CHAPTER 1
1
Late Friday afternoon, well into the second day of the disaster (in Dooling, at least; in some parts of the world, it was already Aurora Day Three), Terry Coombs awoke to the aroma of sizzling bacon and brewing coffee. Terry’s first coherent thought was: Is there any liquid left in the Squeaky Wheel, or did I drink the whole place, right down to the dishwater? His second was more basic: get to the bathroom. He did just that, arriving in time to vomit copiously into the toilet. For a couple of minutes he rested there, letting the pendulum that was making the room swing back and forth settle to a stop. When it did, he hauled himself up, found some Bayer and swallowed three with gulps of water from the faucet. Back in the bedroom, he stared at the space on the left side of the bed where he recalled that Rita had been lying, cocoon around her head, the white stuff in her mouth sucking inward and billowing out with each breath.
Had she gotten up? Was it over? Tears prickled Terry’s eyes and he staggered, wearing nothing but his underwear, out into the kitchen.
Frank Geary sat at the table, dwarfing it with his broad upper body. Somehow the inherent mournfulness of that sight—a big man at a tiny table in bright sunlight—informed Terry of everything he needed to know before any words were spoken. Their gazes met. Geary had a copy of National Geographic folded open. He set it aside.
“I was reading about Micronesia,” said Frank. “Interesting place. Lots of wildlife, too much of it endangered. Probably you were hoping for someone else. I don’t know if you remember, but I slept over. We moved your wife into the basement.”
Ah, now it came back. They’d carried Rita downstairs, a man to each end, as if she were a rug, banging their shoulders off the railings and the walls as they descended. They’d left her on the old couch, atop the old quilt that covered it to keep the dust off. Rita was undoubtedly lying there at that moment, surrounded by the other pieces of dusty furniture they’d discarded over the years and intended to yardsale but never got around to: bar chairs with yellow vinyl seats, the VCR, Diana’s old crib, the old woodstove.
Despondency sapped Terry: he couldn’t even keep his head raised. His chin dropped to his chest.
In front of the empty chair on the opposite side of the table was a plate with bacon and toast on it. Beside the plate was a cup of black coffee and a bottle of Beam. Terry drew in a ragged breath and sat down.
He crunched up a piece of bacon and waited to see what would happen. His stomach made noises and swirled around some, but nothing came up. Frank wordlessly added a dollop of whiskey to Terry’s coffee. Terry took a sip. His hands, which he hadn’t realized were trembling, steadied.
“I needed that. Thank you.” His voice was a croak.
Though they weren’t close friends, he and Frank Geary had shared a few drinks together over the years. Terry knew Frank was serious about his job as the town’s animal control officer; he knew Frank had a daughter he believed was a pretty terrific artist; he remembered that a drunk had once suggested to Frank that he should leave some irritation or another up to God, and Frank had told the drunk to put a sock in it, and as well-sauced as the drunk had been, he’d caught the warning in Frank’s tone and had not made a peep the rest of the night. In other words, Frank had seemed to Terry like a right enough guy, just not someone whose balls you’d ever want to bust. That Frank was black might have played into a certain sense of necessitated distance, too. Terry had never actually considered the possibility of being buddies with a black guy, although he had nothing against the idea now that he did consider it.
“It’s no problem,” said Frank. His cool, straightforward manner was reassuring.
“So, everything’s . . .” Terry had another swallow of the juiced coffee. “The same?”
“As yesterday? Yeah. Which means everything’s different. For one thing, you’re acting sheriff. Station called looking for you a few minutes ago. The old sheriff has gone missing.”
Terry’s stomach sent up a bubble of nastiness. “Lila missing? Jeez.”
“Congratulations, huh? Big promotion. Cue the marching band.”
Frank’s right eyebrow was wryly arched. They both broke into laughter, but Terry’s dried up quickly.
“Hey,” Frank said. His hand found Terry’s, squeezed it. “Keep it together, okay?”
“Okay.” Terry swallowed. “How many women are still awake?”
“Don’t know. It’s bad. But I’m sure you can handle this.”
Terry wasn’t. He drank his doctored coffee. He chewed his bacon. His dining companion was quiet.
Frank drank from his own coffee and looked at Terry over the rim of his cup.
“Can I handle it?” Terry asked. “Can I really?”
“Yes.” There was no doubt at all in Frank Geary’s voice. “But you’ll need all the help you can get.”
“You want me to deputize you?” It made sense to Terry: besides Lila, they were down at least a couple of officers.
Frank shrugged. “I’m a town employee. I’m here to pitch in. If you want to give me a star, that’s fine.”
Terry took another slug of the laced coffee and got to his feet. “Let’s go.”
2
Aurora had knocked out a quarter of the department, but Frank helped Terry fill out a roster of volunteer deputies that Friday morning, and brought in Judge Silver to administer their oaths on Friday afternoon. Don Peters was one of the new hires; another was a high school senior named Eric Blass, young but enthusiastic.
On Frank’s advice, Terry posted a nine PM curfew. Two-man teams began canvasing Dooling’s neighborhoods to put up the notices. Also to settle folks down, discourage vandalism, and—another notion of Frank’s—to begin cataloging the whereabouts of the sleepers. Frank Geary might have been a dogcatcher before Aurora, but he made a helluva law officer, with a terrific sense of organization. When Terry discovered he could lean on him, he leaned hard.
