Sleeping Beauties

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The spongy old boards of the porch bow and weep beneath Lila’s shoes. A powerful spring breeze shakes the field of oxtail that used to be her own front yard, and the noise is a beautiful roar. The fabulous green of the oxtails strains credulity. She glances back in the direction she has come from and sees that saplings have risen up through the broken pavement of Tremaine Street. They rock in the wind like the hands of confused clocks, trapped between twelve and one. A blue sky covers the world. In Mrs. Ransom’s driveway, her cruiser, the door left ajar, is scaled with rust. All four tires are flat.

How did she get here?

Never mind, she tells herself. It’s a dream. Leave it at that.

She goes inside her house and stops to consider the remains of the little-used dining room: windows broken, tattered curtains curling and uncurling in another waft of breeze, seasons and seasons’ worth of leaves drifted almost to the top of the mold-spackled table. The smell of rot is pervasive. As she walks down the hall, she thinks this might be a time-traveling dream.

Chunks of the living room ceiling have fallen, littering the carpet with moon rocks. The flatscreen TV is still bolted to the wall, but the screen has gone bad somehow, warped and puffed out, as if it has been baked.

Dirt and dust have whitened the sliding glass doors to opacity. Lila pulls the right one, and it opens, moaning along its decayed rubber track.

“Jared?” she asks. “Clint?”

They were here last night, sitting around a table that now lies on its side. Yellow weeds tower around the edges of the deck and sprout between the boards. Their barbecue, the center of many summer picnic suppers, has been engulfed.

In the pool, where the waters are the brackish color of a fish tank after a long power outage, a bobcat pauses breast-deep in its crossing. A bird is clamped in its teeth. The bobcat’s eyes are bright and its teeth are large and water beads its fur. Pasted to its broad, flat nose is a white feather.

Lila rakes her fingernails down her cheek, feels the pain, and decides (reluctantly) that this might not be a dream, after all. If not, how long has she been asleep?

A good while. Or a bad one.

The animal blinks its shining eyes and begins to paddle toward her.

Where am I? she thinks, then thinks, I am home, and then thinks the first thing again: Where am I?

CHAPTER 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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

CHAPTER 2

The women started out just calling it “the new place,” because it wasn’t really Dooling anymore—not the Dooling they’d known, at least. Later, as they began to realize they might be here for the long haul, it became Our Place.

The name stuck.

The meat tasted strongly of the lighter fluid it took to ignite the ancient charcoal from Mrs. Ransom’s basement, but they ate the entire shank that Lila had hacked from the body of the bobcat she’d shot with her service revolver and dragged out of the fetid swimming pool.

“We are sick puppies,” said Molly on that first night, licking the grease from her fingers and grabbing another chunk. Being a sick puppy didn’t seem to sit too badly with her.

“Got that right, m’darlin,” her grandmother said, “but I’m damned if this isn’t half-decent eatin. Grab me another piece, Missus Sheriff.”

They had taken shelter in the remains of Mrs. Ransom’s house, not trying anything from the dusty canned goods in the pantry because Lila was afraid of botulism. They subsisted for the next two weeks primarily on berries they picked from the bushes in their former suburban neighborhood, and tiny ears of wild corn, tough and almost tasteless, but at least edible. May was too early for berries and corn, but there it was.

From this Lila drew a conclusion, shaky at first but growing more solid: the version of Dooling where they found themselves was moving at a different pace in time from the Dooling they had been in before. Time felt the same, but it wasn’t. Mrs. Ransom confirmed that she had been alone for several days before Molly appeared. The hours in the old place (before?), were days in the new one (now?). Maybe more than days.

This concern with the differing time-streams most often occupied Lila in the loose minutes before sleep took her. Many of the places they slept were open to the sky—fallen trees had punched holes in some roofs, wind had snatched others away altogether—and Lila blinked at the stars as she drifted off. The stars were the same, but their glare was shocking. They were hot-white welding sparks. Was it even real, this world without men? Was it heaven? Purgatory? An alternate universe on an alternate time-stream?

More women and girls arrived. The population began to snowball, and although Lila didn’t want the job, she found herself in charge. By default, it seemed.

Dorothy Harper of the Curriculum Committee, and her friends, three cheerful, white-haired women in their seventies, who introduced themselves as book club chums, emerged from the scrub forest that had risen around a condo. They made a great fuss over Molly, who enjoyed being fussed over. Janice Coates arrived strolling down Main Street, a leaf stuck in the ruins of her perm, accompanied by three women in prison red tops. Janice and the three former inmates—Kitty McDavid, Celia Frode, and Nell Seeger—had needed to hack their way through a thicket to get out of Dooling Correctional.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” Janice said, after embracing first Blanche McIntyre, then Lila. “Forgive our appearance. We just broke jail. Now which one of you nicked your finger on a spindle and created this mess?”

Some of the old dwellings were habitable and salvageable. Others were fabulously overgrown or crumbled or both. On Main Street they gaped at the high school, which had been an outmoded building even in the old Dooling. In this new one, it was literally split down the middle, each half of the structure leaning to opposite sides, and open air in between jagged brick edges. Birds perched on the cliffs of classroom lino that jutted out into space. The Municipal Building, which had included the town and sheriff’s department offices, was half-collapsed. A sinkhole had opened on Malloy. A car sat at the bottom, submerged to the windshield in coffee-colored water.

A woman named Kayleigh Rawlings joined the colony, and volunteered her experience as an electrician. It was no surprise to the former warden, who knew that Kayleigh had gone to vocational school to learn about wiring and voltage. That Kayleigh and her education had emerged from inside the fence of Dooling Correctional was not an issue. The woman had never committed a crime in this new place, under these too-bright stars.

Kayleigh managed to resurrect a solar-powered generator attached to what had once been a rich doctor’s house, and they cooked rabbit on his electric stovetop and listened to old records on his vintage Rock-Ola jukebox.

In the evenings they talked. Most of the women had, like Lila in the cruiser in Mrs. Ransom’s driveway, awakened in the places where they had fallen asleep. A few others, however, remembered finding themselves in the dark, hearing nothing but wind and birdsong and—perhaps—distant voices. When the sun had risen these women had picked their way west through woods and come out either on Ball’s Hill Road or West Lavin. To Lila, the picture they drew of those early moments was of a world being formed, as if the surroundings of their existence was an act of collective imagination. That, she thought, was as likely as anything else.

Day followed day and night followed night. Exactly how many from the first day no one was sure, but weeks certainly, and then months.

A hunting and gathering group was formed. There was a great deal of game—deer and rabbit, especially—as well as plenty of wild fruits and vegetables. They never came close to starving. There was a farming group, a construction group, a healthcare group, and an education group to teach the children. Each morning a different girl stood out in front of the little school, ringing a cowbell. The sound carried for miles. Women taught; some of the older girls did, too.

No viruses afflicted them, though there were many cases of poison ivy to deal with and more than a few cuts and bruises, even broken bones brought about by the perils inherent in long-abandoned structures—sharp edges and bucklings and hidden traps. If this world was an act of imagination, Lila sometimes thought as she drifted toward sleep, it was a remarkably strong one if it could make people bleed.

In the basement of the high school, where some variety of mold had made a feast of the filing cabinets full of decades-old school board transcripts, Lila unearthed a mimeograph machine that had probably not been used since the mid-sixties. It was packed neatly away in a plastic crate. Some of the erstwhile prison inmates turned out to be remarkably crafty. They helped Molly Ransom make fresh ink from swamp redcurrants, and the girl founded a single-sheet newspaper called Dooling Doings. The first headline was SCHOOL REOPENS! and she quoted Lila Norcross as saying, “It’s nice to see the kids getting back into their routine.” Molly asked Lila what her title was, Dooling Chief of Police or plain Sheriff. Lila said to just to call her “a local.”

And there were the Meetings. These took place once a week initially, then twice, and lasted an hour or two. Although they turned out to be extremely important to the health and well-being of the women living in Our Place, they came about almost by accident. The first attendees were the ladies who had called themselves the First Thursday Book Club in the old world. In this new one, they got together in the Shopwell supermarket, which had held up remarkably well. And they had enough to talk about without a book to get them started. Blanche, Dorothy, Margaret, and Margaret’s sister Gail sat on folding chairs at the front of the store, chatting about all the things they missed. These included fresh coffee and orange juice, air conditioning, television, garbage pickup, the Internet, and being able to just power up a phone and call a friend. Mostly, though—they all agreed on this—they missed men. Younger women began to drift in, and were welcomed. They talked about the gaps in their lives, places of absence that had once been filled by their sons, nephews, fathers, grandfathers… and their husbands.

“Let me tell you girls something,” Rita Coombs said at a Meeting toward the end of that first summer—by then there were almost four dozen ladies in attendance. “It may be too frank for some of you, but I don’t care. I miss a good old Friday night fuck. Terry was too quick on the trigger at the start of our relationship, but once I got him trained, he was fine. I had nights when I could pop off two little ones and one big one before he fired his gun. And afterward? Slept like a baby!”

“Don’t your fingers work?” someone asked, to general laughter.

“Yes, they do!” Rita retorted. She was also laughing, her cheeks as red as apples. “But darlin, they are not the same!”

This earned her a hearty round of applause, although a few women—Fritz Meshaum’s mousy wife, Candy, for one—abstained.

The two big questions came up, of course, in a hundred different ways. First, how had they come to be here, in Our Place? And why?

Was it magic? Was it some scientific experiment gone wrong? Was it the will of God?

Was their continued existence a reward or a punishment?

Why them?

Kitty McDavid was a frequent speaker when the discussion turned in this direction; Kitty’s memory of her Aurora’s eve nightmare—of the dark figure that she’d somehow recognized as a queen, and the cobwebs that had flowed from the queen’s hair—remained vivid, haunting her still. “I don’t know what to do, if I should pray for forgiveness or what,” she said.

“Oh, fuck it,” Janice Coates had advised her. “You can do what you want since the pope’s not here to make a ruling, but I’m just going to keep doing my best. What else is there to do, honestly, that we know for sure can make a difference?” This had been another crowdpleaser.

The question, however—What the fuck had happened?—was renewed again and again. Without lasting satisfaction.

At one Meeting (it was at least three months after what Janice Coates liked to call the Great Displacement), a new attendee crept in, and settled on a fifty-pound bag of fertilizer at the back of the room. She kept her head down during the lively discussion of life as it was now lived, and news of a wonderful discovery at the local UPS shipping office: nine boxes of Lunapads, which were reusable sanitary napkins.

“No more cutting up tee-shirts to stuff in my underwear at that time of the month!” Nell Seeger exulted. “Hallelujah!”

Toward the end of the Meeting, talk turned—as it always did—to those things they missed. These discussions almost always occasioned tears for the boys and men, but most of the women said they felt at least temporarily unburdened. Lighter.

“Are we done, ladies?” Blanche asked on this particular day. “Does anyone have a burning desire to share before we get back to work?”

A small hand went up, the fingers dusted with many different colors of chalk.

“Yes, dear,” Blanche said. “You’re new, aren’t you? And very short! Would you care to stand?”

“Welcome,” the women chorused, turning to see.

Nana Geary got to her feet. She brushed her hands down the front of her shirt, which was now very worn and raggedy at the sleeves… but still her favorite.

“My mom doesn’t know I’m here,” she said, “so I hope no one will tell her.”

“Honey,” said Dorothy Harper, “this is like Vegas. What goes on in Women’s Hour stays in Women’s Hour.”

This brought a murmur of laughter, but the little girl in the faded pink tee-shirt did not even smile. “I just want to say I miss my daddy. I went into Pearson’s Barber Shop and found some of his aftershave—Drakkar Noir, it’s called—and I smelled it, and it made me cry.”

The front of the supermarket was dead silent except for a few sniffles. It would turn out later that Nana hadn’t been the only one to visit the aftershave shelves at Pearson’s.

“I guess that’s all,” Nana said. “Just… I miss him, and I wish I could see him again.”

They applauded her.

Nana sat down and put her hands over her face.

Our Place was no utopia. There were tears, more than a few arguments, and during the first summer, a murder-suicide that shocked them all, mostly because it was utterly senseless. Maura Dunbarton, another refugee from the Dooling Correctional of the previous world, strangled Kayleigh Rawlings, then took her own life. It was Coates who fetched Lila to see.

Maura was hanging from a noose knotted to the rusty crossbar of a backyard swing set. Kayleigh had been discovered in the room the lovers had shared, dead in her sleeping bag, her face gray and the sclera of her open eyes filigreed with hemorrhages. She had been strangled, then stabbed at least a dozen times. Maura had left a note, penciled on a scrap of envelope.

“What do you think?” asked Lila.

Janice said, “I think it’s a mystery, like everything else here. I think it’s a goddam shame that when it came on to the crazy bitch to kill someone, she picked the only one in Our Place who understood how to wire a circuit and make it hot. Now I’ll hold her legs while you climb up and cut her down.”

Coates walked over and, without any ceremony, wrapped her arms around Maura Dunbarton’s short legs. She looked over at Lila. “Come on, then, don’t make me wait. Smells like she loaded her pants. Suicide is so glamorous.”

They buried both the killer and her hapless victim outside the sagging ring of fencing that surrounded the prison. It was summer again by then, bright and hot, with chiggers popping around the grass tops. Coates spoke a few words about Kayleigh’s contribution to the community and Maura’s puzzling act of homicide. A chorus of the children sang “Amazing Grace.” Their little girl voices made Lila weep.

She had salvaged a number of photographs of Jared and Clint from their home, and she sometimes attended the Meetings, but as time passed, her son and husband began to seem less real. At night, in her tent—Lila preferred to camp out as long as the weather was clement—she wound her crank flashlight, and scanned their faces in the beam. Who would Jared become? There was still that softness at the edges of his face, even in the most recent of the pictures. It hurt her not to know.

She looked at her husband’s image, his wry smile and graying hair, and missed him, though not as much as she missed Jere. Her suspicions of Clint on that horrible last day and night embarrassed her; her lies and the pointless fears made her ashamed. But Lila also found herself regarding her husband differently now that she saw him through the lens of memory. She thought about how carefully he’d bricked up his past, the way he’d used his authority as a doctor to bolster the concealment and ward her off. Had Clint thought that only he could handle that kind of pain? That it was too much for her little mind and puny spirit to absorb? Or was it a kind of egotism masquerading as strength? She knew men were taught (primarily by other men, of course) that they were to keep their pain to themselves, but she also knew marriage was supposed to undo some of that teaching. That hadn’t been the case with Clint.

And there was the pool. It still made her mad. And how he’d quit his job without a moment’s notice all those years ago. And a million tiny decisions in between, taken by him, and for her to live with. It made her feel like a Stepford Wife, even with her husband in some other world.

Owls hooted in the dark, and dogs, run feral after who knew how many canine generations, howled. Lila zipped the flap of her tent. The moon shone blue through the yellow fabric. Remembering all that domestic soap opera depressed her, her parts and his parts, back and forth, he slams one door, she slams the other. The histrionic crap she had always looked down on in other people’s marriages. Condescension, thy name was Lila, she thought, and had to laugh.

The hedges that once framed the prison had flourished into dense mounds. Lila entered through the gouge in the foliage that Coates and the other women who had awakened there had hacked out. Entry to the prison itself was through a hole in the south wall. Something—Lila was guessing the industrial gas stove in the kitchen—had exploded, blowing out the concrete as easily as a child huffing out a birthday candle. Going in, she half-expected to emerge in yet another place—a white beach, a cobbled thoroughfare, a rocky mountaintop, Oz—but when she arrived, it was only a wing of former cells. The walls were half-crumbled, some of the barred doors blown right off their hinges. She thought that the detonation must have been a doozy. Weeds grew from the floor and mold crawled across the ceiling.

She walked through the ruined wing and emerged into the central hall of the prison, what Clint called Broadway. Things looked better here. Lila followed the red line painted down the middle of the corridor. The various gates and barriers were unlocked; the wire-reinforced windows that gave onto the prison’s facilities—cafeteria, library, the Booth—were fogged over. Where Broadway reached the front doors there was another section that showed signs of an explosion: busted cinderblocks, dusty shards of glass, the steel door separating the entry area from the prison proper crumpled inward. Lila skirted the junk.

Farther down Broadway she passed the open door to the staff lounge. Inside, mushrooms sprouted from the wall-to-wall carpeting. The air reeked of enthusiastic plant-life.

She eventually came to Clint’s office. The corner window was blown out and a mass of overgrown shrubbery poured in, flowering with white blooms. A rat was rummaging around in the stuffing of a torn couch cushion. It gawked at Lila for a moment and darted for the safety of a pile of crumbled drywall.

The Hockney print behind her husband’s desk hung askew, cocked at eleven and five. She straightened it. The picture showed a plain, sandy-colored building with rows of identically curtained windows. At ground level, the building had two doors. One door was blue, the other red: examples of Hockney’s famous colors, bright like the feelings aroused by good memories, even if the memories themselves were thin—and the interpretative possibilities had appealed to Lila. She had given it to Clint all those years ago, thinking that he might point to it and say to his patients: “See? Nothing is closed to you. There are doors to a healthier, happier life.”

The irony was as glaring as the metaphor. Clint was in another world. Jared was in another world. For all she knew, one or both of them might be dead. The Hockney print belonged to the rats and mold and weeds of this world. It was a broken world, emptied out and forgotten, but it was the one they had. It was, God save us, Our Place. Lila left the office and retraced her steps through the dead world of the prison to the hole in the foliage. She wanted out.

Throughout those months, more women continued to appear from what James Brown had once called a man’s, man’s, man’s world. They reported that in Dooling, when they’d fallen asleep, the Aurora crisis was still fresh; there, only two or three days had passed. The violence and confusion and desperation they talked about seemed unreal to the earlier arrivals in this new place. More—it seemed almost unimportant. The women of this world had their own problems and concerns. One of them was the weather. Summer waned. After the fall, the winter would follow.

With the aid of manuals from the library, and overseen by the unlikely personage of Magda Dubcek, the widow of a contractor (not to mention the mother of Lila’s pool boy), they were able to finish some of the work Kayleigh had begun before being murdered by her crazy ex-girlfriend. Magda’s late husband had taught her quite a bit about electrical work. “My husband, he was telling me what he was doing every day: ‘And look, here is the live wire, Magda, and look here is the ground wire, and so on.’ I listen. He never knew it, he thought he was just talking to some stupid wall, but I listen.” At this, Magda paused to make a sly face that reminded Lila, heartbreakingly, of Anton. “Well, for the first five hundred times I listen, anyway.”

With power scavenged from a handful of solar panels that had survived the years of neglect, they were able to create a limited electrical grid for at least a few of the high-ground houses.

Regular cars were useless; it was impossible to determine how long this version of their world had spun unattended, but the state of the parked cars was a clue that it had been enough time for water and moisture to have its way with engines. A car stored in a still-standing garage might have been salvageable, except there wasn’t a drop of gasoline anywhere that hadn’t destabilized or evaporated. What the women did find was a small fleet of well-preserved solar-powered golf carts in the equipment shed at the country club. Once they were recharged, they started right up. Women drove them up and down streets that had been cleared of trees and foliage.

Like the Shopwell, the Olympia Diner had stood up to the passage of time remarkably well, and Rita Coombs, once the wife of Terry, reopened it on a barter basis, cooking with an old portable woodstove that a gang of women had helped haul up from the Coombses’ basement.

“I always wanted to try my hand at running a restaurant,” she explained to Lila, “but Terry never wanted me to work. He said it would make him worry. Terry could never understand how damn boring it was, to be a piece of china in a hutch.”

She said this in a light way, but kept her gaze averted in an expression of what Lila read as shame—a shame that came from being happy to have something of her own. Lila hoped Rita would get over it, and thought she would—eventually. There were a lot of them that felt changed, but in a way that might also contain that tincture of shame, as if they were playing hooky. Women like Magda and Rita, who suddenly found themselves in demand and flourishing in the light of a new world. As those unmarked weeks peeled away, they discussed not just what they missed, but also some of what they did not miss.

The leaves changed as they did in the old world, but to Lila their colors seemed more vibrant and longer-lasting.

She was in Mrs. Ransom’s garden one day in what felt like late October, picking pumpkins for the schoolgirls to carve. Old Essie, seated on a bench in the shade, watched her. Next to the bench was a rusty shopping cart full of things Essie had picked up, as if trying to restock her new life from memories of the old one: a radio, a cell phone, a heap of clothes, a dog collar, a calendar from 2007, a bottle of something that had no label but might have been maple syrup once upon a time, and a trio of dolls. She liked to follow Lila when she saw Lila in her big straw hat rolling the wheelbarrow piled high with gardening implements.

The old lady was silent at first, and shied away if anyone came near her, but as the weeks passed, she began to relax, at least around Lila. Sometimes she would even talk, although Lila guessed she’d never been a great conversationalist, even in her prime.

“Things are better now,” Essie said once. “I have my very own house.” She looked fondly down at the dolls in her lap. “My girls like it. Their names are Jingle, Pingle, and Ringle.”

Lila had asked her on that occasion what her last name was.

“Once it was Wilcox,” Essie said, “but now it’s Estabrook. I have taken back my maidenhood name just like that Elaine woman. This place is better than the old place, and not just because I have my maidenhood name and my very own house. It smells sweeter.”

Today, Essie seemed to have slipped back inside herself a bit. When Lila tried to engage her in conversation, Essie shook her head, made violent shooing motions in Lila’s direction, and rummaged in her rusty shopping cart. From it she removed an ancient Philco table radio and started tossing it from hand to hand. Which was perfectly okay with Lila; let her play hot potato to her heart’s content if that was what eased her mind.

As she was getting ready to break for lunch, Janice Coates rode up on a bicycle. “Sheriff,” she said to Lila. “A word.”

“I’m not the sheriff anymore, Janice. Don’t you read the Dooling Doings? I’m just another local.”

Coates was undeterred. “Fine, but you need to know there’s people disappearing. Three of them now. Too many to be a coincidence. We need someone to look into this situation.”

Lila examined the pumpkin she had just torn from a vine. The top was bright orange, but the underside was black and rotten. She dropped it with a thud in the tilled earth. “Talk to the Redevelopment Committee, or bring it up at the next Meeting. I’m retired.”

“Come on, Lila.” Coates, perched on the seat of the bike, crossed her bony arms. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re not retired, you’re depressed.”

Feelings, Lila thought. Men almost never wanted to talk about them, women almost always did. It could get boring. That came as a surprise. It came to her that she might have to re-evaluate some of her resentments about Clint’s stoicism.

“I can’t, Janice.” Lila walked down the row of pumpkins. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m depressed, too,” said Janice. “I may never see my daughter again. I think of her first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Every damn day. And I miss calling my brothers. But I’m not about to let that—”

There was a dull thump and a soft cry from behind them. Lila glanced around. The radio lay on the grass next to Jingle, Pingle, and Ringle. The dolls stared up at the cloudless sky with their flat, beatific expressions. Essie was gone. There was a single brown moth where she had been. It fluttered aimlessly for a moment, then flew up and away, trailed, faintly, by the smell of fire.

CHAPTER 3

“Holy fucking shit!” Eric Blass cried. He was sitting on the ground, and staring up. “Did you see that?”

“I’m still seeing it,” Don replied, looking at the flock of moths winging above the tennis courts and toward the high school. “And smelling it.”

He had given Eric his lighter, since it was Eric’s idea (also so he could semi-plausibly put it all on the kid, if anyone found out). Eric had squatted, flicked the Zippo alight, and applied it to the edge of the cocoon in the littered den filled with junk. The cocoon had gone up in a crackling flash, as if it had contained gunpowder instead of a crazy homeless lady. The stench was immediate and sulphuric. It was like God himself had cut the cheese. Old Essie had sat upright—not that you could see anything more than the outline of her—and seemed to twist toward them. For an instant, her features had clarified, black and silver like a photo negative, and Don had seen her lips rolling back into a snarl. In another beat there was nothing left of her.

The fireball rose to a height of four feet, seeming to revolve as it did so. Then the fireball had turned into moths—hundreds of them. Of the cocoon or a skeleton there was no sign, and the grass where Old Essie had been lying wasn’t so much as charred.

It wasn’t that kind of fire, Don thought. If it had’ve been, we would be baked.

Eric got to his feet. His face was very white, and his eyes were frantic. “What was that? What just happened?”

“I don’t have a fucking clue,” Don said.

“Those Blowtorch Brigades, or whatever they call themselves… have there been any reports from them of burning cocoons that turned into flying bugs?”

“Not that I know of. But maybe they’re not reporting it.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Eric licked his lips. “Yeah, there’s no reason why she’d be different.”

No, there wasn’t any reason why Old Essie would be different from every other sleeping woman in the world. But Don could think of one reason why things in Dooling might be different. Things might be different here because there was a special woman here, one who slept without growing a cocoon around her. And who woke up again.

“Come on,” Don said. “We’ve got work to do on Ellendale Street. Bitch-bags to count. Names to write down. This here… this never happened. Right, partner?”

“Right. Absolutely.”

“You’re not going to talk about it, are you?”

“Jesus, no!”

“Good.”

But I might talk about it, Don thought. Not to Terry Coombs, though. It had only taken Don a couple of days to come to the conclusion that the man was next door to useless. A what-did-you-call-it, a figurehead. And he seemed to have a drinking problem, which was truly pathetic. People who couldn’t control their urges repulsed Don. That guy Frank Geary, though, the one Terry had appointed his chief deputy… that one was a thinking cat, and he was keenly interested in the Evie Black woman. He’d have her sprung soon, if not already. He was the one to talk to about this, if talking had to be done.

But he needed to think about it first.

Very carefully.

“Don?”

They were back in the truck. “Yeah, kid?”

“Did she see us? It seemed like she saw us.”

“No,” said Don. “She didn’t see nothing, just exploded. Don’t be a pussy, Junior.”

Terry said he wanted to go home and think about their next move. Frank, who was pretty sure the acting sheriff’s next move would be lying down to sleep it off, said that was a good idea. He saw Terry to his front door, then drove directly to the sheriff’s station. There he found Linny Mars pacing circles with a laptop in her hands. There was a crust of white powder around her nostrils. Her cheeks were colored a hectic red. Her eyes were bleary and sunken. From the laptop came the all-too-familiar sounds of chaos.

“Hi, Pete.”

She had been calling him Pete since yesterday. Frank didn’t bother correcting her. If he did, she’d remember he was Frank for a few minutes, then revert to Pete. Short-term memory loss was common among the women who were still awake. Their frontal lobes were melting like butter in a hot pan. “What are you watching?”

“YouTube vids,” she said, not slowing her circuit of the office. “I could watch at my desk, I know, Gertrude’s screen is much bigger, but every time I sit down I start to float away. Walking is better.”

“Gotcha. What’s on?” Not that he really needed an update. Frank knew what was going on: bad things.

“Clips from Al Jazeera. All the news networks are going crazy, but Al Jazeera’s absolutely shitting themselves. The whole Mideast is on fire. Oil, you know. Oil wells. At least no nukes yet, but somebody over there will pop one eventually, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Linny, I wonder if you could look something up for me. I tried on my phone and couldn’t get anywhere. I guess prison personnel’s pretty cagey about their personal info.”

Linny was walking faster now, still staring at her laptop, which she held out in front of her like a chalice. She stumbled over a chair, almost fell, righted herself, and forged onward. “The Shias are fighting the Sunnis, and ISIL is fighting them both. Al Jazeera had a panel of commentators on, and they seem to think it’s because the women are gone. They say that without females to protect, though their idea of protection sure isn’t mine, some central psychological underpinning of Judaism and Islam is gone. Like both of those things are the same. Basically still blaming the women, even after they’ve gone to sleep. Bonkers, huh? In England—”

Enough news of the world, Frank thought. He clapped his hands repeatedly in front of Linny’s face. “I need you to do your job for a minute, hon. Could you do that for me?”

She snapped to attention. “Absolutely! What do you need, Pete?”

“Terry asked me to get an address for Lawrence Hicks. He’s the assistant warden up at Correctional. Can you find that for me?”

“Walk in the park, piece of cake, can of corn. Got all their phone numbers and addresses. In case there’s trouble up there, you know.”

But it didn’t turn out to be a walk in the park, after all. Not in Linny’s current state. Frank waited patiently as she sat at her desk, first trying one file and backing out, then another, then a third, shaking her head and cursing the computer as people did even when it was their own fault. Once she started to nod off and he saw a fine white thread spinning out of her ear. He clapped his hands again in front of her nose. “Concentrate, Linny, okay? This could be important.”

Her head jerked up. The thread snapped off, floated, disappeared. She gave him a loopy smile. “Roger that. Hey, remember that night we went line-dancing at Halls of Ivy over in Coughlin, and they kept playing that ‘Boot-Scootin’ Boogie?’ ”

Frank had no idea what she was talking about. “I sure do. Lawrence Hicks. Address.”

She finally got it. Sixty-four Clarence Court, on the south side of town. Just about as far from the prison as you could get, and still be a Dooling resident.

“Thanks, Linny. Better get some coffee.”

“I think I’ll settle for Colombian marching powder instead of Colombian roast. Works better. God bless the Griner brothers.”

The phone rang. Linny grabbed the receiver. “Police!” For about three seconds she listened, then hung up.

“They keep calling to ask. ‘Is it true that there’s a woman up at the prison—’ Blah, blah, blah. Do I look like the newspaper?” She gave him a desperately unhappy smile. “I don’t know why I bother staying awake. I’m just postponing the inevitable.”

He bent down and rubbed her shoulder with his fingertips, didn’t know he was going to do it until it was done. “Hang in. There might be a miracle waiting around the next bend in the road. You won’t know until you get there.”

Linny started to cry. “Thanks, Dave. That’s a nice thing to say.”

