CHAPTER 15
Later, when the smoke and teargas clears, there will be dozens of stories about the battle for the Dooling Correctional Facility for Women, all of them different, most conflicting, true in some of the details and false in others. Once a serious conflict commences—a fight to the death—objective reality is quickly lost in the smoke and noise.
Also, many of those who could have added their own accounts were dead.
1
As Van Lampley—hip-shot, bleeding, tired to her soul—drove her ATV slowly along a dirt road that she believed might be Allen Lane (hard to tell for sure; there were so many dirt roads curling around in these hills), she heard a distant explosion from the direction of the prison. She looked up from the screen of the tracker-equipped cell phone she had liberated from Fritz Meshaum. On that screen, the phone in her hand was represented by a red dot. The GPS gizmo on the bazooka was a green one. The two dots were now very close, and she felt she had taken the ATV as far as she could without alerting the Griners that she was after them.
Maybe that boom was them shooting off another bazooka shell, she thought. It was possible, but as a mining-country girl who had grown up to the rough music of dynamite, she didn’t believe it. The explosion from the prison had been sharper and harder. It had been dyno, all right. Apparently the Griner brothers weren’t the only sleazebuckets abroad with explosives.
She parked, dismounted the ATV, and staggered. The left leg of her pants was soaked with blood from hip to knee, and the adrenalin that had carried her this far was dwindling. Every part of her body ached, but her hip, where Meshaum had shot her, was agony. Something was shattered in there, she could feel the bones grinding with every step, and now she was lightheaded with blood loss as well as days upon nights of no sleep. Every part of her cried out to give up—to quit this madness and go to sleep.
And I will, she thought, grabbing her rifle and the antique pistol Meshaum had used to shoot her, but not yet. I may not be able to do anything about what’s happening at the prison, but I can put a hurt on those two bastards before they make it any worse. After that, I can rack out.
Branching off from the lane and angling up through the scrubby second-growth trees were two weedy ruts that might once have been a road. Twenty yards along, she found the truck the Griners had stolen. She looked inside, saw nothing she wanted, and continued on, her leg a rake that she dragged alongside the rest of her body. She no longer needed the tracker app because she knew where she was, although she hadn’t been here since her high school days, when it had been a less-than-prime makeout spot. A quarter mile up, maybe a bit more, the overgrown track ended on a knoll where there were a few tilted gravestones: the family plot of a family that had long since departed—probably the Allen family, if this really was Allen Lane. It had been the third or fourth choice for randy kids because the view from the knoll was of Dooling Correctional. Not exactly conducive to romance.
I can do this, she told herself. Another fifty yards.
She made the fifty yards, told herself she could make another fifty, and continued that way until she heard voices ahead. Then there was an explosive whoosh, followed by Little Lowell Griner and his brother Maynard whooping and slapping each other on the back.
“I wasn’t sure it’d have the range, brother, but looka that!” one of them cried. The response was a rebel yell.
Van cocked Meshaum’s pistol, and moved toward the sounds of redneck celebration.
2
Clint would have believed the phrase his heart sank was nothing but a poetic expression until his actually did it. Unaware that he had left the cover provided by the southwestern corner of the main building, he stared, slack-jawed, at the concrete showering down from C Wing. How many of the sleeping women in that cellblock had been killed in the blast, incinerated or torn to pieces in their cocoons? He barely heard something buzz past his left ear, and didn’t feel the tug as another bullet, this one thrown by Mick Napolitano from behind the second bulldozer, tore open one of his pants pockets and spilled loose change down his leg.
Willy Burke seized him by the shoulders and yanked him back so hard Clint nearly fell over. “You crazy, Doc? You want to get yourself killed?”
“The women,” Clint said. “There were women up there.” He swiped at his eyes, which were smarting from the acrid gas and welling with tears. “That son of a bitch Geary put a rocket launcher or something up on that knoll where the little graveyard is!”
“Nothing we can do about it now.” Willy bent over and gripped his knees. “You got one of the bastards, anyway, and that’s a start. We need to be inside. Let’s get to the back door, pull Billy in with us.”
He was right. The front of the building was now a free-fire zone.
“Willy, are you all right?”
Willy Burke straightened up and offered a strained smile. His face was pale, his forehead dotted with sweat. “Well, shoot a pickle. Might be having a little heart episode. Doctor told me to give up the pipe after my last checkup. Shoulda listened.”
Oh no, thought Clint. Oh . . . fucking . . . no.
Willy read the thought on Clint’s face—there was nothing wrong with his eyes—and clapped him on the shoulder. “I ain’t done yet, Doc. Let’s go.”
3
From his position outside the visitors’ room, now most surely gutted by the dynamite blast (along with whoever had been inside), Frank saw Jack Albertson go down with his gas mask torn askew. There was nothing but blood where his face had been. His own mother wouldn’t recognize him, Frank thought.
He lifted his walkie-talkie. “Report! Everybody report!”
Only eight or so did, mostly those who had been using the bulldozers for cover. Of course not all of the men had walkies, but there should have been at least a few more responses. Frank’s most optimistic guess was that he had lost four men, including Jack, who had to be as dead as dirt. In his heart, he guessed it might be five or six, and the wounded would need hospitalization. Maybe the kid, Blass, whom they had left at the roadblock with Miller, could drive them back to St. Theresa’s in one of the buses, although God knew who might still be on duty at St. Terry’s. If anyone. How had it come to this? They had the bulldozers, for God’s sake. The dozers were supposed to end it fast!
