CHAPTER 16
1
Drew T. Barry reached the Booth and saw what had stopped Peters before the woman grabbed him: two men, one of them possibly Norcross, the arrogant bastard who had instigated this mess. He had his arm around the other one. This was good. They had no idea he was here, and were probably on their way to the woman. To protect her. It was insane, given the size of the force Geary had mustered, but look how much damage they’d managed to inflict already. Good townspeople killed and wounded! They deserved to die just for that.
And then, two more came out of the smoke: a woman and a younger man. All with their backs to Drew T. Barry.
Better and better.
2
“Jesus Christ,” Clint said to his son. “You were supposed to be hiding.” He looked reproachfully at Michaela. “You were supposed to take care of that.”
Jared replied before Michaela could. “She did what you told her, but I couldn’t hide. I just couldn’t. Not if there’s a chance we can get Mom back. And Mary. Molly, too.” He pointed to the woman in the cell at the end of the corridor. “Dad, look at her! She’s floating! What is she? Is she even human?”
Before Clint could answer, a burst of music came from Hicks’s phone, followed by the proclamation of a tiny electronic voice: “Congratulations, Player Evie! You have survived! Boom Town is yours!”
Evie dropped to her bunk, swung her legs onto the floor, and approached the bars. Clint would have thought he was beyond surprise at this point, but was shocked to see her pubic hair was mostly green. Not hair at all, in fact—it was some kind of vegetation.
“I won!” she cried happily, “and not a minute too soon! I was down to the last two percent of battery. Now I can die happy!”
“You’re not going to die,” Clint said. He no longer believed it, though. She was going to die, and when what remained of Geary’s force got here—which would be momentarily—it was likely that they were going to die with her. They had killed too many. Frank’s men wouldn’t stop.
3
Drew T. Barry slid around the side of the Booth, liking what he saw more and more. Unless some of the defenders were hiding in the cells, all that remained of Norcross’s little cabal was at the end of this corridor, clustered together like pins in a bowling alley. They had no place to hide, and they were all out of running room. Excellent.
He raised the Weatherby . . . and a chisel pressed into his throat, just below the angle of his jaw.
“No-no-no,” Angel said in the voice of a cheery primary school teacher. Her face, shirt, and baggy pants were stippled with blood. “Move and I’ll cut open your juggler vein. I got the blade right on it. Only reason you’re not dead already is you let me finish my business with Officer Peters. Put that elephant gun on the floor. Don’t bend, just drop it.”
“This is a very valuable weapon, ma’am,” said Drew T. Barry.
“Ask me if I give a shit.”
“It might go off.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
Drew T. Barry dropped it.
“Now hand me the one you got slung over your shoulder. Don’t try anything weird, either.”
From behind them: “Lady, whatever you’re holding on his throat, put it down.”
Angel snatched a quick look over her shoulder and saw four or five men with their rifles pointed. She smiled at them. “You can shoot me, but this one here will die with me. That’s a stone promise.”
Frank stood, indecisive. Drew T. Barry, hoping to live a little longer, handed over Don’s M4.
“Thank you,” Angel said, and hooked it over her own shoulder. She stepped back, dropped the chisel, and raised her hands to either side of her face, showing Frank and the others that they were empty. Then she backed slowly down the short hall to where Clint was standing with his arm still around Willy, supporting him. She kept her hands up the whole way.
Drew T. Barry, surprised to be alive (but grateful), picked up his Weatherby. He felt lightheaded. He supposed anyone would feel lightheaded after having a lunatic female inmate hold a chisel to his throat. She had told him to put the gun down . . . then let him pick it up again. Why? So she could be on the killing ground with her friends? It seemed the only answer. A crazy one, but she was crazy. They all were.
Drew T. Barry decided it was up to Frank Geary to make the next move. He had inaugurated this colossal shit-show, let him figure out how to clean it up. That was best, because to the outside world, what they had done in the last half hour would look a lot like a vigilante action. And there were parts of it—the walking corpses in the gym, for instance, or the naked green woman he spied standing at the cell bars a few steps behind Norcross—that the outside world would simply not believe, Aurora or no Aurora. Drew T. Barry felt lucky to be alive, and would be happy to fade into the background. With luck, the world might never know he’d even been here.
“What the fuck?” said Carson Struthers, who had seen the green woman down the hall. “That ain’t right nor normal. What do you want to do with her, Geary?”
“Take her and take her alive,” Frank said. He had never felt so tired in his life, but he would see this through. “If she really is the key to Aurora, let the docs figure her out. We’ll drive her to Atlanta and hand her over.”