“I’m a nice man,” Frank said, who did try to be nice, but found that it wasn’t always possible. In the long run, he suspected niceness didn’t pull the plow. Frank didn’t like that. It didn’t give him any pleasure. He wasn’t sure Elaine had ever grasped that he didn’t actually enjoy losing his temper. But he saw how it was. Someone had to pull the plow, and in Dooling, that was him.

He left, feeling sure that the next time he saw Linny Mars, she would be in a cocoon. What some of the deputies had started calling bitch-bags. He didn’t approve of the term, but he didn’t stop them. That was Terry’s job.

He was the sheriff, after all.

Behind the wheel of Unit Four once more, Frank got on the horn to Reed Barrows and Vern Rangle in Unit Three. When Vern answered, Frank asked if they were still in the Tremaine Street area.

“Yup,” said Vern, “and making fast work of it. Not many sleepers in this neighborhood once you get past the sheriff’s place. You should see all the For Sale signs. Guess the so-called economic recovery never made it this far.”

“Uh-huh. Listen, you two, Terry says he wants to locate Sheriff Norcross and her son.”

“Their house is empty,” Vern said. “We already checked it. I told Terry that. I think maybe he’s been…” Vern must have suddenly realized that what he was saying was going out over the air. “He’s been, you know, a little overworked.”

“No, he knows that,” Frank said. “He wants you to start checking the empty houses, too. I seem to remember there’s a whole cul-de-sac that’s unfinished a little further up. If you find them, just say howdy and move on. But then get in touch with me right away, all right?”

Reed took the mic. “I think if Lila’s not awake, Frank, then she must have wandered off into the woods or something. Otherwise she’d be in a cocoon at home or at the sheriff’s station.”

“Look, I’m just passing on what Terry told me.” Frank certainly wasn’t going to tell those two what seemed obvious to him: Norcross was a step ahead. If his wife was still awake, she’d still be in charge. Therefore, the doc had phoned his son and told the kid to move Lila to a safer place. It was another indication that the man was up to mischief. Frank was sure they wouldn’t be far from home.

“Where is Terry, anyway?” Reed asked.

“I dropped him off at his house,” Frank said.

“Jesus.” Reed sounded disgusted. “I hope he’s up to this job, Frank. I really do.”

“Can that talk,” Frank said. “Remember you’re on the air.”

“Roger that,” Reed said. “We’ll start checking the empty houses further up Tremaine. That section’s on our list, anyway.”

“Great. Unit Four is clear.”

Frank racked the mic and headed for Clarence Court. He badly wanted to know where Lila Norcross and her son were—they could be the levers he needed to end the situation bloodlessly—but that was second on his list. It was time to get some answers about Ms. Eve Black.

Jared answered on the second ring. “This is the CDC, Dooling branch, epidemiologist Jared Norcross speaking.”

“No need for that, Jere,” Clint said. “I’m alone in my office. Is Mary okay?”

“Yeah, for now. She’s walking around in the backyard. She says the sun perks her up.”

Clint felt vague alarm, and told himself not to be such an old biddy. Privacy fences, lots of trees; she’d be okay back there. It wasn’t as if Terry and his new second-in-command could send out a drone or a helicopter.

“I don’t think she can stay awake much longer, Dad. I don’t know how she’s managed it this long.”

“Me, either.”

“And I’m not sure why Mom wanted us up here, anyway. There’s some furniture, but the bed is hard.” He paused. “Guess that sounds pretty whiny, huh? With all that’s going on?”

“People tend to focus on the small things to keep the big ones from overwhelming them,” Clint said. “And your mom was right, Jere.”

“You don’t really think a Blowtorch Brigade is going to start up in Dooling, do you?”

Clint thought of the title of an old novel—It Can’t Happen Here. The point being that anything could happen anywhere. But no, it wasn’t a Dooling Blowtorch Brigade he was currently worried about.

“There are things you don’t know,” Clint said, “but since other people do—or suspect, at least—I’ll bring you up to speed tonight.” After that I might not get many more chances, he thought. “I’ll bring you and Mary dinner. Double hamburg, double mush from Pizza Wagon sound okay? Assuming they’re still open for business?”

“Sounds awesome,” Jared said. “How about a clean shirt, too?”

“It will have to be an officer’s blueshirt,” Clint said. “I don’t want to go by the house.”

Jared didn’t reply at first. Clint was about to ask if he was still there when his son said, “Please tell me you’re just being paranoid.”

“I’ll explain everything when I get there. Keep Mary awake. Remind her she can’t eat pizza through a cocoon.”

“I’ll do that.”

“And Jared?”

“Yeah?”

“The cops aren’t keeping me apprised of their strategy for dealing with the local situation—I’m not their favorite person right now—but if I were them, I’d be grid-searching the town and keeping a master list of all the sleeping women, plus their locations. Terry Coombs might not be smart enough or on top of things enough to think of that, but I believe there’s a man who’s working with him who is.”

“Okay…”

“If they show up where you are, keep quiet and… is there a storage space in that house? Other than the cellar, I mean?”

“Not sure, I haven’t exactly searched it, but I think there’s an attic.”

“If you see cops on the street, you should get everyone up there.”

“Jesus, really? You’re kind of freaking me out here, Pop. I’m not sure I’m following you. Why shouldn’t I let the cops find Mom and Mrs. Ransom and Molly? They’re not burning women here, right?”

“No, they’re not, but it could still be dangerous, Jared. For you, for Mary, and especially for your mother. Like I said, the police aren’t very happy with me right now. It has to do with the woman I told you guys about, the one who’s different. I don’t want to get into the details now, but you have to believe me. Can you get them up to the attic or not?”

“Yeah. I hope I don’t have to, but yeah.”

“Good. I love you, and I’ll be there soon, hopefully bearing pizza.”

But first, he thought, I’m going to take another run at Evie Black.

When Clint got to A Wing, carrying a folding chair from the common room under one arm, Jeanette was standing by the door to the shower and the delousing station, having a conversation with an individual who didn’t exist. It seemed to be some kind of convoluted dope deal. She said she wanted the good stuff, the Blues, because they mellowed Damian out. Evie was at the bars of her cell, watching this with what appeared to be sympathy… although with the mentally unbalanced, you could never be sure. And speaking of the mentally unbalanced, Angel was sitting on the bunk in a nearby cell with her lowered head propped on her hands and her hair hiding her face. She looked up briefly at Clint, said, “Hello, cocksucker,” and lowered her head again.

“I know where you get it,” Jeanette was saying to the invisible pusher, “and I know you can get it now. It’s not like they close at midnight. Do me a favor, okay? Please? Please? I don’t want Damian in one of those moods. And Bobby’s teething, too. My head can’t take it.”

“Jeanette,” Clint said.

“Bobby?” She blinked at him. “Oh… Dr. Norcross…” Her face seemed attenuated now, as if all muscles there had already gone to sleep and were only waiting for her stubborn brain to follow. It made Clint think of an old joke. Horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says, Hey, buddy, why the long face?

Clint wanted to explain to her why he’d ordered the officers to disable the payphones, and apologize for preventing her from calling her son to make sure the boy was all right. He wasn’t certain, however, that Jeanette would be able to comprehend him at this point, and if she did, if it would achieve anything, or only distress her further. The liberties that Clint had taken with the lives of the prison’s women, the lives of his patients, were grotesque. That he felt he had no alternative did not make it less grotesque or cruel. And that didn’t cover all of it, not by a long shot. It was because of Evie that he’d had to do all of it—and he realized, suddenly, insane or not, he hated her for that.

“Jeanette, whoever you—”

“Don’t bother me, Doc, I gotta do this.”

“I want you to go out to the exercise yard.”

“What? I can’t do that, at least not by myself, I can’t. This is a prison, you know.” She turned from him and peered into the shower. “Oh now look, the man’s gone. You scared him away.” She gave a single dry sob. “What’ll I do now?”

“None of the doors are locked, sweetheart.” Never in his life had Clint used such a term of intimacy when addressing an inmate, but now it came naturally, without thought.

“I’ll get on Bad Report if I do that!”

“She’s lost it, Doc,” Angel said without looking up.

“Go on, Jeanette,” Evie said. “Out to the furniture shop, across the exercise yard, into the garden. There are new peas there, as sweet as honey. Fill your pockets and come back. Dr. Norcross and I will be done by then, and we can have a picnic.”

“A pea-pea picnic,” Angel said through the screen of her hair, and snickered.

“Go on, now,” Evie said.

Jeanette eyed her uncertainly.

“The man may be out there,” Evie coaxed. “In fact, I’m sure he is.”

“Or possibly up your dirty ass,” Angel said through her hair. “He might be hiding there. Go find me a wrench and I’ll help you find him.”

“You got a bad mouth, Angel,” Jeanette said. “Bad.” She started up the short A Wing corridor, then stopped, staring fixedly down at a slanting oblong of sun on the floor as if hypnotized.

“I say you can’t not be bothered by a square of light,” Evie said quietly.

Jeanette laughed, and exclaimed, “That’s right, Ree! That’s right! It’s all Lying for Prizes, isn’t it?”

She went on, step by slow step, weaving left and correcting, weaving right and correcting.

“Angel?” Evie said.

She spoke in that same quiet, courteous voice, but Angel looked up at once, seemingly wide awake.

“Dr. Norcross and I are going to have a brief consultation. You may listen, but you need to keep your mouth closed. If you don’t, I’ll stop it up with a rat and it will eat the tongue right out of your head.”

Angel stared at her for several seconds, then lowered her face into her hands again.

Officer Hughes showed up just as Clint was unfolding his chair outside Evie’s cell. “Inmate just went outside,” he said. “Looked like she was headed for the garden. That okay?”

“It’s fine, Scott. But keep an eye on her, would you? If she falls asleep out there, get her into the shade before she starts to grow a cocoon. We’ll bring her in after she’s completely wrapped.”

“Okay, boss.” Hughes sketched a salute and left.

Boss, Clint thought. Jesus-God, boss. I wasn’t nominated, I didn’t campaign, but I got the job, anyway.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” Evie said. “Henry IV, Part Two. Not one of his best, but not bad. You know they had boys play the women’s parts back then, right?”

She is not a mind-reader, Clint told himself. The men came, just as she predicted, but I could have predicted that. It’s simple logic. She’s got the skills of a good carnival fortune-teller, but she is not a mind-reader.

Yes, and he could go on believing that as long as he liked—it was a free country. Meanwhile, she was looking at him with curiosity and interest, eyes aware and totally awake. Probably the only woman alive who still looked like that.

“What shall we talk about, Clint? Shakespeare’s history plays? Baseball? The last season of Doctor Who? Too bad it ended on a cliffhanger, huh? I’m afraid it’s reruns from here on out. I have it on good authority that the doctor’s companion fell asleep a couple of days ago and now she’s riding in a TARDIS through her own innerspace. Maybe they can recast, though, go all male next season.”

“Sounds good,” said Clint, automatically falling into shrink mode.

“Or should we tackle something more germane to the current situation? I’d suggest the last, because time is getting short.”

“I’m interested in this idea you have about the two of us,” Clint said. “You being the Woman, and me being the Man. Symbolic figures. Archetypes. Yin and yang. The king on one side of the chessboard, the queen on the other.”

“Oh, no,” she said, smiling. “We’re on the same side, Clint. White king and white queen. On the other side, arrayed against us, is an entire army of black pieces. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Emphasis on men.”

“That’s interesting, that you see us on the same side. I didn’t get that before. And when, exactly, did you begin to realize that?”

The smile faded. “Don’t. Don’t you do it.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Fall back on DSM IV. To deal with this, you need to let go of certain rational assumptions and rely on intuition. Embrace your female side. Every man has one. Just think of all the male authors who have put on the dress. Mildred Pierce, by James Cain, for example. That’s a personal favorite.”

“There are a lot of female psychiatrists who would object to the idea that—”

“When we spoke on the phone, while your wife was still awake, you believed what I was telling you. I could hear it in your voice.”

“I was in… a strange place that night. Dealing with personal issues. Look, I’m not discounting your influence, your powers, however you want to characterize it. Let’s assume you’re in control. At least for today.”

“Yes, let’s assume that. But tomorrow they may come for me. If not then, the next day, or the one after that. It won’t be long. While in the other world, the one beyond the Tree, time is moving at a much faster pace—months are reeling by there. There are dangers, but with every one the women surmount, it becomes less likely that they will want to return to this world.”

“Let’s say I understand and believe even half of what you’re saying,” Clint said. “Who sent you?”

“President Reginald K. Dinkleballs,” Angel blurted from the neighboring cell. “Either him, or Lord Herkimer Jerkimer. Maybe—”

Then she screamed. Clint turned in time to see a large brown rat scamper through the bars and into Angel’s cell. She drew her feet up on the bunk and screamed again. “Git it out! Git it out! I hate rats!”

“Are you going to be quiet, Angel?” Evie asked.

“Yes! Yes! I promise! Yes!”

Evie twirled her finger, like an umpire signaling a home run. The rat reversed out of Angel’s cell and squatted in the corridor, watching her with beady eyes.

Clint turned back to Evie. He’d had a series of questions in mind when he came down here, questions designed to make her face her delusions, but now they were blown away like a house of cards in a strong wind.

I am the one with the delusions, he thought. Holding onto them so I don’t go completely insane.

“No one sent me,” Evie said. “I came on my own.”

“Can we make a deal?” he asked.

“We already have one,” Evie said. “If I live through this, if you save me, the women are free to decide their own course. But I warn you: the big guy, Geary, is very determined to have me. He thinks he can control the other men and capture me alive, but he’s probably wrong about that. And if I die, it’s over.”

“What are you?” he asked.

“Your only hope. I suggest you stop worrying about me and focus all your energies on the men outside these walls. They’re the ones that need to concern you. If you love your wife and son, Clint, you need to work quickly to gain the upper hand. Geary isn’t in complete control yet, but he will be soon. He’s clever, he’s motivated, and he doesn’t trust anyone but himself.”

“I put him off.” Clint’s lips felt numb. “He has his suspicions, yes, but he can’t be sure.”

“He will be, once he talks to Hicks, and he’s on his way there now.”

Clint rocked back on his chair as if she had reached through the bars and slapped him. Hicks! He’d forgotten all about Hicks. Would he keep his mouth shut, if Frank Geary questioned him about Eve Black? Balls he would.

Evie sat forward, her eyes locked on Clint’s. “I’ve warned you about your wife and son, I’ve reminded you that there are weapons you may be able to access, and those things are more than I should have done, but I didn’t expect to like you so much. I suppose I might even be attracted to you, because you’re so damn foolhardy. You’re like a dog barking at the ocean tide, Dr. Norcross. Not to get off the subject, but this is another aspect of the basic problem, the man-woman equation that never balances. Never mind, subject for another time. You have a decision to make: either prepare your defenses, or clear out and let them have me.”

“I’m not going to let them have you,” Clint said.

“Big talk. Very macho.”

Her dismissive tone galled him.

“Does your all-seeing eye know I had to disable the payphones, Evie? That I kept every last woman here from saying goodbye to anyone, even to their children, because we couldn’t risk letting word of you get out any further? That my own son is probably in danger, too? He’s a teenage boy, and he’s taking chances that I’m telling him to take.”

“I know what you’ve done, Clint. But I didn’t make you do anything.”

Clint was suddenly furious with her. “If you believe that, you’re lying to yourself.”

From the shelf, she took Hicks’s phone. “We’re done here, Doctor. I want to play a few games of Boom Town.” She dropped him the wink of a flirty teenager. “I’m getting better all the time.”

“Here we are,” Garth Flickinger said, and brought his battered Mercedes to a stop in front of the late Truman Mayweather’s far more battered trailer.

Michaela regarded it blankly. For the last few days she’d felt like a woman in a dream, and the rusty trailer—up on blocks, surrounded by weeds and discarded auto parts, the police tape now lying on the ground and fluttering lackadaisically—seemed like just another of the peculiar turns dreams take.

But I’m still here, she told herself. My skin is still my skin. Right? She rubbed a hand up one cheek and across her forehead. Right. Still clean of cobwebs. Still here.

“Come on, Mickey,” Garth said, getting out. “If I find what I’m looking for, you’ll be good to go for at least another day or two.”

She tried to open her door, couldn’t find the handle, and simply sat there until Garth came around and opened it for her, with an extravagant bow. Like a boy taking his date to the prom instead of to some shitass trailer in the woods where there was a recent double murder.

“Upsa-daisy and out you come,” Garth said, seizing her arm and pulling. He was bright and lively. Why not? He wasn’t the one who’d been awake for over a hundred hours.

Since that night in the Squeaky Wheel, she and Garth had become fast friends. Or drug buddies, at least. He’d had a large bag of crystal meth—his emergency stash, he said—and that had balanced off the drinks nicely. She’d been happy enough to go home with him when the Wheel finally ran out of booze and closed its doors. Under other circumstances she might even have slept with him—as little as men did for her, sometimes the novelty was appealing, and God knew, the way things were going, she appreciated the company. Not under these circumstances, though. If she slept with him, she would really go to sleep after, she always did, and if she did that, whoopsie, there goes your ballgame. Not that she had any idea if he would even be interested; Garth Flickinger did not present as the most sexual of beings, except in regards to dope, about which he was quite passionate.

The emergency stash turned out to be sizable, and they had kept the party going at Garth’s house for the better part of the next forty-eight hours. When he finally fell asleep for a few hours on Sunday afternoon, she had explored the contents of the doctor’s rolltop desk. It contained, predictably, a stack of medical journals and several scorched drug pipes. Less expected was a creased photo of a baby wrapped in a pink blanket. Cathy was penciled lightly on the reverse side—and in the desk’s bottom cabinet, a big box of reptile vitamin supplements. Next, she played with his jukebox. It held nothing but jam bands, unfortunately; she didn’t need to listen to “Casey Jones”; she was well en route to becoming Casey Jones. Michaela flicked through what seemed like five hundred channels on his el gigantico TV, pausing only to watch those infomercials where the hucksters had the loudest, most offensive, listen-to-me-or-die voices. She seemed to remember ordering a Shark vacuum cleaner and having it sent to her old address in DC. She doubted if it would arrive; although it had been a man who took her call, Michaela was sure that it was women who actually filled the orders. Wasn’t it usually the women who got those kinds of jobs? The crap jobs?

If you see a toilet bowl without a ring, she thought, you know there’s a woman somewhere in the vicinity.

“Trume told me he got hold of the best shit ever, and he wasn’t lying,” Garth said, leading her toward the trailer. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, he was a maniac and he lied almost all the time, but this was the rare instance when he wasn’t.”

The trailer had a hole in the side that was surrounded by a corona of what looked like dried blood—but surely that wasn’t really there. She must be waking-dreaming, quite common among people who had been without sleep for a long time—so said a self-proclaimed expert in a NewsAmerica sidebar piece she’d seen before decamping for the green hills of her Appalachian home town.

“You don’t see a hole in the side of that trailer, do you?” she asked. Even her voice was dreamlike now. It seemed to be issuing from a loudspeaker in the top of Michaela’s head.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “It’s there, all right. Listen, Mickey, Trume called this new stuff Purple Lightning, and I got a sample before the wild woman came on the scene and offed Trume and his sidekick.” Garth was momentarily diverted into reverie. “The guy, he had the stupidest tattoo. That turd from South Park? The one that sings and stuff? It was on his Adam’s apple. Who gets a turd tattoo on his Adam’s apple? You tell me. Even if it’s a witty, singing and dancing turd, it’s still a turd. Everyone who looks at you sees a turd. Not my specialty, but I’ve consulted, and you would not believe what a pain it is to get something like that removed.”

“Garth. Stop. Rewind. The wild woman. Is that the woman people in town are talking about? The one they’re holding at the prison?”

“Uh-huh. She totally Hulked out. I was lucky to get away. But that’s water under the bridge, piss down the sewer pipe, last week’s news, so on and so forth. Doesn’t matter. And we should be grateful for that, trust me. What does matter is this superb crystal. Trume didn’t make it, he got it from Savannah or somewhere, but he was going to make it, dig? Analyze it and then create his own version. He had a two-gallon Baggie of the shit, and it’s in there somewhere. I’m going to find it.”

Michaela hoped so, because resupply was necessary. They had smoked up Garth’s reserves over the last few days, even smoked up the rug-bunnies and a couple of shards they’d found under the couch, Garth insisting that she brush her teeth after every session with the bong. “Because that’s why meth addicts have such bad teeth,” he’d told her. “They get high and forget basic hygiene.”

The stuff hurt her throat, and the euphoric effect had long since worn off, but it kept her awake. Michaela had been almost positive she would fall asleep on the ride out here—it had seemed interminable—but somehow she had managed to stay conscious. And for what? The trailer, balanced crooked on its cement blocks, didn’t exactly look like the Fountain of Awareness. She could only pray that the Purple Lightning wasn’t a fantasy of Garth Flickinger’s dope-addled brain.

“Go ahead,” she said, “but I’m not going in with you. There might be ghosts.”

He looked at her with disapproval. “Mickey, you’re a reporter. A news maven. You know there are no such things as ghosts.”

“I do know that,” Michaela said from the loudspeaker on top of her head, “but in my current state, I might see them anyway.”

“I don’t like leaving you on your own. I won’t be able to slap you if you start nodding off.”

“I’ll slap myself. Go get it. Just try not to be long.”

Garth trotted up the steps, tried the door, and put his shoulder to it when it wouldn’t give. It flew open and he stumbled inside. A moment later he poked his head out the maroon-stained hole in the side of the trailer, a big grin on his face. “Don’t go to sleep, you pretty thing! Remember, I’m going to touch up your nose one of these fine days!”

“In your dreams, buster,” she said, but Garth had already pulled his head back inside. Michaela heard thuds and crashes as he began his search for the elusive Purple Lightning. Which the cops had probably taken and stashed in the evidence locker at the sheriff’s station, if they hadn’t taken it home to their womenfolk.

Michaela wandered to the ruins of the meth-cooking shed. It was surrounded by charred bushes and blackened trees. No meth would be cooked here in the future, purple or otherwise. She wondered if the shed had blown up on its own, as meth-cooking facilities were wont to do, or if the woman who had killed the cookers had blown it up. It was a moot question at this late date, but the woman herself interested Michaela, piqued the natural, seeking curiosity that had made her investigate Anton Dubcek’s dresser drawers when she was eight and eventually led her into journalism, where you got to investigate everybody’s drawers—those in their houses, and those that they wore. That part of her mind was still active, and she had an idea it was keeping her awake as much as Flickinger’s methamphetamine. She had Qs with no As.

Qs like how this whole Aurora business got rolling in the first place. And why, assuming there was a why. Qs about whether or not the world’s women could come back, as Sleeping Beauty had. Not to mention Qs about the woman who had killed the meth dealers, and whose name was, according to some talk they’d overheard at the Squeaky Wheel and in town, either Eve or Evelyn or Ethelyn Black, and who could supposedly sleep and wake again, which made her like no other woman anywhere, unless another existed in Tierra del Fuego or the high Himalayas. This woman might only be a rumor, but Michaela tended to believe there was an element of truth to her. When rumors came to you from different directions, it was wise to pay attention.

If I wasn’t living with one foot in reality and the other in the Land of Nod, Michaela thought, starting up the path beyond the ruined meth shed, I would hie myself to the women’s prison and make some inquiries.

Another Q: Who was running the place up there, now that her mother was asleep? Hicks? Her mother said he had the brain of a gerbil and the spine of a jellyfish. If memory served, Vanessa Lampley was the senior officer on the staff. If Lampley wasn’t there anymore, or if she was snoozing, that left—

Was that humming just in her head? She couldn’t be completely sure, but she didn’t believe so. She thought it was the power lines that ran near here. No big deal. Her eyes, however, were reporting stuff that was harder to dismiss as normal. Glowing splotches like handprints on some of the tree trunks a few feet from the blasted shed. Glowing splotches that looked like footprints on the moss and mulch, as if saying, This way, m’lady. And clumps of moths on many of the branches, perched there and seeming to watch her.

“Boo!” she shouted at one of these clumps. The moths fluttered their wings, but did not take off. Michaela slapped one side of her face, then the other. The moths were still there.

Casually, Michaela turned and looked down the slope toward the shed and the trailer below. She expected to see herself lying on the ground, wrapped in webs, undeniable evidence that she had disconnected from her body and become a spirit. There was nothing, though, except for the ruins and the faint sounds of Garth Flickinger, treasure-hunting his ass off.

She looked back up the path—it was a path, the glowing footprints said so—and saw a fox sitting thirty or forty yards ahead. Its brush was curled neatly around its paws. It was watching her. When she took a hesitant three steps toward it, the fox trotted further up the path, pausing once to glance over its shoulder. It seemed to be grinning amiably.

This way, m’lady.

Michaela followed. The curious part of her was fully awake now, and she felt more aware, more with it, than she had in days. By the time she’d covered another hundred yards, there were so many moths roosting in the trees that the branches were furry with them. There had to be thousands. Hell, tens of thousands. If they attacked her (this brought a memory of Hitchcock’s film about vengeful birds), she’d be smothered. But Michaela didn’t think that was going to happen. The moths were observers, that was all. Sentinels. Outriders. The fox was the leader. But leading her where?

Her trail-guide brought Michaela up a rise, down a narrow dip, up another hill, and through a scrubby stand of birch and alder. The trunks were patched with that weird whiteness. She rubbed her hands over one of the spots. The tips of her fingers glowed briefly, then faded. Had there been cocoons here? Was this their residue? More Qs without As.

When she looked up from her hand, the fox was gone, but that hum was louder. It no longer sounded like power lines to her. It was stronger and more vital. The earth itself was vibrating beneath her shoes. She walked toward the sound, then stopped, awestruck just as Lila Norcross had been on this same spot a bit more than four days before.

Ahead was a clearing. In the center of it, a gnarled tree of many entwined, russet-colored trunks ascended into the heavens. Ferny, prehistoric leaves lolled from its arms. She could smell their spicy aroma, a little like nutmeg, mostly like nothing she had ever smelled in her life. An aviary’s worth of exotic birds roosted in the high branches, whistling and keening and chattering. At the foot was a peacock as large as a child, its iridescent fan spread for Michaela’s delectation.

I am not seeing this, or if I am, all of the sleeping women are seeing it, too. Because I’m like them now. I fell asleep back by the ruins of that meth shed, and a cocoon is weaving around me even as I admire yonder peacock. I must have overlooked myself somehow, that’s all.

What changed her mind was the white tiger. The fox came first, as if leading it. A red snake hung around the tiger’s neck like barbaric jewelry. The snake flicker-flicked its tongue, tasting the air. She could see shadows waxing and waning in the muscles of the tiger’s flanks as it paced toward her. Its enormous green eyes fixed on hers. The fox broke into a trot, and its muzzle scraped against her shin—cool and slightly damp.

Ten minutes before, Michaela would have said she no longer had it in her to jog, let alone run. Now she turned and fled the way she had come in great bounding leaps, batting branches aside and sending clouds of brown moths whirling into the sky. She stumbled to her knees, got up, and ran on. She didn’t turn around, because she was afraid the tiger would be right behind her, its jaws yawning open to bite her in two at the waist.

She emerged from the woods above the meth shed and saw Garth standing by his Mercedes, holding up a large Baggie filled with what looked like purple jewels. “I am part cosmetic surgeon, part motherfucking drug-sniffing dog!” he cried. “Never doubt it! The sucker was taped to a ceiling panel! We shall… Mickey? What’s wrong?”

She turned and looked back. The tiger was gone, but the fox was there, its brush once more curled neatly around its paws. “Do you see that?”

“What? That fox? Sure.” His glee evaporated. “Hey, it didn’t bite you, did it?”

“No, it didn’t bite me. But… come with me, Garth.”

“What, into the woods? No thanks. Never a Boy Scout. I only have to look at poison ivy to catch it. Chemistry Club was my thing, ha-ha. No surprise there.”

“You have to come. I mean it. It’s important. I need… well… verification. You won’t catch poison ivy. There’s a path.”

He came, but without any enthusiasm. She led him past the ruined shed and into the trees. The fox just trotted at first, then sprinted ahead, weaving between the trees until it was lost to view. The moths were also gone, but…

“There.” She pointed at one of the tracks. “Do you see that? Please tell me you do.”

“Huh,” Garth said. “I’ll be damned.”

He tucked the precious Baggie of Purple Lightning into his unbuttoned shirt and took a knee, examining the luminous footprint. He used a leaf to touch it gingerly, sniffed the residue, then watched the spots fade.

“Is it that cocoon stuff?” Michaela asked. “It is, isn’t it?”

“It might have been once,” Garth said. “Or possibly an exudation of whatever causes the cocoons. I’m just guessing here, but…” He got to his feet. He seemed to have forgotten that they had come out here searching for more dope, and Michaela glimpsed the intelligent, probing physician who occasionally roused himself from the king-sized bed of meth inside Garth’s skull. “Listen, you’ve heard the rumors, right? Maybe when we went downtown for more supplies at the grocery?” (Said supplies—beer, Ruffles potato chips, ramen noodles, and an economy-sized tub of sour cream—had been meager. The Shopwell had been open, but pretty much ransacked.)

“Rumors about the woman,” she said. “Of course.”

Garth said, “Maybe we really do have Typhoid Mary right here in Dooling. I know it seems unlikely, all the reports say Aurora started on the other side of the world, but—”

“I think it’s possible,” Michaela said. All her machinery was working again, and at top speed. The feeling was divine. It might not last long, but while it did, she meant to ride it like one of those mechanical bulls. Yahoo, cowgirl. “And there’s something else. I might have found where she came from. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Ten minutes later, they stood at the edge of the clearing. The fox was gone. Ditto tiger and peacock with fabulous tail. Also ditto exotic birds of many colors. The tree was still there, only…

“Well,” Garth said, and she could practically hear his attentiveness dwindling away, air whistling out from a punctured floatation device, “it’s a fine old oak, Mickey, I’ll give you that, but otherwise I see nothing special.”