Johnny Lee Kronsky grabbed his shoulder. “We need to get on in there, buddy. Finish them off. With this.” His backpack was still unzipped. He pushed aside the towel he’d wrapped the dynamite in and showed Frank the Griner brothers’ bump of C4. Kronsky had shaped it into something that looked like a child’s toy football. Embedded in it was an Android.
“That’s my phone,” Kronsky said. “I’m donating it to the cause. It was a piece of shit, anyway.”
Frank asked, “Where do we go in?” The teargas was blowing away, but he felt as if his mind was full of it, obscuring all thought. The daylight was strengthening, the sun rising red.
“Right up the gut would be best,” Kronsky said, and pointed at the half-crushed Fleetwood RV. It was tilted against the building, but there was room to squeeze through and reach the main doors, which had been smashed inward and twisted off their hinges. “Struthers and those bulldozer guys’ll give us cover. We go in, and we keep moving until we get to the bitch that caused all this.”
Frank was no longer sure who had caused all this, or who was in charge, but he nodded. There seemed to be nothing else to do.
“Gotta set the timer,” Kronsky said, and powered up the phone embedded in the C4. There was a wire plugged into the cell’s headphone port. The other end was attached to a battery pack stuck in the explosive. Looking at it made Frank remember Elaine preparing Sunday dinners, pulling the roast out of the oven and sticking in a meat thermometer.
Kronsky whapped him on the shoulder, and not gently. “How much time, do you think? And think about it careful, because when the count gets down to single numbers, I’m gonna throw it, no matter where we are.”
“I guess . . .” Frank shook his head, trying to clear it. He had never been in the prison, and had expected Don Peters would give them all the layout they needed. He just hadn’t realized how useless Peters was. Now that it was too late, that seemed like a glaring oversight. How many other things had he overlooked? “Four minutes?”
Sounding like a crabby high school teacher faced with a thick-headed pupil, Kronsky said, “Are you asking me or telling me?”
They heard spatters of gunfire, but the attack seemed to have fallen into a lull. The next thing might be his men deciding to fall back. That could not be allowed.
Nana, Frank thought, and said: “Four minutes. I’m sure.”
Frank thought, In four minutes I’ll either be dead, or this will be on the way to being over.
Of course it was possible the woman herself would be killed in the final assault, but that was a chance he would have to take. That made him think of his caged strays, their lives held hostage to forces they did not understand.
Kronsky opened an app, tapped the screen, and 4:00 appeared. He tapped again and the numbers began to count down. Frank watched, fascinated, as 3:59 became 3:58 became 3:57.
“You ready, Geary?” Kronsky asked. In his manic grin, a gold tooth glimmered.
(“What are you doing?” the sonofabitch agitator had called to Kronsky that day in the Ulysses Energy’s Graystone #7 mine. “Quit lagging.” The sonofabitch agitator had been at least twenty yards down the hall. In the deep black of the underground, Kronsky hadn’t been able to see the dumb bastard’s face, let alone his Woody Guthrie tee-shirt, just his headlamp. Power in a union, the sonofabitch agitator liked to say. More power in a dollar, and the man from Ulysses Energy had given Johnny Lee Kronsky a few crisp ones to take care of their problem. “Fuck you, your union, and the horse you rode in on,” Kronsky had told the sonofabitch agitator, before throwing the dynamite and running like hell.)
“I think we ought to—” Frank began, and that was when Lowell Griner fired the bazooka for the first time. There was a whooshing sound almost directly overhead. Frank had a blurred glimpse of something flying. Some projectile.
“Hit the deck!” Kronsky screamed, but didn’t give Frank a chance to do so; just grabbed him around the neck and yanked him down.
The bazooka shell hit C Wing and exploded. In the world beyond the Tree, fourteen former Dooling Correctional inmates disappeared, flashing once, before clouds of moths spilled into the open air where they had stood.
4
Although he had a walkie, Drew T. Barry was one of those who had not responded to Frank’s command to report in. He didn’t even hear it, because he had turned the walkie off. He’d gotten as high up as he could while maintaining cover, and unslung his Weatherby. The angle wasn’t quite as good as he’d hoped. Through the Weatherby’s scope, he could see a corrugated metal shed. The back door to the prison was open—light spilled out in an oblong—but that guy was behind the shed, defending the way in. Barry saw an elbow . . . a shoulder . . . part of a head, but quickly withdrawn after a single peek at where Elmore Pearl and Don Peters were still stationed. Drew T. Barry had to put that guy down, and itched to take the shot—yes, his trigger finger was literally itching—but he knew that no shot was better than a bad one. He had to wait. If Pearl or Peters would throw another rock, that might make the guy down there stick his whole head out to see what was happening, but Drew T. Barry did not expect this to happen. Elmore Pearl was too cautious, and that fat little shit Peters was as numb as a pounded thumb.
Move, you sucker, Drew T. Barry thought. Two steps would be enough. Maybe just one.
But although he cringed into a crouch when the bundle of dynamite went off, Billy Wettermore held his position behind the shed. It took the exploding bazooka shell to get him on his feet. He stepped out from behind the protection of the shed, looking toward the sound, and that gave Drew T. Barry the clean shot he had been waiting for.
