CHAPTER 12
1
On the prison’s last night, the weather cleared and the rain clouds of the day were blown south by a steady wind, leaving the sky to the stars and inviting the animals to stick their heads up, and sniff, and converse. No seventy-two hours. No second thoughts. A change was coming tomorrow. The animals felt it the way they felt oncoming thunderstorms.
2
Hunkered beside his partner in the rearmost seat of one of the schoolbuses that had been requisitioned to block Route 31, Eric Blass listened to Don Peters’s snores. Any vague remorse Eric had felt about burning Old Essie had been assuaged by the fading of the day. If no one ever noticed she was gone, what did she count for, really?
Rand Quigley, a far more thoughtful man than most gave him credit for, was also hunkered down. His spot was in a plastic chair in the visitors’ room. In his lap he had overturned the toddler-sized toy car from the family area. It had been a source of disappointment for as long as Rand could remember; the kids of the inmates climbed in it and pushed forward, but got frustrated because they couldn’t turn. The problem was a broken axle. Rand had fetched a tube of epoxy from his toolbox and glued the break, and now he tied the pieces together to set with a bowline knot of twine. That he might be in his last hours did not elude Officer Quigley. It comforted him to do something useful with whatever time might be left.
On the wooded knoll above the prison, Maynard Griner stared up at the stars, and fantasized about shooting them out with Fritz’s bazooka. If you could do that, would they pop like light bulbs? Had anyone—scientists, maybe—poked a hole in space? Did aliens on other planets ever think about shooting out stars with bazookas or death-rays?
Lowell, propped against the trunk of a cedar, commanded his brother, who was flat on his back, to wipe his mouth; the light of the stars, sent out billions of years ago, glimmered on Maynard’s drool. Low’s mood was sour. He did not like to wait, but it was not in their best interest to unload with the artillery until the cops made their move. The mosquitoes were biting and some hemorrhoid of an owl had been screeching since sundown. Valium would have improved his spirits greatly. Even some Nyquil would have been helpful. If Big Lowell’s grave had been nearby, Little Lowell would not have hesitated to dig up the rotting corpse and relieve it of that bottle of Rebel Yell.
Down below, the T-shaped structure of the prison lay pinned in the harsh radiance that shone from the light towers. On three sides, woods surrounded the dell in which the building stood. There was an open field to the east, running up to the high ground where Low and May were camped. That field was, Low thought, an excellent firing lane. Nothing at all to impede the flight of a high-explosive bazooka shell. When the time came, it was going to be awesome.
3
Two men crouched in the space between the nose of Barry Holden’s Fleetwood and the front doors of the prison.
“You want to do the honors?” Tig asked Clint.
Clint wasn’t sure it was an honor, but said okay and lit the match. He placed it against the trail of gas that Tig and Rand had laid earlier.
The trail flamed, snaking from the front doors across the apron of the parking lot and under the interior fence. In the grass median that separated this fence from the second, outer fence, the piles of doused tires first smoldered and then began to flicker. Soon, the firelight had cut away much of the darkness at the perimeter of the prison. Curls of filthy smoke began to rise.
Clint and Tig went back inside.
4
In the darkened officers’ break room, Michaela used a flashlight to sift the drawers. She found a pack of Bicycles, and asked Jared to play War with her. Everyone else, save the three remaining wakeful prisoners, was on watch. Michaela needed something to occupy herself. It was around ten PM on Monday night. Way back last Thursday morning, she had awoken at six sharp and gone running. Feeling frisky, feeling fine.
“Can’t,” Jared said.
“What?” Michaela asked.
“Super busy,” he said, and gave a twitchy grin. “Thinking about stuff I should have done, and didn’t. And how my dad and mom should have waited to be mad at each other. Also about how my girlfriend—she wasn’t really my girlfriend, but sort of—fell asleep while I was holding her.” He repeated, “Super busy.”
If Jared Norcross needed mothering, Michaela was the wrong person. The world had been out of tilt since Thursday, but as long as she’d been around Garth Flickinger, Michaela had been able to treat it almost like a lark, a bender. She would not have expected to miss him so much. His stoner good cheer was the only thing that made sense once the world went wacky.