“I didn’t imagine it. I didn’t.” But already she was beginning to wonder. Perhaps she had imagined the moths, too.

“Even if you did, those glowing handprints and footprints are definitely X-Files material.” Garth brightened. “I’ve got all those shows on disc, and they hold up remarkably well, although the cell phones they use in the first two or three seasons are hilarious. Let’s go back to the house and smoke up and watch some, what do you say?”

Michaela did not want to watch The X-Files. What she wanted was to drive to the prison and see if she could score an interview with the woman of the hour. It seemed like an awful lot of work, and it was hard to imagine persuading anyone to let her in looking as she did now (sort of like the Wicked Witch of the West, only in jeans and a shell top), but after what they had seen up here, where that woman had reportedly made her first appearance…

“How about a real-life X-File?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s take a ride. I’ll tell you on the way.”

“Maybe we could try this stuff out first?” He shook the Baggie hopefully.

“Soon,” she said. It would have to be soon, because weariness surrounded her. It was like being stuck in a suffocating black bag. But there was one tiny rip in it, and that rip was her curiosity, letting in a shaft of bright light.

“Well… okay. I guess.”

Garth led their return down the path. Michaela paused long enough to take a look back over her shoulder, hoping to surprise the amazing tree back into existence. But it was just an oak, broad and tall but not in the least supernatural.

The truth is out there, though, she thought. And maybe I’m not too tired to find it.

Nadine Hicks was of the old school; in the days before Aurora she had been wont to introduce herself as “Mrs. Lawrence Hicks,” as though by marrying her husband, she had to some degree become him. Now she was wrapped up like a wedding present and reclining at the dining room table. Set in front of her was an empty plate, an empty glass, napkin and cutlery. After letting Frank into the house, Hicks brought him into the dining room, and the assistant warden sat down at the cherrywood table across from his wife to finish his breakfast.

“I bet you think this is weird,” said Hicks.

No, Frank thought, I don’t think arranging your cocooned wife at the dining table like a giant mummified doll is weird at all. I think it’s, oh, what’s the word? Ah, there it is: insane.

“I’m not going to judge you,” Frank said. “It’s been a big shock. Everyone’s doing the best they can.”

“Well, Officer, I’m just trying to keep to a routine.” Hicks was dressed up in a suit and he’d shaved, but there were huge bags under his eyes and the suit was wrinkled. Of course, everyone’s clothes seemed to be wrinkled now. How many men knew how to iron? Or to fold, for that matter? Frank did, but he didn’t own an iron. Since the separation, he took his clothes to Dooling Dry Cleaners, and if he needed a pair of creased pants in a hurry, he put them under the mattress, lay down for twenty minutes or so, and called it good.

Hicks’s breakfast was chipped beef on toast. “Hope you don’t mind if I eat. Good old shit-on-a-shingle. Moving her around works up an appetite. After this, we’re going to sit out in the yard.” Hicks swiveled to his wife. “Isn’t that right, Nadine?”

They both waited a couple of pointless seconds, as if she might respond. Nadine just sat there, though, an alien statue behind her place setting.

“Listen, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, Mr. Hicks.”

“It’s fine.” Hicks scooped up a toast point and took a bite. Droplets of white mush and beef splatted down on his knee. “Darn it.” Hicks chuckled through his mouthful. “Running out of clean clothes already. Nadine’s the one who does the laundry. Need you to wake up and get on that, Nadine.” He swallowed his bite, and gave Frank a small, serious nod. “I scoop the litter box and take out the trash on Friday mornings. It’s equitable. A fair division of labor.”

“Sir, I just want to ask you—”

“And I gas up her car. She hates those self-service pumps. I used to tell her, ‘You’ll have to learn if I predecease you, honey.’ And she’d say—”

“I want to ask you about what’s going on at the prison.” Frank also wanted to get away from Lore Hicks as quickly as possible. “There’s a woman there that people are talking about. Her name’s Eve Black. What can you tell me about her?”

Hicks studied his plate. “I would avoid her.”

“So, she’s awake?”

“She was when I left. But yes, I would avoid her.”

“They say that she sleeps and wakes. Is that true?”

“It seemed like she did, but…” Hicks, still staring at his plate, angled his head, as if he were suspicious of his shit on toast. “I hate to beat a dead horse, but I would let that one go, Officer.”

“Why do you say that?” Frank was thinking of the moths that had burst up from the clipping of web that Garth Flickinger had lit. And the one that had seemed to fix its eyes on him.

“She took my phone,” said Hicks.

“Pardon? How did she do that?”

“She threatened me with rats. The rats are with her. They do her bidding.”

“The rats do her bidding.”

“You see the implications, don’t you? Like every hotel, every prison has rodents. Cutbacks exacerbate the problem. I remember Coates complaining about having to cancel the exterminator. No room in the budget. They don’t think about that at the legislature, do they? ‘It’s just a prison. What are a few rats to an inmate, when they are rats themselves?’ Well, what if one of the inmates learns to control the rats? What then?” Hicks pushed his plate away. Apparently his appetite had left him. “Rhetorical question, of course. Legislature doesn’t think of things like that.”

Frank hovered in the doorway of the Hickses’ dining room, contemplating the likelihood that the man was suffering from hallucinations brought on by stress and grief. But there was the fragment of web that had turned into moths—what about that? Frank had seen it happen. And hadn’t a moth stared Frank down? That might have been a hallucination (he himself was suffering from stress and grief, after all), but Frank didn’t really think so. Who was to say that the assistant warden hadn’t completely lost his marbles? And who was to say he wasn’t telling the truth?

Maybe he’d lost his marbles because he was telling the truth. How about that for an unpleasant possibility?

Hicks stood up. “Since you’re here, would you mind helping me carry her outside? My back’s aching, and I’m not exactly young anymore.”

There were few things he wanted to do less, but Frank agreed. He took Nadine Hicks’s bulked-up legs and her husband gripped her under her bulked-up armpits. They hoisted her and went out the front door, down the steps, and along the side of the house, carefully carrying the woman between them. The webbing crackled like Christmas paper.

“Just hold on there, Nadine,” Hicks told the white membrane that surrounded his wife’s face. “We’re going to get you set up good in the Adirondack. Get you some sun. I’m sure it filters through.”

“So who’s supposed to be in charge now?” Frank asked. “At the prison?”

“No one,” said Hicks. “Oh, I suppose Van Lampley could make a claim, if she’s still upright. She’s the senior officer.”

“The psychiatrist, Dr. Norcross, claims he’s the acting warden,” Frank said.

“Nonsense.”

They settled Mrs. Hicks in a bright yellow Adirondack chair on the stone patio. There was, of course, no sun. Not today. Just the same light rain. Instead of soaking in, the precipitation beaded on the surface of the cocoon, the way it would on the fabric of a waterproof tent. Hicks began to half-rock, half-drag over a stand-up umbrella. The umbrella’s base screeched across the stone. “Have to be careful, can’t apply sunblock with that stuff on her, and she burns very easily.”

“Norcross? The psychiatrist?”

Hicks chuckled. “Norcross is just a contractor. He doesn’t have any authority. He wasn’t appointed by anybody.”

This didn’t surprise Frank. He’d suspected that Norcross’s line of bullshit was just that—a line. It did piss him off, though. Lives were at stake. Plenty of them, but it was okay to think mostly of Nana, because she stood for all the rest. There was no selfishness in what he was doing when you looked at it that way; seen in that light, it was altruistic! Meanwhile, he needed to stay cool.

“What kind of a man is he? This shrink?”

Hicks got the umbrella situated and opened it over his wife. “There.” He took a few deep breaths. Sweat and rain had darkened his collar. “He’s smart, I’ll give him that. Too smart, actually. No business working in a prison. And think of this: he is awarded a full-time salary, almost the equal of my own, and yet we cannot afford an exterminator. This is politics as we know it in the twenty-first century, Officer Geary.”

“What do you mean when you say he has no business working in a prison?”

“Why didn’t he go into private practice? I’ve seen his records. He’s published. Got the right degrees. I’ve always figured there was something off about him, wanting to hang around with reprobates and drug addicts, but I couldn’t say what. If it’s a sex thing, he’s been extremely cautious. That’s your first idea when you think of a man who likes to work with female criminals. But I don’t think that’s it.”

“How would you deal with him? Is he reasonable?”

“Sure, he’s reasonable. A very reasonable man who also happens to be a politically correct softie. And that’s exactly why I hate to, as you put it, deal with him. We’re not a rehab facility, you know. Prison’s a storage center for people who won’t play by the rules and suck at cheating. A garbage can, when you come right down to it, and we’re paid to sit on the lid. Coates gets her jollies sparring with him, they’re pally, but he exhausts me. He’ll reason you right out of your shoes.” From his pocket Hicks withdrew a crumpled handkerchief. He used it to dab away some water beads from his wife’s shroud. “Big on eye contact. Makes you think he thinks you’re nuts.”

Frank thanked Lawrence Hicks for his help and went back around to the front where he’d parked. What was Norcross thinking? What reason would he have to keep them from seeing the woman? Why wouldn’t he trust them? The facts only seemed to support one conclusion, and it was an ugly one: for some reason, the doctor was working on the woman’s behalf.

Hicks came jogging after him. “Mr. Geary! Officer!”

“What is it?”

The assistant warden’s expression was tight. “Listen, that woman—” He rubbed his hands together. The light rain stained the shoulders of his wrinkled suit jacket. “If you do talk to her, to Eve Black, I don’t want you to give her the impression that I care about getting my phone back, all right? She can keep it. I’ll use my wife’s if I need to make any calls.”

When Jared hurried out to the rear of the demo house where he and Mary were currently living (if you can call this living, he thought), Mary was leaning against the stake fence with her head in her arms. Fine white threads were spinning out of her hair.

He sprinted to her, almost tripping over the neat-as-pie doghouse (a match for the demo, right down to the miniature blue window frames), grabbed her, shook her, then pinched both earlobes, as she’d told him to do if she started to drift away. She said she’d read on the Internet that it was the quickest way to wake someone up when they were dozing off. Of course there were all sorts of stay-awake remedies on the Internet now, as many as there had once been go-to-sleep strategies.

It worked. Her eyes came back into focus. The strands of white webbing detached themselves from her and lazed upward, disappearing as they went.

“Whoa,” she said, touching her ears and trying on a smile. “Thought I was getting my ears pierced again. There’s a big purple blotch floating over your face, Jere.”

“You were probably looking into the sun.” He took her arm. “Come on. We have to hurry.”

“Why?”

Jared didn’t answer. If his dad was paranoid, then it was catching. In the living room, with its perfectly matching but somehow sterile items of furniture—even the pictures on the wall matched—he paused to look out the window at the sheriff’s department cruiser parked six or seven houses down the street. As he watched, two officers emerged from one of the houses. His mom had invited all her deputies and their wives to dinner at one time or another over the years, and Jared knew most of them. Those two were Rangle and Barrows. Given that all the houses except for this one were empty of furniture, the cops would probably just give them a lick and a promise. They’d be here in no time.

“Jared, stop pulling!”

They had stashed Platinum, Molly, Mrs. Ransom, and Lila in the master bedroom. Mary had wanted to leave them on the ground floor, said it wasn’t as if they were going to care about the décor, or anything. Jared had insisted, thank God, but even the second floor wasn’t enough. Because the demo house was furnished, Rangle and Barrows might decide to really search it.

He got Mary up the stairs, she muttering complaints the whole way. From the bedroom he grabbed the basket containing Platinum’s swathed little body and rushed to pull down the ringbolt in the hallway ceiling. The ladder to the attic descended with a bang. It would have clocked Mary on the head if he hadn’t pulled her out of the way. Jared climbed up, shoved the baby’s basket up over the edge onto the attic floor, and slid back down. Ignoring her questions, he ran to the end of the hall and looked out. The cruiser was creeping along the curb. Only four houses away now. No, three.

He ran to where Mary was standing with her shoulders slumped and her head down. “We have to carry them up there.” He pointed to the ladder.

“I can’t carry anyone,” she said, sounding like a whiny child. “I’m tiyy-erd, Jere!”

“I know. But you can manage Molly, she’s light. I’ll get her gram and my mother.”

“Why? Why do we have to?”

“Because those cops might be looking for us. My father said so.”

He expected her to ask why it would be bad for the deputies to find them, but she didn’t. Jared led her to the bedroom—the women were on the double bed, Molly reposing on a fluffy towel in the en suite bathroom. He picked Molly up and put her in Mary’s arms. Then he got Mrs. Ransom, who seemed heavier than he remembered. But not too heavy, Jared thought, and remembered what his mother liked to sing when he was small: Ack-sen-tuate the positive, elim-i-nate the negative.

“And don’t mess with Mr. In Between,” he said, getting a better grip on what remained of the old lady.

“Huh? Wha?”

“Never mind.”

With Molly in her arms, Mary began to mount the ladder one slow step at a time. Jared (imagining the prowl car already pulling up out front, Rangle and Barrows looking at the sign on the lawn reading COME IN AND LOOK AROUND) socked his shoulder into Mary’s butt when she stopped halfway to the top. She looked down over her shoulder.

“You’re getting a little personal there, Jared.”

“Hurry up, then.”

Somehow she struggled to the top without dropping her burden on his head. Jared followed, panting, pushing Mrs. Ransom through the opening. Mary had set Molly’s small body on the bare boards of the attic. The space ran the length of the house. It was low and very hot.

“I’ll be back,” Jared said.

“Okay, but I’m finding it very hard to care. The heat is making my head ache.”

Jared hurried back to the master bedroom. He got his arms around Lila’s wrapped body and felt his sore knee give a warning twang. He had forgotten about her uniform, her heavy workshoes, and her utility belt. How much did all that add to the weight of a healthy, well-nourished female? Ten pounds? Twenty?

He got her as far as the ladder, contemplated its steep incline, and thought, I’ll never be able to get her up there. No way.

Then the doorbell rang, four cheery ascending chimes, and he started to climb, not panting now but gasping. He made it three-quarters of the way up the ladder, then ran out of gas. Just as he was trying to decide if he could get down without dropping his mother, two slim arms appeared, hands open. Mary, thank God. Jared managed another two steps, and Mary was able to grab Lila.

From below, one of the deputies said, “Not even locked. Door’s wide open. Come on.”

Jared shoved. Mary pulled. Together they managed to get Lila above the level of the trapdoor. Mary collapsed on her back, yanking Lila over and in. Jared grabbed the top of the ladder and pulled. It came up, folding in on itself as it did, and he pressed against it, easing it the last couple of feet so it wouldn’t bang shut.

Down below, the other deputy called, “Yoo-hoo, anybody home?”

“Like some woman in a bitch-bag is going to answer,” the other said, and the two of them laughed.

Bitch-bags? Jared thought. Is that what you’re calling them? If my mother heard something like that come out of your mouths, she’d kick your country asses right up between your shoulder blades.

They were still talking, but moving toward the kitchen side of the house, and Jared could no longer tell what they were saying. His fear had communicated itself to Mary, even in her dopey state, and she put her arms around him. He could smell her sweat, and when her cheek pressed against his, he could feel it.

The voices came back, and Jared sent the cops below a thought command: Leave! The place is obviously empty, so just leave!

Mary whispered in his ear. “There’s food in the fridge, Jere. In the pantry, too. A wrapper I tossed in the wastebasket. What if they—”

Big cop shoes going clump-clump-clump, the deputies came up the stairs to the second floor. That was bad, but they weren’t talking about food in the fridge, or fresh trash in the can beside it, and that was good. (Ack-sen-tuate the positive.) They were discussing what to do about their lunch.

From beneath them and to the left, one of the cops—Rangle, maybe—said, “This bedspread looks kinda rumpled to me. Does it to you?”

“Yeah,” said the other. “Wouldn’t shock me if someone’s been squatting here, but more likely, people that come in to look at the place, prospective buyers, they probably sit down, too, sometimes, right? Or even try the bed. Natural thing to do.”

More footsteps, back out into the hall. Clump-clump-clump. Then they stopped, and this time when the voices came, they were directly below. Mary tightened her arms around Jared’s neck and whispered. “If they catch us hiding up here, they’ll arrest us, won’t they!”

“Shhh,” Jared whispered back, thinking, They would have arrested us even if they found us down there. Only they’d probably call it protective custody.

“Trapdoor in the ceiling,” the one who was probably Barrows said. “You want to go up and check the attic, or should I?”

The question was followed by a moment of silence that seemed to stretch out forever. Then the one who was probably Rangle said, “You can go up if you want to, but if Lila and her kid were in the house they’d be down here. And I got allergies. I’m not going up and breathing a lot of dust.”

“Still…”

“Have at it, buddy,” Rangle said, and all at once the ladder went flopping back down, spilling muted light into the attic. If Lila’s cocooned body had been even six inches closer to the open trapdoor, it would have been in view. “Enjoy the heat up there, too. I bet it’s a hundred and ten.”

“Fuck it,” Barrows said. “And while I’m at it, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Allergies. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

The ladder came back up, this time closing with a loud bang that made Jared twitch even though he’d known it was coming. The big cop shoes went clump-clump-clumping back down the stairs. Jared listened, holding his breath, as the deputies stood in the foyer, talking some more. Low tones. Impossible to catch more than a word or a phrase. Something about Terry Coombs; something about a new deputy named Geary; and something else again about lunch.

Leave! Jared wanted to scream at them. Leave before Mary and me have fucking heatstrokes!

At last the front door shut. Jared strained his ears to catch the sound of their cruiser starting up, but couldn’t. Either he’d spent too much time listening to loud music with his headphones on, or the attic insulation was too thick. He counted to a hundred, then back down to zero. He couldn’t stand to wait any longer. The heat was killing him.

“I think they’re gone,” he said.

Mary didn’t answer, and he realized her formerly tight grip on his neck had slackened. He had been concentrating too hard to notice until now. When he turned to look at her, her arms fell limply to her sides and she collapsed to the board floor.

“Mary! Mary! Don’t go to sleep!”

There was no response. Jared shoved the trapdoor open, not caring about the bang the ladder made when its feet landed on the hardwood floor below. He had forgotten about the cops. Mary was what he cared about now, and all he cared about. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

Only it was. Shaking did no good. Mary had fallen asleep while he was listening to make sure the cops weren’t coming back. Now she was lying beside Lila, her fine features already blurring beneath the white threads that were busily knitting themselves out of nothing.

“No,” Jared whispered. “She tried so hard.”

He sat there for almost five minutes, watching the cocoon thicken, weaving relentlessly, then called his father.

It was all he could think to do.

CHAPTER 4

In the world the women had somehow exited, Candy Meshaum had resided in a house on West Lavin, in the direction of the prison. Which was fitting, because her house had also been a prison. In this new world, she had chosen to live with some other women, all regular attendees of the Meeting, in an enclave they’d made out of a storage facility. The storage facility, like the Shopwell (and unlike the great majority of the other buildings in the area), had stayed almost entirely water-tight over the indeterminate number of years of abandonment. It was an L-shaped structure of two levels, box-upon-box-upon-box, hacked out of the surrounding woods and planted on a cement tarmac. Built of hard plastics and fiberglass, the storage pods had admirably fulfilled the leakproof promise of the faded advertisement on the sign outside. Grasses and trees had encroached on the tarmac, and leaves clogged the gutter system, but it had been an easy project to cut back the overgrowth and clear the drainage, and the opened pods, once emptied of useless boxes of possessions, had proven to be excellent if not exactly beautiful housing.

Although Candy Meshaum had made a sweet try at it, hadn’t she, Lila thought.

She walked around the box, which was filled with the natural light that came through the open bay door. There was a nicely made bed in the middle of the room, draped in a glossy red comforter that picked up the daylight. Hung on the windowless wall was a framed seascape: fair skies and a length of rocky coast. It had perhaps been scavenged from the original stored contents of the pod. In the corner was a rocking chair, and on the floor beside the chair was a basket of yarn punctured by two brass needles. Another basket nearby contained pairs of expertly knitted socks, examples of her work.

“What do you think?” Coates had lingered outside the box to smoke. (Cigarettes, wrapped in foil and cellophane, were another of the things that had lasted quite well.) The warden—former warden—had grown her hair out, allowing it to go white. The way it spread down to her narrow shoulders gave her a prophetic look—as if she had been wandering in the desert in search of her tribe. Lila thought it suited her.

“I like what you’ve done with your hair.”

“Thanks, but I was referring to the woman who ought to be here, but suddenly isn’t.”

Candy Meshaum was one of four women who had lately vanished, counting Essie. Lila had interviewed a number of other women who lived in the neighboring pods. Candy had been seen happily rocking in her chair, knitting, and ten minutes afterward, she was nowhere. The pod was on the second floor of the storage complex, close to the middle, and yet not a single person had seen her slip away, a good-sized woman with a bad limp. It wasn’t inconceivable that she’d managed such a disappearance, but it was improbable.

Her neighbors described Candy as cheerful and happy. One of them, who had known her before, in the old world, used the word reborn. She evinced great pride in her crafts, and in her pretty little decorated box of a home. More than one person mentioned that she referred to her home as “the apartment of her dreams” without a crumb of irony.

“I don’t see anything definitive. Nothing I’d want to take to court,” Lila said. She guessed, however, that what had happened was what had occurred with Essie: there one second, gone the next. Poof. Abracadabra.

“Same thing, isn’t it?” Janice, who had been looking right at Essie, reported seeing a tiny flash—no bigger than a lighter flame—and then nothing. The space that the woman had filled was empty. Janice’s eyes had failed to detect the transformation, or disintegration, or whatever phenomenon had occurred. It was too quick for the eye. It was, the warden said, as if Essie had been turned off like a light bulb, except not even a filament dimmed that quickly.

“Could be,” Lila said. God, she sounded like her lost husband.

“She’s dead,” Janice said. “In the other world. Don’t you think so?”

A moth perched on the wall above the rocking chair. Lila held out her hand. The moth fluttered to it, landing on the fingernail of her index finger. Lila smelled a faint odor of burn.

“Could be,” she repeated. For the moment, this Clint-ism was all she dared to say. “We ought to go back and see the ladies off.”

“Crazy idea,” Janice grumbled. “We’ve got enough to do without exploring.”

Lila smiled. “Does that mean you wish you were going?”

Mimicking Lila, ex–Warden Coates said, “Could be.”

On Main Street, a patrol was about to set off for a look at the world beyond Dooling. There were a half-dozen women in the group, and they’d packed a pair of the golf carts with supplies. Millie Olson, an officer from the prison, had volunteered to take the lead. To this point, no one had ventured much beyond the old town lines. No airplanes or helicopters had flown overhead, no fires had burned in the distance, and no voices had surfaced on the bands of the emergency radios they’d cranked up. It reinforced in Lila that sense of incompleteness she’d felt from the beginning. The world they inhabited now seemed like a reproduction. Almost like a scene inside a snow globe, only without the snow.

Lila and Janice arrived in time to watch the final preparations. A former prisoner named Nell Seeger crouched on the ground by one of the golf carts, humming to herself as she checked the air pressure on the tires. Millie was sifting through the packs loaded onto a trailer hitched to the back, making last minute double-checks of the supplies: sleeping bags, freeze-dried food, clean water, clothes, a couple of toy walkie-talkies that had been found sealed in plastic and actually functioned (somewhat), a couple of rifles that Lila herself had cleaned up, first aid kits. There was an atmosphere of excitement and good humor; there were laughter and high-fives. Someone asked Millie Olson what she’d do if they ran into a bear.

“Tame it,” she deadpanned, not glancing up from the pack she was digging through. This earned a round of laughs from the onlookers.

“Did you know her?” Lila asked Janice. “You know, before?” They were under a sidewalk awning, shoulder to shoulder in winter coats. Their breath steamed.

“Shit, I was her damn boss.”

“Not Millie, Candy Meshaum.”

“No. Did you?”

“Yes,” said Lila.

“And?”

“She was a domestic abuse victim. Her husband beat her. A lot. That’s why she limped. He was a total asshole, a mechanic who made his real money selling guns. Ran a bit with the Griners. Or so it was rumored—we never managed to clip him for anything. He used his tools on her. They lived out on West Lavin in a house that was falling down around their ears. I’m not surprised she didn’t want to try to fix the place up, wouldn’t have been any point. Neighbors called us out more than once, heard her screaming, but she wouldn’t give us a word. Afraid of reprisals.”

“Lucky he never killed her.”

“I think he probably did.”

The warden squinted at Lila. “Do you mean what I think you mean?”

“Walk with me.”

They strolled along the ruins of the sidewalk, stepping over weed-choked fissures, detouring around asphalt chunks. The little park that faced the broken remains of the Municipal Building had been salvaged, trimmed and swept. Here the only sign of time’s passage was the toppled statue of some long-deceased town dignitary. A massive elm branch—storm-tossed, surely—had knocked him off his perch. The branch had been dragged away and chipped, but the dignitary was so heavy no one had done anything about him yet. He had gone down at an acute angle from the plinth, his top hat dug into the ground and his boots to the sky; Lila had seen little girls run up him, using his backside like a ramp, laughing wildly.

Janice said, “You think her son-of-a-bitch husband torched her in her cocoon.”

Lila didn’t answer directly. “Has anyone mentioned feeling dizzy to you? Nauseated? Comes on very suddenly, and then after a couple of hours it goes?” Lila had felt this herself a couple of times. Rita Coombs had mentioned a similar experience; so had Mrs. Ransom, and Molly.

“Yes,” said Janice. “Just about everyone I know has mentioned it. Like being spun around without being spun. I don’t know if you know Nadine Hicks, wife of my colleague at the prison—”

“Met her at a couple of community potlucks,” said Lila, and wrinkled her nose.

“Yeah, she hardly ever missed. And wasn’t missed when she did, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she claims to have that vertigo thing just about all the time.”

“Okay, keep that in mind. Now think about the mass burnings. You know about those?”

“Not personally. I’m like you, I came relatively early. But I’ve heard the newer arrivals talk about seeing it on the news: men burning women in their cocoons.”

“There you go,” Lila said.

“Oh,” Janice replied, getting the drift. “Oh shit.”

“Oh shit covers it, all right. At first I thought—hoped—that maybe it was some sort of misinterpretation on the part of the newer arrivals. They’d been sleep-deprived, of course, and distressed, and maybe they saw something on television that they thought was cocoons being burned, but was actually something else.” Lila inhaled deeply of the late fall air. It was so crisp and clean it made you feel taller. No exhaust smells. No coal trucks. “That instinct, to doubt what women say, it’s always there. To find some reason not to take their word. Men do it… but we do, too. I do it.”

“You’re too hard on yourself.”

“And I saw it coming. I talked about it with Terry Coombs not more than three or four hours before I fell asleep in the old world. Women reacted when their cocoons were torn. They were dangerous. They fought. They killed. It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of men might see the situation as an opportunity, or a precaution, or the pretext they’d always wanted to light a few people on fire.”

Janice offered a slanted smile. “And I get accused of taking a less than sunny view of the human race.”

“Someone burned Essie, Janice. Back in our world. Who knows who. And someone burned Candy Meshaum. Was her hubby upset because his punching bag fell asleep on him? He’d definitely be the first person I’d question, if I was there.”

Lila sat down on the fallen statue. “And the dizziness? I’m pretty sure that’s also because of what’s happening back there. Someone moving us. Moving us around like furniture. Right before Essie was burned, she was in a low mood. I’m guessing that maybe someone moved her a bit before lighting her up and it was the vertigo that had her down.”

“Pretty sure you’ve got your ass on Dooling’s first mayor,” said Janice.

“He can take it. Someone washed his underwear for him. This is our new honorary bench.” Lila realized she was furious. What had Essie or Candy Meshaum ever done, except finally find a few months of happiness out of the entirety of their rotten lives? Happiness that had come at the price of nothing more than a few dolls and a converted storage space with no windows.

And men had burned them. She was sure of it. That was how their story ended. When you died there, you died here, too. Men had ripped them right out of the world—right out of two worlds. Men. There seemed to be no escape from them.

Janice must have read her thoughts… or, more likely, her face. “My husband Archie was a good guy. Supported everything I ever did.”

“Yeah, but he died young. You might not have felt that way if he’d stuck around.” It was an awful thing to say, but Lila didn’t regret it. For some reason, an old Amish saying occurred to her: KISSIN’ DON’T LAST, COOKIN’ DO. You could say that about a lot of things when it came to the wedded state. Honesty. Respect. Simple kindness, even.

Coates gave no sign of offense. “Clint was that bad a husband?”

“He was better than Candy Meshaum’s.”

“Low bar,” Janice said. “Never mind. I’ll just sit here and treasure the gilded memory of my husband, who had the decency to pop off before he became a shit.”

Lila let her head loll back. “Maybe I deserved that.” It was another sunny day, but there were gray clouds to the north, miles of them.

“Well? Was he that bad a husband?”

“No. Clint was a good husband. And a good father. He pulled his weight. He loved me. I never doubted that. But there was a lot he never told me about himself. Things I shouldn’t have had to find out in ways that made me feel bad about myself. Clint talked the talk, about openness and support, talked until his face turned blue, but when you got below the surface, he was your basic Marlboro Man. It’s worse, I think, than being lied to. A lie indicates a certain degree of respect. I’m pretty sure he was carrying a bag of stuff, real heavy stuff, that he thought I was just too delicate to help him with. I’d rather be lied to than condescended to.”

“What do you mean by a bag of stuff… ?”