Smoke was billowing above the prison. People were yelling. Guns were firing—wildly, no doubt. Drew T. Barry had no patience with wild shooting. He held his breath and squeezed the trigger of his rifle. The result was entirely satisfactory. In his scope he saw the defender fly forward, his shirt billowing out in shreds.
“Got him, by God,” Drew T. Barry said, looking at the remains of Billy Wettermore with a species of doleful satisfaction. “Was a good shot, if I do say so myse—”
From the trees below came another gunshot, followed by the unmistakable voice of Deputy Elmore Pearl: “Oh, you fuckin idiot, what did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO?”
Drew T. Barry hesitated, then ran back toward his mates, keeping low, wondering what had gone wrong now.
5
Clint and Willy saw Billy Wettermore thrown in the air. When Billy came down he was boneless. One of his shoes flew from his foot, spun up, and banged off the lip of the shed roof. Clint started toward him. Willy Burke’s hand pulling him back was surprisingly strong.
“Nope, nope,” Willy said. “Back it up, Doc. That way’s no good now.”
Clint tried to think. “We might be able to get into my office through the window. The glass is reinforced, but not barred.”
“I can take care of the window,” Willy said. “Let’s go.” But instead of moving, he bent over and grasped his knees again.
6
Don Peters hardly heard Elmore Pearl shouting at him. Down on his knees, he was staring at his erstwhile Zombie Patrol partner, who was spreadeagled on the ground with blood gushing from a hole in the base of his throat. Eric Blass stared up at him, gagging on more blood.
“Partner!” Don shouted. His football helmet slid down, obscuring his eyes, and he pushed it back up with the heel of his hand. “Partner, I didn’t mean to!”
Pearl hauled him to his feet. “You dumb asshole, didn’t anybody ever teach you to see what you were shooting at before you pulled the trigger?”
Eric made a thick glugging sound, coughed out a fine spray of blood, and pawed at the ruins of his throat.
Don wanted to explain. First the roar of the dynamite, then a second explosion, then the rustling bushes behind him. He had been sure it was more of that fucking shrink’s men. How was he supposed to know it was Blass? He had shot without thinking, let alone aiming. What evil brand of providence had caused the shot to hit Blass as he came through the trees to join them?
“I . . . I . . .”
Drew T. Barry appeared, his Weatherby slung over his shoulder. “What in hell’s name—”
“Wild Bill Hickok here just shot one of ours,” Pearl said. He socked Don in the shoulder, driving him down beside Eric. “Kid was coming to help out, I guess.”
“I thought he was back at the buses!” Don gasped. “Frank told him to stay back in case there was wounded, I heard him!” This much was true.
Drew T. Barry hauled Don to his feet. When Pearl balled up a fist to hit the weeping, white-faced man again, Barry grabbed him. “Beat him all you want later. Beat him like a red-headed stepchild, for all of me. Right now we might need him—he knows the lay of the land in there, and we don’t.”
“Did you get him?” Pearl asked. “The guy down there by that shed?”
“I got him,” Drew T. Barry said, “and if this ever winds up in a courtroom, remember you gave me the green light. Now let’s end this.”
From a knoll above the prison, they saw a flash of bright light, and a contrail of white smoke. This was followed by another explosion on the other side of the prison.
“Who in fuck is shooting rockets from up on that hill?” Pearl asked.
“Don’t know and don’t care,” Barry said. “Being as how we’re behind the prison, we’ve got a thousand or so tons of concrete between us and them.” He pointed down the hill and across the track. “What’s inside that door, Peters?”
“The gym,” Don said, eager to atone for what he was already coming to believe had been a justifiable mistake, the sort of thing anyone might have done. I was trying to protect Pearl as well as myself, he thought, and when this madness is over, Elmore will see that. Elmore will probably thank me and buy me a drink down at the Squeak. And hey, it was just Blass, a lunatic delinquent if ever there was one, lighting that poor homeless bag on fire before Don could stop him.
“It’s where the cunts play basketball and volleyball. The main corridor starts on the other side, what we call Broadway. The woman’s in a cell in A Wing, down to the left. Not far.”
“Then let’s go,” Pearl said. “You lead, Quickdraw. I got clippers for the fence.”
Don didn’t want to lead. “Maybe I ought to stay here with Eric. He was my partner, after all.”
“No need,” Drew T. Barry said. “He has expired.”
7
A year before Aurora, when Michaela had still been relegated to taping filler features for NewsAmerica—stuff like dogs that could count and twin brothers meeting by accident after fifty years of separation—she had done a story about how people with large collections of books had lower heating bills than non-readers, because books made good insulation. With this in mind, she repaired to the prison library once the shooting started, scurrying with her head low. What she discovered was mostly shelves of battered paperbacks, not exactly the insulation she’d had in mind, and when the dynamite bundle exploded in the room next door, she was pelted with Nora Roberts and James Patterson novels as the wall buckled.
She ran back onto Broadway, this time not bothering to duck but pausing, horrified, to look into the visitors’ room, where what remained of Rand Quigley was puddled on the floor and dripping from the ceiling.
She was totally disoriented, on the verge of panic, and when the bazooka shell hit C Wing and a cloud of dust billowed toward her (reminding her of news footage she’d seen following the collapse of the Twin Towers), she turned to go back the way she had come. Before she managed three steps, a strong arm encircled her throat, and she felt a cold steel edge press against her temple.
