking lot, a length of fencing stuck shrieking under its nose.
The second and third bulldozers followed the first through the gap.
A brown shoe, visible behind the rear left corner of the first bulldozer, appeared in Willy’s sight. He fired. A man shouted and fell out from behind the bulldozer, one pinwheeling arm casting off a shotgun. It was a banty-legged little guy wearing a gas mask and a vest. (Willy wouldn’t have known it was Pudge Marone, saloonkeeper of the Squeaky Wheel, even if Pudge’s face had been visible. Willy hadn’t drunk in bars, not for years.) While the man’s torso was covered, his legs and arms were not, and that was just fine because Willy did not want to kill anyone if he could help it. He shot again, not quite where he wanted, but close enough, and the .223-caliber bullet, expressed by an M4 assault rifle that had been the property of the Dooling Sheriff’s Department until the previous day, blew off Pudge Marone’s thumb.
An arm reached out from behind the bulldozer to assist the prone man, an understandable and perhaps commendable attempt, though definitely unwise. The arm in question belonged to retired Deputy Nate McGee, who, having lost over a hundred dollars playing dice on the tarmac of Route 31 the previous evening, had soothed himself with a pair of false thoughts: one, that if he’d known for certain that Mrs. McGee might some day reawaken, he wouldn’t have bet at all; and two, that at least he had used up his bad luck for the week. Not so. Willy shot a third time, catching the elbow of the reaching arm. There was another shout and McGee tumbled from behind the bulldozer. Willy squeezed off four more quick shots, testing the steel plate that had been mounted over the bulldozer’s grill, and heard them zing off uselessly.
Frank leaned out from the cover of the first bulldozer with a pistol and fired a series of rapid shots at Willy. In 1968 Willy might have been able to judge by the angle of Geary’s arm that his aim would be way off, and thus stayed in position and taken him out, but 1968 was fifty years ago, and getting shot at was something you lost your coziness with pretty swiftly. Willy and Clint scooted to cover.
As Jack Albertson’s bulldozer rolled through the tangles of teargas and black smoke, straight on for the RV and the front doors, the debris under its nose grinding, the second bulldozer, driven by Coach Wittstock, barreled through the hole in the fence.
Like Albertson before him and Carson Struthers behind him, Coach Wittstock’s blade was raised for protection. He could hear the shots, could hear the shouts, but he couldn’t see Nate McGee clutching his elbow on the ground in front of him, and when the bulldozer rolled over the disabled man, Coach Wittstock assumed it was just one of the burned tires that the machine’s crawlers were climbing.
He whooped. He was breaking through just like he taught his linebackers to do, reckless and relentless!
From his vantage at the window in the visitors’ room, Rand waited to fire on the first bulldozer until it was halfway between the gatehouse and the front doors. His shots struck plating here and there, ricocheting off without effect.
Pete Ordway, the Wittstock boys, and Dan “Treater” Treat, under cover of the second bulldozer, found themselves confronted with the crushed corpse of Nate McGee. The dead man’s gas mask was full of blood and his torso had burst out around the straps of his vest. Gore sprayed up from the crawler treads; shreds of skin flapped like streamers. Rupe Wittstock screamed and leaped away from the mess, clearing himself of the viscera, but putting himself in Rand’s line of fire.
Rand’s first shot missed his target’s head by an inch, the second by half an inch. Rand swore at himself and put his third shot square in the middle of the man’s back. The slug lodged itself in the bulletproof vest the target was wearing and bowed him over. He threw his arms skyward like a fan in a stadium doing the Wave. Rand shot a fourth time, lower. It hit the target in the buttocks and sent him sprawling.
Deputy Treat was not fazed. Treater, only a year late of the 82nd Airborne, still possessed the relative comfort with being shot at that Willy Burke had lost long ago. He hopped off Dozer Two without a second thought. (He was relieved, in fact, to settle into military mode. Action was a break from the untenable reality of his daughter, Alice, at that second propped at her play table in their apartment, wrapped up in white fibers, when she ought to have just been getting up for another day of second grade. And it was a break from the thought of his year-old son, currently in a makeshift daycare run by men.) Free of cover, Treat returned suppression fire with an M4 he’d recovered on Route 31.