“He grew up rough. I think he fought his way out, and I mean that literally. I’ve seen the way he rubs his knuckles when he’s preoccupied or upset. But he doesn’t talk about it. I’ve asked, and he does the Marlboro Man thing.” Lila glanced at Coates, and read some variety of unease in her expression.

“You know what I mean, don’t you? From being around him.”

“I suppose I do. Clint has—another side. A harder side. Angrier. I didn’t come to see it clearly until recently.”

“It pisses me off. But you know what’s worse? It’s left me feeling kind of… disheartened.”

Janice was using a twig to poke bits of caked mud off the face of the statue. “I can see how that would dishearten a person.”

The golf carts started to move away, followed by their small, tarp-draped trailers of supplies. The procession moved out of sight and then reappeared for a couple of minutes where the road ascended to higher ground before disappearing for good.

Lila and Janice switched to other topics: the ongoing repairs to the houses on Smith; the two beautiful horses that had been corralled and taught—or perhaps re-taught—how to take riders; and the wonder Magda Dubcek and those two former prisoners claimed to be on the verge of bringing to fruition. If they could get more juice, more solar panels, clean running water seemed to be a foreseeable possibility. Indoor plumbing, the American dream.

It was dusk before they were talked out, and never once did the subject of Clint, of Jared, of Archie, of Candy Meshaum’s husband, of Jesus Christ, or of any other man, again arise to trouble their discourse.

They didn’t talk about Evie, but Lila had not forgotten her. She had not forgotten about the suggestive timing of Eve Black’s appearance in Dooling, or her strange, knowing talk, or the webbed tracks in the woods near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. She had not forgotten about where those tracks had brought her, either, to the Amazing Tree, driving up into the sky on its countless roots and intertwined trunks. As for the animals that had appeared from around the Tree—the white tiger, the snake, the peacock, and the fox—Lila remembered them, too.

Her mental picture of the spiraling roots of the Tree, like the cords for a giant’s sneakers, the way they wound around each other, recurred often. It was so perfect, so majestic, the plan of its being so right.

Had Evie come from the Tree? Or had the Tree come from Evie? And the women of Our Place—were they dreamers, or were they the dream?

Icy rain pelted Our Place for forty-eight hours, snapping tree branches, pouring chilly slop through the holes in roofs, filling the streets and walks with cloudy puddles. Lila, stretched in her tent, occasionally put aside the book she was reading to kick at the walls and break off the frozen coating that had formed on the vinyl. The sound was like breaking glass.

Before, she’d switched from paper books to an e-reader, little suspecting that the world would break down and make such things obsolete. There were still books in her house, though, and a few of them weren’t moldy. When she finished the one she was reading, she ventured from her tent in the front yard to the wreckage of her home. It was too depressing—too redolent of her son and husband—for Lila to imagine living in it, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to move away.

The slicks of rain sliding down the interior walls glistened in the beam of her crank flashlight. The rain sounded like an ocean being stirred. From a shelf at the back of the living room, Lila picked out a damp mystery novel, and started to return the way she had come. The beam caught an odd, parchment-colored leaf, lying on the rotted seat of a stool by the kitchen counter. Lila picked it up. It was a note from Anton: the information for his “tree guy,” to deal with the Dutch Elm in the backyard.

She studied the note for a long time, stunned by it, by the sudden closeness of that other life—her real life? her previous life?—which appeared like a child darting out between parked cars and into traffic.

The exploration party had been gone a week when Celia Frode returned on foot, splattered in mud from head to toe. She was alone.

Celia said that beyond Dooling Correctional, in the direction of the little neighboring town of Maylock, the roads had become impassable; every tree they cleared from the highway only got them a few yards before they came to the next one. It was easier to leave the golf carts and hike.

There was no one in Maylock when they got there, and no sign of recent life. The buildings and houses were like the ones in Dooling—overgrown, in states of greater and lesser disrepair, a few burned by fires—and the road above Dorr’s Hollow Stream, which was now a swollen river with sunken cars for shoals, had collapsed. Probably they should have turned around then, Celia conceded. They’d scavenged useful supplies from the grocery store and other businesses in Maylock. But they got to talking about the movie theater in the small town of Eagle that was another ten miles off, and how great it would be for the kids if they came back with a film projector. Magda had assured them that their big generator would be up to such tasks.

“They still had that new Star Wars movie playing there,” Celia said, and added, wryly, “You know, Sheriff, the one where the girl’s the hero.”

Lila didn’t correct the “Sheriff.” It had turned out to be remarkably difficult to quit being a cop. “Go on, Celia.”

The exploring party crossed the Dorr’s Hollow Stream at a bridge that was still intact, and picked up a mountain road called Lion Head Way that seemed to offer a shortcut to Eagle. The map they’d been using—borrowed from the remains of the Dooling Public Library—showed an old, unnamed coal company road curling off near the top of the mountain. The company road could take them to the interstate, and from there the going would be easy. But the map turned out to be outdated. Lion Head Way now dead-ended at a plateau, where stood that dreary place of male incarceration called Lion Head Prison. The company road they had been hoping to find had been plowed under during the construction of the prison.

Because it was late in the day, rather than attempt to backtrack the narrow, broken decline off the mountain in the dark, they had decided to camp at the prison, and start fresh in the morning.

Lila was all too familiar with Lion Head Prison; it was the maximum security facility where she had anticipated the Griner brothers would spend the next twenty-five or so years.

Janice Coates, also present for Celia’s retelling, had a brief verdict on the prison. “That place. Nasty.”

The Head, as it was called by the men imprisoned there, had been in the media a great deal before Aurora, a rare story of successful land reclamation on the site of a mountaintop removal. After Ulysses Energy Solutions finished deforesting and blasting away the top of the mountain to mine the coal beneath, it “restored” the land by pulling debris up and flattening it out. The oft-promoted idea was that, instead of viewing the mountaintops as “destroyed,” the public ought to see them as having been “opened up.” Newly flattened land was newly buildable land. Although the majority of the state’s population supported the coal industry, few failed to recognize this for the bunkum it was. These wonderfully useful new plateaus were generally situated in the middle of nowhere and often came attended by impoundments of slurry waste or chemical containment ponds, which were not the sort of neighbors anyone wanted.

But a prison was uniquely suitable for backwoods reclamation. And no one had been particularly concerned about the possible environmental dangers that its residents might face. That was how Lion Head Mountain had become the setting for Lion Head Maximum Security Prison.

The prison gate, Celia said, had been open, and the front doors, too. She, Millie, Nell Seeger, and the others had gone in. Most of the exploration party from Our Place consisted of recently released prison inmates and personnel, and they were curious about how the other half had lived. All things being equal, it was pretty comfortable. As much as it reeked from being shut up, and although there were some fissures in the floors and walls, it was dry; and the gear in every cell looked new. “Some déjà vu,” conceded Celia, “but kind of funny, too, you know.”

Their last night had been calm. In the morning, Celia had trekked down the mountain a ways, searching for a trail that might cut off some of the hike and save them having to go all the way down the longer, circuitous route to Eagle. To Celia’s surprise, she’d received a call on her toy walkie-talkie.

“Celia! We think we see someone!” It was Nell.

“What?” Celia had replied. “Say again?”

“We’re inside! Inside the prison! The windows at the end of their version of Broadway are all fogged, but there’s a woman in one of the solitary confinement cells! She’s lying under a yellow blanket! It looks like she’s moving! Millie’s trying to find a way to get the door to release without the power so—” That’s where the transmission ended.

A vast rumble in the earth startled Celia. She held out her hands, trying to balance. The toy walkie flew out of her hand and shattered on the ground.

Returning to the top of the road, lungs burning and legs shaking, Celia went through the prison gate. Powder sifted through the air like snow; she had to cover her mouth to keep from choking. What she saw was hard to process, and even harder to accept. The terrain was shattered, heaved up in clefts as if in the aftermath of an earthquake. Displaced dirt hung in the air. Celia stumbled to her knees several times, eyes slitted almost shut, reaching for anything solid. Gradually, the rectangular shape of the Lion Head intake unit, two stories high, emerged, and then nothing else. There was no more land behind the intake unit, and no more prison. The plateau had crumbled and given way. The new max security facility had gone down the back of the mountain like a great stone child down a slide. Intake was now no more than a film prop, all front and no back.

Celia didn’t dare go all the way to the edge to look down, but she glimpsed a few pieces of wreckage far below: massive cement blocks jumbled at the foot, amid a swamp of dust particles.

“So I came back by myself,” said Celia, “as fast as I could.”

She inhaled and scratched a clean place in the mud on her cheek. The listeners, a dozen women who had hurried to their meeting place at the Shopwell when word spread that she was back, were silent. The others weren’t going to return.

“I recall reading that there was some controversy about the fill under that overgrown jailhouse,” said Janice. “Something about how the ground was too soft for the weight. People saying the coal company cut corners when they were packing it down. State engineers were looking into it…”

Celia let her breath go, a long sigh, and continued absently. “Nell and I always kept it casual. I didn’t expect it to last outside of prison.” She sniffed—just once. “So I probably shouldn’t feel so blue, but there it is: I feel blue as hell.”

There was silence. Then Lila said, “I need to go there.”

Tiffany Jones said, “Want company?”

What they were doing was foolish, Coates said.

“Fucking foolish, Lila. To go off and play around in an avalanche.” She had walked with Lila and Tiffany Jones as far as Ball’s Hill Road. The two expeditionaries were leading a pair of horses.

“We’re not going to play around in an avalanche,” Lila said. “We’re going to play around in the wreckage from an avalanche.”

“And see if someone is still alive in there,” Tiffany added.

“Are you kidding?” Janice’s nose was beet-red in the cold. She appeared ever more oracular, her white hair floating out behind her, the color in her rawboned cheeks as bright as road flares. All that was missing was the gnarled staff and a bird of prey to perch on her shoulder. “They went down the side of a mountain, and the prison landed on top of them. They’re dead. And if they saw a woman in there, she’s dead, too.”

“I know that,” said Lila. “But if they did see a woman in Lion Head, it means there are other women outside of Dooling. Knowing we’re not alone in this world, Janice… that would be huge.”

“Don’t die,” the warden called after them as they rode up Ball’s Hill. Lila said, “That’s the plan,” and beside her, Tiffany Jones chimed in, more conclusively, “We won’t.”

Tiffany had ridden all through her girlhood. Her family had run an apple orchard with a playground, goats to feed, a hotdog stand, and a pony ride. “I used to ride all the time, but… there was some other stuff with the family—downsides, you could say. It wasn’t all ponies. I started to run into some trouble and got out of the habit.”

This trouble was no mystery to Lila, who had personally arrested Tiff more than once. That Tiffany Jones bore startlingly little resemblance to this one. The woman who rode astride the massive roan beside Lila’s smaller white mare was a full-faced, auburn-haired woman in a white cowboy hat that would have suited any John Ford rancher. She had a self-possession about her that was utterly unlike the wretched drug addict Truman Mayweather had regularly tuned up on in the trailer next to his meth lab so long ago, and so far away.

And she was pregnant. Lila had heard Tiffany mention it at a Meeting. That, Lila thought, was where at least part of her glow came from.

It was dusk. They would have to stop soon. Maylock was visible, a spread of dim dark buildings in a valley a couple of miles distant. The exploring party had been there, and found no one, male or female. It seemed that only Dooling held human life. Unless there really had been a woman in the men’s prison, that was.

“You seem like you’re doing pretty well,” said Lila carefully. “Now.”

Tiffany’s laugh was amiable. “The afterlife clears your mind. I don’t want dope, if that’s what you mean.”

“Is that what you think this is? The afterlife?”

“Not really,” said Tiffany, and didn’t pick the subject up again until they were lying in their sleeping bags in the shell of a gas station that had been abandoned in the other world, too.

Tiffany said, “I mean, the afterlife, it’s supposed to be heaven or hell, right?” They could see the horses through the plate glass, tied up to the old pumps. The moonlight gave their coats a sheen.

“I’m not religious,” Lila said.

“Me neither,” Tiffany said. “Anyway, there’s no angels and no devils, so go figure. But isn’t this some kinda miracle?”

Lila thought of Jessica and Roger Elway. Their baby, Platinum, was growing fast, crawling all over the place. (Elaine Nutting’s daughter, Nana, had fallen in love with Plat—an ugly nickname, but everyone used it; the kid would probably hate them for it later—and rolled her everywhere in a rusty baby carriage.) Lila thought of Essie and Candy. She thought of her husband and her son and her whole life that was no longer her life.

“Some kind,” Lila said. “I guess.”

“I’m sorry. Miracle’s the wrong word. I’m just saying we’re doin all right, right? So it’s not hell, right? I’m clean. I feel good. I got these wonderful horses, which I never in my wildest dreams imagined could happen. Someone like me, takin care of animals like these? Never.” Tiffany frowned. “I’m making this all about me, aren’t I? I know you’ve lost a lot. I know most everybody here has lost a lot, and I’m just someone who didn’t have nothing to lose.”

“I’m glad for you.” She was, too. Tiffany Jones had deserved something better.

They skirted Maylock and rode along the banks of the swollen Dorr’s Hollow Stream. In the woods, a pack of dogs gathered on a hummock to observe them as they passed. There were six or seven of them, shepherds and Labs, tongues out, breath steaming. Lila took out her pistol. Beneath her, the white mare rolled its head and shifted its gait.

“No, no,” Tiffany said. She reached a hand across and brushed the mare’s ear. Her voice was soft but steady, not cooing. “Lila’s not gonna shoot that gun.”

“She’s not?” Lila had an eye on the dog in the middle. The animal’s fur was a bristly gray and black. It had mismatched eyes, blue and yellow, and its mouth seemed especially large. She wasn’t a person who typically let her imagination run away from her, but she thought the dog looked rabid.

“She certainly isn’t. They want to chase us. But we’re just doing our thing. We don’t want to play chase. We’re just getting along.” Tiffany’s voice was airy and certain. Lila thought that if Tiffany didn’t know what she was doing, she believed she knew what she was doing. They paced along through the underbrush. The dogs didn’t follow.

“You were right,” Lila said later. “Thanks.”

Tiffany said she was welcome. “But it wasn’t for you. No offense, but I’m not lettin you put a fright in my horses, Sheriff.”

They crossed the river and bypassed the high road the others had taken up the mountain, continuing instead on the lower ground. The horses descended into a dell that formed the gap between what was left of Lion Head on the left and another cliff face on the right, which rose up at a sharp, splintery slant. There was a pervasive metallic stench that tickled the backs of their throats. Crumbles of loose earth shook down, the embedded stones echoing far too loudly in the bowl created by the rises on either side.

They tied up the horses a couple of hundred yards from the prison ruins and approached on foot.

“A woman from somewhere else,” Tiffany said. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Yes,” Lila agreed. “Finding some of our own still alive would be even better.”

Fragments of masonry, some as tall and wide as moving vans, were embedded higher up along the back of Lion Head, stabbed into the earth like enormous cenotaphs. As sturdy as they appeared, Lila could easily imagine them breaking loose under their own weight and tumbling down to join the pile at the bottom.

The body of the prison had hit bottom and folded inward on itself, forming a vaguely pyramid-like shape. In a way, it was impressive, how much of the building’s body had survived the slide down the mountain—and hideous, too, in its decipherability, like a dollhouse smashed by a bully. Spears of jagged steel jutted out from the cement, and massive root-knotted clods of earth had settled on other parts of the debris. At the edges of this unplanned new structure were tattered breaches in the cement that offered glimpses of the black interior. Everywhere there were smashed trees, twenty- and thirty-footers snapped into raw shards.

Lila put on a surgical mask that she’d brought. “Stay here, Tiffany.”

“I wanna come with you. I’m not afraid. Let me have one a them.” She stuck out her hand for a surgical mask.

“I know you’re not afraid. I just want someone able to go back if this place falls in on my head, and you’re the horse girl. I’m just a middle-aged ex-cop. Also, we both know you’re living for two.”

At the nearest opening, Lila paused to wave. Tiffany didn’t see it; she’d walked back to the horses.

Light filtered into the interior of the prison in sabers punched through the smashed concrete. Lila found herself walking atop a wall, stepping on the closed steel doors of cells. Everything was turned one-quarter. The ceiling was on her right. What would have been the left wall was now the ceiling, and the floor was on her left. She had to lower her head to slip under an open cell door that hung down like a trap. She heard ticking noises, dripping noises. Her boots crunched against stone and glass.

A clog composed of rock, shattered pipes, and chunks of insulation obstructed her forward progress. She flicked her flashlight around. A-Level was stenciled in red paint on the wall above her head. Lila backtracked to where the door hung. She jumped and grabbed the doorframe, hoisting herself up into the cell. A hole had broken open in the wall on the opposite side of the hanging door. Lila made her way—carefully—to the breach. She crouched and ducked her way through. Serrations of broken concrete snagged at the back of her shirt, and the fabric tore.

Clint’s voice came to her, inquiring if maybe—just maybe, and don’t take this as an accusation, please—there was a risk-reward ratio that needed to be reconsidered here?

Let’s unpack it, shall we, Lila? The risk is that you are climbing into an unsettled wreck at the bottom of an unsettled mountain. Also, there are goddam wild, deranged-looking dogs out there, and a pregnant drug addict waiting—or not waiting—with the horses. And you are—again, no criticism, merely setting down the facts, darling—forty-five. Everyone knows that the prime age for a woman to crawl around unsettled and volatile ruins is from her late teens to her late twenties. You’re out of the target group. It all adds up to a significant risk of death, horrible death, or unimaginably horrible death.

In the next cell, Lila had to climb over a battered steel toilet, then slip down through another hole in the floor that had been the right wall. Her ankle bent funny when it hit the bottom, and she grabbed for purchase. Something metal slashed her hand.

The wound on her palm was a deep red gash. It probably needed a stitch or two. She ought to turn back, get some ointment and a proper bandage from the first aid kit that they’d brought.

Instead, Lila ripped off a piece of her shirt and wrapped her hand. She used the flashlight to find another stencil on the wall: Secure Wing. This was good. That sounded like exactly the place where they’d seen the woman in the cell. What was bad was that the new hall was situated above her head, a shaft going upward. What was worse was the leg in one canted corner, raggedly severed two inches above the knee. It was clad in green corduroy. Nell Seeger had been wearing green cords when the expedition had left for Eagle.

“I’m not going to tell Tiff about this,” Lila said. Hearing herself speaking out loud both startled and comforted her. “It would do no good.”

Lila pointed her beam upward. The Lion Head’s secure wing had become a great wide chimney. She shone the light from side to side, looking for a way to go, and thought she might see one. The ceiling of the wing had been of the drop-panel type; the panels had all shaken loose in the slide, but the steel gridding remained in place. It resembled a trellis. Or a ladder.

As for the reward, Clint offered, you might find someone. Might. But be honest with yourself. You know that this wreck is empty, just like the rest of the world. There’s nothing to be found but the bodies of the women who went with Nell. Let that one severed leg stand for all of them. If there were other women in the world you’re calling Our Place, they would have made themselves known by now. They would at least have left some trace. What is it you think you have to prove? That women can be Marlboro Men, too?

It seemed that even in her imagination, he couldn’t just tell her he was afraid for her. He couldn’t stop treating her like one of his incarcerated patients, throwing leading questions like dodgeballs in a playground game.

“Go away, Clint,” she said, and for a wonder, he did.

Lila reached up and grabbed the lowest trellis of ceiling gridding. The crosspiece bowed, but didn’t break. Her hand sang and she felt blood leaking around the edges of her rag bandage—but she hung on and pulled herself up, and upright. She braced her boot on the crosspiece and pushed down. It bowed again—and held. Lila reached up, pulled, stepped. She began to ascend the ladder of gridding. Each time she came to the level of a cell door, Lila used her good left hand to hang on while she swung out in the air, shining the flashlight with her hurt right. There was no woman to be seen through the wired glass at the top of the first cell door, no woman in the second, no woman in the third; all she saw were bed frames sticking out from what had been the floors. Her hand pulsed. The blood was dripping down inside her sleeve. Nothing in the fourth cell and she had to stop and rest, but not for too long, and definitely no looking down into the darkness. Was there a trick to this kind of effort? Something that Jared had mentioned about cross-country, something to tell yourself? Oh, right, now she had it. “When my lungs start tightening up,” Jared had said, “I just pretend there are girls checking me out, and I can’t let them down.”

That wasn’t much use. She’d just have to keep going.

Lila climbed. The fifth cell contained just a cot, a sink, and a dangling toilet. Nothing more.

She had arrived at a T. Off to the left, across the channel, the length of another hall stretched away. Far off, at the end of the hall, the beam of Lila’s flashlight found what appeared to be a pile of laundry—a body or bodies, she thought, the remains of the other explorers. Was that Nell Seeger’s puffy red jacket? Lila wasn’t sure, but as cold as it was, she could smell the beginnings of decomp. They had been tossed around until they snapped and then probably tossed around some more. There was nothing to do but leave them there.

Something moved amid the pile and she heard squeaking. The prison’s rats had survived the tumult, it seemed.

Lila climbed some more. Each metal grid seemed to give more under her weight, creaking longer and higher with every push-off. The sixth cell was empty and so were the seventh and the eighth and the ninth. It’s always the last place you check, isn’t it? It’s always on the top shelf of the closet at the very back. It’s always the bottom file in the stack. It’s always in the littlest, least-used pocket of the knapsack.

If she fell now, at least she’d die instantaneously.

You always—always, always, always—fall from the topmost grid of the ceiling that you’re using for a ladder in the hall of the maximum security prison that has gone sliding down the unstable remains of a former coal mountain.

But she decided she was not going to quit now. She had killed Jessica Elway to defend herself. She had been the first female police sheriff in the history of Dooling County. She had clapped handcuffs on the Griner brothers, and when Low Griner had told her to go fuck herself, she had laughed in his face. A few more feet wasn’t going to stop her.

And it didn’t.

She leaned out into the dark, swinging free as if unfurled by a dance partner, and cast the beam of her flashlight through the window of the tenth cell door.

The blow-up doll had come to rest with its face against the glass. Its cherry red lips were a bow of surprise, made for fellatio; its eyes were a thoughtless and seductive Betty Boop blue. A draft from somewhere caused it to nod its empty head and shrug its pink shoulders. A sticker on its head was printed with the label, Happy 40th Birthday, Larry!

“Come on now, Lila,” said Tiffany. Her voice drifted up from the well. “Just take one step and then worry about the next step.”

“Okay,” Lila managed. She was glad that Tiffany hadn’t listened to her. In fact, she didn’t know if there were many things she’d ever been so glad about. Her throat was dry; her body felt too tight in her skin; her hand was burning. The voice below was another life, though. This dark ladder didn’t have to be the end.

“That’s good. Now: one step,” said Tiffany. “You just gotta go one step. That’s how you start.”

“A blow-up fuck-me doll,” Tiffany marveled later. “Some a-hole’s birthday present. They let em have shit like that?”

Lila shrugged. “All I know is what I saw. There’s probably a story, but we’ll never know it.”

They rode all day and into the dark. Tiffany wanted one of the women in Our Place who’d had nursing experience to clean up Lila’s hand pronto. Lila said she’d be okay, but Tiff was insistent. “I told that crone who used to be warden up at the prison we wouldn’t die. We. That means both of us.”

She told Lila about the apartment she had in Charlottesville before meth addiction had napalmed the last decade or so. She’d kept a shitload of ferns. Buggers had flourished, too.

“That’s livin right, when you got big houseplants,” Tiffany said.

Slumped low in her saddle, the pace of her horse rocking her so pleasantly, Lila had to fight to keep from falling asleep and possibly slipping off. “What?”

“My ferns,” said Tiffany. “I’m regalin you about my ferns to keep you from passing out on me.”

This made Lila feel giggly but all that came out was a moan. Tiffany said not to be sad. “We can get you some. Ferns all over the fuckin place. They ain’t rare.”

Later, Lila asked Tiffany if she was hoping for a boy or a girl.

“Just a healthy kid,” said Tiffany. “Either way, so long as it’s healthy.”

“How about if it’s a girl, you name her ‘Fern.’ ”

Tiffany laughed. “That’s the spirit!”

Dooling appeared at dawn, the buildings floating through a blue haze. Smoke twisted up from the parking lot behind the remains of the Squeaky Wheel. Here a communal firepit had been set up. Electricity was still at a premium, so they cooked outside as much as possible. (The Squeak had proved an excellent source of fuel. Its roof and walls were slowly being dismantled.)

Tiffany led them toward the fire. There were a dozen women there, shapeless in their heavy coats, caps, and mittens. Two big pots of coffee were boiling over the wide fire.

“Welcome home. We got coffee.” Coates stepped from the group.

“Unlike us, we got nothing,” Lila said. “Sorry. It was a Fuck-Me Farrah doll in the secure wing. If there’s anybody else in this world, there’s still no sign of them. And the others…” She shook her head.

“Mrs. Norcross?”

They all turned to check out the new one, who’d arrived just a day earlier. Lila took a step toward her, then stopped. “Mary Pak? Is that you?”

Mary came to Lila and hugged her. “I was just with Jared, Mrs. Norcross. I thought you’d want to know, he’s all right. Or he was, the last I saw him. That was in the attic of the demo house over in your neighborhood, before I fell asleep.”

CHAPTER 5

Tig Murphy was the officer that Clint told first—the truth about Evie, and about what she’d said: that everything seemed to depend on whether or not Clint could keep her alive, but she would plead her case no more than Jesus had when hauled in front of Pontius Pilate. Clint finished by saying, “I lied because I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth. The truth is so big it stuck in my throat.”

“Uh-huh. You know I used to teach high school history, Doc?” Tig was, in fact, looking at him in a way that reminded Clint intensely of high school. It was a gaze that doubted your hall pass. It was a gaze that wanted to see if your pupils were dilated.

“Yes, I know that,” Clint said. He’d pulled the officer into the laundry room where they could talk in private.

“I was the first person in my family to graduate from college. Busting chops in a women’s prison wasn’t exactly a step up for me. But, you know, I’ve seen how you care about these gals. And I know that even though a lot of them have done bad stuff, most aren’t bad through and through. So, I want to help…” The officer grimaced and rubbed a hand through the receding hair at his temples. You could see the teacher he’d been, picture him pacing around, going on about the vast difference between the legend of the Hatfields and the McCoys and the historical facts of the feud, dragging his fingers harder and harder through his hair the more excited and enthusiastic he got about the subject.

“So help,” Clint said. If not one of the officers agreed to stay he would try to keep the prison locked down without them, and he would fail. Terry Coombs and the new guy had the remains of the police force. They could gather other men if necessary. Clint had seen the way Frank Geary had eyed the fences and the gates, looking for weak spots.

“You really believe this? You think she’s—magic?” Tig said the word magic the way Jared said the word seriously—as in, “You seriously want to see my homework?”

“I believe she’s got some command of this thing that’s happening, and more importantly, I believe that men outside this prison believe that.”

“You believe she’s magic.” Tig gave him the suspicious teacher look again: Kid, just how stoned are you?

“Actually, I do,” Clint said, and raised a hand to stop Tig from speaking, at least for the moment. “But even if I’m wrong, we need to hold this prison. It’s our obligation. We have to protect every one of our prisoners. I do not trust Terry Coombs in his cups, or Frank Geary, or anyone else, to just talk to Eve Black. You’ve heard her. Whether she’s just delusional or not, she’s a genius at pissing people off. She will go on doing that until someone loses his shit and kills her. Someone or all of them. Burning at the stake isn’t entirely out of the question.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“Actually, I do. Blowtorch Brigades tell you anything?”

Tig leaned against one of the industrial washers. “All right.”

Clint could have hugged him. “Thank you.”

“Well, it’s my stupid job, y’know, but okay, you’re welcome. How long do you think we need to hold out?”

“Not long. A few days, at most. That’s what she says, anyway.” He realized that he was talking about Eve Black like an ancient Greek talking about an angry deity. It was outrageous, and yet it felt as true as anything.

“Wait-wait-wait,” Rand Quigley said after Clint had gone through everything a second time. “She’s going to end the world if we let the cops have her?”

That was almost exactly what Clint believed, but he preferred to finesse it a bit. “We just can’t let the local cops carry her off, Rand. That’s the bottom line.”

Rand’s pale brown eyes blinked behind the thick lenses of his square-framed glasses, and his black unibrow sat on the crosspiece like a burly caterpillar. “What about the CDC? I thought you were talking to the CDC?”

Tig handled this one head-on. “The CDC was bullshit. The doc made it up so we’d stay.”

This is where Rand puts one foot in front of the other, Clint thought, and the whole thing ends. But Rand only glanced at Clint and then back to Tig. “Never got through to them?”

“No,” Clint said.

“Never at all?”

“Well, I got an answering machine a couple of times.”

“Fuck,” Rand said. “That blows.”

“You said it, buddy,” Tig said. “Can we still count on you? If someone wants to start something?”

“Yeah,” Rand said, sounding offended. “Of course. They run the town, we run the prison. That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

Wettermore was next. The whole scenario amused him in a sour but genuine way.

“It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Warrior Girl the Meth-Head Slayer was magic. I wouldn’t be surprised if bunnies wearing pocket watches started hopping through the joint. What you’re telling me is no nuttier than the Aurora. It doesn’t change anything for me. I’m here for the duration.”

It was Scott Hughes, at nineteen the youngest of the bunch, who handed over his keys, his gun, his Taser, and the rest of his gear. If the CDC wasn’t coming to take Eve Black, he wasn’t staying. He wasn’t anybody’s white knight; he was just an ordinary Christian who’d been baptized at the Lutheran church right there in Dooling and hardly missed a Sunday. “I like all you guys. You’re not like Peters or some of the other dinks at this place. And I don’t care that Billy’s gay or that Rand’s half-retarded. Those guys’re okay.”

Clint and Tig had followed him past intake to the front door of the prison and out into the yard to try and change his mind.