She said, “I’m afraid, too. You’d be crazy not to be afraid.”
“I just . . .” He trailed off.
He didn’t understand it, what the others around the prison had said about the woman, that she had powers, and that this Michaela, the warden’s reporter daughter, had supposedly received a magic kiss from the special prisoner that had given her new energy. He didn’t understand what had come over his father. All he understood was that people had started to die.
As Michaela had guessed, Jared missed his mother, but he wasn’t angling for a substitute. There was no replacing Lila.
“We’re the good guys, right?” Jared asked.
“I don’t know,” Michaela admitted. “But I’m positive we’re not the bad guys.”
“That’s something,” Jared said.
“Come on, let’s play cards.”
Jared swiped a hand across his eyes. “What the hell, okay. I’m a champ at War.” He came over to the café table in the middle of the break room.
“Do you want a Coke or something?”
He nodded, but neither of them had change for the machine. They went to the warden’s office, emptied out Janice Coates’s huge knit handbag, and crouched on the floor, sifting for silver through the receipts and notes and ChapSticks and cigarettes. Jared asked Michaela what she was smiling about.
“My mom’s handbag,” said Michaela. “She’s a prison warden, but she’s got, like, this hippie monstrosity for a bag.”
“Oh.” Jared chuckled. “But what’s a warden’s handbag supposed to look like, do you think?”
“Something held together with chains or handcuffs.”
“Kinky!”
“Don’t be a child, Jared.”
There was more than enough change for two Cokes. Before they went back to the break room, Michaela kissed the cocoon that held her mother.
War usually lasted forever, but Michaela beat Jared in the first game in less than ten minutes.
“Damn. War is hell,” he said.
They played again, and again, and again, not talking much, just flipping cards in the dark. Michaela kept winning.
5
Terry dozed in a camp chair a few yards behind the roadblock. He was dreaming about his wife. She had opened a diner. They were serving empty plates. “But Rita, this isn’t anything,” he said, and handed his plate back to her. Rita handed it right back. This went on for what seemed like years. Back and forth with the empty plate. Terry grew increasingly frustrated. Rita, never speaking, grinned at him like she had a secret. Outside the windows of the diner, the seasons were shuffling past like photographs through one of those old View-Masters—winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring—
He opened his eyes and Bert Miller was standing over him.
Terry’s first waking thought was not of the dream, but of earlier that night, at the fence, Clint Norcross calling him out about the booze, humiliating him in front of the other two. The irritation of the dream mixed with shame, and Terry fully comprehended that he was not the man for the sheriff’s job. Let Frank Geary have it if he wanted it so bad. And let Clint Norcross have Frank Geary if he wanted to deal with a sober man.
Camp lights were set up everywhere. Men stood in groups, rifles hung from straps over their shoulders, laughing and smoking, eating food from crinkly plastic MRE packages. God only knew where they’d come from. A few guys knelt on the pavement, shooting dice. Jack Albertson was using a power drill on one of the bulldozers, rigging an iron plate over the window.
Selectman Bert Miller wanted to know if there was a fire extinguisher. “Coach Wittstock’s got asthma and the smoke from those assholes’ tire fires is drifting over here.”
“Sure,” Terry said, and pointed to a nearby cruiser. “In the trunk.”
“Thanks, Sheriff.” The selectman went to fetch the extinguisher. There was a cheer from the dicing men as somebody made a hard point.
Terry lurched up from the camp chair and oriented himself toward the parked cruisers. As he walked, he unbuckled his gunbelt and let it fall into the grass. Fuck this shit, he thought. Just fuck it.
In his pocket were the keys to Unit Four.
6
From his seat on the driver’s side of the animal control pickup, Frank observed the acting sheriff’s silent resignation.
You did that, Frank, Elaine said from beside him. Aren’t you proud?
“He did it to himself,” Frank said. “I didn’t tie him down and put a funnel in his mouth. I pity him, because he wasn’t man enough for the job, but I also envy him, because he gets to quit.”
But not you, Elaine said.