Almost a dozen looters were collared. This really wasn’t much in the way of police work, because few bothered to hide what they were doing. They probably believed their behavior would be winked at, but soon learned better. One of these miscreants was Roger Dunphy, Dooling Correctional’s AWOL janitor. On their first Sunday morning cruise around town, Terry and Frank spied Mr. Dunphy blatantly toting a clear plastic bag filled with necklaces and rings that he’d lifted from the rooms of the female residents at Crestview Nursing Home, where he sometimes moonlighted.
“They don’t need them now,” Dunphy had argued. “Come on, Deputy Coombs, gimme a break. It’s a clear case of salvage.”
Frank seized the janitor by the nose, squeezing hard enough to make the cartilage creak. “Sheriff Coombs. You’ll call him Sheriff Coombs from now on.”
“Okay!” Dunphy cried. “I’ll call im President Coombs, if you’ll just leave go of my schnozz!”
“Return that property and we’ll let this ride,” Terry said, and was gratified by Frank’s approving nod.
“Sure! You bet!”
“And don’t you fuck the dog on this, because we’ll be checking.”
The great thing about Frank, Terry realized during those first three days, was that he grasped the enormous pressure Terry was functioning under in a way that no one else seemed to. He never pressed, but he always had a suggestion and, nearly as important, he kept that leather-encased silver hip flask—very cool, maybe it was a black thing—at the ready for when Terry got low, when it seemed the day would never end and his wheels started spinning in the awful, surreal mud of it all. He was at Terry’s elbow the entire time, stalwart as hell, and he was with him on Monday, Aurora Plus Five, outside the gates of the Dooling Correctional Facility for Women.
3
Acting chief Coombs had tried several times over the weekend to convince Clint that he needed to release Eve Black into his custody. Rumors about the woman who had killed the meth dealers were circulating: unlike all the others, the stories went, she slept and woke. At the station, Linny Mars (still hanging in there; you go, girl) had received so many calls regarding this that she had taken to hanging up on anyone who asked. Frank said they had to find out if the rumors were true; it was a priority. Terry supposed he was right, but Norcross was being stubborn, and Terry was finding it increasingly difficult to even get the annoying man on the phone.
The fires had burned themselves out by Monday, but the countryside near the prison still smelled like an ashtray. It was gray and humid and the misty rain that had been falling off and on since early Friday morning was falling again. Acting Sheriff Terry Coombs, feeling mildewed, stood at the intercom and monitor outside the gates of the Dooling Correctional Facility for Women.
Norcross still wasn’t buying the transfer order that Judge Silver had signed for Eve Black. (Frank had assisted with that, too, explaining to the judge that the woman might possess a unique immunity to the virus, and impressing on the old jurist the need to act quickly and keep things calm before a riot started.)
“Oscar Silver’s got no jurisdiction in the matter, Terry.” The doctor’s voice burbled from the speaker, sounding as if it were coming from the bottom of a pond. “I know he signed her in at my wife’s request, but he can’t sign her out. Once she was remanded to me for evaluation, that was the end of his authority. You need a county judge now.”
Terry couldn’t fathom why Lila’s husband, who had always seemed down-to-earth, was being such a pain in the ass. “There’s no one else right now, Clint. Judge Wainer and Judge Lewis are both asleep. Just our luck to’ve had a couple of female judges on the county circuit.”
“All right, so go ahead and call Charleston and find out who they’ve appointed as interim,” Clint said. As if they’d come to a happy compromise, as if he’d given even a single damn inch. “But why bother? Eve Black is now asleep like all the rest.”
Hearing that put a lead ball in Terry’s stomach. He should have known better than to believe a bunch of loose talk. Might as well try to question his own wife, a mummy in the basement dark, sprawled atop the dingy quilt on their old couch.
“She went down yesterday afternoon,” Norcross continued. “We’ve only got a few inmates that are still awake.”
“Then why won’t he let us see her?” Frank asked. He had been standing silently throughout the exchange.
It was a good question. Terry jabbed the call button and asked it.
“Look, here’s what we’ll do,” said Clint. “I’ll send you a picture on your cell phone. But I can’t let anyone in. That’s lockdown protocol. I’ve got the warden’s book open right here in front of me. I’ll read you what it says. ‘State authorities must enjoin the facility and may remove the Lockdown Order at their discretion.’ State authorities.”
“But—”
“Don’t but me, Terry, I didn’t write it. Those are the regulations. Since Hicks walked off on Friday morning, I’m the only administrative officer this prison’s got, and protocol is all I have to go on.”
“But—” He was starting to sound like a two-cycle engine: but-but-but-but.
“I had to put us on lockdown. I had no choice. You’ve seen the same news I’ve seen. There’re people going around torching women in their cocoons. I think you’ll agree that my population would be a prime target for that breed of vigilante.”
“Oh, come on.” Frank made a hissing noise and shook his head. They hadn’t been able to find a uniform shirt large enough to button across his chest, so Frank wore it open to his undershirt. “Sounds like a bunch of bureaucratic gobblydegook to me. You’re the acting sheriff, Terry. That’s gotta trump a doctor, especially a shrink.”
Terry held up a hand to Frank. “I get all that, Clint. I understand your concern. But you know me, all right? I’ve worked with Lila for more than a decade. Since before she was sheriff. You’ve eaten dinner at my house and I’ve eaten dinner at yours. I’m not going to do anything to any of those women, so give me a break.”
“I’m trying—”
“You would not believe some of the garbage I’ve had to shovel up around town over the weekend. Some lady left her stove on and burned down half of Greely Street. A hundred acres of woods south of town are torched. I got a dead high school athlete who tried to rape a sleeper. I got a guy with his head smashed in by a blender. I mean, this is stupid. Let’s put aside the rulebook. I’m acting sheriff. We’re friends. Let me see she’s sleeping like the others, and I’ll get out of your hair.”