“And Tig, you’ve always been cool. You seem fine, too, Dr. Norcross. But I’m not dying here.”

“Who said anything about dying?” Clint asked.

The teenager arrived at his pickup, which stood on enormous bigfoot tires. “Get real. Who do you know in this town who doesn’t have a gun? Who do you know in this town who doesn’t have two or three?”

It was true. Even in exurban Appalachia (and exurban might have been pushing it; they had a Foot Locker and a Shopwell in Dooling, but the nearest movie theater was in Eagle), just about everyone had a gun.

“And, I mean, I been to the sheriff’s station, Dr. Norcross. They got a rack of M4s. Other stuff, too. The vigilantes show up after raiding the armory, no offense, but you and Tig can take those Mossbergs we got in the gun locker and shove em up your asses.”

Tig was standing at Clint’s shoulder. “So you’re just going to split?”

“Yeah,” Hughes said. “I’m just going to split. Someone needs to open the gate for me.”

“Shit, Tig,” Clint said, which was the signal.

Tig sighed, apologized to Scott Hughes—“I feel terrible about this, man”—and zapped his colleague with his Taser.

This was a matter that they’d discussed. There were serious problems with letting Scott Hughes leave. They couldn’t allow someone telling the town folks what a short roster they had, or outlining the limitations of the prison’s armaments. Because Scott was right, the prison’s armory was not impressive: a dozen Mossberg 590 shotguns, birdshot to load them, and each officer’s personal sidearm, a .45-caliber pistol.

The two men stood over their colleague, writhing on the parking lot pavement. Clint was queasily reminded of the Burtells’ backyard, the Friday Night Fights, his foster sibling Jason, lying bare-chested on the patio cement at Clint’s filthy sneakers. Under Jason’s eye there had been a red quarter-shaped mark from Clint’s fist. Snot had leaked out of Jason’s nose, and from the ground, he had mumbled, “It’s okay, Clint.” The grownups all cheered and laughed from their lawn chairs, toasting with their cans of Falstaff. That time, Clint had won the milkshake. What had he won this time?

“Well, damn, now we done it,” said Tig. Three days ago, when they’d had to deal with Peters, Tig had looked like a man in the throes of an allergic reaction, about to pitch up a bellyful of spunky shellfish. Now he just looked like he had a touch of acid. He lowered himself to his knees, rolled Scott over, and zip-tied his wrists behind his back.

“How about we put him in B Wing, Doc?”

“Okay, I guess.” Clint hadn’t even considered where to put Scott, which did not exactly increase his confidence in his ability to deal with the developing situation. He squatted to grab Hughes’s armpits and help Tig hoist him to his feet so they could bring him inside.

“Gentlemen,” came a voice from just beyond the gate. It was a woman’s voice, full of grit, and exhaustion… and delight. “Can you hold that pose? I want to get a good picture.”

The two men looked up, their expressions the very essence of guilt; they could have been Mafia button men about to bury a body. Michaela was even more delighted when she checked her first photo. The camera she carried in her purse was only a bottom-of-the-line Nikon, but the image was sharp. Perfect.

“Ahoy, ye scruffy pirates!” Garth Flickinger cried. “What are ye about, pray tell?” He had insisted on stopping at the nearby scenic lookout to sample the Purple Lightning, and he was feeling chipper. Mickey also seemed to have caught her second wind. Or maybe by now it was her fourth or fifth.

“Oh, shit, Doc,” said Tig. “We are surely fucked.”

Clint didn’t reply. He stood, holding Scott Hughes and gaping at the newcomers standing in front of a battered Mercedes. It was as if a weird reverse landslide were going on inside his head, one where things came together instead of falling apart. Maybe this was how true inspiration came to a great scientist or philosopher. He hoped so. Clint dropped Scott and the disoriented officer gave a moan of dissatisfaction.

“One more!” Michaela called. She snapped. “And one more! Good! Great! Now exactly what are you boys doing?”

“God’s blood, it’s mutiny!” Garth cried, doing what might have been an imitation of Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. “They’ve rendered the first mate unconscious, and soon will make him walk the plank! Arrr!”

“Shut up,” said Michaela. She grasped the gate—not electrified, fortunately for her—and shook it. “Does this have anything to do with the woman?”

“We are so fucked.” Tig said this as if he were impressed.

“Open the gate,” Clint said.

“What—?”

“Do it.”

Tig started toward the entry booth, pausing once to look doubtfully back over his shoulder at Clint, who nodded and motioned him on. Clint walked to the gate, ignoring the steady click of the young woman’s camera. Her eyes were red, which was to be expected after four days and three nights of wakefulness, but her companion’s were just as red. Clint suspected they might have been partaking of illegal stimulants. In the throes of his sudden inspiration, that was the least of his concerns.

“You’re Janice’s daughter,” he said. “The reporter.”

“That’s right, Michaela Coates. Michaela Morgan, to the great viewing public. And I believe you’re Dr. Clinton Norcross.”

“We’ve met?” Clint didn’t remember that.

“I interviewed you for the high school newspaper. Would have been eight or nine years ago.”

“Did you like me?” he asked. Christ, he was old; and getting older by the minute.

Michaela tipped a hand. “I thought it was a little weird that you liked working in a prison so much. In a prison with my mom. But never mind that, what about the woman? Is her name Eve Black? Does she really sleep and then wake up? Because that’s what I’m hearing.”

“Eve Black is the name she goes by,” Clint said, “and yes, she does indeed sleep and wake normally. Although not much else about her seems normal in the least.” He felt giddy, like a man walking a tightrope blindfolded. “Would you like to interview her?”

“Are you kidding?” For the moment, Michaela appeared not the slightest bit sleepy. She looked feverish with excitement.

The outer and inner gates began to trundle open. Garth hooked Michaela’s arm with his own and stepped into the dead space between them, but Clint held up his hand. “There are conditions.”

“Name them,” Michaela said briskly. “Although, given the pictures I have in my camera, you might not want to be too greedy.”

Clint asked, “Did you see any sheriff’s cruisers nearby?”

Garth and Michaela shook their heads.

No cruisers yet. No one watching the access road leading in from West Lavin. That was a trick Geary had missed, at least so far, and Clint wasn’t terribly surprised. With Terry Coombs seeking refuge in a flask, his Number Two, Mr. Animal Control Guy, had to be playing catch-up. But Clint didn’t think he’d miss it for long. There might be someone on the way already. In fact, and on second thought, he would have to assume that was the case, which meant going for pizza and eating with Jared was out. Geary might not care about anyone entering the prison, but he surely wouldn’t want anyone leaving. The problematic head-doctor, for one. Evie Black, possibly smuggled out in the back of a prison van, for another.

“Your conditions?” Michaela asked.

“It has to be quick,” Clint said. “And if you hear what I think you’re going to hear, and see what I think you’re going to see, you have to help me.”

“Help with what?” asked Tig, rejoining them.

“Reinforcements,” Clint said. “Weapons.” He paused. “And my son. I want my son.”

There was no pie at the Olympia. The woman who made the pies was sleeping in a cocoon in the break room. Gus Vereen, taking the deputies’ orders, said he was shorthanded all around. “Found some ice cream cake down at the bottom of the freezer, but I can’t vouch for it. Been there since Hector was a pup.”

“I’ll try it,” said Don, although it was a piss-poor substitute—a diner without pie was a disgrace—but with Frank Geary on the other side of the table, he was on his best behavior.

Also present at the rear table of the diner were deputies Barrows, Rangle, Eric Blass, plus an old legal beagle named Silver. They’d just finished eating a lousy lunch. Don had the Haluski Special and it had arrived swimming in a pool of yellow grease. He’d eaten it anyway, partly out of spite, and Magic 8 Ball said that a case of the dribbling shits was in his future. The others had eaten sandwiches and burgers; none of them had finished more than half. They had also passed on dessert, which was probably smart of them. Frank had spent half an hour giving them all the rundown on what he knew about the situation at the prison.

“You think Norcross is boning her?” Don blurted at this point.

Frank turned a low-lidded gaze on him. “That’s unlikely and irrelevant.”

Don received the message and hadn’t said another word until Gus Vereen came around to see if they needed anything else.

Once Gus left, Judge Silver spoke up. “What do you see as our options, Frank? What’s Terry’s take on this?” His Honor’s skin tone was worryingly gray. His speech was wet, as if he were talking around a knot of chewing tobacco.

“Our options are limited. We could wait Norcross out, but who knows how long that could mean. Prison’s probably got quite a stock of food.”

“He’s right,” Don said. “There’s no prime rib or nothing, but they got enough dry goods to last to the end of days.”

“The longer we wait,” Frank went on, “the more talk gets around. Lot of guys around here might start thinking about taking things into their own hands.” He waited for someone to say, Isn’t that what you’re doing? But no one did.

“If we don’t wait?” the judge asked.

“Norcross has got a son, and of course you know his wife.”

“Good cop,” the judge said. “Careful, thorough. The lady goes by the book.”

Eric, busted twice by Sheriff Norcross for speeding, made a sour face.

“And we wish we had her,” Geary said. Don didn’t believe that for a second. From the first, when Geary had jammed his hand under Don’s armpit, treated him like a puppet, he’d seen that he wasn’t the kind of fellow who accepted second position. “But she’s in the wind, and so is the son. If they were around, I’d say we should try and get them to see if they couldn’t convince Norcross to break loose from whatever thing he has going with the Black woman.”

Judge Silver clucked his tongue and stared into his coffee cup. He hadn’t touched it. His tie had bright yellow lemons on it and the contrast with his skin underlined the sickly look of the man. A moth fluttered around his head. The judge waved it away and it flew off to alight on one of the light-globes that hung from the diner’s ceiling.

“So…” Judge Silver said.

“Yeah,” Don said. “So what do we do?”

Frank Geary shook his head and swept a few crumbs from the table, catching them in his palm. “We put together a responsible group. Fifteen, twenty reliable men. We tool up. There should be enough body armor to go around at the station. God knows what else. We haven’t exactly had time to take inventory.”

“Do you really think—” Reed Barrows began doubtfully, but Frank overrode him.

“There’s half a dozen assault rifles, anyway. They should go to the guys who can handle them. Everyone else carries either Winchesters or their sidearms or both. Don here gives us the layout of the prison, any particulars that might help. Then, we make a show of force, and give Norcross one more chance to send her out. I think he will.”

The judge asked the obvious. “If he doesn’t?”

“I don’t think he could stop us.”

“This seems rather extreme, even under the extraordinary circumstances,” the judge said. “What about Terry?”

“Terry is…” Frank brushed his crumbs onto the diner floor.

“He’s drunk, Judge,” Reed Barrows said.

Which kept Frank from having to say it. What he said (pulling a glum face) was, “He’s doing the best he can.”

“Drunk is drunk,” Reed said. Vern Rangle opined that this was a true statement.

“Then…” The judge touched Frank’s big shoulder, gave it a squeeze. “Guess it’s you, Frank.”

Gus Vereen came over with Don’s slice of ice cream cake. The diner owner’s expression was dubious. The slice was bearded in frost. “You sure, Don?”

“What the fuck,” Don said. If the pie ladies of the world were gone, and he still wanted sweet stuff, he was going to have to eat more adventurously.

“Uh, Frank?” Vern Rangle said.

“What?” It sounded more like What now?

“I was just thinking maybe we ought to have a cruiser watching the prison. In case, you know, the doc decides to take her out and hide her somewhere.”

Frank stared at him, then slapped the side of his own head—a good hard whack that made them all jump. “Jesus. You’re right. I should have done that right away.”

“I’ll go,” Don said, forgetting the ice cream cake. He got up fast, his thighs striking the underside of the table and making the cups and plates rattle. His eyes were bright. “Me and Eric. Anyone tries to get in or out, we’ll stop them.”

Frank didn’t much care for Don, and Blass was just a kid, but maybe it would be okay. Hell, it was just a precaution. He didn’t really think Norcross would try to take the woman out. To him, she probably seemed safer where she was, behind the prison walls.

“Okay,” he said. “But if anyone does come out, just stop them. No drawn guns, you hear? No OK Corral stuff. If they refuse to stop, just follow them. And radio me ASAP.”

“Not Terry?” the judge asked.

“No. Me. Park at the foot of the prison access road, where it meets West Lavin. Got it?”

“Got it!” Don snapped. He was on the case. “Come on, partner. Let’s go.”

As they left, the judge mumbled, “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”

“What, Judge?” Vern Rangle asked.

Silver shook his head. He looked weary. “Never mind. Gentlemen, I must say that on the whole, I don’t care much for the way this is going. I wonder…”

“What, Oscar?” Frank asked. “What do you wonder?”

But the judge didn’t reply.

“How’d you know?” It was Angel. “About the baby?”

The question drew Evie away from the Olympia Diner where, from the eyes of the moth perched on the light-globe, she’d been observing the men making their plans. And just to add to the fun, something else was going on, much closer. Clint had visitors. Soon she would have visitors, as well.

Evie sat up and inhaled Dooling Correctional. The stench of industrial cleaning products went horribly deep; she expected to die soon, and felt sad about that, but she had died before. It was never nice, but it had never been the end… although this time might be different.

On the bright side, she told herself, I won’t have to smell this place anymore, this mixture of Lysol and despair.

She’d thought Troy stank: the corpse piles, the fires, the fish guts thoughtfully left out for the gods—gee fucking thanks, guys, just what we want—and the stupid Achaeans stomping around on the beach, refusing to wash, letting the blood cook to black in the sun and rust the joints of their armor. That was nothing compared to the inescapable reek of the modern world. She had been young and too easily impressed then, in the days before Lysol and bleach.

Meanwhile, Angel had asked a perfectly fair question, and she sounded almost sane. For the time being, at least.

“I know about your baby because I read minds. Not always. Most of the time. I’m better at reading men’s minds—they are simpler—but I’m pretty good with women, too.”

“Then you know… I dint want to.”

“Yes, I know that. And I was too hard on you. Before. I’m sorry. There was a lot going on.”

Angel ignored the apology. She was focused on reciting something she’d clearly memorized, a little comfort she’d created to provide light when the dark was at its deepest and there was no one awake with whom to speak and take her mind off herself and the things she had done. “I had to. Every man I killed did hurt me, or woulda hurt me if I give him a chance. I dint want to put that baby girl down, but I couldn’t let that be her life.”

The sigh that Evie produced in response was thick with real tears. Angel was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of an existence in a time and a place where things had just not worked out. Of course, chances were slim that they would have worked out for Angel, anyway; the woman was bad and mad. Even so, she was right: they had hurt her, and they probably would’ve hurt that baby girl, given time. Those men and all the men like them. The earth hated them, but it loved the fertilizer of their murderous bodies.

“Why you cryin, Evie?”

“Because I feel it all, and it’s painful. Now hush. If I may once more quote Henry IV, the game is afoot. I have things to do.”

“What things?”

As if in answer, the door at the far end of A Wing clashed open and footfalls approached. It was Dr. Norcross, Officers Murphy and Quigley, and two strangers.

“Where’s they passes?” Angel shouted. “Those two don’t have no passes to be back here!”

“Hush, I said,” Evie told her. “Or I’ll make you hush. We were having a moment, Angel, don’t spoil it.”

Clint stopped in front of Evie’s cell. The woman pushed up beside him. There were purple pouches beneath her eyes, but the eyes themselves were bright and aware.

Evie said, “Hello, Michaela Coates, also known as Michaela Morgan. I’m Eve Black.” She put her hand through the bars. Tig and Rand moved forward instinctively, but Clint extended his arms to hold them in place.

Michaela clasped the offered hand with no hesitation. “You’ve seen me on the news, I take it.”

Evie smiled warmly. “I’m afraid I’m not big on the news. Too depressing.”

“Then how do you know—”

“Shall I call you Mickey, as your friend Dr. Flickinger does?”

Garth jumped.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to see your mother,” Evie went on. “She was a good warden.”

“Like fuck,” Angel muttered, and when Evie cleared her throat forbiddingly: “Okay, I’m hushin, I’m hushin.”

“How do you know—” Michaela began.

“That your mother was Warden Coates? That you took the name Morgan because some silly cockhound of a journalism professor told you that television audiences tend to remember alliterative names? Oh, Mickey, you never should have slept with him, but I think you know that now. At least the miscarriage saved you having to make a difficult choice.” Evie clucked and shook her head, making her dark hair fly.

Except for her red-rimmed eyes, Michaela was dead pale. When Garth put an arm around her shoulders, she clutched at his hand like a drowning woman clutching at a life preserver.

“How do you know that?” Michaela whispered. “Who are you?”

“I am woman, hear me roar,” Evie said, and once more laughed: a merry sound, like shaken bells. She turned her attention to Garth. “As for you, Dr. Flickinger, a word of friendly advice. You need to get off the dope, and very soon. You’ve had one warning from your cardiologist already. There won’t be another. Keep on smoking those crystals, and your cataclysmic heart attack will come in…” She closed her eyes like a carnival psychic, then popped them open. “In about eight months. Nine, maybe. Most likely while watching porn with your pants around your ankles and a squeeze-bottle of Lubriderm near at hand. Still shy of your fifty-third birthday.”

“Worse ways,” Garth said, but his voice was faint.

“Of course, that’s if you’re lucky. If you hang around Michaela and Clint here, and try to defend poor defenseless me and the rest of the women here, you’re likely to die a lot sooner.”

“You have the most symmetrical face I have ever seen.” Garth paused and cleared his throat. “Can you stop saying scary things now?”

Apparently Evie couldn’t. “It’s a shame that your daughter is hydrocephalic and must live her life in an institution, but that is no excuse for the damage you are inflicting on a formerly fine body and mind.”

The officers were goggling at her. Clint had hoped for something that would prove Evie’s otherworldliness, but this was beyond his wildest expectations. As if he had spoken this aloud, Evie looked at him… and winked.

“How do you know about Cathy?” Garth asked. “How can you?”

Looking at Michaela, Evie said, “I have agents among the creatures of the world. They tell me everything. They help me. It’s like in Cinderella, but different. For one thing, I like them better as rats than as coachmen.”

“Evie… Ms. Black… are you responsible for the sleeping women? And if so, is it possible you can wake them up again?”

“Clint, are you sure this is smart?” Rand asked. “Letting this lady have a jailhouse interview? I don’t think Warden Coates would—”

Jeanette Sorley chose this moment to stumble down the hall, holding up her brown top so it made a makeshift pouch. “Who wants peas?” she cried. “Who wants fresh peas?”

Evie, meanwhile, seemed to have lost the thread. Her hands were gripping the prison bars hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

“Evie?” asked Clint. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. And while I appreciate your need for haste, Clint, I’m multi-tasking this afternoon. You need to wait while I take care of something.” Then, to herself rather than the half a dozen people outside her cell: “I’m sorry to do this, but he wouldn’t have had long, anyway.” A pause. “And he misses his cat.”

Judge Silver had shuffled most of the way to the Olympia’s parking lot before Frank caught up with him. Gems of drizzle shone on the slumped shoulders of the old fellow’s topcoat.

Silver turned at his approach—nothing wrong with his ears, it seemed—and gave him a sweet smile. “I want to thank you again for Cocoa,” he said.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Just doing my job.”

“Yes, but you did it with real compassion. That made it easier for me.”

“I’m glad. Judge, it seemed to me that you had an idea in there. Would you like to share it with me?”

Judge Silver considered. “May I speak frankly?”

The other man smiled. “Since my name is Frank, I’d expect nothing less.”

Silver did not smile back. “All right. You’re a fine man, and I’m glad you’ve stepped up to the plate since Deputy Coombs is… shall we say hors de combat… and it’s clear none of the other officers want the responsibility, but you have no background in law enforcement, and this is a delicate situation. Extremely delicate. Do you agree?”

“Yes,” Frank said. “On all points.”

“I’m worried about a blow-up. A posse that gets out of control and turns into a mob. I’ve seen that happen, back during one of the uglier coal strikes in the seventies, and it was not a pretty thing. Buildings were burned, there was a dynamite explosion, men were killed.”

“You have an alternative?”

“I might. I—get away, dammit!” The judge waved one arthritic hand at the moth fluttering around his head. It flew away and landed on a car aerial, slowly flexing its wings in the fine drizzle. “Those things are everywhere lately.”

“Uh-huh. Now what were you saying?”

“There’s a man named Harry Rhinegold in Coughlin. Ex-FBI, retired there two years ago. Fine man, fine record, several Bureau commendations—I’ve seen them on the wall in his study. I’m thinking I might talk to him, and see if he’ll sign on.”

“As what? A deputy?”

“As an advisor,” the judge said, and took a breath that rattled in his throat. “And, possibly, as a negotiator.”

“A hostage negotiator, you mean.”

“Yes.”

Frank’s first impulse, childish but strong, was to tell the judge no way, he was in charge. Except, technically speaking, he wasn’t. Terry Coombs was, and it was always possible Terry would show up, hungover but sober, and want to take the reins. Also, could he, Frank, stop the judge, short of physical restraint? He could not. Although Silver was too much of a gentleman to say it (unless he absolutely had to, of course), he was an officer of the court, and as such far outranked a self-appointed lawman whose specialties were catching stray dogs and doing ads for Adopt-A-Pet on the Public Access channel. There was one more consideration, and it was the most important of all: hostage negotiation was actually not a bad idea. Dooling Correctional was like a fortified castle. Did it matter who pried the woman out, as long as the job got done? As long as she could be questioned? Coerced, if necessary, should they conclude that she actually might be able to stop the Aurora?

Meanwhile, the judge was looking at him, shaggy eyebrows raised.

“Do it,” Frank said. “I’ll tell Terry. If this Rhinegold agrees, we can have a skull session either here or at the station tonight.”

“So you won’t…” The judge cleared his throat. “You won’t take any immediate steps?”

“For this afternoon and tonight, I’ll just keep a car posted near the prison.” Frank paused. “Beyond that, I can’t promise, and even that depends on Norcross not trying anything funny.”

“I hardly think—”

“But I do.” Frank gravely tapped a finger against the hollow of his temple, as if to indicate thought processes hard at work. “Position I’m in right now, I have to. He thinks he’s smart, and guys like that can be a problem. To others, and to themselves. Looking at it that way, your trip to Coughlin is a mission of mercy. So drive carefully, Judge.”

“At my age, I always do,” Judge Silver said. His entry into the Land Rover was slow and painful to watch. Frank was on the verge of going to help him when Silver finally made it behind the wheel and slammed the door. The engine roared to life, Silver gunning it thoughtlessly, and then the lights came on, cutting cones through the drizzle.

Ex-FBI, and in Coughlin, Frank marveled. Wonders never ceased. Maybe he could call the Bureau and get an emergency federal order enjoining Norcross to let the woman go. Unlikely, with the government in an uproar, but not out of the question. If Norcross defied them then, no one could blame them for forcing the issue.

He went back inside to give the remaining deputies their orders. He’d already decided to send Barrows and Rangle to relieve Peters and that Blass kid. He and Pete Ordway could start making a list of guys, responsible ones, who might form a posse, should a posse be needed. No need to go back to the station, where Terry might show up; they could do it right here at the diner.

Judge Oscar Silver rarely drove anymore, and when he did, he no longer exceeded forty miles an hour, no matter how many cars stacked up behind him. If they began to honk and tailgate, he found a place to pull over and let them go by, then resumed his stately pace. He was aware that both his reflexes and his vision had declined. In addition, he had suffered three heart attacks, and knew that the bypass operation performed on his failing pump at St. Theresa’s two years ago would only hold the final infarction at bay for so long. He was at peace with that, but he had no wish to die behind the wheel, where a final swerve might take one or more innocent people with him. At only forty (less, within the city limits), he thought he would have a fair chance to apply braking and shift into park before the lights went out for good.

Today was different, however. Once he was beyond Ball’s Ferry and on the Old Coughlin Road, he increased his speed until the needle hovered at sixty-five, territory it hadn’t explored in five years or more. He had reached Rhinegold on his cell, and Rhinegold was willing to talk (although the judge, a crafty old soul, hadn’t wanted to discuss the subject of their confab on the phone—probably a needless precaution, but discretion had ever been his byword), and that was good news. The bad news: Silver suddenly found that he did not trust Frank Geary, who talked so easily about gathering a bunch of men and storming the prison. He had sounded reasonable enough back at the Olympia, but the situation was utterly unreasonable. The judge didn’t care for how practical Frank made such a move sound, when it ought to be an absolute last resort.

The windshield wipers clicked back and forth, clearing the thin rain. He turned on the radio and tuned in the all-news station in Wheeling. “Most city services have been shut down until further notice,” the announcer said, “and I want to repeat that the nine o’clock curfew will be strictly enforced.”

“Good luck with that,” the judge murmured.

“Now, recapping our top story. So-called Blowtorch Brigades, goaded by Internet-fueled fake news that respiration exhaled through the growths—or cocoons—surrounding the sleeping women is spreading the Aurora plague, have been reported in Charleston, Atlanta, Savannah, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Tampa.” The announcer paused, and when he resumed, his flat twang had become more pronounced. Folksier. “Neighbors, I’m proud to say none of these ignorant mobs have been operating here in Wheeling. We all have womenfolks we love like mad, and killing them in their sleep, no matter how unnatural that sleep may be, would be a terrible thing to do.”

He pronounced terrible as turrible.

Judge Silver’s Land Rover was nearing the outer limits of Dooling’s neighbor, Maylock. Rhinegold’s house in Coughlin was on the other side, a drive of another twenty minutes or so.

“The National Guard has been called out in all the cities where those Brigades have been at work, and they have orders to shoot to kill if those superstitious fools won’t cease and desist. I say amen to that. The CDC has repeated that there is no truth whatsoever to—”

The windshield was fogging up. Judge Silver leaned to his right, never taking his eyes from the road, and flipped on the defroster. The fan whooshed. On its wind, clouds of small brown moths spewed from the vents, filling the cabin and circling the judge’s head. They lit in his hair and battered his cheeks. Worst of all, they spun before his eyes, and something one of his old aunts had told him long ago, when he was just an impressionable boy, recurred to him with the brilliance of a proven fact, like up is up and down is down.

“Don’t ever rub your eyes after touching a moth, Oscar,” she had said. “The dust from their wings will get in there and you’ll go blind.”

“Get away!” Judge Silver yelled. He took his hands off the wheel and beat at his face. Moths continued to pour from the vents—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. The Land Rover’s cabin became a swirling brown mist. “Get away, get away, get aw—”

A huge weight settled on the left side of his chest. Pain hammered down his left arm like electricity. He opened his mouth to cry out and moths flew in, crawling on his tongue and tickling the lining of his cheeks. With his last struggling breath he pulled them down his throat, where they clogged his windpipe. The Land Rover veered left; an approaching truck veered right just in time to avoid it, ending up in the ditch, canted but not quite toppling. There was no ditch to avoid on the other side of the road—just the guardrails separating the Dorr’s Hollow Bridge from the open air and the stream beneath. Silver’s vehicle snapped the guardrails and pitched over. The Land Rover went end-for-end into the water below. Judge Silver, by then already dead, was ejected through the windshield and into Dorr’s Hollow Stream, a tributary of Ball Creek. One of his loafers came off and floated downstream, shipping water and then sinking.

The moths exited the overturned vehicle, now bubbling its way down into the water, and flew back toward Dooling in a flock.

“I hated to do that,” Eve said—speaking not to her guests, Clint felt, but to herself. She wiped a single tear from the corner of her left eye. “The more time I spend here, the more human I become. I had forgotten that.”

“What are you talking about, Evie?” Clint asked. “What did you hate to do?”

“Judge Silver was trying to bring in outside help,” she said. “It might not have made any difference, but I couldn’t take the chance.”

“Did you kill him?” Angel asked, sounding interested. “Use your special powers an all?”

“I had to. From this point forward, what happens in Dooling has to stay in Dooling.”

“But…” Michaela rubbed a hand down her face. “What’s happening in Dooling is happening everywhere. It’s going to happen to me.”

“Not for awhile,” Evie said. “And you won’t need any more stimulants, either.” She extended a loose fist through the prison bars, extended a finger, and beckoned. “Come to me.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Rand said, as Garth overlapped him, saying, “Don’t be stupid, Mickey.” He grabbed her forearm.

“What do you think, Clint?” Evie asked, smiling.

Knowing he was giving in—not just to this, but to everything—Clint said, “Let her go.”

Garth released his grip. As if hypnotized, Michaela took two steps forward. Evie put her face against the bars, her eyes on Michaela’s. Her lips parted.

“Lesbo stuff!” Angel crowed. “Turn on the cameras, freaks, the muff-divin comes next!”

Michaela took no notice. She pressed her mouth to Evie’s. They kissed with the hard bars of the soft cell between them, and Clint heard a sigh as Eve Black breathed into Michaela’s mouth and lungs. At the same time he felt the hairs stand up on his arms and neck. His vision blurred with tears. Somewhere Jeanette was screaming, and Angel was cackling.

At last Evie broke the kiss and stepped back. “Sweet mouth,” she said. “Sweet girl. How do you feel now?”

“I’m awake,” Michaela said. Her eyes were round, her recently kissed lips trembling. “I’m really awake!”

There was no question that she was. The purple pouches beneath her eyes had disappeared, but that was the least of it; her skin had tightened on her bones and her formerly pallid cheeks had taken on a rosy glow. She turned to Garth, who was staring at her with slack-jawed amazement.

“I’m really, really awake!”

“Holy shit,” Garth said. “I think you are.”

Clint darted his spread fingers at Michaela’s face. She snapped her head away. “Your reflexes are back,” he said. “You couldn’t have done that five minutes ago.”

“How long can I stay this way?” Michaela clasped her shoulders, hugging herself. “It’s wonderful!”