At the window, Rand dropped to his knees on the table he had been standing atop. Concrete fragments rained down his neck and back.
Treater hoisted Rupe Wittstock and pulled him to safety behind a stack of smoldering tires.
Dozer One crashed into the rear end of the Fleetwood RV, slamming its hood against the front doors of the prison in an explosion of glass.
5
Jared sat on the floor of the laundry room while Michaela piled sheets around him, constructing a mound to hide him. “I feel stupid,” Jared said.
“You don’t look stupid,” Michaela said, which wasn’t true. She fluttered a sheet above his head.
“I feel like a pussy.”
Michaela hated that word. Even as she heard more shots ring out, it touched a nerve. A pussy was supposed to be soft, and although Michaela possessed one, there was nothing particularly soft about the rest of her. Janice Coates had not raised her to be a softie. She flipped up the sheet and gave Jared a hard—but not too hard—slap across the cheek.
“Hey!” He put a hand to his face.
“Don’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“Don’t say pussy when it means weak. If your mother didn’t teach you better than that, she should have.” Michaela dropped the sheet over his face.
6
“It is a fucking crime that someone is not filming this for fucking reality TV,” Low said. Eye to the scope of the bazooka, he had seen the second bulldozer squash the poor sucker who had fallen in front of the treads, seen the Rambo guy jump out from behind the second dozer, start blasting, and rescue another guy. He then witnessed—not without a mixture of wonder and glee—the first bulldozer as it smashed the RV into an accordion in front of the prison doors. It was a stellar conflict, and it was only going to get better once they spiced the soup with three or four bazooka shells.
“When do we do our thing?” May asked.
“Soon as the cops have wore themselves out a bit more.”
“How are we going to be sure we got Kitty, Low? That place must be full of slags in cocoons.”
Low didn’t appreciate his brother’s last minute naysaying. “We probably won’t be absolutely sure, May, but we are going to fire all these shells, and blow the fuck out of the place, so I like our chances. To a certain extent, I suppose we’re just going to have to hope for the best. Now are we going to enjoy this or not? Or would you rather that I do all the shooting?”
“Come on, Low, I didn’t say that,” protested May. “Be fair.”
7
On Level 32 of Boom Town, little pink spiders began to invade Evie’s field of stars, triangles, and burning orbs. The spiders doused the orbs and turned them into the irritating sparkling blue stars that clogged up all the works—booger. In A Wing, the sound of the gunfire echoed piercingly. Evie was undisturbed; she had seen and heard men killing on numerous occasions. The pink spiders did bother her, though.
“So evil,” she said to no one, sliding her colorful shapes around, searching for connections. Evie was extremely relaxed; as she played with the phone, she floated on her back a couple of centimeters above the cot.
8
Bushes twitched on the opposite side of the north fence, directly across from Billy Wettermore’s position in the alley behind the garden shed. He unleashed a dozen rounds into the mass of greenery where the twitch had come from. The bushes shook and trembled.
Drew T. Barry, a crafty insurance man who always kept to the most risk-averse course, wasn’t anywhere near Billy’s line of fire. Instead, with the prudence that not only made him Dooling’s first stop for all your indemnification needs but also an excellent deer hunter, willing to take his time to get an ideal shot, he had halted the other two men—Pearl and Peters—in the woods behind the prison gymnasium. Peters had told him that the rear door to the prison was on the west wall of the gym. The reaction produced by the rock that Drew had thrown into the brush close to that spot had told them a lot: yes, there must be a door, and yes, it was definitely defended.
“Deputy?” Drew T. Barry asked.
They were crouched behind an oak. Fifteen feet or so ahead of them, bits of leaf were still drifting down from where the gunfire had torn up the foliage. To judge by the sound, the shooter was perhaps thirty or forty yards beyond the interior fence, near the wall of the prison.
“What?” Don Peters replied. Sweat streaked his flushed face. He had been lugging the duffel bag with their masks and the bolt cutters.
“Not you, the real deputy,” Drew T. Barry said.
“Yeah?” Pearl nodded at him.