The security kiosk on the opposite side of the fence, where an officer ought to have been stationed, was empty. Beyond it, across the parking lot and on the opposite side of the second fence, the prison hunched its gray shoulders. There was no movement to be seen through the bulletproof glass of the front doors, no prisoners taking laps on the track or working in the garden plot. Terry thought of amusement parks in the late fall, the ramshackle appearance they took on when the rides stopped spinning and there were no kids walking around eating ice cream and laughing. Diana, his daughter, was grown now, but he’d taken her on countless amusement park trips when she was younger. Those had been fine times.
Christ, he could use a nip. Good thing Frank kept his cool flask handy.
“Check your phone, Terry,” came Clint’s voice through the intercom speaker.
The train whistle that was Terry’s ringtone went off. He took his cell phone from his pocket and looked at the photograph that Clint had messaged him.
A woman in a red top lay on a cell cot. There was an ID number above her breast pocket. Beside the ID number an ID card had been placed. On the card was a photograph of a woman with long black hair, tan skin, and a wide, white smile. The name of the woman was listed as “Eve Black” and her ID number matched the number on the uniform shirt. A cocoon had blotted out her face.
Terry handed the phone to Frank so he could see the picture. “What do you think? Do we call it good?”
It occurred to Terry, that he—the acting sheriff—was fishing for a direction from his new deputy, when it was supposed to be the other way around.
Frank studied the picture and said, “This doesn’t prove jack shit. Norcross could put one on any sleeping woman and add Black’s ID.” Frank returned the phone to Terry. “It doesn’t make any sense, refusing to let us in. You’re the law, Terry, and he’s a goddam prison psychiatrist. He is smoother than slippery elm, I’ll give him that, but it smells. I think it’s a stall game.”
Frank was right, of course; the picture didn’t prove anything. Why not allow them in to at least see the woman in the flesh, sleeping or not? The world was on the verge of losing half its population. What did some warden’s rulebook matter?
“Why stall, though?”
“I don’t know.” Frank took out the flat flask and offered it. Terry thanked him, took a glorious swig of the whiskey, and offered the flask back. Frank shook his head. “Keep it handy.”
Terry pocketed the flask and thumbed the intercom. “I got to see her, Clint. Let me in, let me see, and we can all get on with our day. People are talking about her. I need to put the talk to rest. If I don’t, we might have a problem I can’t control.”
4
From his seat in the Booth, Clint observed the two men on the main monitor’s feed. The door to the Booth was open, as it never would have been under normal conditions, and Officer Tig Murphy was leaning in. Officers Quigley and Wettermore were just outside, also listening. Scott Hughes, the only other officer they had left, was taking a nap in an empty cell. A couple of hours after she’d shot Ree Dempster, Van Lampley had clocked out—Clint hadn’t had the heart to ask her to stay. (“Good luck, Doc,” she’d said, sticking her head in the door of his office, out of uniform and in her street clothes, eyes bloodshot from tiredness. Clint had wished her the same. She hadn’t thanked him.) If she wasn’t asleep by now, he doubted she would have been of much use, anyway.
Clint was confident that he could put Terry off at least for awhile. What concerned him was the big guy standing beside Terry, who had given the acting sheriff the flask and was advising him between exchanges. It was like watching a ventriloquist and his talking dummy. Clint noticed the way the big guy was scanning around instead of staring at the intercom speaker, as people instinctively tended to do. It was like he was casing the place.
Clint depressed his intercom button and spoke into the mic. “Honestly, I’m not trying to complicate things, Terry. I feel terrible about this. Not to beat a dead horse, but I swear, I’ve got the warden’s book right here in front of me. It’s in capital letters at the top of the Lockdown Ordinances!” He tapped the electronics board in front of him, on which there rested no book of any kind. “This isn’t what I was trained for, Terry, and the book is all I have.”
“Clint.” He could hear Terry’s disgusted exhalation. “What the heck, man. Am I going to have to bust down the gate? This is ridiculous. Lila would be—really disappointed. Really disappointed. She wouldn’t believe this.”
“I understand you’re frustrated, and I know I can’t even begin to appreciate the stress you’ve been under the last couple of days, but you do realize there’s a camera on you, right? I just watched you take a drink from a flask and we both know that it wasn’t Kool-Aid. With all due respect, I knew Lila—” The mention of his wife in the past tense, realized only as soon as it was out of his mouth, caused Clint’s heart to catch. To get himself a moment, he cleared his throat. “I know Lila a little better than you, and that’s what I think would disappoint her, that her go-to deputy is drinking on the job. Put yourself in my position. Would you let someone into the prison who doesn’t have jurisdiction, or the right paperwork, and who’s been drinking?”
They watched Terry throw up his hands and walk away from the intercom, pacing in a circle. The other man put an arm around his shoulder, and spoke to him.
Tig shook his head and chuckled. “You should never have gone into prison medicine, Doc. You could have been rich selling shit on HSN. You just did major voodoo on that guy. He’s going to need therapy now.”
Clint swiveled to the three officers standing by. “Anybody know the other one? The big dude?”
Billy Wettermore did. “That’s Frank Geary, the local animal control officer. My niece helps out with the strays. She told me he’s okay, but kind of intense.”
“Intense how?”
“He really doesn’t like people who don’t take care of their animals, or abuse them. There was a rumor that he put a beatdown on a redneck who tortured a dog or cat or something, but I wouldn’t bet all my money on that one. High school grapevine has never been too reliable.”