“A few days,” Evie repeated. “After that, the weariness will return, and with interest. You’ll fall asleep no matter how much you struggle against it, and grow a cocoon like all the rest. Unless, that is…”

“Unless you get what you want,” Clint said.

“What I want is immaterial now,” Evie said. “I thought you understood that. It’s what the men of this town do with me that matters. And what the women on the other side of the Tree decide.”

“What—” Garth began, but then Jeanette hit him like a left tackle intent on sacking the quarterback, driving him into the bars. She shouldered him aside and grasped the bars, staring at Evie. “Do me! Evie, do me! I don’t want to fight it no more, I don’t want to see the bud man anymore, so do me!”

Evie took her hands and looked at her sadly. “I can’t, Jeanette. You should stop fighting it and go to sleep like all the others. They could use someone as brave and strong as you are over there. They call it Our Place. It can be your place, too.”

“Please,” Jeanette whispered, but Evie let go of her hands. Jeanette staggered away, squashing spilled peas underfoot and crying soundlessly.

“I don’t know,” Angel said thoughtfully. “Maybe I won’t kill you, Evie. I’m thinking maybe… I just don’t know. You’re spiritual. Plus, even crazier than me. Which is goin some.”

Evie addressed Clint and the others again: “Armed men will be coming. They want me because they think I may have caused Aurora, and if I caused it, I can put a stop to it. That’s not exactly true—it’s more complicated than that—just because I turned something on by myself doesn’t mean I can turn it off by myself—but do you think angry, frightened men would believe that?”

“Not in a million years,” Garth Flickinger said. Standing behind him, Billy Wettermore grunted agreement.

Evie said, “They’ll kill anyone who gets in their way, and when I’m not able to awaken their sleeping beauties with a wave of my Fairy Godmother magic wand, they’ll kill me. Then they’ll set fire to the prison and every woman in it, just for spite.”

Jeanette had wandered into the delousing area to resume her conversation with the bud man, but Angel was paying close attention. Clint could almost hear her mood lift, like a generator first thumping to life and then whirring into gear. “They ain’t gonna kill me. Not without a fight.”

For the first time Evie looked piqued. Clint thought that whatever she’d done to awaken Mickey Coates might have drained her battery. “Angel, they’ll wash over you like a wave over a child’s sand castle.”

“Maybe, but I’ll take a few with me.” Angel did a couple of rusty kung fu moves that made Clint feel an emotion he had never before associated with Angel Fitzroy: pity.

“Did you bring us here?” Michaela asked. Her eyes were bright, fascinated. “Did you draw us here? Garth and me?”

“No,” Evie said. “You don’t understand how powerless I am—little more than one of the drug-man’s rabbits hung on a line, waiting to be skinned or set free.” She turned her gaze fully on Clint. “Do you have a plan? I think you do.”

“Nothing so grand,” Clint said, “but I might be able to buy some time. We’ve got a fortified position here, but we could use a few more men—”

“What we could use,” Tig interrupted, “is a platoon of marines.”

Clint shook his head. “Unless Terry Coombs and that guy Geary can get outside help, I think we can hold the prison with a dozen men, maybe as few as ten. Right now we number just four. Five, if we can get Scott Hughes onboard, but I don’t hold out much hope of that.”

Clint went on, speaking mostly to Mickey and the doc she’d brought with her. He didn’t like the idea of sending Flickinger on a life-or-death mission—nothing about how he looked or smelled disagreed with Evie’s pronouncement that he was a big-time doper—but Flickinger and Janice Coates’s daughter were all he had to work with. “The real problem is weaponry, and the big question is who lays hands on it first. I know from my wife that they’ve got quite the armory at the sheriff’s station. Since 9/11 and all the domestic terrorism threats afterward, most towns Dooling’s size do. For handguns they’ve got Glock 17s and, I think Lila said, Sig… something or others.”

“Sig Sauer,” Billy Wettermore said. “Good weapon.”

“They’ve got M4 semi-autos with those big clips,” Clint went on, “and a couple of Remington Model 700s. Also, I believe Lila said they have a forty-millimeter grenade launcher.”

“Guns.” Evie spoke to no one in particular. “The perfect solution to any problem. The more you have, the more perfectly they solve the problem.”

“Are you shitting me?” Michaela cried. “A grenade launcher?”

“Yes, but not for explosives. They use it with teargas.”

“Don’t forget the bulletproof vests.” Rand sounded glum. “Except at super-close range, those things will stop a Mossberg slug. And the Mossies are the heaviest armament we’ve got.”

“This sounds like a punting situation,” Tig remarked.

Billy Wettermore said, “I sure don’t want to kill anybody if I don’t have to. Those are our friends, for God’s sake.”

“Well, good luck,” Evie said. She went to her bunk and powered up Assistant Warden Hicks’s phone. “I’m going to play a few games of Boom Town, then take a nap.” She smiled at Michaela. “I won’t be taking any further questions from the press. You’re a wonderful kisser, Mickey Coates, but you’ve worn me out.”

“Just watch that she don’t decide to sic her rats on you,” Angel said to the group at large. “They do whatever she wants. It’s how she got Hicksie’s cell phone.”

“Rats,” Garth said. “This keeps getting better.”

“I need you folks to come with me,” Clint said. “We need to talk, but it has to be quick. They’ll have this place locked down soon enough.”

Billy Wettermore pointed to Jeanette, now seated cross-legged in the shower alcove of the delousing station and talking earnestly with someone only she could see. “What about Sorley?”

“She’ll be fine,” Clint said. “Come on. Go to sleep, Jeanette. Let yourself rest.”

Without looking at him, Jeanette said a single word. “No.”

To Clint, the warden’s office had an archaeological appearance, as if it had been abandoned for years instead of less than a week. Janice Coates lay on the couch, wrapped in her cerements of white. Michaela went to her and knelt down. She stroked the cocoon with one hand. It gave off crackling sounds. Garth started to approach her, but Clint took his arm. “Give her a minute, Dr. Flickinger.”

It was actually more like three before Michaela got to her feet. “What can we do?” she asked.

“Can you be persistent and persuasive?” Clint asked.

She fixed him with eyes that were no longer bloodshot. “I came to NewsAmerica as an unpaid intern at twenty-three. By twenty-six, I was a full-time correspondent and they were talking about giving me my own evening show.” She saw Billy giving a look to Tig and Rand, and smiled at them. “You know what they say around here, don’t you? It ain’t bragging if it’s the truth.” She returned her attention to Clint. “Those are my references. Are they good enough?”

“I hope so,” Clint said. “Listen.”

He talked for the next five minutes. There were questions, but not many. They were in a bad corner, and all of them knew it.

CHAPTER 6

Alexander Peter Bayer, the first baby to be born on the other side of the Tree, son of a former Dooling inmate named Linda Bayer, breathed air for the first time a week after Lila and Tiffany returned from the wreck below Lion Head. It was another few days before Lila made his acquaintance at a small gathering in Elaine Nutting Geary’s repaired home. He was not a traditionally attractive infant; the stacking of his many jowls produced an association not with the Gerber Baby but with a bookie that Lila had once arrested who had been known as “Larry Large.” However, baby Alexander had an irresistibly comic way of rolling his eyes around, as if he were anxiously attempting to gain his bearings amid the flowering of female faces that loomed above him.

A plate of slightly crispy (though still pretty tasty) scones was passed around. Between bouts of the strange vertigo that afflicted her, Nadine Coombs had baked them in an outdoor oven. The oven itself had recently been hauled from the ruins of the Lowe’s in Maylock, using sledges and Tiffany’s horses. It flabbergasted Lila sometimes, the rate of progress they were making, the speed and efficiency with which problems were solved and advancements made.

At some point Lila ended up with the baby. “Are you the last man on earth, or the first?” she asked him.

Alexander Peter Bayer yawned.

“Sorry, Lila. He doesn’t talk to cops.” Tiffany had sidled up beside her in the corner of the living room.

“That so?”

“We teach em young around here,” Tiffany said.

Since their adventure they’d become odd friends. Lila liked how Tiffany rode around town on her horses, wearing her white cowboy hat, insisting that children come over and stroke the animals’ necks, and see how soft and warm they were.

One day, with nothing better to do, Lila and Tiffany searched the Dooling YMCA, not knowing exactly what they were looking for, only knowing it was one of the few places that hadn’t been investigated. They found plenty of stuff, some of it interesting, but nothing they really needed. There was toilet paper, but supplies of that in the Shopwell were still plentiful. There were also cartons of liquid soap, but over the years it had hardened into pink bricks. The pool had dried up; nothing remained but a faint, astringent odor of chlorine.

The men’s locker room was damp and dank; luxuriant growths of mold—green, black, yellow—spanned the walls. A varmint’s mummified corpse lay at the far end of the room, its legs stiff in the air, its face frozen in a savage death-gape, lips stretched away from rows of sharp teeth. Lila and Tiffany stood for a moment in silent contemplation of the first urinal in a row of six.

“Perfectly preserved,” said Lila.

Tiffany gave her a quizzical look. “That?” Pointing at the varmint.

“No. This.” Lila patted the top of the urinal, her wedding ring clicking against the porcelain. “We’ll want it for our museum. We can call it the Museum of Lost Men.”

“Ha,” Tiffany said. “Tell you what, this is a scary fuckin place. And believe me, that is sayin something because I have toured some real dungeons. I mean, I could write you a guidebook of the sweaty, drafty, fucked-up meth caves of Appalachia, but this is truly unpleasant. I knew men’s locker rooms were creepy places, but this is worse than I could ever have imagined.”

“It was probably better before it got old,” Lila said… but she wondered.

They used hammers and chisels to break the combination locks off the lockers. Lila found stopped watches, wallets full of useless green paper and useless plastic rectangles, dead smart phones thus rendered stupid, key rings, moth-eaten trousers, and a caved-in basketball. Tiffany’s haul wasn’t much better: an almost full box of Tic Tacs and a faded photograph of a bald man with a hairy chest standing on a beach with his little laughing daughter perched on his shoulders.

“Florida, I bet,” Tiffany said. “That’s where they go if they got the scratch.”

“Probably.” The photo made Lila think of her own son, which she increasingly felt was counterproductive—not that she could keep from doing it. Mary had filled her in on Clint, stalling to keep the officers at the prison, and Jared, hiding their bodies (our other bodies, she thought) in the attic of the show house up the street. Would she hear any more about either of them? A couple of other women had appeared since Mary, but none of them knew anything about her two guys, and why would they? Jared and Clint were on a spaceship and the spaceship was getting farther and farther away, so many light years, and eventually they’d slip from the galaxy entirely and that would be the end. Finito. When should she begin to mourn them? Had she already started?

“Aw,” said Tiffany. “Don’t.”

“What?”

But Tiffany had read her face somehow, seen right through to the hopelessness and the muddle. “Don’t let it get you.” Lila returned the photo to its locker and shut the door.

In the gymnasium upstairs, Tiffany challenged her to a game of H-O-R-S-E. The prize was the almost full box of Tic Tacs. They pumped up the basketball. Neither of them had any talent for the game. Clint’s daughter who had turned out to not be his daughter would have dispatched them both with ease. Tiffany shot everything granny-style, underhanded, which Lila found annoyingly girly but also cute. When she had her coat off, you could see her pregnant stomach protrude, a bulb at Tiffany’s waist.

“Why Dooling? Why us? Those are the questions, wouldn’t you say?” Lila trotted after the basketball. Tiffany had shot it into the dusty bleachers to the right of the court. “I’ve got a theory.”

“You do? Let’s have it.”

Lila hurled the basketball from the bleachers. It missed the basket by a couple of car lengths and bounced into the second row of the opposite set of bleachers.

“That was pathetic,” Tiffany said.

“You’re one to talk.”

“I’ll admit that.”

“We’ve got a couple of doctors and a few nurses. We’ve got a veterinarian. We’ve got a bunch of teachers. Kayleigh knew her way around a circuit, and although she’s gone, Magda isn’t bad. We’ve got a carpenter. We’ve got a couple of musicians. We’ve got a sociologist who’s already writing a book about the new society.”

“Yeah, and when it’s done, Molly can print it with her berry-juice ink.” Tiffany snickered.

“We’ve got that retired engineering professor from the university. We’ve got seamstresses and gardeners and cooks out the ying-yang. The book club ladies are running an encounter group so women can talk about the stuff they miss, and get out some of the sadness and grief. We’ve even got a horse whisperer. See?”

Tiffany retrieved the basketball. “See what?”

“We’re all we need,” Lila said. She had descended from the bleachers and stood with her arms crossed at the baseline of the court. “That’s why we were chosen. Every basic skill we need to survive is here.”

“Okay. Maybe. Could be. Sounds about right to me.” Tiffany took off her cowboy hat and fanned herself with it. She was plainly amused. “You are such a cop. Solving the mysteries.”

Lila wasn’t done, though. “So how do we keep things going? We’ve already got our first baby. And how many pregnant women are there? A dozen? Eight?”

“Could be as many as ten. That enough to jump-start a new world, you think, when half of em’s apt to be girls?”

“I don’t know.” Lila was riffing now, her face feeling hot as ideas came to her, “But it’s a start, and I bet you there’s cold storage facilities with generators that were programmed to run and run and are still running. You’d have to go to a city to find one, I’d guess, but I bet you could. And there would be frozen sperm samples there. And that would be enough to get a world—a new world—going.”

Tiffany stuck her hat on the back of her head and thumped the basketball off the floor a couple of times. “New world, huh?”

“She could have planned it this way. The woman. Eve. So we could start over again without men, at least at the beginning,” Lila said.

“Garden of Eden with no Adam, huh? Okay, Sheriff, let me ask you a question.”

“Sure.”

“Is it a good plan? What that woman’s set up for us?”

A fair question, Lila thought. The inhabitants of Our Place had discussed Eve Black endlessly; the rumors that had started in the old world had been carried into the new world; it was a rare Meeting when her name (if it was her name) did not come up. She was an extension, and a possible answer to the original questions, the great How and Why of their situation. They discussed the likelihood that she was something more than a woman—more than human—and there was increasing unity in the belief that she was the source of everything that had happened.

On the one hand, Lila mourned the lives that had been lost—Millie, Nell, Kayleigh, Jessica Elway before them, and how many others—as well as the histories and existences from which those that still lived had been separated. Their men and boys were gone. Yet most—Lila definitely among them—could not deny the renewal before them: Tiffany Jones with full cheeks and clean hair and a second heartbeat. In the old world, there were men who had hurt Tiff, and badly. In the old world, there were men who burned women, thus incinerating them in both realities. Blowtorch Brigades, Mary said they were being called. There were bad women and there were bad men; if anyone could claim the right to make that statement, Lila, who had arrested plenty of both, felt that she could. But men fought more; they killed more. That was one way in which the sexes had never been equal; they were not equally dangerous.

So, yes, Lila thought it was probably a good plan. Merciless, but very good. A world re-started by women had a chance to be safer and fairer. And yet…

“I don’t know.” Lila couldn’t say that an existence without her son was better. She could conceptualize the idea, but she couldn’t articulate it without feeling like a traitor to both Jared and to her old life.

Tiffany nodded. “How about this, then: can you shoot backwards?” She turned away from the basket, bent her knees low, and flipped the ball over her head. It went up, caromed off the corner of the square, caught the rim—and fell off, bounce, bounce, bounce, so close.

An ocher gush belched from the tap. A pipe clanked loudly against another pipe. The brownish flow sputtered, stopped, and then, hallelujah, clean water began to pour into the sink.

“Well,” said Magda Dubcek to the small assembly around the work-sink set against the wall of the water treatment plant. “Dere it is.”

“Incredible,” said Janice Coates.

“Nah. Pressure, gravity, not so complex. We be careful, turn on one neighborhood each at a time. Slow but steady win the race.”

Lila, thinking of the ancient note from Magda’s son Anton, undoubtedly a dope and a cocksman, but pretty damn sharp about the ways of water in his own right, abruptly hugged the old lady.

“Oh,” said Magda, “all right. Thanks.”

The water echoed in the long room of the Dooling County Water District plant, hushing them all. In silence, the women took turns passing their hands though the fresh stream.

One of the things everyone missed was the ability to just jump in a car and drive somewhere, instead of walking and getting blisters. The cars were still there, some in pretty good shape from being parked in garages, and at least some of the batteries they found in storage still held juice. The real problem was gasoline. Every drop had oxidized during the in-between period.

“We’ll have to refine some,” the retired engineering professor explained at a committee meeting. Not more than a hundred and fifty miles distant, in Kentucky, there were storage wells and refineries that might be re-started with work and luck. They immediately began to plan another journey; they assigned tasks and selected volunteers. Lila scanned the women in the room for signs of misgivings. There were none. Among the faces, she took special note of Celia Frode, the only survivor of the exploration party. Celia nodded along with the rest of them. “Put me on that list,” Celia said. “I’ll go. Feel a need to put on my rambling shoes.”

It would be risky, but they would be more careful this time. And they would not flinch.

When they got to the second floor of the demo house, Tiffany announced that she wasn’t climbing the ladder to the attic. “I’ll wait here.”

“If you’re not coming up, why’d you come at all?” Lila asked. “You’re not that pregnant.”

“I was hoping you’d give me some of your Tic Tacs, ringer. And I’m plenty pregnant enough, believe me.” Lila had won H-O-R-S-E and the mints.

“Here.” She tossed the box to Tiffany, and climbed up the ladder.

The Pine Hills show house had, ironically, proved to be better constructed than almost every other structure on Tremaine, including Lila’s own. Although dim—small windows smudged by the passage of seasons—the attic was dry. Lila paced the space, her footfalls drawing puffs of dust from the floor. Mary had said that this was the one where she and Lila and Mrs. Ransom were, back there, wherever back there was. She wanted to feel herself, to feel her son.

She didn’t feel anything.

At one end of the attic, a moth was batting against one of the dirty windows. Lila walked over to release it. The window was stuck. Lila heard creaking as, behind her, Tiffany climbed the ladder. She moved Lila aside, took out a pocket knife, worked the point around the edges, and the window went up. The moth escaped and flew away.

Below, there was snow on the overgrown lawns, on the busted-up street, on her dead cruiser in Mrs. Ransom’s driveway. Tiffany’s horses were poking their noses around, nickering about whatever it was that horses nickered about, switching their tails. Lila could see past her own house, past the pool that she had never wanted and that Anton had tended, and past the elm tree that he had left her the note about. An orange animal trotted from the shadowy edge of the pine woods that backed the neighborhood. It was a fox. Even at this distance the luster of its winter coat was evident. How had it got to be winter so soon?

Tiffany stood in the middle of the attic. It was dry, but also cold, especially with the window open. She held out the box of Tic Tacs for Lila to take back. “I wanted to eat them all, but it would’ve been wrong. I’ve given up my life of crime.”

Lila smiled and put them back in her own pocket. “I declare you rehabilitated.”

The women stood about a foot apart, looking at each other, breathing steam. Tiffany pulled off her hat and dropped it on the floor.

“If you think that’s a joke, it’s not. I don’t wanna take anything from you, Lila. I don’t wanna take anything from anybody.”

“What do you want?” asked Lila.

“My very own life. Baby and a place and stuff. People that love me.”

Lila closed her eyes. She’d had all those things. She couldn’t feel Jared, couldn’t feel Clint, but she could remember them, could remember her very own life. It hurt, those memories. They made shapes in the snow, like the angels they’d made as children, but those shapes became fuzzier every day. God, she was lonesome.

“That’s not so much,” Lila said, and reopened her eyes.

“It seems like a lot to me.” Tiffany reached out and drew Lila’s face to hers.

The fox trotted away from the Pine Hills development, across Tremaine Street, and into the thick stands of winter wheat that had grown up on the far side. He was hunting for the smell of hibernating ground squirrels. The fox loved ground squirrels—Crunchy! Juicy!—and on this side of the Tree, unbothered for so long by human habitation, they had grown careless.

After a half hour’s search he discovered a little family of them in a dug-out chamber. They never awoke, even as he was crushing them between his teeth. “So tasty!” he said to himself.

The fox went on, entering the deep woods, making for the Tree. He paused briefly to explore an abandoned house. He pissed on a pile of books scattered on the floor and nosed fruitlessly around in a closet full of rotting linens. In the kitchen of the house there was food in the refrigerator that smelled deliciously spoiled, but his attempts to bump the door ajar accomplished nothing.

“Let me in there,” the fox demanded of the fridge, just in case it was only pretending to be a dead thing.

The fridge loomed, unresponsive.

A copperhead slid out from under the woodstove on the far side of the kitchen. “Why are you glowing?” it asked the fox. Other animals had commented on this phenomenon and were wary of it. The fox saw it himself when he looked into still water and saw his reflection. A gold light clung to him. It was Her mark.

“I’ve had some good fortune,” the fox said.

The copperhead wriggled its tongue at him. “Come here. Let me bite you.”

The fox ran from the cabin. Various birds heckled him as he loped beneath the canopy of gnarled and tangled bare branches, but their petty jibes meant nothing to the fox, whose belly was full and whose coat was thick as a bear’s.

When he emerged into the clearing, the Tree was there, the centerpiece of a leafy, steaming oasis in the fields of snow. His paws crossed over from the cold ground to the rich, warm summer loam that was the Tree’s forever bed. The Tree’s branches were layered and blended in countless greens and beside the passage in the bole, the white tiger, flicking its great tail, watched him approach with sleepy eyes.

“Don’t mind me,” said the fox, “just passing through.” He darted by, into the black hole, and out the opposite side.

CHAPTER 7

Don Peters and Eric Blass had yet to be relieved at the West Lavin roadblock when a banged-up Mercedes SL600 came trundling toward them from the prison. Don was standing in the weeds, shaking off after a leak. He zipped up in a hurry and returned to the pickup that served as their cruiser. Eric was standing in the road with his gun drawn.

“Stow the cannon, Junior,” Don said, and Eric holstered his Glock.

The driver of the Mercedes, a curly-haired man with a florid face, pulled to an obedient stop when Don raised his hand. Sitting beside him was a good-looking woman. Make that astoundingly good-looking, especially after all the zombie chicks he and Eric had seen the last few days. Also, she was familiar.

“License and registration,” Don said. He had no orders to look at drivers’ IDs, but it was what cops said when they made a stop. Watch this, Junior, he thought. See how a man does it.

The driver handed over his license; the woman rooted around in the glove compartment and found the registration. The man was Garth Flickinger, MD. From Dooling, with a listed residence in the town’s fanciest neighborhood, over on Briar.

“Mind telling me what you were doing up at the prison?”

“That was my idea, Officer,” the woman said. God, she was good-looking. No bags under this bitch’s eyes. Don wondered what she’d been taking to keep her so bushy-tailed. “I’m Michaela Morgan. From NewsAmerica?”

Eric exclaimed, “I knew I recognized you!”

It meant jack shit to Don, who didn’t watch network news, let alone the blah-blah crap they put out 24/7 on the cable, but he remembered where he’d seen her. “Right! The Squeaky Wheel. You were drinking there!”

She gave him a high-voltage smile, all capped teeth and high cheekbones. “That’s right! A man gave a speech about how God was punishing women for wearing pants. It was very interesting.”

Eric said, “Could I have your autograph? It would be something cool to have after you…” He stopped in confusion.

“After I fall asleep?” she said. “I think the bottom may have fallen out of the autograph market, at least temporarily, but if Garth—Dr. Flickinger—has got a pen in his glove compartment, I don’t see why n—”

“Forget that,” Don said harshly. He was embarrassed by his young partner’s lack of professionalism. “I want to know why you were up at the prison, and you aren’t going anywhere until you tell me.”

“Of course, Officer.” She spotlighted him with her smile again. “Although my professional name is Morgan, my real name is Coates, and I’m from right here in town. In fact, the warden is—”

“Coates is your mother?” Don was shocked, but once you got past her nose, which was arrow-sharp while old Janice’s honker was crooked, he could see the resemblance. “Well, I hate to tell you this, but your mother isn’t with us anymore.”

“I know.” No smile now. “Dr. Norcross told me. We spoke to him on the intercom.”

“The man is an asshole,” the Flickinger guy said.

Don grinned, just couldn’t help it. “I’ll double down on that.” He handed back the paperwork.

“Wouldn’t let her in,” Flickinger marveled. “Wouldn’t even let her say goodbye to her own mother.”

“Well,” Michaela said, “the complete truth is that wasn’t the only reason I persuaded Garth to take me up there. I also wanted an interview with a woman named Eve Black. I’m sure you’ve heard the chatter about how she sleeps and wakes. It would have been quite a scoop, you know. The outside world doesn’t care about much these days, but it would care about that. Only Norcross said she was inside a cocoon, like all the rest of the inmates.”

Don felt compelled to set her straight. Women—even women reporters, it seemed—could be painfully gullible. “Pure bullshit, and everybody knows it. She’s different, special, and he’s holding onto her for some crazy reason of his own. But that’s going to change.” He dropped her a wink ponderous enough to include Garth, who winked back. “Be nice to me, and I might get you that interview once we spring her.”

Michaela giggled.

“I better look in your trunk, I guess,” Don said. “Just so I can say I did.”

Garth got out and wrenched open his trunk, which rose with a weary squall—Geary had taken a few swipes here, as well. He hoped this clown wouldn’t check beneath the spare tire; it was where he had sequestered the Baggie of Purple Lightning. The clown didn’t bother, just took a quick look and gave a nod. Garth closed the trunk. This produced an even louder squall, the sound of a cat with its paw caught in a door.

“What happened to your car?” Eric asked as Garth got back behind the wheel.

Garth opened his mouth to tell the lad that a crazed animal control officer had laid into it, then remembered the crazed animal control officer was now, according to Norcross, the acting sheriff.

“Kids,” he said. “Vandals. They see something nice and they just want to destroy it, don’t they?”

The clown bent down to look at the pretty lady. “I’m heading down to the Squeak when my shift is over. If you’re still awake, I’d love to buy you a drink.”

“That would be wonderful,” Michaela said, just as if she meant it.

“You guys drive carefully and have a good evening,” the clown said.

Garth dropped the transmission into drive, but before he could turn onto the main road, the kid shouted, “Wait!”

Garth stopped. The kid was bending down, hands on his knees, looking at Michaela. “How about that autograph?”

There was a pen in the glove compartment, it turned out—a nice one with GARTH FLICKINGER, MD stamped in gold on the barrel. Michaela scribbled To Eric, with best wishes on the back of a drug rep’s business card, and handed it over. Garth got rolling while the kid was still thanking her. Less than a mile down Route 31 toward town, they spotted a town cruiser coming toward them, moving fast.

“Slow down,” Michaela said. As soon as the cruiser disappeared over the hill behind them, she told him to step on it.

Garth did.

For two years Lila had pestered Clint to add her various contacts to his own, in case of trouble at the prison. Six months ago he had finally done it, mostly to get her off his case, and now he thanked God for her persistence. First he called Jared and told him to sit tight; if all went well, he told his son, someone would be along to pick him up before dark. Possibly in an RV. Then he closed his eyes, said a brief prayer for eloquence, and called the lawyer who had facilitated Eve Black’s transfer to the prison.

After five rings, as Clint was resigning himself to voicemail, Barry Holden answered. “Holden here.” He sounded uninterested and exhausted.

“This is Clint Norcross, Barry. Up at the prison.”

“Clint.” No more than that.

“I need you to listen to me. Very carefully.”

Nothing from Barry Holden.

“Are you there?”

After a pause, Barry replied in that same uninterested voice. “I’m here.”

“Where are Clara and your daughters?” Four girls, ages twelve to three. A terrible thing for the father who loved them, but maybe a good thing for Clint, awful as that was to think of; he didn’t have to talk about the fate of the world, only about the fate of Barry’s female hostages to fortune.

“Upstairs, sleeping.” Barry laughed. Not a real laugh, though, just ha-ha-ha, like a dialogue balloon in a comic book. “Well, you know. Wrapped up in those… things. I’m in the living room, with a shotgun. If anybody shows up here with so much as a lit match, I’m going to blow them away.”

“I think there might be a way to save your family. I think they could wake up. Does that idea interest you?”

“Is it the woman?” Something new crept into Barry’s voice. Something alive. “Is it true, what they’re saying? That she can sleep and then wake up? If it’s only a rumor, be straight with me. I can’t stand to hope unless there’s a reason to.”

“It’s true. Now listen. Two people are coming to see you. One’s a doctor, the other is Warden Coates’s daughter.”

“Michaela’s still awake? Even after all this time?” Barry had begun to sound like his old self. “Not impossible, I guess—Gerda, my eldest, held out until last night—but still pretty remarkable.”

“She’s not just awake, she’s totally awake. Unlike every other woman in the Tri-Counties who’s still got her eyes open. The woman we’ve got in custody up here did it. Just breathed down her throat and woke her up.”

“If this is a joke, Norcross, it’s in extremely bad ta—”

“You’ll see for yourself. They’re going to tell you everything, then ask you to do some pretty dangerous stuff. I don’t want to say you’re our only hope, but…” Clint closed his eyes, rubbed at his temple with his free hand. “… but that might be what you are. And time is very short.”

“I would do anything for my wife and girls,” Barry said. “Anything.”

Clint allowed himself a long exhalation of relief. “Buddy, I was hoping you’d say that.”

Barry Holden did indeed have a shotgun. It wasn’t new, having been handed down through three generations of Holdens, but he had cleaned it and oiled it, and it looked lethal enough. He listened to Garth and Michaela with it laid across his thighs. Beside him, on an end table decorated with one of Clara Holden’s lace doilies, was an open box of fat red shells.

Talking turn and turn about, Michaela and Garth told the lawyer what Clint had told them: how Eve Black’s arrival roughly coincided with Aurora’s first reported victims; how she had killed two men with her bare hands; how she had allowed herself to be taken into custody without a struggle, saying it was what she wanted; how she had banged her face repeatedly into the protective mesh of Lila’s cruiser; how the bruises had healed with magical speed.