Willy started to raise his rifle, but slowly, as if it weighed a thousand pounds. It wasn’t hot in A Wing, but his round face was wet with sweat. It had darkened his beard. Clint grabbed the rifle away from him. At the end of the corridor, Carson Struthers, Treater, Ordway, and Barrows raised their own guns.
“That’s it!” Evie cried. “Here we go! Shootout at the OK Corral! Bonnie and Clyde! Die Hard in a Women’s Prison!”
But before the short A Wing corridor could become a free-fire zone, Clint dropped Willy’s rifle and yanked the M4 from Angel’s shoulder. He held it over his head for Frank’s group to see. Slowly, and with some reluctance, the men who had raised their guns now lowered them.
“No, no,” Evie said. “People won’t pay to see such a poor excuse for a climax. We need a rewrite.”
Clint paid no attention; he was focused on Frank. “I can’t let you take her, Mr. Geary.”
In an eerily good John Wayne imitation, Evie drawled, “If ya hurt the little lady, you’re gonna have to answer to me, ya varmint.”
Frank also ignored her. “I appreciate your dedication, Norcross, although I’ll be damned if I understand it.”
“Maybe you don’t want to,” Clint said.
“Oh, I think I’ve got the picture,” Frank said. “You’re the one who’s not seeing clearly.”
“Too much shrinky-dink shit in his head,” Struthers said, and this brought a few grunts of tense laughter.
Frank spoke patiently, as if lecturing a slow pupil. “So far as we know, she’s the only woman on earth who can sleep and wake up again. Be reasonable. I only want to take her to doctors who can study her, and maybe figure out how to reverse what’s happened. These men want their wives and daughters back.”
There was a rumble of agreement at this from the invaders.
“So stand aside, tenderfoot,” Evie said, still doing the Duke. “Ah reckon—”
“Oh, shut up,” Michaela said. Evie’s eyes flew wide, as if she had been unexpectedly slapped. Michaela stepped forward, fixing Frank with a stare that burned. “Do I look sleepy to you, Mr. Geary?”
“I don’t care what you are,” said Frank. “We’re not here for you.” This raised another chorus of agreement.
“You ought to care. I’m wide awake. So is Angel. She woke us up. Breathed into us and woke us up.”
“Which is what we want for all the women,” Frank said, and this brought a louder chorus of agreement. The impatience that Michaela read on the faces of the men gathered before her was close to hate. “If you’re really awake, you should get that. It’s not rocket science.”
“You don’t get it, Mr. Geary. She was able to do that because Angel and I weren’t in cocoons. Your wives and daughters are. That’s not rocket science, either.”
Silence. She finally had their attention, and Clint allowed himself to hope. Carson Struthers spoke one flat word. “Bullshit.”
Michaela shook her head. “You stupid, willful man. All of you, stupid and willful. Evie Black isn’t a woman, she’s a supernatural being. Don’t you understand that yet? After all that’s happened? Do you think doctors can take DNA from a supernatural being? Put her in an MRI tube and figure out how she ticks? All the men who have died here, it was for nothing!”
Pete Ordway raised a Garand rifle. “I could put a bullet in you, ma’am, and stop your mouth. Tempted to do it.”
“Put it down, Pete.” Frank could feel this thing dancing on the edge of control. Here were men with guns faced with a seemingly insoluble problem. To them, the easiest way to deal with it would be to shoot it to pieces. He knew this because he felt it himself.
“Norcross? Have your people stand aside. I want a good look at her.”
Clint stepped back, one arm around Willy Burke to hold him up and one hand laced through Jared’s fingers. Michaela flanked Jared on the other side. Angel stood defiantly in front of the soft cell for a moment, shielding Evie with her body, but when Michaela took her hand and pulled gently, Angel gave in and stood beside her.
“Better not hurt her,” Angel said. Her voice was trembling; tears stood in her eyes. “Just better not, you bastards. She’s a fuckin goddess.”
Frank took three steps forward, not knowing or caring if his remaining men followed. He looked at Evie so long and hard that Clint turned to look himself.
The greenery that had twined in her hair was gone. Her naked body was beautiful, but in no way extraordinary. Her pubic hair was a dark triangle above the joining of her thighs.
“What the fuck,” Carson Struthers said. “Wasn’t she—just—green?”
“It’s—nice to finally make your acquaintance in person, ma’am,” Frank said.