“No,” he agreed. “I’m in it to the end. Because of Nana.”
You’re obsessed with her, Frank. Nana-Nana-Nana. You refused to hear anything Norcross said, because she’s all you can think of. Can you not wait at least a little longer?
“No.” Because the men were here, and they were primed and ready to go.
What if that woman is leading you by the nose?
A fat moth sat on the pickup’s wiper blades. He flicked the wand for the blades to clear it off. Then he started the engine and drove away, but unlike Terry, he intended to return.
First, he stopped at the house on Smith to check on Elaine and Nana in the basement. They were as he had left them, hidden away behind a shelving unit and tucked beneath sheets. He told Nana’s body that he loved her. He told Elaine’s body that he was sorry that they could never seem to agree. He meant it, too, although the fact that she continued to scold him, even in her unnatural sleep, was extremely irritating.
He relocked the basement door. In the driveway, by the headlights of his pickup, he noticed a pool had collected in the large pothole that he had planned to fix soon. Sediments of green and brown and white and blue sifted around in the water. It was the remains of Nana’s chalked drawing of the tree, washed away by the rain.
When Frank reached downtown Dooling, the bank clock read 12:04 AM. Tuesday had arrived.
As he passed the Zoney’s convenience store, Frank noticed that someone had smashed out the plate glass windows.
The Municipal Building was still smoking. It surprised him that Norcross would allow his cohorts to blow up his wife’s place of work. But men were different now, it seemed—even doctors like Norcross. More like they used to be, maybe.
In the park across the street, a man was, for no apparent reason, using a cutter to work on the verdigris-stained trousers of the statue of the top-hatted first mayor. Sparks fountained up, doubling in the tinted slot of the man’s welding helmet. Farther along, another man, a la Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, was hanging off a lamp post, but he had his cock in his hand and he was pissing on the pavement and bellowing some fucked-up sea chanty: “The captain’s in his cabin, lads, drinking ale and brandy! Sailors in the whorehouse, where all the tarts are handy! Way, haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe!”
The order that had existed, and which Frank and Terry had tried to shore up over the last few chaotic days, was collapsing. It was, he supposed, a savage kind of mourning. It might end, or it might be building to a worldwide cataclysm. Who knew?
This is where you should be, Frank, Elaine said.
“No,” he told her.
He parked behind his office. Each day he’d found half an hour to stop in here. He fed his strays in their cages and left a bowl of Alpo for the one that was his special pet, his office-dog. There was a mess in the holding area each time he came, and they were restless, shivering and whimpering and howling, because he usually was only able to walk them once a day, if that, and of the eight animals, probably only a couple had ever been housetrained to begin with.
He considered putting them down. If something happened to him, they would almost certainly starve; it wasn’t likely a Good Samaritan would come along and take care of them. The possibility of simply releasing them did not cross his mind. You didn’t let dogs run wild.
A fantasy sketched itself in Frank’s mind’s eye: coming in the next day with Nana, letting her help feed and walk them. She always liked to do that. He knew she would love his office-dog, a sleepy-eyed beagle-cocker mix with a stoic manner. She would love the way his head drooped down over his paws like a kid slumped over a desk, forced to listen to some never-ending school lecture. Elaine didn’t like dogs, but no matter what happened, that no longer made a difference. One way or another, he and Elaine were through, and if Nana wanted a dog, it could stay with Frank.
Frank walked them on triple leashes. When he finished, he wrote a note—PLEASE CHECK ON THE ANIMALS. MAKE SURE THEY HAVE FOOD AND WATER. GRAY-WHITE PITBULL MIX IN #7 IS SKITTISH APPROACH CAREFULLY. PLEASE DON’T STEAL ANYTHING, THIS IS A GOVERNMENT OFFICE.—and fastened it to the outside door with duct tape. He stroked the office-dog’s ears for a couple of minutes. “Look at you,” he said. “Just look at you.”
When he returned to his pickup and headed back to the roadblock, the bank clock read 1:11 AM. He’d start prepping everyone for the assault at four thirty. Dawn would come two hours later.