It was on the tip of Clint’s tongue to ask Billy Wettermore to give his niece a ring before he remembered how unlikely it was that she’d still be awake. Their own female population was down to a grand total of three: Angel Fitzroy, Jeanette Sorley, and Eve Black. The woman he’d photographed was an inmate named Wanda Denker who had a body type similar to Evie’s. Denker had been conked out since Friday night. In preparation, they’d dressed her in scrubs with Evie’s ID number and Evie’s ID pinned to her red top. Clint was grateful—and a little stunned—that the crew of four remaining officers had bought into what he was doing.
He’d told them that since word of Evie’s sleeping and waking was public knowledge, it was inevitable that someone—probably the cops—would come for her. He hadn’t attempted to pitch Tig Murphy and Rand Quigley and Billy Wettermore and Scott Hughes on the idea that Evie was some sort of fantastic being whose safety, and by extension the safety of every woman in existence, depended on Clint. He had a great deal of confidence in his ability to talk a person around to a new way of seeing things—he’d been doing exactly that for nearly two decades—but this was an idea that not even he dared attempt to sell. The tack Clint had taken with Dooling Correctional’s remaining officers was simpler: they couldn’t hand Evie over to locals. Moreover, they couldn’t play it straight with them, because as soon as they acknowledged that Evie was different, they’d only become more relentless. Whatever the deal with Evie was—whatever immunity she possessed—it needed to be sorted out by serious scientists from the federal government who knew what the hell they were doing. It didn’t matter that the town authorities probably had a comparable plan in mind: to have a doctor examine her, to question her about her background, and perform every test you could perform on a person who seemed to have a unique biology. Which sounded okay.
But, as Terry might have said. But.
She was too precious to risk, that was the but. If they handed Evie over to the wrong people and things went sideways, if someone lost their temper and killed her—perhaps out of simple frustration, perhaps because they needed a scapegoat—what good would she be then to anyone’s mothers and wives and daughters?
And forget Evie as an interview subject, Clint told his (very) thin blue line. She couldn’t or wouldn’t tell anyone anything. She seemed not to have the remotest idea of what was so special about her biology. Plus, immune or not, Eve Black was a psychopath who’d planted a pair of meth cookers.
“Someone could still, like, study her body and her DNA and such, couldn’t they?” Rand Quigley had hopefully proposed. “Even if her brains were blown out?” He added hastily: “I’m just sayin.”
“I’m sure they could, Rand,” said Clint, “but don’t you think that’s not optimal? It’s probably better if we keep her brains in. They might be useful.”
Rand had conceded as much.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of this scenario, Clint had been making regular calls to the CDC. Since the guys in Atlanta didn’t answer—repeated calls yielded nothing but a recorded announcement or the same busy signal as on the Thursday the crisis started—he was discussing matters with a branch of the CDC that happened to be located on the second floor of an empty house on Tremaine Street. Its number was Lila’s cell phone, and Jared and Mary Pak were the only scientists on the staff.
“This is Norcross again at Dooling Correctional in West Virginia,” began the play that Clint performed over and over, with minor variations, for the ears of his remaining officers.
“Your son is asleep, Mr. Norcross,” was how Mary replied at the start of their latest go-round. “May I please kill him?”
“That’s a negative,” Clint said. “Black is still sleeping and waking. She’s still extremely dangerous. We still need you to come and get her.”
Mrs. Pak and Mary’s younger sister had both fallen asleep by Saturday morning, and her out-of-town father was still attempting to make his way back from Boston. Rather than stay home alone, Mary had tucked her mother and sister into bed and gone to join Jared. To the two teenagers, Clint had been honest—mostly. He had omitted some things. He had told them that there was a woman in the prison who slept and woke, and asked them to participate in the CDC rigamarole because he said he was worried that the staff would give up and walk if it didn’t seem like he was talking to someone and that help was imminent. The parts he’d left out were about Evie: her impossible knowledge, and the deal she’d offered him.
“My pee is pure Monster Energy drink, Mr. Norcross. When I move my arms fast, there are, like, traces in the air—that I see. Does that make sense? Oh, probably not, but whatever, I think this might be my superhero origin story and Jared is in his sleeping bag missing the excitement. I am going to have to dribble spit in his ear if he doesn’t wake up soon.”
This was the part where Clint increasingly flashed a show of annoyance. “That’s all fascinating, and I certainly hope you’ll take whatever steps are necessary, but let me repeat: we need you to come and extract this woman and get to work on whatever makes her different. Capisce? Call me as soon as you have a helicopter en route.”
“Your wife is okay,” Mary said. Her euphoria had abruptly dampened. “Well, not changed. You know, the same. Resting . . . um . . . resting comfortably.”
“Thank you,” said Clint.
The entire structure of logic he’d constructed was so rickety that Clint wondered how much Billy and Rand and Tig and Scott truly believed, and how much of it was the officers craving something to dedicate themselves to amid an emergency that was as amorphous as it was nightmarish.
And there was another motivation in play, simple but strong: the territorial imperative. In the view of Clint’s small cadre of shields, the prison was their patch, and townies had no business messing in it.
These factors had allowed them, for a few days at least, to keep doing the job they were accustomed to, albeit with fewer and fewer prisoners that needed attending. They found comfort in doing the job in familiar surroundings. The five men took shifts sleeping on the couch in the officers’ break room, and cooking in the prison kitchen. It also may have helped that Billy, Rand, and Scott were young and unmarried, and that Tig, the oldest of the bunch by twenty years, was divorced without kids. They had even seemed to acclimate, after some grumbling, to Clint’s insistence that everyone’s safety depended on no more personal calls being made. And, accordingly, they had abetted him in the most distasteful measure he’d been forced to make: under the pretext of “emergency security regulations” they had used tin snips to amputate the receivers from the three payphones available for the use of the prisoners, and deprived the population, in what might well be their last days, from any opportunity to communicate with their loved ones.