“Hey there, sweetcheeks,” Angel Fitzroy said. When Michaela did not immediately respond to this greeting, Angel pressed harder with the chisel she’d borrowed from the furniture shop. “What the fuck’s going on out there?”
“Armageddon,” Michaela managed in a gasping voice that sounded nothing like her chirrupy TV tones. “Please stop choking me.”
Angel let go and turned Michaela to face her. The smoke drifting down the corridor carried the bitter tang of teargas, making them cough, but they could see each other well enough. The woman with the chisel was pretty in a narrow, intense, predatory sort of way.
“You look different,” Michaela said. Possibly a supremely stupid comment with the prison under attack and a convict brandishing a chisel in front of her eyes, but all she could think of. “Awake. Really awake.”
“She woke me up,” Angel said proudly. “Evie. Same as she did you. Cause I had a mission.”
“What mission would that be?”
“Them,” Angel said, and pointed as two female creatures came shambling down the corridor, seemingly untroubled by the smoke and gunfire. To Michaela, the shreds of cocoon hanging from Maura Dunbarton and Kayleigh Rawlings looked like bits of rotted shroud in a horror movie. They passed by without looking at Michaela and Angel.
“How can they—” Michaela began, but a second bazooka shell hit out front before she could finish her question. The floor shook, and more smoke billowed in, black and stinking of diesel fuel.
“Don’t know how they can do anything, and don’t care,” Angel said. “They got their job and I got mine. You can help out, or I can put this chisel in your gizzard. Which would you prefer?”
“I’ll help,” Michaela said. (Journalistic objectivity aside, it would be hard to report the story later if she was, you know, dead.) She followed Angel, who at least seemed to know where she was going. “What’s the job?”
“Gonna protect the witch,” Angel said. “Or die trying.”
Before Michaela could reply, Jared Norcross stepped out of the kitchen, which was adjacent to the prison laundry where Michaela had left him. Angel raised the chisel. Michaela grabbed her wrist. “No! He’s with us!”
Angel was giving Jared her best Stare of Death. “Are you? Are you with us? Will you help protect the witch?”
“Well,” Jared said, “I was planning to go clubbing and drop some E, but I guess I could change my plans.”
“I told Clint I’d protect you,” Michaela said reproachfully.
Angel brandished her chisel and bared her teeth. “No one gets protection today but the witch. No one gets protection but Evie!”
“Fine,” Jared said. “If it helps my dad and gets my mom and Mary back, I’m in.”
“Is Mary your girlfriend?” Angel asked. She had lowered the chisel.
“I don’t know. Not exactly.”
“Not exactly.” Angel seemed to chew on that for a moment. “You treat her right? No pushing, no hitting, no yelling?”
“We need to get out of here before we choke,” Michaela said.
“Yeah, I treat her right.”
“Damn well better,” Angel said. “Let’s get truckin. Evie’s in the soft cell down on A Wing. Soft cell, but hard bars. You gotta stand in front of her. That way, anyone that wants to get to her will have to go through you.”
Michaela thought that sounded like a terrible plan, which might explain why Angel was talking “you” instead of “us.”
“Where will you be?”
“Commando mission,” Angel said. “Maybe I can drop a few before they get this far.” She brandished her chisel. “I’ll be with you soon, don’t fear.”
“A few guns might help, if you really—” Jared was drowned out by the loudest explosion yet. This time shrapnel—mostly pieces of wall and ceiling—rained down. When Michaela and Jared straightened up again, Angel was no longer with them.
8
“What the fuck was that?” Frank asked in the seconds after the first bazooka shell hit C Wing. He got to his feet, brushing dust, dirt, and a few crumbles of cement out of his hair. His ears weren’t ringing, exactly; what he heard was the high, steely whine he sometimes got in his head after taking too much aspirin.
“Someone’s shooting off ordinance from up on yonder knoll,” Kronsky said. “Probably the same ones who took out the sheriff’s station. Come on, Mr. Acting Sheriff. Time’s a-wasting.” He once more bared his teeth in a gold-twinkling grin so cheerful it looked surreal. He pointed at the screen of the phone imbedded in the plastic explosive. 3:07 became 3:06 became 3:05.
“Okay,” Frank said.
“Remember, don’t hesitate. He who hesitates is butt-fucked.”
They headed for the crushed front doors. In his peripheral vision, Frank could see the men who had come in behind the bulldozers, watching them. None seemed eager to join this particular assault, and Frank did not blame them. Probably some were wishing they had left with Terry Coombs.
9
As the battle for Dooling Correctional approached its climax, Terry was parked in his garage. The garage was a small one; the door was closed; Unit Four’s windows were open and its big V8 engine was running. Terry inhaled exhaust in long, chest-filling gulps. It tasted bad to begin with, but you got used to it pretty fast.
It’s not too late to change your mind, Rita said, taking his hand. His wife sat beside him in the passenger seat. You might still be able to take control out there. Impose a little sanity.
“Too late for that, hon,” Terry said. The garage was now blue with toxic vapor. Terry took another deep breath, stifled a cough, and inhaled again. “I don’t know how this is going to come out, but I see no good ending. This way is better.”
Rita squeezed his hand sympathetically.