7
Across the prison athletic fields, on the far side of the fence, two men with bandannas over their mouths were using fire extinguishers to put out the tire fires. The extinguisher spray glowed phosphorescent through the night vision scope and the men were limned in yellow. Billy Wettermore didn’t recognize the larger man, but the smaller one he knew well. “Yonder dingleberry in the straw hat is Selectman Miller. Bert Miller,” Billy said to Willy Burke.
There was ironic personal history here. While attending Dooling High, Billy Wettermore had, as a National Honor Society student, interned in the selectman’s office. There he had been forced to silently attend to Bert Miller’s frequent thoughts on homosexuality.
“It’s a mutation,” Selectman Miller explained, and he dreamed of stopping it. “If you could wipe out all the gays in an instant, Billy, perhaps you could stop the mutation from spreading, but then again, much as we might not like to admit it, they’re human, too, aren’t they?”
A lot had happened in the intervening decade-plus. Billy was a country boy and stubborn, and when he quit college he had returned to his Appalachian home town in spite of the politics. Around here his preference for men seemed to be the first thing on everyone’s mind. This being almost two decades into the twenty-first century, that was damned annoying to Billy, not that he would ever show it, because that would be giving folks something they didn’t deserve to have.
However, the thought of putting a bullet in the dirt right in front of Bert Miller and making him drop a big old bigoted shit in his pants was extremely tempting. “I’m going to give him a jump, get him away from our tires, Willy.”
“No.” This came not from Willy Burke, but from behind him.
Norcross had materialized from the propped-open door at the rear of the prison. In the dimness, there was barely anything to his face except for the shine on the rims of his glasses.
“No?” Billy said.
“No.” Clint was rubbing the thumb of his left hand across the knuckles of his right. “Put one in his leg. Drop him.”
“Seriously?” Billy had shot game, but never a man.
Willy Burke made a kind of humming sound through his nose. “Bullet in the leg can kill a man, Doc.”
Clint nodded his head to show he understood. “We have to hold this place. Do it, Billy. Shoot him in the leg. That’ll be one less and it’ll show them we’re not playing games here.”
“All right,” Billy said.
He dropped his eye down to the scope. Selectman Miller, big as a billboard, crisscrossed by the two layers of chainlink, was fanning himself with his straw hat, the extinguisher set on the grass beside him. The crosshairs settled on Miller’s left knee. Billy was glad his target was such an asshole, but he hated to do it anyway.
He triggered.
8
Evie’s rules were:
1) Stay undercover and no killing until daylight!
2) Cut open the cocoons enclosing Kayleigh and Maura!
3) Enjoy life!
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Angel said. “But are you sure Maura an Kay won’t kill me while I’m enjoyin life?”
“Pretty sure,” Evie said.
“Good enough,” Angel said.
“Open her cell,” Evie said, and a line of rats emerged from the hole by the shower alcove. The first one stopped at the base of Angel’s cell door. The second climbed atop the first, the third atop the second. A tower formed, gray rat body stacked on gray rat body like hideous ice cream scoops. Evie gasped when she felt the bottom rat suffocate. “Oh, Mother,” she said. “I am so, so sorry.”
“Look at this wonderful circus shit here.” Angel was entranced. “You could make money at this, sister, you know it?”
The topmost rat was the smallest, still a pup. It squeezed into the keyhole and Evie controlled its tiny paws, searching through the mechanisms, investing it with a strength that no rat had ever possessed before. The cell door opened.
Angel fetched a couple of towels from the shower, fluffed them up, laid them on the bunk, and draped a blanket over them. She closed the cell door behind her. If anyone looked in, it would appear that she had finally lost the fight and fallen asleep.
She started up the corridor, headed for C Wing, where most of the cocooned sleepers now resided.
“Goodbye, Angel,” Evie called.
“Yeah,” Angel said. “See ya.” She hesitated with her hand on the door. “You hear screamin somewhere far off?”
Evie did. It was, she knew, Selectman Bert Miller, blatting about the bullet wound in his leg. His wailing carried inside the prison through the ventilation ducts. Angel didn’t need to concern herself with that.