“Thank you,” said Evie. Bold nakedness not withstanding, she sounded as shy as a schoolgirl. Her eyes were downcast. “Do you like it, Frank, putting animals in cages?”
“I only cage those that need to be caged,” said Frank, and for the first time in days, he really smiled. If there was one thing he knew, it was that wild went two ways—the danger a wild animal presented to others, and the danger that others presented to a wild animal. In general, he cared more about keeping the animals safe from the people. “And I’ve come to let you out of yours. I want to take you to doctors who can examine you. Would you allow me to do that?”
“I think not,” Evie said. “They would find nothing, and change nothing. Remember the story of the golden goose? When the men cut it open, there was nothing inside but guts.”
Frank sighed and shook his head.
He doesn’t believe her because he doesn’t want to believe her, Clint thought. Because he can’t afford to believe her. Not after all he’s done.
“Ma’am—”
“Why don’t you call me Evie,” she said. “I don’t like this formality. I thought we had a lovely little rapport when we talked on the phone, Frank.” But her eyes were still downcast. Clint wondered what was in them that she had to hide. Doubt about her mission here? That was probably wishful thinking, but possible—hadn’t Jesus Christ himself prayed to have the cup taken from his lips? As, he supposed, Frank wished that scientists at the CDC would take the cup from his. That they would look at Evie’s scans and bloodwork and DNA and say aha.
“Evie it is,” Frank said. “This inmate . . .” He tilted his head toward Angel, who was staring at him with wrath. “She says that you’re a goddess. Is that true?”
“No,” Evie said.
At Clint’s side, Willy began to cough and rub the left side of his chest.
“This other woman . . .” This time the tilt went toward Michaela. “She says you’re a supernatural being. And—” Frank didn’t like to say it aloud, to get close to the fury that it could lead to, but he had to. “—you knew things about me that you couldn’t have known.”
“Plus she can float!” Jared blurted. “You may have noticed that? She levitated! I saw it! We all did!”
Evie looked at Michaela. “You’re wrong about me, you know. I am a woman, and in most ways like any other. Like the ones these men love. Although love is a dangerous word when it comes from men. Quite often they don’t mean the same thing as women do when they say it. Sometimes they mean they’ll kill for it. Sometimes when they say it they don’t mean much of anything. Which, of course, most women come to know. Some with resignation, many with sorrow.”
“When a man says he loves you, that means he wants to get his pecker up inside your pants,” Angel put in helpfully.
Evie returned her attention to Frank and the men standing behind him. “The women you want to save, are at this very moment living their lives in another place. Happy lives, by and large, although of course most miss their little boys and some miss their husbands and fathers. I won’t say they never behave badly, they are far from saints, but for the most part, they’re in harmony. In that world, Frank, no one ever pulls your daughter’s favorite shirt, shouts in her face, embarrasses her, or terrifies her by putting his fist through the wall.”
“They’re alive?” Carson Struthers asked. “Do you swear it, woman? Do you swear to God?”
“Yes,” Evie said. “I swear to your god and every god.”
“How do we get them back, then?”
“Not by poking me or prodding me or taking my blood. Those things wouldn’t work, even if I were to allow them.”
“What will?”
Evie spread her arms wide. Her eyes flickered, the pupils expanding to black diamonds, the irises roiling from pale green to brilliant amber, turning to cat’s eyes. “Kill me,” she said. “Kill me and they’ll awake. Every woman on earth. I swear this is true.”
Like a man in a dream, Frank raised his rifle.
4
Clint stepped in front of Evie.
“No, Dad, no!” Jared screamed.
Clint took no notice. “She’s lying, Geary. She wants you to kill her. Not all of her—I think part of her has changed her mind—but it’s what she came here to do. What she was sent here to do.”
“Next you’ll be saying she wants to be hung on a cross,” Pete Ordway said. “Stand aside, Doc.”
Clint didn’t. “It’s a test. If we pass it, there’s a chance. If we don’t, if you do what she expects you to do, the door closes. This will be a world of men until all the men are gone.”
He thought of the fights he’d had growing up, battling not for milkshakes, not really, but just for a little sun and space—a little room to fucking breathe. To grow. He thought of Shannon, his old friend, who had depended on him to pull her out of that purgatory as much as he had depended on her. He had done so to the best of his ability, and she had remembered. Why else would she have given her daughter his last name? But he still owed a debt. To Shannon, for being a friend. To Lila, for being a friend and his wife and his son’s mother. And those who were with him, here in front of Evie’s cell? They also had women to whom they owed debts—yes, even Angel. It was time to pay off.