“Besides fixing me up, she knew things about me she couldn’t possibly have known,” Michaela said, “and they say she can control the rats. I know that’s hard to believe, but—”

Garth interrupted. “Another prisoner, Fitzroy, told us she used rats to get the assistant warden’s cell phone. And she does have a cell phone. I saw it.”

“There’s more,” Michaela said. “She claims to have killed Judge Silver. She claimed…”

She paused, reluctant to say it, but Clint had told them to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Remember that he may be grieving, Clint had said, but he’s still a lawyer, and a damned good one. He can smell a lie at forty yards, even upwind.

“She claimed she did it using moths. Because Silver was trying to bring in someone from out of town, and that’s not allowed.”

Michaela knew that a week ago, this was where Barry Holden would have decided they were either sharing a pernicious delusion or trying on the world’s worst and most stoned prank, and invited them to leave his house. But it wasn’t a week ago. Instead of telling them to get out, Barry handed his grandfather’s shotgun to Michaela. “Hold this.”

There was a laptop on the coffee table. Barry sat on the couch (also liberally decorated with his wife’s needlework) and began tapping away. After a moment, he looked up. “Bridger County police are reporting an accident on the Old Coughlin Road. One fatality. No name, but the vehicle was a Land Rover. Judge Silver drives a Land Rover.”

He regarded Michaela Coates. What they were telling him, essentially, was that the fate of every woman on planet Earth depended on what happened here in Dooling over the next few days. It was mad, but Warden Coates’s daughter, sitting there in Clara’s favorite bentwood rocker and looking at him earnestly, was the best argument that it was true. Possibly an irrefutable argument. A news report on CNN that morning had said that less than ten percent of the world’s women were estimated to still be awake on Aurora Day Five. Barry didn’t know about that, but he would have been willing to bet Grampa Holden’s shotgun that none of them looked like Michaela.

“She just… what? Kissed you? Like when the prince kissed Princess Aurora in the cartoon?”

“Yes,” said Michaela. “Like that. And she breathed down my throat. I think that’s what really did it—her breath.”

Barry switched his attention to Garth. “You saw this?”

“Yes. It was amazing. Mickey here looked like a vampire after a fresh transfusion.” And when he caught Michaela’s frowning stare: “Sorry, darling, maybe not the best metaphor.”

“That was actually a simile,” she said coldly.

Barry was still trying to get his mind around it. “And she says they’ll come for her? The cops? The townies? And that Frank Geary’s in charge?”

“Yes.” Michaela had left out everything Evie had said about the sleeping women having to make their own decision; even if true, that part was out of their hands.

“I know Geary,” Barry said. “I never defended him, but he’s been in District Court a couple of times. I remember a case where a woman complained that he threatened her for not keeping her Rottweiler on a leash. He has what you’d call anger issues.”

“Tell me about it,” Garth murmured.

Barry looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“Never mind,” Garth said. “Not important.”

Barry took back his shotgun. “Okay, I’m in. For one thing, I’ve got nothing else to do, with Clara and the girls gone. For another… I want to see this mystery woman with my own eyes. What does Clint want from me?”

“He said you have a Winnebago,” Michaela said. “To go camping in with your wife and girls.”

Barry smiled. “Not a Winnebago, a Fiesta. Sucks a ton of gas, but it sleeps six. The girls squabble almost non-stop, but we had some good times in that old thing.” His eyes abruptly filled with tears. “Some very, very good times.”

Barry Holden’s Fleetwood Fiesta was parked in a small lot behind the old-fashioned granite block of a building where he kept his office. The RV was a monstrous zebra-striped thing. Barry sat behind the wheel while Michaela climbed into the passenger seat. They waited for Garth to reconnoiter the cop-shop. The Holden family’s heirloom shotgun lay on the floor between them.

“Does this have any chance at all, do you think?” Barry asked.

“I don’t know,” Michaela replied. “I hope so, but I really don’t know.”

“Well, it’s nuts, no doubt about that,” Barry said, “but it beats sitting home and thinking bad thoughts.”

“You have to see Evie Black to really understand. Speak to her. You have to…” She searched for the right word. “You have to experience her. She—”

Michaela’s cell phone rang. It was Garth.

“There’s a geezer with a beard sitting under an umbrella on one of the benches out front, but otherwise the coast is clear. No cruisers in the side lot, just a few personal vehicles. If we’re going to do this, I think we’d better hurry up. That RV is not what I’d call unobtrusive.”

“Coming now,” Michaela said. She ended the call.

The alley between Barry’s building and the one next to it was narrow—there couldn’t have been more than five inches of clearance for the lumbering Fleetwood on either side—but Barry threaded its length with the ease of long experience. He stopped at the mouth of the alley, but Main Street was deserted. It’s almost as if the men are gone, too, Michaela thought as Barry made a wide right turn and drove the two blocks to the Municipal Building.

He parked the Fleetwood in front, taking three spaces marked OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY, OTHERS WILL BE TOWED. They got out and Garth joined them. The man with the beard got up and ambled over, holding the umbrella over his head. The stem of a pipe poked up from the bib of his Oshkosh overalls. He held out his hand to Barry and said, “Hello there, Counselor.”

Barry shook with him. “Hey, Willy. Good to see you, but I can’t stop to chew the fat. We’re in sort of a hurry. Urgent business.”

Willy nodded. “I’m waiting for Lila. I know the chances are good that she’s asleep, but I’m hoping not. Want to talk to her. I went back out to that trailer where those meth-heads got killed. Something funny out there. Not just fairy handkerchiefs. The trees are full of moths. Wanted to talk to her about it, maybe take her to see. If not her, then whoever’s supposed to be in charge.”

“This is Willy Burke,” Barry told Garth and Michaela. “Volunteer fire department, Adopt-A-Highway, coaches Pop Warner, all around good guy. But we’re really pressed for time, Willy, so—”

“If it was Linny Mars you came to talk to, you better hurry up.” Willy’s eyes flicked from Barry to Garth to Michaela. They were deep-set, caught in nets of wrinkles, but sharp. “She was still awake the last time I popped in, but she’s fadin fast.”

“No deputies around?” Garth asked.

“Nope, all out on patrol. Except maybe for Terry Coombs. I heard he’s a little under the weather. Struck drunk, don’t you know.”

The three of them started up the steps to the triple doors. “Haven’t seen Lila, then?” Willy called after them.

“No,” Barry said.

“Well… maybe I’ll wait a little longer.” And Willy wandered back to his bench. “Something funny out there, all right. All those moths. And the place has got a vibration.”

Linny Mars, part of the ten percent of earth’s female population still holding out on that Monday, continued to walk around with her laptop, but now she was moving slowly, occasionally stumbling and bumping into the furniture. To Michaela she looked like a wind-up toy that had almost run down. Two hours ago, that was me, she thought.

Linny walked past them, staring at her laptop with her bloodshot eyes, not seeming to realize they were there until Barry tapped her on the shoulder. Then she jumped, her hands flying up. Garth caught her laptop before it could crash to the floor. On the screen was a video of the London Eye. In slow motion it tottered and rolled into the Thames again and again. Hard to tell why anyone would want to destroy the London Eye, but apparently someone had felt a need to do so.

“Barry! You scared the dickens out of me!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Terry sent me to get some of the hardware from the weapons room. I guess he wants it up to the prison. May I have the key, please?”

“Terry?” she frowned. “Why would he… Lila’s the sheriff, not Terry. You know that.”

“Lila, right,” Barry said. “It’s Lila’s order via Terry.”

Garth went to the doors and looked out, convinced that a sheriff’s department cruiser would pull up at any moment. Maybe two or three. They would be thrown in jail, and this lunatic adventure would be over before it even got started. So far there was no one but the bearded guy sitting out there under his umbrella, like Patience on her monument, but that couldn’t last.

“Can you help me out, Linny? For Lila?”

“Sure. I’ll be glad to see her back,” Linny said. She went to her desk and put her laptop down. On the screen, the London Eye fell and fell and fell. “That guy Dave is running things until she does. Or maybe his name is Pete. Confusing to have two Petes around. In any case, I don’t know about him. He’s very serious.”

She rummaged in her wide top drawer, and brought out a heavy ring of keys. She peered at them. Her eyes drifted closed. White threads immediately rose from her eyelashes, wavering in the air.

“Linny!” Barry said sharply. “Wake up!”

Her eyes snapped open, and the threads disappeared. “I am awake. Stop shouting.” She ran a finger along the keys, making them jingle. “I know it’s one of them…”

Barry took them. “I’ll find it. Miss Morgan, maybe you’d like to go back to the RV and wait there.”

“No, thanks. I want to help. It will be quicker that way.”

At the back of the main room was an unmarked metal door painted a particularly unappetizing shade of green. There were two locks. Barry found the key that fitted the top one easily enough. The second, however, was taking more time. Michaela thought Lila might have kept that key for herself. It might be in her pocket, buried under one of those white cocoons.

“Do you see anyone coming?” she called to Garth.

“Not yet, but hurry up. This is making me need to pee.”

There were only three keys left on the ring when Barry found the one that turned the second lock. He opened the door, and Michaela saw a small closet-sized room with rifles stowed in racks and pistols nestled in Styrofoam-lined cubbies. There were shelves stacked with boxes of ammunition. On one wall was a poster showing a Texas Ranger in a ten-gallon hat, pointing a revolver with a huge black barrel. I FOUGHT THE LAW AND THE LAW WON, read the line beneath.

“Get as much of the ammo as you can,” Barry said. “I’ll get the M4s and some of the Glocks.”

Michaela started for the ammo shelves, then changed her mind and went back into the dispatch area. She grabbed Linny’s wastebasket and turned it over, dumping out a heap of crumpled paper and takeout coffee cups. Linny took no notice. Michaela loaded as many boxes of ammunition as she thought she could carry into the wastebasket and left the secure room with the basket clasped in her arms. Garth brushed past her to get his own armload of weaponry. Barry had left one of the triple entry doors open. Michaela staggered down the wide stone steps through the thickening rain in time to see Barry reach the Fleetwood. The bearded man got up from his bench, still holding his umbrella over his head. He said something to Barry, who replied. Then the bearded man, Willy, opened the RV’s rear door so Barry could put in his armload of guns.

Michaela joined him, panting. Barry took the wastebasket from her and dumped the boxes of ammo on top of the jackstraw pile of guns. They went back together while Willy stood beneath his umbrella, watching. Garth came out with a second load of armament, his pants sagging under the weight of the ammo boxes he had shoved into all his pockets.

“What did the old guy say to you?” Michaela asked.

“He wanted to know if we were doing something Sheriff Norcross would approve of,” Barry replied. “I said we were.”

They went back inside and hurried to the secure room. They had taken about half the weaponry. Michaela spotted something that looked like a submachine gun afflicted with the mumps. “We should definitely take that. I think it’s the teargas-launcher thingy. I don’t know if we need it, but I don’t want anyone else to have it.”

Garth rejoined them. “I come bearing bad news, Counselor Holden. Truck with a jackpot light on the dash just pulled up behind your RV.”

They hurried to the doors and peered out through the smoked glass. Two men were getting out of the truck, and Michaela recognized them both: the clown and his autograph hound partner.

“Oh, Christ,” Barry said, “that’s Don Peters, from the prison. What’s he doing pretending to be a cop? The man has the brains of an insect.”

“That particular insect was most recently seen manning a roadblock near the prison,” Garth said. “Same bug, same truck.”

The bearded man approached the newcomers, said something, and pointed further up Main Street. Peters and his young partner ran to their truck and jumped in. The lightbars came on and they pulled out with the siren screaming.

“What’s going on?” Linny asked in a distracted voice. “Just what in the doodly-fuck is going on?”

“Everything’s fine,” Garth said, and gave her a smile. “Not to worry.” Then, to Barry and Michaela: “May I suggest we quit while we’re ahead?”

“What’s going on?” Linny wailed. “Oh, this is all just a bad dream!”

“Hang in there, miss,” Garth said. “It might get better.”

The three of them left, running once they got to the concrete path. Michaela had the grenade launcher in one hand and a bag of teargas shells in the other. She felt like Bonnie Parker. Willy was standing beside the Fleetwood.

“How did you get those guys out of here?” Barry asked.

“Told em someone was shooting up the hardware store. They won’t be long, so I think you folks better roll.” Willy snapped his umbrella closed. “And I think I better roll with you. Those two ain’t going to be happy campers when they come back.”

“Why would you help us like this?” Garth asked.

“Well, it’s strange days now, and a man has got to trust his instincts. Mine have always been pretty good. Barry here’s always been a friend to Lila, even though he bats for the other team in court, and I recognize this girl here from the TV news.” He peered at Garth. “You I don’t like the looks of so much, but you’re with them, so what the hell. Besides, the die is cast, as they say. Where we going?”

“First to pick up Lila’s son,” Barry said, “then up to the prison. How would you like to take part in a siege, Willy? Because that may be what’s shaping up.”

Willy smiled, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Well, I had a coonskin cap when I was a kid, and I always like movies about the Alamo, so why not? Help me up the steps of this rig, would you? The goddam rain plays hell with my rheumatism.”

Jared, waiting at the door of the demo house, was getting ready to call his father again when a huge RV pulled up in front. Jared recognized the driver; like his mother’s deputies and many other town officials, Barry Holden had been a dinner guest at the Norcross house on occasion. Jared met him on the stoop.

“Come on,” Barry said. “We have to go.”

Jared hesitated. “My mom and four others are in the attic. It was really hot up there before the rain started, and it will be hot again tomorrow. You should help me get them down.”

“It will cool off fast tonight, Jared, and we have no time.”

Barry didn’t know if the cocooned women could feel heat or cold, but he did know that their window of opportunity was rapidly closing. He also thought that Lila and the others might be better off stashed away here on this quiet street. He had insisted on bringing his own wife and daughters along, because of the RV. It was well known in Dooling, and he was afraid of reprisals.

“Can we at least tell someone—”

“That’s a decision your father can make. Please, Jared.”

Jared allowed himself to be led down the walk to the idling Fleetwood. The back door opened, and his old Pop Warner coach leaned out. Jared smiled in spite of himself. “Coach Burke!”

“Well, lookit this!” Willy exclaimed. “The only peewee quarterback I ever had who didn’t drop every other snap. Climb in here, son.”

But the first thing Jared saw was the array of guns and ammo on the floor. “Holy shit, what are these for?”

A woman sat on the plaid couch just inside the door. She was young, extremely pretty, and vaguely familiar, but the most remarkable thing about her was how awake she looked. She said, “Hopefully just insurance.”

A man standing in the passage in front of her laughed. “I wouldn’t bet on that, Mickey.” He held out his hand. “Garth Flickinger.”

Behind Garth Flickinger, on a matching couch, were arranged five cocooned bodies, each smaller than the previous, like a set of separated nesting dolls.

“That’s Mr. Holden’s wife and daughters, I’m told,” Coach Burke said.

The RV started rolling. Jared staggered. Willy Burke steadied him, and as Jared shook with Mr. Flickinger, he thought that maybe all of this was a dream. Even the guy’s name seemed like something out of a dream—who, in the real world, was named Garth Flickinger?

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. In his peripheral vision the Holden women rolled against one another as the RV went around a corner. Jared told himself not to see them, but there was no not seeing them, reduced to mummified dolls. “I’m—ah—Jared Norcross.” And dream or no dream, he had a certain resentment—there had been time for Mr. Holden to get his family, hadn’t there? And why was that? Because it was his RV?

Jared’s phone rang as Barry hooked them around the Tremaine Street cul-de-sac. They were leaving his mother, Molly, Mary, the baby, and Mrs. Ransom behind. It felt wrong. Everything felt wrong, though, so what else was new?

The caller was his father. They spoke briefly and then Clint asked to speak to Michaela. When she took the phone, Clint said, “Here’s what you need to do.”

She listened.

Deputy Sheriff Reed Barrows had parked Unit Three directly across the byroad leading to the prison. This was high ground; he and Vern had a clear view down at least six miles of Route 31. Reed had expected a ration of shit from Peters about being relieved so soon after they had taken up their post, but Peters had been surprisingly agreeable. Probably eager to get an early start on the day’s drinking. Maybe the kid was, too. Reed doubted if they were checking IDs at the Squeaky Wheel this week, and currently the cops had better things to do than enforce alcohol laws.

Peters reported they had stopped just a single car, some reporter who’d gone up to the prison hoping to get an interview, and been turned away. Reed and Vern had stopped no one at all. Even traffic on the main road was so sparse it was nearly nonexistent. The town was in mourning for its women, Reed thought. Hell, the world was in mourning.

Reed turned to his partner, who was reading something on his Kindle and picking his nose. “You’re not wiping boogers under the seat, are you?”

“Jesus, no. Don’t be disgusting.” Vern raised his rump, pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket, wiped a little green treasure into it, and replaced it. “Tell me something—what exactly are we doing here? Do they really think Norcross is stupid enough to take that woman out into the world when he’s got her behind bars right now?”

“I don’t know.”

“If a food truck or something comes along, what are we supposed to do?”

“Stop it and radio for instructions.”

“Radio who? Terry or Frank?”

About this Reed was less sure. “Guess I’d try Terry’s cell first thing. Leave a message just to cover our asses if he doesn’t pick up. Why don’t we worry about that if it happens.”

“Which it probably won’t, the mess everything’s in.”

“Yeah. Infrastructure’s shot to hell.”

“What’s infrastructure?”

“Look it up on your Kindle, why don’t you?”

Vern did so. “ ‘The basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or an enterprise.’ Huh.”

“Huh? What does huh mean?”

“That you’re right. It’s shot to hell. I went to the Shopwell this morning, before I came on. Place looks like a bomb hit it.”

Down the hill, in the gray afternoon light, they could see an approaching vehicle.

“Reed?”

“What?”

“With no women, there’s going to be no babies.”

“You’ve got a scientific mind, all right,” Reed said.

“If this doesn’t end, where will the human race be in another sixty or a hundred years?”

This was something Reed Barrows did not want to think about, especially with his wife in a cocoon and his toddler being babysat (probably inadequately) by ancient Mr. Freeman next door. Nor did he have to. The vehicle was now close enough to see it was a humungous zebra-striped camper, and slowing down as if it meant to turn onto the prison road. Not that it could, with Three parked across it.

“That RV belongs to Holden,” said Vern. “The lawyer. My brother services it over in Maylock.”

The Fleetwood came to a stop. The driver’s door opened, and Barry Holden got out. At the same time, the officers got out of Three.

Holden greeted them with a smile. “Gentlemen, I come bearing good tidings of great joy.”

Neither Reed nor Vern returned the smile.

“No one goes up to the prison, Mr. Holden,” Reed said. “Sheriff’s orders.”

“Now, I don’t think that’s strictly true,” Barry said, still smiling. “I believe a gentleman named Frank Geary gave that order, and he’s what you might call self-appointed. Isn’t that so?”

Reed wasn’t sure how to respond to this, so he kept silent.

“In any case,” Barry said, “I got a call from Clint Norcross. He’s decided that turning the woman over to local law enforcement is the right thing to do.”

“Well, thank God for that!” Vern exclaimed. “The man sees reason!”

“He wants me at the prison to facilitate the deal and make it clear for the public record as to why he went outside of protocol. Just a formality, really.”

Reed was about to say, You couldn’t find a smaller vehicle to come up here in? Car wouldn’t start, maybe?, but that was when Three’s dash radio blared. It was Terry Coombs, and he sounded upset. “Unit Three, Unit Three respond! Right now! Right now!”

Just as Reed and Vern were first noticing the approach of Barry Holden’s RV, Terry Coombs entered the Olympia Diner and walked to the booth where Frank and Deputy Pete Ordway were sitting. Frank was less than happy to see Coombs up and about, but concealed his displeasure as best he could. “Yo, Terry.”

Terry nodded to both men. He had shaved and changed his shirt. He looked rocky but sober. “Jack Albertson told me you guys were here.” Albertson was one of the retired deputies who had been pressed back into service two days before. “I got some pretty bad news from Bridger County fifteen minutes ago.” There was no smell of booze about Terry. Frank hoped to change that. He didn’t like encouraging a man who was probably an incipient alcoholic, but Coombs was easier to work with when he’d had a few.

“What’s going on in Bridger?” Pete asked.

“Wreck on the highway. Judge Silver went into Dorr’s Hollow Stream. He’s dead.”

“What?” Frank’s shout was loud enough to bring Gus Vereen out of the kitchen.

“It’s a damn shame,” Terry said. “He was a fine man.” He pulled up a chair. “Any idea what he was doing over there?”

“Went to speak to an ex-FBI guy he knew in Coughlin about helping to talk sense into Norcross,” Frank said. It had to have been a heart attack. The judge had looked horrible, washed out and shaky. “If he’s dead… I guess that’s out.” With an effort, he composed himself. He’d liked Judge Silver and had been willing to go along with him—up to a certain point. That point was erased now.

“And that woman is still at the prison.” Frank leaned forward. “Awake. Norcross was lying about her being in a cocoon. Hicks told me.”

“Hicks’s got a poor reputation,” Terry said.

Frank wasn’t hearing it. “And there’s other strange things about her. She’s the key.”

“If the bitch started it, she’ll know how to stop it,” Pete said.

Terry’s mouth twitched. “There’s no proof of that, Pete. And since Aurora started halfway around the world, it seems kind of farfetched. I think we all need to take a deep breath and just—”

Frank’s walkie came to life. It was Don Peters. “Frank! Frank, come in! I need to talk to you! You better answer this thing, because they fucking—”

Frank raised the walkie to his lips. “This is Frank. Come back. And watch the profanity, you’re going out over the ai—”

“They fucking robbed the guns!” Don yelled. “Some decrepit old piece of shit sent us on a wild-goose chase and then they robbed the fucking guns right out of the fucking sheriff’s station!”

Before Frank could reply, Terry snatched the walkie-talkie out of his hand. “Coombs here. Who did?”

“Barry Holden, in a big motherhumper of an RV! Your dispatcher said there were others with them, but she’s three-quarters out of it and don’t know who!”

“All the guns?” Terry asked, astounded. “They took all the guns?”

“No, no, not all, I guess they didn’t have time, but plenty of them! Jesus Christ, that RV was huge!”

Terry stared at the walkie in his hand, frozen. Frank told himself he ought to keep his mouth shut and let Terry work through the computation on his own—and he just couldn’t do it. It seemed he never could, once he was angry. “Do you still think we just need to take a deep breath and wait Norcross out? Because you know where they’re going with those weapons, don’t you?”

Terry looked up at him, his lips pressed so tightly together his mouth was almost gone. “I think you might have forgotten who’s in charge here, Frank.”

“Sorry, Sheriff.” Under the table, his hands were so tightly clenched they were shaking, the nails digging crescents into his palms.

Terry was still staring at him. “Tell me you put someone out there on the road to the prison.”

It would be your own damn fault if I didn’t, drunk as you were. Ah, but who had been plying him with the booze?

“I did. Rangle and Barrows.”

“Good. That’s good. Which unit are they in?”

Frank didn’t know, but Pete Ordway did. “Three.”

Don was blabbering on, but Terry cut him off and pressed SEND. “Unit Three, Unit Three respond! Right now! Right now!”

CHAPTER 8

At the squawk of the radio, Reed Barrows told Barry to stay put.

“No problem,” Barry said. He gave the side of the Fleetwood three knocks, a message to Willy Burke—crouched behind the curtain that separated the front of the RV from the back—that it was on to Plan B. Plan B was pretty simple: beat it while Barry provided as much of a distraction as possible. It was paramount that the guns got to the prison, and that his girls were safe from harm. Barry didn’t have to think twice about it. They’d arrest him, of course, but he knew a terrific lawyer.

He placed a hand on Vern Rangle’s shoulder, gently easing him past the front of the RV.

“Sounds like someone at the station’s got a full diaper,” Rangle observed cheerfully, moving thoughtlessly along with the lawyer’s guidance. “Where we going?”

Where they were going was away from the RV so that, one, Rangle didn’t see Willy Burke sliding into the driver’s seat and, two, to give the Fleetwood room to go forward without running anyone over. Barry couldn’t tell the officer that, though. A concept that he had endeavored to impress upon his girls was that the law was impersonal; it wasn’t about your feelings, it was about your argument. If you could partition yourself off from personal preference entirely, that was for the best. You wanted, really, to remove your skin, and assume the skin of your client, while at the same time hanging onto your brain.

(Gerda, who had been asked on a date by a high school boy—just a sophomore, but still much too old for her—had recently tried to get her father to take her on as a pro bono client to argue to her mother that she was old enough to go to the movies with the guy. This had been exceptionally clever of Gerda, but Barry had recused himself on the grounds of their familial relationship. Also because, as her father, he had no intention of letting her go anywhere with a boy who was almost fifteen and probably got hard every time the wind blew. If Cary Benson wanted to spend time with her that badly, he’d said, then Cary could buy her an ice cream sundae at the Dairy Treet right here in town. And in broad daylight.)

What Barry had chosen not to express to Gerda was the sticky provision of the utterly culpable. Sometimes you pulled on your client’s skin only to find that they—you—were astoundingly, hopelessly, no-way-to-even-pretend guilty as original sin. When this situation arose, the only sensible tactic was to distract and disrupt, litigate minutiae, gum up the wheels and delay. With luck, you might wear the opposition down until they offered you an advantageous deal just to be rid of you, or better yet, irritate or flummox them into screwing up their case altogether.

With that in mind, he improvised with the most dumbfounding question he could come up with on short notice:

“Listen, Vern. Wanted to take you aside and ask you something.”

“Okay…”

Barry leaned forward confidentially. “Are you circumcised?”

Rain sprinkles dotted the surface of Vern Rangle’s glasses, obscuring his eyes. Barry heard the engine of the RV turn over, heard the clunk as Willy put it into drive, but the cop paid no mind. The circumcision question had put him in mental vapor lock.

“Gee, Mr. Holden…” Vern absently shook out a handkerchief and began to refold it. “… kinda personal, you know.”

Behind them there was a thud and the whinge of metal grinding against metal.

Meanwhile, Reed Barrows had scooted into the driver’s side of the cruiser to take Terry’s call, but the mic slipped out of his damp hand. The seconds that elapsed while he bent to retrieve it from the footwell and untangle the cord were important because that got Willy Burke settled in driving mode.

“Roger, this is Unit Three. Barrows speaking, over,” Reed said once he had the mic again.

Out the window, he saw the RV swerving around the front of the cruiser to the gravel shoulder and grassy embankment on the southbound half of the road. This vision didn’t alarm Reed; it perplexed him. Why was Barry Holden moving his RV? Or was Vern moving it so someone else could get by? That didn’t make sense. They needed to sort out the shyster and his Fleetwood before they dealt with anyone else who wanted to drive through.

Terry Coombs’s voice blared over the radio. “Arrest Barry Holden and confiscate his vehicle! He’s got a pile of stolen guns and he’s headed for the prison! You hear me—”

The front end of the RV bumped the front end of the cruiser, the mic jumped out of Reed’s hand a second time, and his view through the windshield swung away as if on hinges.

“Hey!”

In the back of the RV, Jared lost his balance. He fell off the couch and onto the guns. “You okay?” Garth asked. The doctor had kept his feet by pressing his back against the counter of the kitchenette and grabbing the sink.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for asking about me!” Michaela had managed to stay on the couch, but she’d fallen over onto her side.

Garth realized that he adored Mickey. She had sand, as the old timers liked to say. He wouldn’t change a thing about her. Her nose and everything else was as close to flawless as you could get. “I didn’t have to, Mickey,” he replied. “I know you’re okay because you’ll always be okay.”

The RV rolled slowly along, hugging the sloping roadside at a tilted angle and doing about fifteen miles an hour, shoving the cruiser aside. Metal squalled against metal. Vern gaped and spun to Barry. The lawyer had pissed right down his leg. Vern therefore slugged Barry in the eye and dumped him flat on his rear end.

“Stop the RV!” bellowed Reed from the open door of the shifting cruiser. “Shoot the tires!”

Vern drew his service weapon.

The RV broke loose from the cruiser and began to pick up speed. It was at a two o’clock angle as it moved off the shoulder, now headed back for the center of the road. Vern, aiming for the right rear tire, triggered too quickly. His shot went way high, puncturing a piece of the RV’s wall. The vehicle was about fifty yards distant. Once it gained the road, it would be gone. Vern took a moment to reset and aimed again, properly, focusing again on the rear right tire… and fired into the air as Barry Holden tackled him to the ground.

Jared, on the floor, his back poked in half a dozen places by gunsights and gun barrels, was deafened by the blast. He could somehow feel the screaming around him—the woman, Michaela? Flickinger?—but he couldn’t hear it. His eyes found a hole in the wall: the bullet had made an opening like a burst firecracker top. His hands, flat on the floor of the RV, felt the wheels moving below, gaining speed, thrumming on the hardtop.

Flickinger still had his feet. He was braced at the kitchen counter. Nope, it wasn’t Flickinger who was screaming.

Jared looked where the doctor was looking.

The cocooned figures lay on the couch. A bloody cavity had opened at the sternum of the third in the row, the oldest of the girls, Gerda. She stood up from the couch, and staggered forward. She was the one that was screaming. Jared saw that she was moving at Michaela, who was huddled at the end of the parallel couch. The girl’s arms were raised, torn loose from the webbing that had held them fast to her torso, and the impression of the open, howling mouth under the material was vivid. Moths spilled from the hole in her sternum.

Flickinger caught Gerda. She spun, and her hands clawed at his throat as they wobbled in a circle, and went tripping over the guns on the floor. The two bodies crashed against the rear door. The latch snapped, the door flew open, and they fell out, followed by a rush of moths, and a stream of guns and bullets.