“I keep thinking of every mess on the highway I ever cleaned up,” Terry said. “And that guy’s head, pushed right through the wall of that meth-cooker’s trailer.”
Dimly, across the miles, from the direction of the prison, came the sound of explosions.
Terry repeated, “This way is better,” and closed his eyes. Although he knew he was alone in Unit Four, he could still feel his wife squeezing his hand as he drifted away from Dooling and everything else.
10
Frank and Johnny Lee Kronsky were working their way between the wreckage of Barry Holden’s RV and the wall of the prison. They were almost to the smashed main doors when they heard the second bazooka shell whistling toward them.
“Incoming!” Kronsky shouted.
Frank looked over his shoulder and saw an amazing thing: the bazooka shell struck the parking lot on its rear fin, bounced high without exploding, and dropped nose-down toward the bulldozer that had been piloted by the late Jack Albertson. The roar of its detonation was deafening. The driver’s seat was blown through the thin shell of the dozer’s roof. Disintegrating treads rose in the air like steel piano keys. And one of the iron shields that had been placed to guard the cockpit doors shot outward, punching through the RV ahead of it like the peen of a giant’s sledgehammer.
Frank stumbled over the twisted base of one of the main doors, and thus his life was saved. Johnny Lee Kronsky, still upright, was not just decapitated by a flying wedge of the Fleetwood’s siding; he was cut in two at the shoulders. Yet he staggered on two or three more steps, his heart beating long enough to send two gaudy jets of blood into the air. Then he collapsed. The C4 football fell from his hands and wobbled toward the security station. It came to rest with the embedded Android phone visible, and Frank saw 1:49 become 1:48 become 1:47.
He crawled toward it, blinking concrete dust out of his eyes, then rolled to one side and into the shelter of the half-collapsed reception desk as Tig Murphy leaped up behind the security station’s bulletproof glass and fired his sidearm through the slot where visitors were supposed to surrender their IDs and phones. The angle was bad, and Tig’s slug went high. Frank was okay if he stayed down, but if he tried to go forward, toward the doors leading into the prison proper, he’d be a sitting duck. Going back, ditto.
The lobby was filling with diesel smoke from the burning bulldozer. Added to this was the high, nauseating stench of Kronsky’s spilled blood—gallons of it, from the look. Beneath Frank was one of the reception desk’s legs, its splintered end digging into his back between his shoulder blades. Lying just out of Frank’s reach was the C4. 1:29 became 1:28 became 1:27.
“There’s men all around the prison!” Frank shouted. “Give up and you won’t be hurt!”
“Suck shit! This is our prison! You’re trespassing, and you got no authority!” Tig fired another shot.
“There’s explosive! C4! It’s going to blow you to pieces!”
“Right, and I’m Luke fucking Skywalker!”
“Look out! Look down! You’ll see it!”
“So you can try putting one in my gut through the slot? Think I’ll pass.”
Desperate, Frank looked around toward the doors he’d come through, partially blocked by the remains of the RV. “You guys out there!” he shouted. “I need some covering fire!”
No covering fire came. No reinforcements, either. Two of the men—Steve Pickering and Will Wittstock—were in full retreat, carrying the wounded Rupe Wittstock between them.
On the littered floor of the lobby, almost at the base of the security station manned by Tig Murphy, the cell phone continued to count down toward zero.
11
Seeing Billy Wettermore undeniably dead made Don Peters feel a little better. Don had gone bowling with him once. The little princess had rolled a 252 and taken twenty bucks off Don. It was pretty obvious that he’d used some sort of doctored bowling ball, but Don had let it pass, the way he let so many things pass, because that was the kind of easygoing guy he was. Well, sometimes the world tilted the right way, and that was a fact. One less fag in the world, he thought, and we all say hooray.
He hustled toward the gymnasium. Maybe I’ll be the one to get her, he thought. Put a bullet right into Evie Black’s quacking mouth and end this for good. They’d forget all about that mistake with Junior, and I wouldn’t have to buy a drink down at the Squeak for the rest of my life.
He stepped toward the door, already imagining Evie Black in his sights, but Elmore Pearl shoved him away. “Stand back, Quickdraw.”
“Hey!” Don bleated. “You don’t know where you’re going!”
He started forward again, but Drew T. Barry grabbed him and shook his head. Barry himself had no intention of being first inside, not when he didn’t know what was waiting. Probably the one he’d shot had been their only rearguard, but if there was someone, Pearl had a better chance of knocking him down than Peters, whose only kill this morning had been one of their own.
Pearl was looking over his shoulder at Don and grinning as he stepped into the gym. “Relax, and let a man lead the w—”
That was as far as he got before Maura Dunbarton’s cold hands gripped him, one by the neck and the other by the back of his head. Elmore Pearl gazed into those soulless eyes and began to screech. He didn’t screech for long; the reanimated thing that had been Maura stuck her hand into his mouth, ignored his biting teeth, and yanked straight down. The sound of his upper and lower jaws parting company was like the sound of a drumstick being torn off a Thanksgiving turkey.
12
“Damn if we ain’t a couple of lucky sonsabitches!” Maynard Griner exulted. “Any more distance and them shells’d just explode in the parking lot. Did you see that last one bounce, Low?”
“I saw it,” Low agreed. “Skipped like a stone on a pond and took out a bulldozer. Not bad, but I can do better. Reload me.”