This precaution had led to the breaking out of a small riot on Friday afternoon when half a dozen prisoners had made a charge for the administration wing. It had not been much of a riot; the women were exhausted and, except for one inmate wielding a sock filled with dead batteries, they had been unarmed. The four officers had quickly put the insurrection down. Clint didn’t feel good about it, but if anything, the attack had probably served to strengthen his officers’ resolve.
How long the men would stay resolved, Clint couldn’t hazard a guess. He just hoped they could be persuaded to hang on until he could either change Evie’s mind and get her to cooperate in a way that made sense, or the sun rose on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or whenever, and she was satisfied.
If what she claimed was true. If it wasn’t . . .
Then it didn’t matter. But until it didn’t matter, it did.
Clint felt bizarrely energized. A lot of bad shit had happened, but at least he was doing something. Unlike Lila, who had given up.
Jared had found her in Mrs. Ransom’s driveway. She had let herself fall asleep in her car. Clint told himself he didn’t blame her. How could he? He was a doctor. He understood the body’s limits. Once you went without sleep long enough, you fragmented, lost your sense of what was important and what wasn’t, lost your sense of what was even real, lost yourself. She’d broken down, that was all.
But he couldn’t break down. He had to make things right. Like he’d made things right with Lila before Aurora had taken her, by staying strong and persuading her to see reason. He had to try to resolve this crisis, bring his wife home, bring them all home. Trying was the only thing left.
Evie might be able to stop it. Evie might be able to wake Lila up. She might be able to wake all of them up. Clint might get her to see reason. The world might be returned to normal. Despite everything that Clint knew about the science of medicine—everything that said that Evie Black was just a madwoman with delusions of grandeur—too much had happened for him to entirely refute her claims. Madwoman or not, she had powers. Her lacerations had healed in less than a day. She knew things she couldn’t know. Unlike every other woman on the planet, she slept and woke.
The big man, Geary, slipped his fingers through the fencing of the front gate, and gave it an experimental shake. Then he crossed his arms and peered at an electronic lock the size of a boxing glove.
Clint saw this, noted how Terry had wandered off to toe the dirt at the roadside and nip at the flask, and concluded that serious trouble might be brewing down the road. And maybe not that far down.
He tapped the intercom. “Hi there. So are we all set? Terry? And Frank? You’re Frank, aren’t you? Nice to meet you. You got the picture?”
Instead of responding, the new deputy and the acting sheriff went back to their police car, climbed in, and departed. Frank Geary drove.
5
There was a scenic turnout halfway between the prison and the town. Frank swung in and cut the engine. “Isn’t this a sight?” he said in a low, marveling voice. “You’d think the world was just the same as it was last week.”
Frank was right, Terry thought, it was a fine view. They could see all the way to Ball’s Ferry and beyond—but it was hardly time to admire the countryside.
“Um, Frank? I think we should—”
“Discuss it?” Frank nodded emphatically. “Just what I was thinking. My take’s pretty simple. Norcross may be a psychiatrist or whatever, but his advanced degree must’ve been in bullshit. He gave us a classic runaround, and he’s going to keep on doing it until we refuse to accept it.”
“I guess.”
Terry was thinking of what Clint had said about drinking on the job. He was probably right, and Terry was willing to admit (if only to himself) that he was close to being drunk right now. It was just that he felt so overwhelmed. Sheriff was no job for him. When it came to law enforcement, he was strictly deputy class.
“What we need here is closure, Sheriff Coombs. Not just for us, for everyone. We need access to the woman in the picture he sent, we need to cut open the webs over her face, and make sure it’s the same face as the woman in the ID photo. If that turns out to be the case, we can go to Plan B.”
“Which is what?”
Frank reached into his pocket, produced a pack of bubblegum, peeled a piece out of its wrapper. “Fuck if I know.”
“Cutting the cocoons is dangerous,” Terry said. “People have died.”
“Which makes it damn lucky that you’ve got a certified animal control specialist on your team. I’ve dealt with some mean dogs in my time, Terry, and once I got called out to deal with a very pissed-off bear that managed to wrap himself up in barbed wire. To deal with Ms. Black, I’ll use my biggest catch-pole, the Tomahawk ten-foot. Stainless steel. Spring lock. Drop the noose around her neck before snipping the shit over her face. Yank it as tight as I have to when she starts to buck and snap. She might lose consciousness, but it won’t kill her. The stuff’ll grow back, and when it does, she’ll go sleepy-bye again. All we need is a look. That’s all. A quick look.”
“If it’s her, and all the chatter turns out to be bullshit, everybody’s gonna be disappointed,” Terry said. “Including me.”
“Me, too.” Frank was thinking of Nana. “But we have to know. You see that, don’t you?”
Terry did: “Yeah.”
“The question is, how do we get Norcross to give us access? We could raise a posse, and we might have to, but that’s a last resort, don’t you think?”
“Yes.” Terry found the idea of a posse unpleasant bordering on stomach-churning. In the current situation, a posse might well turn into a mob.
“We could use his wife.”
“Huh?” Terry stared at Frank. “Lila? Say what?”
“Offer a swap,” he said. “You give us Eve Black, we give you your wife.”