“Don’t worry,” Evie said. “It’s just a man.”
“Oh,” Angel said, and left.
9
Jeanette had been sitting against the wall across from the cells during Angel and Evie’s conversation, listening and observing. Now she turned to Damian, years dead and buried over a hundred miles away, and yet also sitting beside her. He had a clutchhead screwdriver in his thigh and he was bleeding onto the floor, although the blood didn’t feel like anything to Jeanette, not even wet. Which was strange, because she was sitting in a pool of it.
“Did you see that?” she asked. “Those rats?”
“Yeah,” Damian said. His tone went high-pitched and squeaky, his imitation of her voice. “I see those ratsies, Jeanie baby.”
Ugh, Jeanette thought. He had been all right when he first reappeared in her life, but now he was becoming irritable.
“There’s rats just like that chew on my corpse because of how you killed me, Jeanie baby.”
“I’m sorry.” She touched her face. It felt like she was crying, but her face was dry. Jeanette scratched at her forehead, digging the nails in, trying to find some pain. She hated being crazy.
“Come on. Check it out.” Damian moved over, bringing his face up close. “They chewed me right down to the marrow.” His eyes were black sockets; the rats had eaten the eyeballs. Jeanette didn’t want to look, wanted to close her own eyes, but if she did, she knew sleep would be waiting.
“What kind of a mother lets her son’s daddy be done by like this? Kills him and lets the rats chew on him like he was a goddam Butterfinger?”
“Jeanette,” Evie said. “Hey. Over here.”
“Never mind that bitch, Jeanie,” Damian said. A rat pup fell out of his mouth as he spoke. It landed in Jeanette’s lap. She screamed and slapped at it, but it wasn’t there. “I need your attention. Eyes on me, moron.”
Evie said, “I’m glad you stayed awake, Jeanette. I’m glad you didn’t listen to me. Something’s happening on the other side and—well, I thought I’d be happy about it, but maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. On the off-chance this thing goes on long enough, I’d like for there to be a fair hearing.”
“What are you talking about?” Jeanette’s throat ached. Her everything ached.
“Do you want to see Bobby again?”
“Of course I want to see him,” Jeanette said, ignoring Damian. It was getting easier to do that. “Of course I want to see my boy.”
“All right, then. Listen carefully. There are secret ways between the two worlds—tunnels. Each woman who goes to sleep passes through one of them, but there’s another—a very special one—that begins at a very special tree. That’s the only one that goes both ways. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“You will,” Evie said. “There’s a woman on the other side of that tunnel, and she’s going to close it unless someone stops her. I respect her position, I think it’s perfectly valid, the male species has performed abysmally on this side of the Tree, no amount of grade inflation can alter that conclusion, but everyone deserves a say. One woman, one vote. Elaine Nutting can’t be allowed to make the decision for everyone.”
Evie’s face was at the bars of her cell. Verdant tendrils had grown up around her temples. Her eyes were auburn-colored tiger eyes. Moths had gathered in her hair, collecting themselves into a fluttering band. She was a monster, Jeanette thought, and beautiful.
“What does that have to do with Bobby?”
“If the Tree burns, the tunnel closes. No one can ever come back. Not you, not any other woman, Jeanette. The end will become inevitable.”
“Nope, nope, nope. It’s already inevitable,” Damian said. “Go to sleep, Jeanie.”
“Can you just shut up! You’re dead!” Jeanette screamed at him. “I’m sorry I killed you, and I would do anything to take it back, but you were cruel to me, and it’s done, so will you just shut your fucking mouth!”
The declaration echoed around the narrow confines of A Wing. Damian was not there.
“Well put,” Evie said. “Courageous! Now listen to me, Jeanette: I want you to close your eyes. You’ll go through the tunnel—your tunnel—but you won’t remember.”
This part Jeanette thought she understood. “Because I’ll be sleeping?”
“Exactly! Once you’re on the other side, you’re going to feel better than you have in quite a long time. I want you to follow the fox. He’ll take you where you need to go. Remember: Bobby and Tree. The one depends on the other.”