Below, the prison was boiling smoke from the hole in the western wall. It was a glorious sight, reminiscent of the gush that came out of a mine when a blast went off, except much better obviously, because they weren’t cracking rocks. They were cracking a goddam state facility. It would have been worth doing even if they hadn’t needed to close Kitty McDavid’s snitching mouth.
May was reaching into the ammo bag when he heard a branch snap. He whirled, reaching for the gun stuffed into his belt at the small of his back.
Van fired the pistol Fritz Meshaum had tried to kill her with. The range was short, but she was exhausted, and instead of taking Maynard in the chest, the bullet only clipped his shoulder and sent him sprawling over the depleted bag of bazooka shells. His unfired gun fell into some bushes and caught by the trigger guard. “Brother!” he shouted. “Shot! She shot me!”
Low dropped the bazooka and snatched up the rifle lying beside him. With one of them out of commission, Van could afford to focus. She secured the butt of the pistol at the center of her considerable bosom, and pulled the trigger. Little Low’s mouth exploded, his brains exited the back of his skull, and he aspirated his teeth with his final breath.
“Low!” Maynard screamed. “Brother!”
He grabbed the gun hanging in the bushes, but before he could bring it to bear, his wrist was gripped by something more like an iron manacle than a human hand.
“You should know better than to point a gun at an arm-wrestling champ, even when she’s been awake for a week,” Van said in an oddly gentle voice, and twisted. From inside May’s wrist came a sound like breaking twigs. He shrieked. The gun dropped from his hand and she kicked it away.
“You shot Low,” Maynard blubbered. “Kilt him!”
“So I did.” Van’s head was ringing; her hip was throbbing; it felt like she was standing on a deck in rough waters. She was near the end of her considerable endurance, and she knew it. But this had been a sight more useful than killing herself, no doubt about that. Only now what?
May had the same question, it seemed. “What are you going to do with me?”
I can’t tie him up, Van thought. I’ve got nothing to tie him up with. Am I just going to go to sleep and let him get away? Probably after he puts a few rounds in me while I’m growing my cocoon?
She looked down at the prison, where a crushed RV and a blazing bulldozer blocked the main doors. She meditated on the hole the first bazooka shell had put in C Wing, where dozens of women had been sleeping, defenseless in their cocoons. How many had been killed by these two country-fried assholes?
“Which one are you? Lowell or Maynard?”
“Maynard, ma’am.” He tried on a smile.
“You the stupid one or the smart one, Maynard?”
His smile grew. “I’m the stupid one, no doubt. Failed out of school in the eighth grade. I just do whatever Lowell says.”
Van returned the smile. “Well, I guess I’ll just let you go, Maynard. No harm and no foul. You’ve got a truck down there. I took a peek, and the keys are in the ignition. Even driving one-handed, I think you could be most of the way to Pedro’s South of the Border by noon, if you don’t spare the horses. So why don’t you get going, before I change my mind?”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
May started jogging back among the tombstones of the little country graveyard. Van briefly considered following through on her promise, but the chances were fair to good that he’d double back and discover her sleeping beside his dead brother. Even if he didn’t, they’d been laughing over their dirty ambush like boys throwing baseballs at wooden bottles during county fair week. She didn’t dare let him get far, either, because she no longer trusted her aim.
At least he won’t know what hit him, she thought.
Van raised Meshaum’s pistol and—not without regret—put a round in May’s back. “Oof,” was his final word on mother earth, as he tripped forward into a pile of dry leaves.
Van sat down with her back against a leaning gravestone—so old the name once carved thereon was almost completely worn away—and closed her eyes. She felt bad about shooting a man from behind, but this feeling was quickly smothered beneath a rising wave of sleep.
Oh, it felt so good to give in.
Threads began to spin from her skin. They blew prettily back and forth in a morning breeze. It was going to be another beautiful day in mountain country.
13
The glass was supposed to be bulletproof, but two close-range shots from the M4 Willy was toting blew Clint’s office window out of its frame. Clint hauled himself in, and landed on his desk. (It seemed to him that he had sat behind it writing reports and evaluations in another lifetime.) He heard screams and shouting from the direction of the gymnasium, but that was nothing he could deal with now.
He turned to assist Willy and saw the old man leaning against the building with his head lowered. His breathing was harsh and rapid.
Willy raised his arms. “Hope you’re strong enough to pull me in, Doc, because I ain’t gonna be able to give you much help.”
“Give me your gun first.”
Willy handed up the M4. Clint put it on his desk with his own weapon, atop a stack of Good Report forms. Then he seized Willy’s hands and pulled. The old man was able to help after all, pedaling his workshoes against the building below the window, and he practically flew in. Clint went over on his back. Willy landed on top of him.
“This is what I’d call pretty goddam intimate,” Willy said. His voice was strained, and he looked worse than ever, but he was grinning.
“In that case, you better call me Clint.” He got Willy to his feet, handed him the M4, and grabbed his own gun. “Let’s get our asses down to Evie’s cell.”
“What are we going to do when we get there?”
“I have no idea,” said Clint.
14
Drew T. Barry couldn’t believe what he was seeing: two women who looked like corpses and Elmore Pearl with his mouth pulled into a yawning cavern. His lower jaw seemed to be lying on his chest.