“If I kill this guy shooting here, there’s no chance of prosecution? Are you sure Geary and Coombs will swear we acted in the legal performance of our duties?”
“Yup. Scout’s honor.” Elmore Pearl raised his hand in the salute of his childhood, first three fingers raised, pinky held down by his thumb.
Peters hocked some phlegm. “You need me to hustle back and fetch you a notary, Drew?”
Drew T. Barry ignored this witless jibe, told them to stay put, and started backtracking into the woods, taking the northern incline in quick, quiet steps, his Weatherby rifle strapped to his back.
9
With the bulldozer halted, Frank continued to aim at the southwest corner of the prison, ready to pick off the rifleman there if he showed his face. The shooting had rattled him; had made it all real. He felt nauseated by the blood and the bodies on the ground, obscured and revealed as the clouds of teargas shifted in the wind, but his determination was still strong. He felt horror but no remorse. His life was Nana’s life, which made the risk acceptable. So he told himself.
Kronsky joined him. “Hurry,” Frank said. “The sooner this is over, the better.”
“You got a point there, Mister Man,” Kronsky said, on one knee with his backpack on the ground. He unzipped the pack, removed the bundle of dynamite, and snipped off three-quarters of the fuse.
The armored door of the bulldozer swung open. Jack Albertson climbed down, carrying his old service weapon, a .38.
“Cover us from yonder shitbird down the way,” Kronsky said to Albertson, pointing in the direction of Willy Burke’s position. Then Kronsky turned to Frank. “Come on, and you’d best high-step it.”
The two men hustled along the northwest wall of the prison, ducking low. Beneath the cutout window that was one of the defenders’ firing points, Kronsky stopped. He had the dynamite in his right hand and a blue plastic lighter in the other. The defender’s rifle barrel that had been there before poked back out.
“Grab that thing,” he said to Frank.
Frank didn’t question the order, just reached up and closed his left hand around the metal tube. He jerked it out of the grip of the man inside. He heard a muffled curse. Kronsky flicked his lighter, lit the shortened fuse on the bundle, and casually tossed it, hook-shot-style, up and through the hole. Frank released the rifle and hit the ground.
Three seconds later there was a thundercrack. Smoke and chunks of bloody flesh flew from the cutout window.
10
The earth trembled and gave an outraged roar.
Clint, shoulder to shoulder with Willy Burke at the west wall, saw a tidal wave of teargas curl from the parking lot, swept along by whatever had just exploded. Chimes rang through his skull and his joints vibrated. Beneath the noise, all he could think was that things were not going as well as he had hoped. These guys were going to kill Evie and all the rest of them. His fault, his failing. The pistol that he had been carrying around, ridiculously—never once in their fifteen years of marriage had he taken up Lila’s invitation to go to the gun range with her—had nevertheless slid into his hand, begging to be fired.
He leaned around Willy Burke, scanned the pile-up at the front doors, and locked on the figure standing at the rear of the first bulldozer. This man was staring at the cloud of dust boiling from Rand Quigley’s window, which had been—like everything else this morning—exploded out of its former normal shape.
(Jack Albertson had not expected the blast. It startled him and he dropped his guard to look. While the chaos did not upset him—as a miner in his youth, one who had survived a good many rumbles in the earth, his nerves were cool—it did perplex him. What was wrong with these folks, that they would prefer a shootout to surrendering some damned wild woman to the law? In his view, the world got crazier and crazier with each passing year. His personal Waterloo had been Lila Norcross’s election as Dooling’s sheriff. A skirt in the sheriff’s office! It didn’t get much more ludicrous than that. Jack Albertson had put in his retirement papers there and then, and returned home to enjoy his lifelong bachelorhood in peace.)
Clint’s arm lifted the pistol, the gunsight found the man behind the bulldozer, and Clint’s finger pulled the trigger. The shot was followed by a succulent pop, the sound of a bullet punching through the faceplate of the man’s gas mask. Clint saw the head snap back and the body crumple.
Ah, Jesus, he thought. That was probably someone I knew.
“Come on,” Willy cried, hauling him away to the rear door. Clint went, his legs doing what they needed to do. It had been easier than he might have guessed to kill someone. Which only made it worse.