Jeanette let her eyes shut. Bobby, she reminded herself. Bobby and the Tree and the tunnel that went both ways. The one some woman named Elaine wanted to close by an act of burning. Follow the fox. She counted one-two-three-four-five and everything was the same. Except for Evie, that was, who had turned into a Green Lady. As if she were a tree herself.
Then she felt a tickle along her check, a swab of the lightest lace.
10
After the shot, they heard Bert Miller bellow and wail and keep wailing as his companion dragged him away. Clint borrowed Willy Burke’s riflescope to take a look. The yellow-clad figure on the ground was clutching his thigh and the other guy was hauling him underneath his armpits.
“Good. Thanks.” Clint returned the rifle to Wettermore. Willy Burke was eyeing both of them with careful consideration: part admiration and part caution.
Clint went back inside. The rear door that let into the small gymnasium was propped open with a brick.
To lower visibility from the outside, they had trimmed the lights to just the red-tinted emergency bulbs. These cast small scarlet spots around the edges of the hardwood floor where inmates played half-court basketball. Clint stopped under the hoop and steadied himself against the padded wall. His heart was pumping. He wasn’t scared, he wasn’t happy, but he was here.
Clint warned himself about the euphoria he was feeling, but it didn’t temper the pleasant thrumming in his limbs. He was either becoming walled off from himself or returning to himself. He didn’t know which. What he knew was that he had the milkshake, and Geary wasn’t going to take it away from him. That Geary was wrong almost didn’t matter.
Aurora wasn’t a virus, it was an enchantment, and Evie Black was like no woman—no human—who had ever existed. You couldn’t fix something that was beyond human understanding with a hammer, which was what Frank Geary and Terry Coombs and the other men outside the prison presumed they could do. This required a different approach. It was obvious to Clint and should have been to them, because they weren’t all stupid men, but for some reason it wasn’t, and that meant he was going to have to use his own hammer to block theirs.
They started it! How childish! And how true!
The cycle of this logic went around on rusty, squalling wheels. Clint punched the padded wall several times and wished it were a man under his knuckles. He thought of pyrotherapy: the fever cure. For awhile, it had been cutting edge treatment, except giving malaria to your patients was awfully heavy medicine. Sometimes it saved them, and sometimes it finished them. Was Evie a pyrotherapist or the pyrotherapy? Was she possibly doctor and treatment both?
Or, by ordering Billy Wettermore to fire that shot to the leg of Selectman Bert Miller, had he himself administered the first dose?
11
Footsteps clicked across the floor from the direction of the gymnasium. Angel was just leaving the abandoned Booth with a set of cell keys. She gripped them in her right hand, the longest key protruding between the knuckles of her index finger and her middle finger. She had once stabbed a sloppy old cowboy in an Ohio parking lot in the ear with a sharpened key. It had not killed the cowboy, but he hadn’t enjoyed it much. Angel, feeling kind, had merely taken from the man his wallet, his dimestore wedding ring, his scratch tickets, and silver belt buckle; she had allowed him to keep his life.
Dr. Norcross walked by the glassed wall of the Booth without stopping. Angel weighed coming up behind him and plunging the key in the untrustworthy quack’s jugular. She loved the idea. Unfortunately, she had made a promise to Evie not to kill anyone until daylight, and Angel was profoundly wary of crossing the witch.
She allowed the doctor to pass.
Angel headed for C Wing and the cell that was home to Maura and Kayleigh. The shape that was clearly Maura, short and stout, lay on the outside of the bottom bunk, where someone had placed her after she had gone night-night in A Wing. Kayleigh was on the inside of the bunk. Angel had no clue what Evie had meant when she said that “their souls were dead,” but it encouraged caution.
She used the tip of a key to slice through the webbing that covered Maura’s face. The material separated with a purr, and Maura’s pudgy, red-cheeked features emerged. They could have served as the model for an illustration on the box of some “down home” brand sold in little backwater stores—“Mama Maura’s Cornbread” or “Dunbarton Soothing Syrup.” Angel jumped away into the hall, ready to flee if Maura went for her.
The woman on the bed sat up slowly.