Pearl staggered away from the creature that held him. He made almost a dozen steps before Maura caught him by the sweat-soaked collar. She drew him against her and stuck a thumb deep into his right eye. There was a pop, like a cork coming out of a bottle. Viscous liquid spilled down Pearl’s cheek, and he went limp.
Kayleigh turned jerkily toward Don Peters, like a wind-up toy with a tired spring. He knew he should run, but an incredible lassitude seemed to have filled him. I have gone to sleep, he reasoned, and this is the world’s worst nightmare. Has to be, because that’s Kayleigh Rawlings. I put that bitch on Bad Report just last month. I’ll let her get me, and that’s when I’ll wake up.
Drew T. Barry, whose life’s work involved imagining the worst things that could happen to people, never considered the old I-must-be-dreaming scenario. This was happening, even though it seemed like something straight out of that show where rotting dead people came back to life, and he had every intention of surviving it. “Duck!” he shouted.
Don might not have done so if the plastic explosive hadn’t detonated at that instant on the other side of the prison. It was actually more of a fall than a duck, but it did the job; instead of grasping the soft meat of his face, Kayleigh’s pallid fingers slapped off the hard plastic shell of the football helmet. There was a gunshot, amplified to monstrous levels in the empty gymnasium, and a point-blank round from the Weatherby—a gun that could literally stop an elephant—did the job on Kayleigh. Her throat simply exploded and her head lolled back, all the way back. Her body crumpled.
Maura cast Elmore aside and lurched toward Don, a boogeylady whose hands opened and snapped closed, opened and snapped closed.
“Shoot her!” Don screamed. His bladder let go and warm piddle coursed down his legs, soaking his socks.
Drew T. Barry considered not doing it. Peters was an idiot, a loose cannon, and they might be better off without him. Oh well, he thought, okay. But after this, Mr. Prison Guard, you’re on your own.
He shot Maura Dunbarton in the chest. She flew back to center court, landing beside the late Elmore Pearl. She lay there a moment, then struggled up and started toward Don again, although her top and bottom halves no longer seemed to be working together very well.
“Shoot her in the head!” Don screamed. (He seemed to have forgotten that he had a gun himself.) “Shoot her in the head like you did the other one!”
“Will you please just shut up,” said Drew T. Barry. He sighted and blew a hole through Maura Dunbarton’s head that vaporized the upper left quadrant of her skull.
“Oh God,” Don gasped. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go back to town.”
Little as Drew T. Barry liked the pudgy ex-guard, he understood Peters’s impulse to run; even sympathized with it to a degree. But he had not become the most successful insurance man in the Tri-Counties by giving up on a job before it was finished. He grabbed Don by the arm.
“Drew, they were dead! What if there are more?”
“I don’t see any more, do you?”
“But—”
“Lead the way. We’re going to find the woman we came for.” And out of nowhere, a bit of Drew T. Barry’s high school French recurred to him. “Cherchez la femme.”
“Churchy what?”
“Never mind.” Drew T. Barry gestured with his high-powered rifle. Not exactly at Don, but in his general vicinity. “You go first. Thirty feet ahead of me should be good.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Drew T. Barry said, “I believe in insurance.”
15
While Vanessa Lampley was putting paid to Maynard Griner and Elmore Pearl was undergoing impromptu oral surgery from the reanimated corpse of Maura Dunbarton, Frank Geary was beneath the half-collapsed reception desk, watching as 0:46 became 0:45 became 0:44. There would be no help from outside, he knew that now. The remaining men out there were either hanging back or gone. If he was going to get past the goddam security station and into the prison proper, he would have to do it on his own. The only alternative was to scurry back outside on his hands and knees and hope the guy behind the bulletproof glass didn’t shoot him in the ass.
He wished none of this had happened. He wished he was cruising one of the pleasant roads of Dooling County in his little truck, looking for someone’s pet raccoon. If a domesticated coon was hungry, you could coax him close enough to use the net with a piece of cheese or hamburger on the end of the long pole Frank called his Treat Stick. That made him think of the shattered desk leg poked into his back. He rolled on his side, grabbed it, and pushed it along the floor. The leg was just long enough to reach the lethal football. Nice to finally catch a break.
“What are you doing?” Tig asked from behind the glass.
Frank didn’t bother answering. If this didn’t work, he was a dead man. He speared the football with the jagged end of the leg. Johnny Lee had assured him that even driving over the stuff wouldn’t cause it to explode, and the stick didn’t set it off. He lifted the desk leg and leaned it just below the window with its ID slot. 0:17 became 0:16 became 0:15. Tig fired once, and Frank felt the bullet pass just above his knuckles.
“Whoever you are in there, you better get gone,” he said. “Do it while you’ve got the chance.”
Taking his own advice, Frank dove toward the front doors, expecting to take a bullet. But Tig never fired again.
Tig was peering through the glass at the white football stuck on the end of the desk leg like a big piece of gum. He got his first good look at the phone, where 0:04 became 0:03. He understood then what it was and what was going to happen. He bolted for the door giving on the prison’s main corridor. His hand was on the knob when the world went white.
16
Outside the main doors, shadowed from the brightening sun by the remains of the Fleetwood RV—never to take Barry Holden and his family on camping expeditions again—Frank felt the badly mauled building shudder from the latest blast. Glass that had survived the earlier explosions thanks to reinforcing wire belched out in glittering shards.