The fight he’d wanted was over. Clint was punched out and he hadn’t won a thing.
Not yet.
He held his hands out to either side, palms up, and beckoned. Evie’s last defenders came and stood in a line in front of her cell, even Willy, who appeared on the verge of passing out. Jared stood next to Clint, and Clint put a hand on his son’s neck. Then, very slowly, he picked up the M4. He handed it to Michaela, whose mother slept in a cocoon not far from where they now stood.
“Listen to me, Frank. Evie’s told us that if you don’t kill her, if you just let her go, there’s a chance the women can come back.”
“He’s lying,” Evie said, but now that he couldn’t see her, Frank heard something in her voice that gave him pause. It sounded like anguish.
“Enough bullshit,” Pete Ordway said, and spat on the floor. “We lost a lot of good men getting this far. Let’s just take her. We can decide what comes next later.”
Clint lifted Willy’s rifle. He did so reluctantly, but he did it.
Michaela turned to Evie. “Whoever sent you here thinks this is how men solve all their problems. Isn’t that right?”
Evie made no reply. Michaela had an idea that the remarkable creature in the soft cell was being torn in ways she had never expected when she appeared in the woods above that rusted trailer.
She turned back to the armed men, now halfway down the corridor. Their guns were pointed. At this range, their bullets would shred the little group in front of the strange woman.
Michaela raised her weapon. “It doesn’t have to go this way. Show her it doesn’t have to.”
“Which means doing what?” Frank asked.
“It means letting her go back to where she came from,” Clint said.
“Not on your life,” said Drew T. Barry, and that was when Willy Burke’s knees buckled and he went down, no longer breathing.
5
Frank handed his rifle to Ordway. “He needs CPR. I took the course last summer—”
Clint pointed his rifle at Frank’s chest. “No.”
Frank stared at him. “Man, are you crazy?”
“Step back,” Michaela said, pointing her own gun at Frank. She didn’t know what Clint was doing, but she had an idea he was playing the last card in his hand. In our hand, she thought.
“Let’s shoot em all,” Carson Struthers said. He sounded near hysterics. “That devil-woman, too.”
“Stand down,” Frank said. And, to Clint: “You’re just going to let him die? What would that prove?”
“Evie can save him,” Clint said. “Can’t you, Evie?”
The woman in the cell said nothing. Her head was lowered, her hair obscuring her face.
“Geary—if she saves him, will you let her go?”
“That old cocksucker’s fakin!” Carson Struthers shouted. “It’s all a set-up they planned!”
Frank began, “Can I just check if—?”
“Okay, yes,” Clint said. “But be quick. Brain damage starts after three minutes, and I don’t know if even a supernatural being could reverse that.”
Frank hurried to Willy, dropped to one knee, and put his fingers to the old man’s throat. He looked up at Clint. “His clock’s stopped. I should start CPR.”
“A minute ago, you were ready to kill him,” Reed Barrows grumbled.
Officer Treat, who thought he had witnessed some shit in Afghanistan, groaned. “I don’t understand any of this. Just tell me what it’s going to take to get my kid back and I’ll do it.” To whom, exactly, this statement was directed, was unclear.
“No CPR.” Clint turned to Evie, who stood with her head down. Which, he thought, was good, because she couldn’t help seeing the man on the floor.
“This is Willy Burke,” said Clint. “His country told him to serve, and he served. These days he goes out with the volunteer fire department to fight brushfires in the spring. They do it without pay. He helps at every bean supper the Ladies’ Aid puts on for indigent families the state is too chintzy to support. He coaches Pop Warner football in the fall.”
“He was a good coach, too,” Jared said. His voice was thick with tears.
Clint continued. “He took care of his sister for ten years when she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He fed her, he brought her back when she took it into her head to wander, he changed her shitty diapers. He came out here to defend you because he wanted to do the right thing by you and by his conscience. He never hurt a woman in his life. Now he’s dying. Maybe you’ll let him. After all, he’s just another man, right?”
Someone was coughing on the smoke drifting down Broadway. For a moment there was no other sound, then Evie Black shrieked. Lights burst in their overhead cages. Cell doors that had been locked slammed open and then banged shut in a sound that was like iron hands applauding. Several of the men in Frank’s group screamed, one of them in a pitch so high that he sounded like a little girl of six or seven.
Ordway turned and ran. His footfalls echoed through the cinderblock halls.