“Why would he go for that?” Terry asked. “He knows we’d never hurt her.” When Frank didn’t reply to this, Terry grabbed Frank by the shoulder. “We would never hurt her, Frank. Never. You get that, right?”
Frank shook loose. “Of course I do.” He showed Terry a smile. “I’m talking about running a bluff. But it’s one he might believe. They’re burning cocoons in Charleston. Just panicky social-media-driven bullshit, I know. But lots of people believe it. And Norcross might believe we believe it. Also . . . he has a son, right?”
“Yeah. Jared. Nice kid.”
“He might believe it. He might be persuaded to call his dad and tell him to give the Black woman up.”
“Because what, we threaten to burn his mother like a mosquito on a bug light?” Terry couldn’t believe the words he was hearing himself say. No wonder he was drinking on the job. Look at the kind of discussion he was being forced to have.
Frank chewed his gum.
“I don’t like it,” Terry said. “Threatening to burn up the sheriff. I don’t like it a bit.”
“I don’t like it, either,” Frank said, and this was the truth. “But desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures.”
“No,” Terry said, for the moment not feeling drunk at all. “Even if one of the teams find her, it’s a flat no. And hell, for all we know, she’s still awake. Put on her boogie shoes and blew town.”
“Left her husband and son? Left her job, with things messed up like they are? You believe that?”
“Probably not,” Terry said. “One of the teams will find her eventually, but using her that way is still a no. Cops don’t make threats, and cops don’t take hostages.”
Frank shrugged. “Message received. It was just an idea.” He turned around to face out through the windshield, started the engine and backed Unit Four onto the highway. “I suppose somebody checked Norcross’s house for her?”
“Reed Barrows and Vern Rangle, yesterday. She and Jared are both gone. Place is empty.”
“The boy, too,” Frank said thoughtfully. “Babysitting her somewhere, maybe? Could have been the shrink’s idea. He ain’t dumb, I’ll give him that.”
Terry didn’t reply. Part of him thought having another nip was a bad idea, but part of him thought one more couldn’t hurt. He fished the flask out of his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and offered it to Frank first, which was only polite, since it was his.
Frank smiled and shook his head. “Not while I’m driving, amigo.”
Five minutes later, as they were passing the Olympia Diner (the sign out front no longer attempted to entice passersby with the promise of egg pie; now it read PRAY FOR OUR WOMEN), something the headshrinker had said over the intercom came to Frank. Since Hicks walked off on Friday morning, I’m the only administrative officer this prison’s got.
His big hands clamped down on the wheel, and the cruiser swerved. Terry, who had been dozing, snapped awake. “What?”
“Nothing,” Frank said.
Thinking about Hicks. Wondering what Hicks knew. Wondering what Hicks had seen. But for now, he would keep these questions to himself.
“Everything’s fine, Sheriff. Everything’s fine.”
6
What pissed Evie off about the video game were the blue stars. Multi-colored triangles, stars, and fiery orbs rained down the screen. You needed a string of four fiery orbs in order to explode one sparkling blue star. Other shapes flashed and disappeared if you linked up chains of them, but the sparkling blue stars were apparently made of some almost adamantine material that only the incendiary force of the fiery orbs could shatter. The name of the game was, for no rationale that Evie could grasp, Boom Town.
She was on Level 15, teetering on extinction. A pink star appeared, then a yellow triangle, and then—finally, thank fuck!—a fiery orb, which Evie tried to slide left to a stack of three fiery orbs that she’d already amassed alongside a blue star that was clogging up that area of her screen. But then came a green death-triangle, and that was all she wrote.
“SORRY! YOU DIED!” proclaimed a flashing message.
Evie groaned and flipped Hicks’s phone onto the far end of her cot. She wanted as much distance as possible between herself and the wicked thing. Eventually, of course, it was going to suck her back in. Evie had seen dinosaurs; she had looked down upon the great forests of America from the eyes of a passenger pigeon. She had surfed into Cleopatra’s sarcophagus atop a flume of desert sand and caressed the glorious queen’s dead face with beetle legs. A playwright, a clever Englishman, had written an amusing, if not entirely accurate, speech about Eve once. She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes / In shape no bigger than an agate-stone / On the fore-finger of an alderman, / Drawn with a team of little atomies / Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep . . .
As an enchanted being, she should be able to do better than Level 15 of Boom Town.
“You know, Jeanette, they say the natural world is cruel and stupid, but that little machine . . . that little machine is a very good argument in and of itself that technology is a lot worse. Technology is, I would say, the actual Boom Town.”
7
Jeanette was nearby, pacing the short A Wing corridor. She was now, it seemed, the head trustee. She was also the only trustee, but Jeanette had paid attention during the career counseling sessions about post-prison life—when composing your resume it was incumbent upon you to make the most of your achievements and to let the person who was doing the hiring decide what was and was not significant. The title was hers.
While the four remaining officers walked B and C wings and kept an eye on the prison’s perimeter, Dr. Norcross had asked if she would mind keeping an eye on the other two inmates whenever he had to step out.
“Sure,” said Jeanette. “I’m not busy. Seems like furniture shop got canceled.”
It was good to have work; it kept her mind occupied.
She shuffled forward. In front of her, the triple-plated, wire-gridded window in the west wall showed a gray morning. There was standing water on the running track and the fields looked marshy.
“I never liked video games,” Jeanette said. It had taken her awhile to construct her response to Evie. She had been awake for ninety-six hours.
“More proof of your excellent character, my dear,” Evie said.