“Come on!” shouted Frank. “Any of you who are left, come on! We’re taking her right now!”
For a moment there was nothing. Then four men—Carson Struthers, Deputy Treat, Deputy Ordway, and Deputy Barrows—trotted from cover and ran to the blasted front doors of the prison.
They joined Frank and disappeared into the smoke.
17
“Holy . . . fucking . . . shit,” Jared Norcross breathed.
Michaela was for the time being incapable of speech, but found herself wishing with all her heart for a film crew. Except a crew wouldn’t help, would it? If you broadcast what she was seeing, the audience would dismiss it as a camera trick. You had to actually be here to believe it. You had to actually see a naked woman floating a foot over her bunk with a cell phone in her hands; you had to see the green tendrils twisting through her black hair.
“Hello, there!” Evie called cheerily, but without looking around. The better part of her attention was on the cell phone in her hands. “I’ll be with you in a minute, but right now I’ve got an important piece of business to finish.”
Her fingers on the phone were a blur.
“Jared?” It was Clint. He sounded both amazed and afraid. “What are you doing here?”
18
Leading the way (little as he liked it) now, Don Peters had reached the halfway point of the corridor leading to Broadway when Norcross and an old bearded fellow with red suspenders appeared out of the drifting smoke. Norcross was supporting his companion. Red Suspenders was plodding slowly in a hunch. Don guessed he’d been shot, although he couldn’t see any blood. You’ll both be shot in a minute, Don thought, and raised his rifle.
Thirty feet behind him, Drew T. Barry raised his own rifle, although he had no idea what Peters had seen; the drifting smoke was too thick, and Peters was in the way. Then—as Clint and Willy headed past the Booth and down the short A Wing corridor leading to the soft cell—a pair of long white arms reached out of the infirmary and seized Don by the throat. Drew T. Barry watched, amazed, as, like a magic trick, Don vanished. The infirmary door slammed shut. When Barry hurried up to where Peters had been standing and tried the knob, he found the door locked. He peered through the wire-reinforced glass and saw a woman who looked like she might be high on drugs holding a chisel to Peters’s throat. She had stripped away the ridiculous football helmet; it lay overturned on the floor beside his gun. Peters’s thinning black hair was plastered to his skull in sweaty strings.
The woman—an inmate wearing prison browns—saw Barry looking in. She raised her chisel and motioned with it. The gesture was clear enough: Get out of here.
Drew T. Barry considered shooting through the glass, but that would draw any defenders who were left. He also remembered the promise he’d made to himself before shooting the second boogeylady in the gym: After this, Mr. Prison Guard, you’re on your own.
He gave the crazy-looking inmate a little salute, plus a thumbs-up for good measure. Then he headed down the corridor. But cautiously. Before being grabbed, Peters had seen something.
19
“Oh, look who I found,” said Angel. “It’s the one who likes to grab girls’ tits and twist their nips and rub up against their hinies until he shoots off in his underwear.”
When she had lifted her hand to wave off the insurance man, Don had slipped away, putting a little space between them. “Put that chisel down, inmate. Put it down this instant and I won’t have to write you up.”
“That ain’t come on your pants this time,” Angel observed. “Too much of it, even for a jizzhound like you. You wet yourself, didn’t you? Mommy wouldn’t like that, would she?”
At the mention of his sainted mother, Don threw caution to the wind and rushed forward. Angel slashed at him, and might have ended things right there, had he not stumbled over the football helmet; instead of cutting his throat, the chisel drew a deep gash across his forehead. Blood sheeted down his face as he went to his knees.
“Ow! Ow! Stop it, that hurt!”
“Yeah? See how this does,” Angel said, and kicked him in the stomach.
Trying to blink blood out of his eyes, Don grabbed one of Angel’s legs and yanked her down. Her elbow struck the floor and jarred the chisel out of her hand. Don wriggled up her body and reached for her throat. “I ain’t gonna fuck you after you’re dead,” he told her, “that’s nasty. I’ll just choke you unconscious. I won’t kill you until I’m fin—”
Angel grasped the football helmet, swung it in a wide-armed arc, and brought it crashing into Don’s bleeding forehead. He rolled off her, clutching at his face.
“Ow, no, you stop that, inmate!”
That helmet-smashing stuff is also a big penalty in the NFL, Angel thought, but since no one’s showing this on TV, I guess I won’t lose any yardage.
She hit Don with the helmet twice more, perhaps breaking his nose with the second blow. It was certainly bent badly enough. He managed to turn over and get to his knees with his ass sticking up. He was shouting something that sounded like Stop it, inmate, but it was hard to tell because the pig was panting so hard. Also, his lips were busted and his mouth was full of blood. It sprayed out with each word, and Angel remembered what they used to say when they were kids: Do you serve towels with your showers?
“No more,” Don said. “Please, no more. You broke my face.”
She cast the helmet aside and picked up the chisel. “Here’s your titty-rub, Officer Peters!”
She buried the chisel between his shoulder blades, all the way up to the wooden handle.
“Mom!” he cried.
“Okay, Officer Peters: here’s one for your ma!” She ripped the chisel out and buried it in his neck, and he collapsed.
Angel kicked him a few times, then straddled him and began to stab again. She went on until she could no longer lift her arm.