“Maura?”
Maura Dunbarton blinked. She stared at Angel. Her eyes were entirely pupil. She pulled her right arm free of its cocoon, then her left arm, and then placed her hands together in her crinkly lap.
After Maura had sat like that for a couple of minutes, Angel eased into the cell again. “I won’t just harm you if you move on me, Mo-Mo. I’ll kill you.”
The woman sat quietly, black eyes fixed on the wall.
Angel used the key to slice the webbing that covered Kayleigh’s face. As quickly as before, she darted back out of the cell and into the hall.
The same process repeated itself: Kayleigh slipping down the top half of her cocoon as though it were a dress, looking with eyes that were all black. Shoulder to shoulder, the two women sat, torn webs hanging over their hair, their chins, their necks. They looked like ghosts in some cheap traveling carny’s haunted house.
“You gals all right?” Angel asked.
They made no reply. They did not appear to be breathing.
“You know what-all you’re supposed to do?” Angel asked, less nervous now, but curious.
They said nothing. No reflection of any kind stirred in their black eyes. A faint scent of turned, damp earth emanated from the two women. Angel thought (she wished she hadn’t), This is how the dead sweat.
“Okay. Good.” Either they would do something or they wouldn’t. “I’ll leave you gals to it.” She thought of adding something of an encouraging nature, like go get em, and decided not to.
Angel went to the woodshop and used the keys to unlock the tools. She tucked a small hand drill into her waistband, a chisel into one sock, and a screwdriver into the other.
Then, she lay down on her back beneath a table, and watched a dark window for the first sign of light. She didn’t feel a bit sleepy.
12
Filaments spun and whirled around Jeanette’s face, splitting and falling and rising, burying her features. Clint knelt beside her, wanting to hold her hand, but not daring. “You were a good person,” he told her. “Your son loved you.”
“She is a good person. Her son does love her. She is not dead, she only sleeps.”
Clint went to the bars of Evie’s cell. “So you say, Evie.”
She sat on her cot. “You look like you’re getting your second wind, Clint.”
Her bearing—the downward tilt of her head, glossy black hair falling across the side of her face—was melancholy. “You can still hand me over. But not for much longer.”
“No,” he said.
“What a voice on that man you had Wettermore shoot! I could hear him all the way over here.”
Her tone wasn’t goading. It was reflective.
“People don’t like to be shot. It hurts. Maybe you didn’t know that.”
“The Municipal Building was destroyed tonight. The ones who did it blamed it on you. Sheriff Coombs took a walk. Frank Geary will bring his people in the morning. Does any of that surprise you, Clint?”
It didn’t. “You’re very good at getting what you want, Evie. I’m not going to congratulate you, though.”
“Now think of Lila and the others in the world beyond the Tree. Please believe me: they’re doing well there. They’re building something new, something fine. And there will be men. Better men, raised from infancy by women in a community of women, men who will be taught to know themselves and to know their world.”
Clint said, “Their essential nature will assert itself in time. Their maleness. One will raise a fist against another. Believe me, Evie. You’re looking at a man who knows.”
“Indeed so,” Evie agreed. “But such aggression isn’t sexual nature, it’s human nature. If you ever doubt the aggressive capacity of women, ask your own Officer Lampley.”
“She’ll be asleep somewhere by now,” Clint said.
Evie smiled, as if she knew better. “I am not so foolish as to promise you the women on the far side of the Tree have utopia. What they will have is a better start, and a good chance of a better finish. You are standing in the way of that chance. You and only you, of all the men on earth. I need you to know that. If you let me die, those women will be set free to live lives of their own choosing.”
“Lives of your choosing, Evie.” His voice sounded parched to his own ears.
The being on the other side of the cell door tapped a rhythm on the frame of the cot with her fingertips. “Linny Mars was in the sheriff’s station when it was destroyed. She’s gone forever. She didn’t get a choice.”
“You took it from her,” Clint said.
“We could go on like this forever. He said, she said. The oldest story in the universe. Go fight your war, Clint. That’s one thing men know how to do. Make me see another sunset if you can.”