“Pick him up,” Evie said. Her cell door had opened with the others. If, that was, it had ever been locked in the first place. Clint had no doubt that she could have left whenever she wished at any time during the last week. The rats had only been part of her theater.
Clint and Jared Norcross lifted Willy’s limp form. He was heavy, but Evie took him as if he were no more than a bag of goosefeathers.
“You played on my heart,” she said to Clint. “That was a cruel thing to do, Dr. Norcross.” Her face was solemn, but he thought that he saw a glint of amusement in her eyes. Maybe even merriment. She encircled Willy’s considerable waistline with her left arm and placed her right hand on the matted, sweat-soaked hair at the back of the old man’s head. Then she pressed her mouth to his.
Willy shuddered all over. His arms lifted to encircle Evie’s back. For a moment the old man and the young woman remained in a deep embrace. Then she let him go and stood back. “How do you feel, Willy?”
“Damn good,” Willy Burke said. He sat up.
“My God,” Reed Barrows said. “He looks twenty years younger.”
“I ain’t been kissed like that since I was in high school,” said Willy. “If ever. Ma’am, I think you saved my life. I thank you for that, but I think the kiss was even better.”
Evie began to smile. “I’m glad you enjoyed it. I rather liked it myself, although it wasn’t as good as beating Boom Town.”
Clint’s blood was no longer up; exhaustion and Evie’s latest miracle had cooled it. He looked on the rage he had felt so recently like a man looking at a stranger who has broken into his house and cluttered the kitchen while making himself an extravagant and gluttonous breakfast. He felt sad and regretful and terribly tired. He wished he could just go home, sit beside his wife, share space with her, and not have to say a word.
“Geary,” Clint said.
Frank was slow to look at him, like a man shaking off a daze.
“Let her go. It’s the only way.”
“Maybe, but even that’s not sure, is it?”
“No,” Clint agreed. “What in this fucked-up life is?”
Angel spoke up then. “Bad times and good times,” she said. “Bad times and good. All the rest is just horseshit in the barn.”
“I thought it would take at least until Thursday, but . . .” Evie laughed, a sound like tinkling bells. “I forgot how fast men can move when they set their minds to a thing.”
“Sure,” Michaela said. “Just think of the Manhattan Project.”
6
At ten minutes past eight on that fine morning, a line of six vehicles drove down West Lavin Road, while behind them the prison smoldered like a discarded cigar butt in an ashtray. They turned onto Ball’s Hill Road. Unit Two led the way with its flashers turning slowly. Frank was behind the wheel. Clint was in the shotgun seat. Behind them sat Evie Black, exactly where she had been sitting after Lila arrested her. Then she had been half-naked. On this return trip, she was wearing a Dooling Correctional red top.
“How we’re ever going to explain this to the state police, I don’t know,” Frank said. “Lot of men dead, lot of men wounded.”
“Right now everyone’s got their hands full with Aurora,” Clint said, “and probably half of them aren’t even showing up. When all the women come back—if they come back—no one will care.”
From behind them, Evie spoke quietly. “The mothers will. The wives. The daughters. Who do you think cleans up the battlefields after the shooting stops?”
7
Unit Two stopped in the lane leading to Truman Mayweather’s trailer, where yellow CRIME SCENE tape still fluttered. The other vehicles—two more police cruisers, two civilian cars, and Carson Struthers’s pickup truck—pulled up behind them. “Now what?” Clint asked.
“Now we’ll see,” Evie said. “If one of these men doesn’t change his mind and shoot me after all, that is.”
“That won’t happen,” Clint replied, not nearly as confident as he sounded.
Doors slammed. For the moment, the trio in Unit Two sat where they were.
“Tell me something, Evie,” Frank said. “If you’re just the emissary, who’s in charge of this rodeo? Some . . . I don’t know . . . life force? Big Mama Earth, maybe, hitting the reset button?”
“Do you mean the Great Lesbian in the sky?” Evie asked. “A short, heavyset deity wearing a mauve pantsuit and sensible shoes? Isn’t that the image most men get when they think a woman is trying to run their lives?”
“I don’t know.” Frank felt listless, done up. He missed his daughter. He even missed Elaine. He didn’t know what had happened to his anger. It was like his pocket had torn, and it had fallen out somewhere along the way. “What comes to mind when you think about men, smartass?”
“Guns,” she said. “Clint, there appear to be no doorhandles back here.”
“Don’t let that stop you,” he said.