Angel, in the neighboring cell, now entered the discussion. “Excellent character? Jeanette? Shee-yit. She kilt her fuckin husband, you know. Stabbed him. Didn’t even use a knife, like a normal person would. Done it with a screwdriver, ain’t that right, Jeanette?” Rapper Angel was gone; Redneck Angel was back. Jeanette figured she was too tired to make rhymes. That was good. On balance, Redneck Angel was less annoying and more (Jeanette struggled for the word) . . . more authentic.
“I do know that, Angel. And I give her credit for it.”
“Wish she’d let me kill you,” Angel said. “I think I’d get to your juggler with my teeth. I think I would.” She made a humming noise. “Know I would.”
“Would you like to have a turn with the phone, Angel? Jeanette, if I give you the phone through the tray slot, will you give it to Angel?” Evie’s tone was conciliatory.
There was talk that the beautiful woman in the soft cell was either a sorceress or a demon. Moths had poured from her mouth; Jeanette had seen them. Whatever Evie was, it seemed that she wasn’t immune to Angel’s taunts.
“I bet I could make you swallow that phone,” Angel said.
“Bet you couldn’t,” said Evie.
“Could.”
Jeanette stopped at the window in the wall, placed her hand against the glass, and let herself lean there. She didn’t want to fantasize about sleep, and couldn’t stop fantasizing about it.
Of course there were prisons even in sleep; Jeanette had on many occasions waited to be let out of a dream cell, as bored as all the times she waited in her actual life to be let out of her actual cell. But sleep was also a beach, and the waves cleaned it up every night, all the footprints and bonfires and sand castles and beer cans and scraps of trash; those cleansing waves washed most every trace into the depths. Sleep was also Bobby. He had met her in a forest that had grown over the ruins of the bad old world and everything was better.
Would Ree be in her sleep, her dreams? Damian was in there, so why not Ree? Or was the sleep that came with the cocoons dreamless?
Jeanette remembered, some days, waking up feeling so young and strong and healthy. “I’m ready to whip my weight in wildcats!” she sometimes told Bobby when he was just little. She couldn’t imagine feeling that way now, or ever again.
When he was a newborn, Bobby had given her some hard nights. “What do you want?” she would ask him. He just cried and cried. She imagined that he hadn’t actually known what he wanted, but hoped maybe his mother might, and fix it for him. That was the hurtful part of motherhood, not being able to fix what you couldn’t understand.
Jeanette wondered if she even could sleep now. What if she had broken her sleep-bone? Sleep-muscle? Sleep-tendon? Her eyes felt terribly dry. Her tongue felt like it was too big. Why didn’t she give in?
Simple. Because she didn’t want to.
She had given in to Damian and she had given in to drugs and her life had gone exactly the way everyone said it would go. She wasn’t giving in to this. This wasn’t going how they expected it to go.
She counted to sixty, got lost in the forties, returned to one and the second time made it up to a hundred. She shoots, she scores. Let’s go to the videotape! What was that guy’s name, the let’s-go-to-the-videotape guy? Dr. Norcross would remember.
Jeanette was facing the east wall, where the metal door of the shower gave on the delousing area. She walked toward the door, right-left, right-left. A man crouched on the floor, pinching buds into a cigarette paper. Behind her, Angel was explaining to Evie how she’d peel off her skin, how she’d dig out her eyes, fry them up with some ramps and eat them, ramps’d flavor up any rotten morsel. And on from there, more bibble-babble, tone and accent, angry-angry-angry, country-country-country. At this point, unless Jeanette really focused, conversation—pretty much anything anyone said—was low volume radiogab. She kept expecting to hear an 800 number.
“You know, Angel, I don’t think I will be sharing my Boom Town video game with you, after all,” Evie said, and Jeanette went right-left, right-left, locking on the differently colored notices on the bulletin board by the Kwell dispenser, the words too bleary to read but knowing that they were lists of church services, AA meetings, crafts classes, and reminders of rules. On one piece of paper, a girl elf was dancing over the words I’M ON GOOD REPORT! Jeanette shuffled to a stop and flashed a look at the spot where the man had been squatting. There was no one.
“Hello? Hey! Where’d you go?”
“Jeanette? Are you all right?”
“Uh-huh.” Jeanette glanced back at Evie’s cell door. The strange woman stood at the bars. She wore a melancholy expression, a well-of-course expression, like you did when you had a hope that you knew wasn’t too realistic, and sure enough, life did what life did with unrealistic hopes. It was the face babies made after a cat scratched them and right before they cried.
“I just thought I—saw someone.”
“You’re beginning to hallucinate. That’s what happens when you don’t sleep. You should go to sleep, Jeanette. It’ll be safer for you if you’re asleep when the men come.”
Jeanette shook her head. “I don’t want to die.”
“You won’t. You’ll sleep, and then you’ll wake up somewhere else.” Evie’s face lit. “And you’ll be free.”
When it came to Evie, Jeanette couldn’t think straight. She seemed crazy, but not crazy like anyone else Jeanette had met in Dooling Correctional. Some insane people were so close to blowing up you could almost hear them tick. Angel was like that. Evie seemed like something else, and not just because of the moths; Evie seemed inspired.
“What do you know about free?”
“I know everything about free,” said Evie. “Shall I give you an example?”
“If you want.” Jeanette risked another look at the spot where the man had been sitting. No one was there. No one.
“You find creatures in the dark of the earth, far below the rubble of the mountaintops that the coal-men have chopped flat, eyeless creatures, that are freer than you have ever been. Because they live as they want to, Jeanette. They are fulfilled in their darkness. They are everything they want to be.” Evie repeated this last, emphasizing it. “They are everything they want to be.”
Jeanette pictured herself in a warm darkness far beneath the earth’s surface. Minerals glittered around her in constellations. She felt small and secure.
Something tickled her cheek. She opened her eyes, brushed at the strand of web that had started to curl up from her skin. She wobbled on her feet. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed her eyes. In front of her, not halfway across the room, was the wall—bulletin board, door to the shower, Kwell dispenser, cement blocks. Jeanette took a step, then another.
There was the man. He was back, now smoking the joint he had rolled. Jeanette wasn’t going to look at him. She wasn’t giving in. She was going to touch the wall, and then she was going to turn around and walk to the other wall, and she wasn’t giving in. Jeanette Sorley wasn’t ready to be enshrouded yet.
I can go awhile, she thought. I can go awhile. You just watch me.
8
All the regular cruisers were taken, so Don Peters and the kid he was partnered with scoured the grid of suburban streets just south of the high school in Don’s Dodge Ram. It had no official insignia, which was disappointing (Don planned to see about that later, maybe get some stick-on letters from the hardware store), but there was a battery-powered bubble light on the dashboard, revolving slowly, and he was wearing his prison officer’s uniform. The kid didn’t have any kind of uniform, of course, just a plain blue shirt with a badge on it, but the Glock on his hip carried all the additional authority he needed.
Eric Blass was only seventeen, technically four years too young to be in law enforcement. Don thought the kid had the right stuff, though. He’d been a Life Scout with a merit badge in target shooting before giving up the Scouting program the year before. (“Too many pussies,” Blass had said, to which Don replied, “Copy that, Junior.”) Besides, the kid was funny. He had invented a game to speed the hours. It was called Zombie Chicks. Don had the left side of the street, since he was driving; Eric had the right. It was five points for old chicks, ten points for middle-aged chicks, fifteen points for kiddie chicks (hardly any of those left by Saturday, none at all today), and twenty points for hotties. Blass was currently up, eighty to fifty-five, only as they turned onto St. George Street, that was about to change.
“Hottie on the left at two o’clock,” Don said. “That puts me up to seventy-five. Closing in on you, Junior.”
The kid, riding shotgun, leaned forward to scrutinize the youngish woman stumbling along the sidewalk in spandex shorts and a sports bra. Her head was down, her sweaty hair swinging back and forth in clumps. Maybe she was trying to run, but the best she could manage was a half-assed, weaving jog.
“Saggy tits and saggy ass,” Eric said. “If that’s what you call a hottie, I pity you.”
“Oh, jeez, pack your bags, we’re goin on a guilt trip.” Don cackled. “Fine, since we can’t see the face, how about I call it fifteen?”
“Works for me,” Eric said. “Give her a honk.”
As they rolled slowly by the staggering woman, Don laid on the horn. The woman’s head jerked up (the face was not too bad, actually, except for the big purple circles under her hollowed-out eyes), and she stumbled. Her left foot caught on her right ankle and she sprawled on the pavement.
“She’s down!” Eric yelled. “Chick goes down!” He craned to look over his shoulder. “But wait, she’s getting up! Not even waiting for the eight-count!” He began to toot the Rocky theme through flapping lips.
Don glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the woman rising shakily to her feet. Her knees were scraped, and blood was trickling down her shins. He thought she might give them the finger—the teenager they’d blasted shortly after their shift began had done that—but the zombie chick didn’t even look around, just went staggering off toward downtown.
Don said, “Did you see the look on her face?”
“Priceless,” Eric said, and raised his palm.
Don high-fived him.
They had a list of streets to be canvased, tucked into a notebook where they wrote down the addresses of houses containing sleeping women, plus their names and some form of ID. If the houses were locked, they were allowed to break in, which was fun at first. Don enjoyed washing his hands with different kinds of soap in different kinds of bathrooms, and the variety of styles and colors of panties in the underwear drawers of the women of Dooling was a subject that had long called for his study. Cheap thrills wore out, though. It wasn’t real action. Without an ass to fill them out, panties got old fast. When you came right down to it, he and Junior were little more than census-takers.
“This is Ellendale Street, right?” Don said, as he pulled the Ram to a curb.
“Roger that, El Commandante. All three blocks of it.”
“Well, let’s get walking, partner. Check out some bitch-bags and write down some names.” But before Don could open the driver’s side door, Eric grabbed his arm. The newbie was looking toward a patch of waste ground between Ellendale and the high school.
“You want to have some fun, boss?”
“Always up for fun,” Don said. “It’s my middle name. What have you got in mind?”
“You burned one yet?”
“A cocoon? No.” Don had seen footage on the news, though, a cell phone video of a couple of guys in hockey masks putting a match to one. The news called guys like that “Blowtorch Brigades.” The cocoon in the video had gone up like a campfire wetted down with gasoline. Whoosh!
“Have you?”
“Nope,” Eric said, “but I heard they, you know, really burn like crazy.”
“What are you thinking?”
“There’s an old homeless babe who lives over there.” Eric pointed. “If you want to call that living, that is. No good to herself or anyone else. We could give her a hotfoot. Just to see what it’s like, you know. It’s not like anybody would miss her.” Eric suddenly looked uneasy. “Of course, if you don’t want to . . .”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” Don said. This was a lie. He wanted to, all right. Just thinking about it had gotten him a little horny. “Let’s check her out, then decide. We can do Ellendale later.”
They got out of the truck and headed for the weed-choked acre of ground where Old Essie kept her den. Don had a Zippo lighter. He took it from his pocket and began to click it open and shut, open and shut.