She didn’t. One of the back doors opened, and Evie Black stepped out. Clint and Frank joined her, one on each side, and Clint was reminded of the Bible classes he’d been forced to attend at one foster home or another: Jesus on the cross, with the disbelieving bad guy on one side and the good thief on the other—the one who would, according to the dying messiah, shortly join him in paradise. Clint remembered thinking that the poor guy probably would have settled for parole and a chicken dinner.
“I don’t know what force sent me here,” she said. “I only know I was called, and—”
“You came,” Clint finished.
“Yes. And now I’ll go back.”
“What do we do?” asked Frank.
Evie turned to him, and she was no longer smiling. “You’ll do the job usually reserved for women. You’ll wait.” She drew in a deep breath. “Oh, the air smells so fresh after that prison.”
She walked past the clustered men as if they weren’t there, and took Angel by the shoulders. Angel looked up at her with shining eyes. “You did well,” Evie said, “and I thank you from my heart.”
Angel blurted, “I love you, Evie!”
“I love you, too,” said Evie, and kissed her lips.
Evie walked toward the ruins of the meth shed. Beyond it sat the fox, its brush curled around its paws, panting and looking at her with bright eyes. She followed it, and then the men followed her.
8
“Dad,” Jared said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “Do you see it? Tell me you see it.”
“Oh my God,” Deputy Treat said. “What is that?”
They stared at the Tree with its many twisting trunks and its flocks of exotic birds. It rose so high that the top could not be seen. Clint could feel a force radiating out from it like a strong electric current. The peacock spread his tail for their admiration, and when the white tiger appeared from the other side, its belly swishing in the high grass, several guns were raised.
“Lower those weapons!” Frank shouted.
The tiger lay down, its remarkable eyes peering at them through the high grass. The guns were lowered. All but one.
“Wait here,” Evie said.
“If the women of Dooling come back, all the women of earth come back?” Clint asked. “That’s how it works?”
“Yes. The women of this town stand for all women, and it must be all of your women who come back. Through there.” She pointed at a split in the Tree. “If even one refuses . . .” She didn’t have to finish. Moths flew and fluttered around her head in a kind of diadem.
“Why would they want to stay?” Reed Barrows asked, sounding honestly bewildered.
Angel’s laugh was as harsh as a crow’s caw. “I got a better question—if they built up a good thing, like Evie says, why would they want to leave?”
Evie started toward the Tree, the long grass whickering against her red pants, but stopped when she heard the snap-clack of someone racking a shell into the chamber of a rifle. A Weatherby, as it happened. Drew T. Barry was the only man who hadn’t lowered his gun at Frank’s command, but he wasn’t pointing it at Evie. He was pointing it at Michaela.
“You go with her,” he said.
“Put it down, Drew,” said Frank.
“No.”
Michaela looked at Evie. “Can I go with you to wherever it is? Without being in one of the cocoons?”
“Of course,” Evie said.
Michaela returned her attention to Barry. She no longer looked afraid; her brow was furrowed in puzzlement. “But why?”
“Call it insurance,” said Drew T. Barry. “If she’s telling the truth, maybe you can persuade your mother, and your mother can persuade the rest of them. I’m a strong believer in insurance.”
Clint saw Frank raising a pistol. Barry’s attention was fixed on the women, and it would have been an easy shot, but Clint shook his head. In a low voice he said, “There’s been enough killing.”
Besides, Clint thought, maybe Mr. Double Indemnity is right.
Evie and Michaela walked past the white tiger to the split in the Tree, where the fox sat waiting for them. Evie stepped in without hesitation, and was lost to sight. Michaela hesitated, and then followed.
The remaining men who had attacked the prison, and those remaining who had defended it, settled down to wait. At first they paced, but as time passed and nothing happened, most of them sat down in the high grass.
Not Angel. She strode back and forth, as if she couldn’t get enough of being beyond the confines of her cell, and the woodshop, and the Booth, and Broadway. The tiger was dozing. Once Angel approached it, and Clint held his breath. She was truly insane.
It raised its head when Angel dared to stroke its back, but then the great head dropped back to its paws, and those amazing eyes closed.
“It’s purrin!” she called to them, in what sounded like exultation.
The sun rose to the roof of the sky and seemed to pause there.
“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Frank said. “And if it doesn’t, I’m going to spend the rest of my life wishing I’d killed her.”
Clint said, “I don’t think it’s been decided yet.”
“Yeah? How do you know?”
It was Jared who answered. He pointed at the Tree. “Because that’s still there. If it disappears or turns into an oak or a weeping willow, then you can give up.”
They waited.