Evie moaned.

“What?” Angel asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh,” Evie said. “Nothing.”

“Liar,” Jeanette said. She was still slumped in the shower alcove. Angel had to hand it to Jeanette: she was almost as stubborn as Angel herself.

“That’s the sound you make when people die.” Jeanette inhaled. She cocked her head and addressed an invisible person. “That’s the sound she makes when people die, Damian.”

“I guess that’s true, Jeanette,” Evie said. “I guess I do that.”

“That’s what I said. Didn’t I, Damian?”

“You’re seein shit, Jeanette,” Angel said.

Jeanette’s gaze stayed on the empty air. “Moths came from her mouth, Angel. She’s got moths in her. Now let me alone—I’m trying to have a conversation with my husband.”

Evie excused herself. “I need to make a call.”

Reed heard Vern’s shot as he hurled himself over the police cruiser’s console and jerked open the passenger door. He glimpsed the rear end of the RV as it lumbered over beyond the slope, its back door flapping back and forth.

Two bodies lay in the road. Reed unholstered his service weapon and ran toward them. Past the bodies there was a trail of three or four assault rifles and a few handfuls of ammunition scattered among them.

When he reached the bodies, he stopped. Blood and gray matter painted the pavement around the skull of the prone man who was nearest. Reed had seen his share of corpses, but the mess here was notable, maybe a prize-winner. In the course of his fall, the guy’s glasses had flipped up to rest on the fringe of his curly hair. The arrangement of the glasses gave him a perversely warm and casual look, a teacherly aspect, as he lay dead in the road with his brains splattered on the asphalt.

A few steps further on, a female was sprawled on her side in the position that Reed himself often adopted when he was on the couch watching television. Her mask of webbing had been scraped away by contact with the road, and the skin that remained was tattered. From what was left of the face and of her body, Reed could determine that she was young, but not much more than that. A bullet had torn a large wound in her chest. The girl’s blood flowed onto the damp pavement.

Sneakers slapped against the pavement behind Reed. “Gerda!” someone screamed. “Gerda!”

Reed turned and Barry Holden rushed past him, falling to his knees by the body of his daughter.

Vern Rangle, nose bloodied, staggered up the road after Holden, bellowing that he’d circumcise him, the fucker.

What a hill of shit: a smeared guy, a dead girl, a howling attorney, Vern Rangle with his blood up, guns and ammo in the road. Reed was relieved that Lila Norcross was not currently serving as sheriff because he would not have wanted to even begin to attempt to explain to her how it had happened.

Reed grabbed for Vern a second too late, catching just a piece of fabric at his shoulder. Vern shook him off and swatted the butt end of his pistol across the back of Barry Holden’s head. There was an ugly cracking noise, like a breaking branch, and a gout of blood. Barry Holden tumbled face-first onto the ground beside his daughter. Vern squatted beside the unconscious lawyer and began to hit him again and again with the butt of his gun. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! You broke my nose, you b—”

The young woman who should have been dead and wasn’t grasped Vern’s jaw, wrapped her fingers over his lower teeth, and jerked him down to her level. Her head lifted and her mouth snapped wide and she buried her teeth in Vern’s throat. Reed’s partner began to whack at her with the pistol butt. It didn’t faze her. Arterial blood pumped out around her lips.

Reed remembered his own weapon. He raised it and shot. The bullet entered through the young woman’s eye and her body went loose, but her mouth remained locked on Vern’s throat. She appeared to be drinking his blood.

On his knees, Reed dug his fingers into the hot and slippery mess where the young woman’s teeth were clamped to his partner’s throat. He hauled and pulled, feeling tongue and enamel. Vern swung at her once more, ineffectually, his gun flying from his relaxing hand and bouncing away. Then he collapsed.

Last in a three-cruiser caravan, Frank drove alone. Everyone had their sirens going. Ordway and Terry were at the fore, followed by Peters and Peters’s sidekick, Blass. Aloneness was not something that Frank sought, but it seemed to find him. Why was that? Elaine had taken Nana and left him alone. Oscar Silver had gone off the road and left him alone. It was grim. It had made him grim. Maybe that was how it had to be, though—how he had to be—to do what he had to do.

But could he do what he had to do? Things were going wrong. Reed Barrows had radioed that shots had been fired and there was an officer down. Frank believed he was ready to kill for his daughter; he was certain that he was ready to die for her. What occurred to him now, though, was that he was not the only one who was willing to take mortal risks. Norcross’s people had stolen police armaments and broken through a barricade. Whatever their reasons, they were determined. It worried Frank that they should be so determined, that their reasons should be such an enigma. What was driving them? What was it between Eve Black and Norcross?

His cell phone rang. The caravan was speeding north on Ball’s Hill. Frank pulled the phone from his pocket. “Geary.”

“Frank, this is Eve Black.” She spoke a shade above a whisper, and her voice had a husky, flirty quality.

“It is, is it? Nice to meet you.”

“I’m calling you from my new cell phone. I didn’t have one, so Lore Hicks gifted me his. Wasn’t that chivalrous of him? By the way, you might as well slow down. No need to risk an accident. The RV got away. There’s just four dead people and Reed Barrows.”

“How do you know that?”

“Trust me, I know. Clint was surprised it was so easy to pull off the heist. I was, too, to be honest. We had a good laugh. I thought you were a little more on top of things. My mistake.”

“You should give yourself up, Ms. Black.” Frank concentrated on measuring his words. On keeping the redness that wanted to overtake his mind at bay. “Or you should give this—thing up. Whatever it is. You should do that before anyone gets hurt.”

“Oh, we’re pretty well past the getting-hurt stage. Judge Silver, for instance, got a lot more than hurt. As did Dr. Flickinger, who actually wasn’t such a bad fellow when his head was clear. We’re in the mass extinction stage.”

Frank choked the wheel of the cruiser. “What the fuck are you?”

“I could ask you the same question, but I know what you’d say: ‘I am the Good Father.’ Because with you it’s all Nana-Nana-Nana, isn’t it? The protective daddy. Have you thought even once about all the other women, and what you might be doing to them? What you might be putting at risk?”

“How do you know about my daughter?”

“It’s my business to know. There’s an old blues song that goes, ‘Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself.’ You need to widen your perspective, Frank.”

What I need, Frank Geary thought, is my hands around your throat. “What do you want?”

“I want you to man up! I want you to man the fuck up and make this interesting! I want your precious Nana to be able to go to school and say, ‘My daddy isn’t just a civil servant who catches feral cats, and he isn’t just a guy who punches walls or pulls on my favorite shirt or yells at Mom when things aren’t going his way. He’s also the man who stopped that wicked old fairy who put all the women to sleep.’ ”

“Leave my daughter out of it, you bitch.”

The teasing note evaporated from her voice. “When you protected her at the hospital, that was brave. I admired it. I admired you. I truly did. I know you love her, and that’s no small thing. I know, in your way, all you want is the best for her. And that makes me love you a tiny bit, even though you’re part of the problem.”

Ahead, the first two vehicles were pulling to a stop beside Reed Barrows’s dented cruiser. Frank could see Barrows walking to meet them. Further on, he could see the bodies in the road.

“Stop this,” said Frank. “Let them go. Let the women go. Not just my wife and daughter, all of them.”

Evie said, “You’ll have to kill me first.”

Angel asked who was this Frank that Evie had been talking to.

“He’s the dragonslayer,” Evie said. “I just needed to make sure that he wasn’t going to allow himself to be distracted by unicorns.”

“You are so fuckin crazy.” Angel whistled.

Evie wasn’t, but it wasn’t an issue to debate with Angel—who, anyway, was entitled to her opinion.

CHAPTER 9

The fox comes to Lila in a dream. She knows it’s a dream because the fox can talk.

“Hey, babe,” he says as he pads into the bedroom of the house on St. George Street she’s now sharing with Tiffany, Janice Coates, and two of the docs from the Women’s Center—Erin Eisenberg and Jolie Suratt. (Erin and Jolie are unmarried. The third Women’s Center doctor, Georgia Peekins, lives on the other side of town, with two daughters who sorely miss their big brother.) Another reason to know this is a dream is that she’s alone in the room. The other twin bed, where Tiffany sleeps, is empty and neatly made up.

The fox puts its cunning forepaws—white rather than red, as if he has walked through fresh paint to get here—on the quilt that covers her.

“What do you want?” Lila asks.

“To show you the way back,” the fox says. “But only if you want to go.”

When Lila opened her eyes, it was morning. Tiffany was in the other bed where she belonged, the blankets pushed down to her knees, her belly a half-moon above the boxer shorts she slept in. She was over seven months now.

Instead of going to the kitchen to brew up a nasty-tasting mess of the chicory that served them as coffee in this version of Dooling, Lila went straight down the hall and opened the front door to a pleasant spring morning. (Time passed with such slippery limberness here; watches kept ordinary time, but there was really nothing ordinary about it.) The fox was there as she’d known it would be, sitting on the weed-choked slate path with its brush of a tail curled neatly around its paws. It regarded Lila with bright interest.

“Hey, babe,” Lila said. The fox cocked its head and seemed to smile. Then it trotted down the path to the broken street and sat again. Watching her. Waiting.

Lila went to wake Tiffany up.

In the end, seventeen residents of Our Place followed the fox in six of the solar-powered golf carts, a caravan trundling slowly out of town and then along what had been Route 31 toward Ball’s Hill. Tiffany rode in the lead cart along with Janice and Lila, grousing the whole way about not being allowed to ride her horse. This had been nixed by Erin and Jolie, who were concerned about the strength of Tiff’s contractions when she still had six or eight weeks to go. This much they had told the mom-to-be herself. What they hadn’t passed on (although Lila and Janice knew) were their worries for the baby, which had been conceived while Tiffany was still using drugs on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis.

Mary Pak, Magda Dubcek, the four members of the First Thursday Book Club, and five erstwhile Dooling Correctional inmates were going. Also along was Elaine Nutting, formerly Geary. She rode with the two lady docs. Her daughter had wanted to come, but Elaine had put her foot down and kept it down even when tears began to flow. Nana had been left with old Mrs. Ransom and her granddaughter. The two girls had become fast friends, but not even the prospect of spending a day with Molly had cheered Nana up. She wanted to follow the fox, she said, because it was like something out of a fairy tale. She wanted to draw it.

“Stay with your little girl, if you want,” Lila had told Elaine. “We’ve got plenty of people.”

“What I want is to see what that thing wants,” Elaine had replied. Although in truth, she didn’t know if she did or not. The fox—now sitting in front of the slumped ruin of Pearson’s Barber Shop and waiting patiently for the women to assemble and get moving—filled her with a sense of foreboding, unfocused but strong.

“Come on!” Tiffany called grumpily. “Before I need to pee again!”

And so they followed the fox as it trotted out of town along the faded white line in the center of the highway, occasionally looking back to make sure his troop was still there. Seeming to grin. Seeming almost to say, There sure are some fine-looking women in the audience today.

It was an outing—a strange one, granted, but still a day off from their various chores and jobs—and there should have been talking and laughter, but the women in the trundling line of golf carts were almost silent. The headlamps of the carts came on when they were rolling, and as they went past the jungle that had once been Adams Lumberyard, the thought came to Lila that they looked more like a funeral cortege than gals on an outing.

When the fox left the highway for an overgrown track a quarter mile past the lumberyard, Tiffany stiffened and put her hands protectively on her belly. “No, no, no, you can stop right here and let me out. I ain’t going back to Tru Mayweather’s trailer, not even if it ain’t no more than a pile of scrap metal.”

“That’s not where we’re going,” Lila said.

“How do you know?”

“Wait and see.”

As it turned out, the remains of the trailer were barely visible; a storm had knocked it off its blocks and it lay on its side in high weeds and brambles like a rusty dinosaur. Thirty or forty yards from it, the fox cut left and slipped into the woods. The women in the two lead carts saw a ruddy orange flash of fur, then it vanished.

Lila dismounted and went to where it had entered the woods. The ruins of the nearby shed had been entirely overgrown, but even after all this time, a sallow chemical smell remained. The meth may be gone, Lila thought, but the memories linger on. Even here, where time seems to gallop, pause for breath, then gallop again.

Janice, Magda, and Blanche McIntyre joined her. Tiffany remained in the golf cart, holding her belly. She looked ill.

“There’s a game trail,” Lila said, pointing. “We can follow it without much trouble.”

“I’m not goin in those woods, either,” Tiffany said. “I don’t care if that fox does a tap dance. I’m havin goddam contractions again.”

“You wouldn’t be going even if you weren’t having them,” Erin said. “I’ll stay with you. Jolie, you can go, if you want.”

Jolie did. The fifteen women went up the game trail in single file, Lila in the lead and the former Mrs. Frank Geary bringing up the rear. They had been walking for almost ten minutes when Lila stopped and raised her arms, index fingers pointing both left and right like a traffic cop who can’t make up her mind.

“Holy shit,” Celia Frode said. “I never seen nothing like that. Never.”

The branches of the poplars, birches, and alders on either side were furred with moths. There seemed to be millions of them.

“What if they attack?” Elaine murmured, keeping her voice low and thanking God that she hadn’t given in to Nana’s demands to be brought along.

“They won’t,” Lila said.

“How can you know that?” Elaine demanded.

“I just do,” Lila said. “They’re like the fox.” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “They’re emissaries.”

“For who?” Blanche asked. “Or what?”

This was another question Lila chose not to answer, although she could have. “Come on,” she said. “Not far now.”

Fifteen women stood in thigh-high grass, staring at what Lila had come to think of as the Amazing Tree. No one said anything for perhaps thirty seconds. Then, in a high, gasping voice, Jolie Suratt said, “My good God in heaven.”

The Tree rose like a living pylon in the sun, its various knotted trunks weaving around each other, sometimes concentrating shafts of sunlight filled with dusty pollen, sometimes creating dark caves. Tropical birds disported among its many branches and gossiped in its ferny leaves. In front of it, the peacock Lila had seen before strutted back and forth like the world’s most elegant doorman. The red snake was there, too, hanging from a branch, a reptilian trapeze artist penduluming lazily back and forth. Below the snake was a dark crevasse where the various boles seemed to draw back. Lila didn’t remember this, but she wasn’t surprised. Nor was she when the fox popped out of it like Jack from his box and took a playful snap at the peacock, who paid him no mind.

Janice Coates took Lila’s arm. “Are we seeing this?”

“Yes,” Lila said.

Celia, Magda, and Jolie screamed shrilly, in piercing three-part harmony. The white tiger was emerging from the split in the many-boled trunk. It surveyed the women at the edge of the clearing with its green eyes, then stretched long and low, seeming almost to bow to them.

“Stand still!” Lila shouted. “Stand still, all of you! It won’t harm you!” Hoping with all her heart and soul that it was true.

The tiger touched noses with the fox. It turned to the women again, seeming to fix on Lila with particular interest. Then it paced around the Tree and out of sight.

“My God,” Kitty McDavid said. She was weeping. “How beautiful was that? How fucking oh-my-God beautiful was that?”

Magda Dubcek said, “This is svaté místo. Holy place.” And she crossed herself.

Janice was looking at Lila. “Tell me.”

“I think,” Lila said, “it’s a way out. A way back. If we want it.”

That was when the walkie-talkie on her belt came to life. There was a burst of static, and no way to make out words. But it sounded like Erin to Lila, and it sounded like she was yelling.

Tiffany was stretched across the front seat of the golf cart. An old St. Louis Rams tee-shirt that she had scrounged somewhere lay crumpled on the ground. Her breasts, once little more than nubbins, jutted skyward in a plain D-cup cotton bra. (The Lycra ones were now totally useless.) Erin was bent between her legs with her hands splayed on that amazing mound of belly. As the women came running, some brushing twigs and the odd moth from their hair, Erin bore down. Tiffany shrieked—“Stop that, oh for God’s sake stop!”—and her legs shot out in a V.

“What are you doing?” Lila asked, reaching her, but when she looked down, what Erin was doing and why she was doing it became obvious. Tiff’s jeans were unzipped. There was a stain on the blue denim and the cotton of Tiff’s underpants was a damp pink.

“The baby is coming, and its butt is where its head should be,” Erin said.

“Oh my God, a breech?” Kitty said.

“I have to turn it around,” Erin said. “Get us back to town, Lila.”

“We’ll have to straighten her up,” Lila said. “I can’t drive until you do that.”

With the help of Jolie and Blanche McIntyre, Lila got Tiffany to a half-sitting position with Erin crammed in next to her. Tiffany screamed again. “Oh, that hurts!”

Lila slid behind the wheel of the cart, her right shoulder tight against Tiffany’s left one. Erin had turned almost sideways to fit. “How fast will this thing go?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.” Lila hit the accelerator pedal, wincing at Tiff’s howl of pain as the cart jerked forward. Tiffany screamed at every jounce, and there were a lot of jounces. At that moment, the Amazing Tree with its freight of exotic birds was the farthest thing from Lila Norcross’s mind.

This was not true of the former Elaine Geary.

They stopped at the Olympia Diner. Tiffany was in too much pain to go further. Erin sent Janice and Magda back to town to get her bag while Lila and three other women carried Tiffany inside.

“Pull a couple of the tables together,” said Erin, “and do it fast. I need to straighten this baby out now, and I need Mom lying down to do it.”

Lila and Mary pushed over the tables. Margaret and Gail hefted Tiffany atop them, grimacing and turning their faces away, as if she were throwing mud at them instead of screams of objection.

Erin went back to work on Tiffany’s stomach, kneading it like dough. “I think it’s starting to move, praise God. Come on, Junior, how about a little somersault for Dr. E.?”

Erin bore down on Tiff’s stomach with one hand while Jolie Suratt pushed sideways.

“Stop!” Tiffany screamed. “Stop it, you fuckers!”

“It’s turning,” said Erin, ignoring the profanity. “Really turning, thank God. Yank her pants off, Lila. Pants and underpants. Jolie, keep pressing. Don’t let it turn back.”

Lila took one leg of Tiffany’s jeans, Celia Frode the other. They yanked and the old denims came off. Tiffany’s underpants came with them part way, leaving brushstrokes of blood and amniotic fluid on her thighs. Lila pulled them the rest of the way. They were heavy with liquid, warm and sopping. She felt her gorge rise, then settle back into place.

The screams were constant now, Tiffany’s head lashing from side to side.

“I can’t wait for the bag,” Erin said. “This baby is coming right now. Only…” She looked at her former office-mate, who nodded. “Somebody get Jolie a knife. A sharp one. We have to cut her a little.”

“I-gotta-push,” Tiffany panted.

“The hell you do,” Jolie said. “Not yet. The door’s open, but we need to take the hinges off. Make a little more room.”

Lila found a steak knife, and in the bathroom, an ancient bottle of hydrogen peroxide. She doused the blade, stopped to consider the hand sanitizer by the door, and tried it. Nothing. The stuff inside had evaporated long ago. She hurried back. The women had surrounded Tiffany, Erin, and Jolie in a semi-circle. All were holding hands except for Elaine Geary, who had her arms wrapped tightly around her midsection. She was directing her gaze first to the counter, then to the empty booths, then out the door. Anywhere but at the panting, screaming woman on the makeshift operating table, now mother-naked save for an old cotton bra.

Jolie took the knife. “Did you disinfect it with something?”

“Hydrogen per—”

“That’ll do,” Erin said. “Mary, find me a Styrofoam cooler if there’s one around. One of you other ladies, get towels. There’ll be some in the kitchen. Put them on top of the—”

A miserable howl from Tiffany as Jolie Suratt performed a steak-knife episiotomy, sans anesthetic.

“Put the towels on top of the golf carts,” Erin finished.

“Oh yeah, the solar panels!” That was Kitty. “To heat em up. Hey, that’s pretty sma—”

“We want them warm but not hot,” Erin said. “I have no intention of roasting our newest citizen. Go on.”

Elaine stood where she was, letting the other women wash around her like water around a rock, continuing to direct her gaze at any object that was not Tiffany Jones. Her eyes were shiny and shallow.

“How close is she?” Lila asked.

“Seven centimeters,” Jolie said. “She’ll be at ten before you can say Jack Robinson. Cervical effacement is complete—one thing that went right, at least. Push, Tiffany. Save a little for next time, though.”

Tiffany pushed. Tiffany screamed. Tiffany’s vagina flexed, then closed, then opened again. Fresh blood flowed between her legs.

“I don’t like the blood.” Lila heard Erin mutter this to Jolie from the side of her mouth, like a racetrack tout passing on a hot tip. “There’s way too much. Christ, I wish I at least had my fetoscope.”

Mary came back with the sort of hard plastic cooler Lila had toted to Maylock Lake many times, when she and Clint and Jared used to go on picnics there. Printed on the side was BUDWEISER! THE KING OF BEERS! “Will this do, Dr. E.?”

“Fine,” Erin said, but didn’t look up. “Okay, Tiff, big push.”

“My back is killing me—” Tiffany said, but me became meeeeeeeEEEEEEE as her face contorted and her fists beat up and down on the chipped Formica of the tabletop.

“I see its head!” Lila shouted. “I see its fa—oh, Christ, Erin, what—?”

Erin pushed Jolie aside and seized one of the baby’s shoulders before it could retreat, her fingertips pressing deep in a way that made Lila feel ill. The baby’s head slid forward tilted strenuously to one side, as if it was trying to look back to where it had come from. The eyes were shut, the face ashy gray. Looped around the neck and up one cheek toward the ear—like a hangman’s noose—was a blood-spotted umbilical cord that made Lila think of the red snake hanging from the Amazing Tree. From the chest down, the infant was still inside its mother, but one arm had slithered free and hung down limply. Lila could see each perfect finger, each perfect nail.

“Quit pushing,” Erin said. “I know you want to finish it, but don’t push yet.”

“I need to,” Tiffany rasped.

“You’ll strangle your baby if you do,” Jolie said. She was back beside Erin, shoulder to shoulder. “Wait. Just… just give me a second…”

Too late, thought Lila. It’s already strangled. You only have to look at that gray face.

Jolie worked one finger beneath the umbilical cord, then two. She flexed the fingers in a come-on gesture, first pulling the cord away from the infant’s neck and then slipping it off. Tiffany screamed, every tendon in her neck standing out in stark relief.

“Push!” Erin said. “Just as hard as you can! On three! Jolie, don’t let it face-plant on this filthy fucking floor when it comes! Tiff! One, two, three!”

Tiffany pushed. The baby seemed to shoot into Jolie Suratt’s hands. It was slimy, it was beautiful, and it was dead.

“Straw!” Jolie shouted. “Get a straw! Now!”

Elaine stepped forward. Lila hadn’t seen her move. She already had one ready, the paper stripped off. “Here.”

Erin took the straw. “Lila,” Erin said. “Open his mouth.”

His. Until then, Lila hadn’t noticed the tiny gray comma below the baby’s stomach.

“Open his mouth!” Erin repeated.

Carefully, Lila used two fingers to do as she was told. Erin put one end of the straw in her own mouth and the other in the tiny opening Lila’s fingers had created.

“Now push up on his chin,” Jolie instructed. “Gotta create suction.”

What point? Dead was dead. But Lila once more obeyed orders, and saw shadowy crescents appear in Erin Eisenberg’s cheeks as she sucked on her end. There was an audible sound—flup. Erin turned her head aside to spit out what looked like a wad of phlegm. Then she nodded to Jolie, who raised the baby to her face and blew gently into its mouth.

The baby just lay there, head back, beads of blood and foam on its bald head. Jolie blew again, and a miracle happened. The tiny chest heaved; the blue eyes popped sightlessly open. He began to wail. Celia Frode started the applause, and the others joined in… except for Elaine, who had retreated to where she was earlier, her arms once again clasping her midsection. The baby’s cries were constant now. Its hands made tiny fists.

“That’s my baby,” Tiffany said, and raised her arms. “My baby is crying. Give him to me.”

Jolie tied off the umbilical cord with a rubber band and wrapped the baby in the first thing that came to hand—a waitress’s apron someone had grabbed from a coathook. She passed the wailing bundle to Tiffany, who looked into his face, laughed, and kissed one gummy cheek.

“Where are those towels?” Erin demanded. “Get them now.”

“They won’t be too warm yet,” Kitty said.

“Get them.”

The towels were brought and Mary lined the Budweiser cooler with them. While she did, Lila saw more blood gushing from between Tiffany’s legs. A lot of blood. Pints, maybe.

“Is that normal?” someone asked.

“Perfectly.” Erin’s voice was firm and sure, confidence personified: absolutely no problem here. That was when Lila began to suspect that Tiffany was probably going to die. “But someone bring me more towels.”

Jolie Suratt moved to take the baby from his mother and put him in the makeshift Budweiser bassinet. Erin shook her head. “Let her hold him a little longer.”

That was when Lila knew for sure.

Sundown in what had once been the town of Dooling and was now Our Place.

Lila was sitting on the front stoop of the house on St. George Street with a stapled sheaf of paper in her hands when Janice Coates came up the walk. When Janice sat down next to her, Lila caught a scent of juniper. From a pocket inside her quilted vest, the ex-warden removed the source: a pint bottle of Schenley’s gin. She held it out to Lila. Lila shook her head.

“Retained placenta,” Janice said. “That’s what Erin told me. No way to scrape it out, at least not in time to stop the bleeding. And none of that drug they use.”

“Pitocin,” Lila said. “I had it when Jared was born.”

They sat quiet for awhile, watching the light drain from what had been a very long day. At last Janice said, “I thought you might like some help cleaning out her stuff.”

“Already done. She didn’t have much.”

“None of us do. Which is sort of a relief, don’t you think? We learned a poem in school, something about getting and spending laying waste to all our powers. Keats, maybe.”

Lila, who had learned the same poem, knew it was Wordsworth, but said nothing. Janice returned the bottle to the pocket it had come from and brought out a relatively clean handkerchief. She used it to wipe first one of Lila’s cheeks, then the other, an action that brought back painfully sweet memories of Lila’s mother, who had done the same thing on the many occasions when her daughter, a self-confessed tomboy, had taken a tumble from her bike or her skateboard.

“I found this in the dresser where she was keeping her baby things,” Lila said, handing Janice the thin pile of pages. “It was under some nightshirts and bootees.”

On the front, Tiffany had pasted a picture of a laughing, perfectly permed mommy holding up a laughing baby in a shaft of golden sunlight. Janice was pretty sure it had been clipped from a Gerber baby food ad in an old women’s magazine—maybe Good Housekeeping. Below it, Tiffany had lettered: ANDREW JONES BOOK FOR A GOOD LIFE.

“She knew it was a boy,” Lila said. “I don’t know how she knew, but she did.”

“Magda told her. Some old wives’ tale about carrying high.”

“She must have been working on this for quite awhile, and I never saw her at it.” Lila wondered if Tiffany had been embarrassed. “Look at the first page. That’s what started the waterworks.”

Janice opened the little homemade book. Lila leaned close to her and they read it together.

“It was the last one that really got me,” Lila said. “It still does. Give me that bottle. I guess I need a nip after all.”

Janice handed it over. Lila swallowed, grimaced, and handed it back. “How’s the baby? Okay?”

“Considering he was born six weeks shy of term, and wearing his umbilical cord for a necklace, he’s doing very well,” Janice said. “Thank God we had Erin and Jolie along, or we would have lost them both. He’s with Linda Bayer and Linda’s baby. Linda quit nursing Alex a little while ago, but as soon as she heard Andy crying, her milk came right back in. So she says. Meanwhile, we’ve got another tragedy on our hands.”

As if Tiffany wasn’t enough for one day, Lila thought, and tried to put her game face on. “Tell me.”

“Gerda Holden? Oldest of the four Holden girls? She’s disappeared.”

Which almost certainly meant something mortal had happened to her in that other world. They all accepted this as a fact now.

“How’s Clara taking it?”

“About as you’d expect,” Janice replied. “She’s half out of her mind. She and all the girls have been experiencing that weird vertigo for the last week or so—”

“So someone’s moving them around.”

Janice shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Whatever it is, Clara’s afraid another of her girls is going to blip out of existence at any moment. Maybe all three of them. I’d be afraid, too.” She began flipping through the Andrew Jones Book for a Good Life. Every page was filled with an expansion of the 10 Rules.

“Should we talk about the Tree?” Lila asked.

Janice considered, then shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I just want to sleep.”

Lila, who wasn’t sure she could sleep, took Janice’s hand and squeezed it.

Nana had asked her mother if she could sleep over with Molly at Mrs. Ransom’s house, and Elaine gave her permission after ascertaining that it would be all right with the old lady.

“Of course,” Mrs. Ransom said. “Molly and I love Nana.”

That was good enough for the former Elaine Geary, who was for once glad to have her little girl out of the house. Nana was her dear one, her jewel—a rare point of agreement with her estranged husband, and one that had kept the marriage together longer than it might have survived otherwise—but this evening Elaine had an important errand to run. One that was more for Nana than it was for her. For all the women of Dooling, really. Some of them (Lila Norcross, for instance) might not understand that now, but they would later.

If, that was, she decided to go through with it.

The golf carts they’d taken on the expedition to that weird tree in the woods were all neatly parked in the lot behind what was left of the Municipal Building. One good thing you could say for women, she thought—one of many things—was that they usually put things away when they were done with them. Men were different. They left their possessions scattered hell to breakfast. How many times had she told Frank to put his dirty clothes in the hamper—wasn’t it enough that she washed them and ironed them, without having to pick them up, as well? And how many times did she still find them in the bathroom outside the shower, or littered across the bedroom floor? And could he be bothered to rinse a glass or wash a dish after a late night snack? No! It was as if dishes and glasses became invisible once their purpose had been served. (The fact that her husband kept his office immaculate and his animal cages spotless made such thoughtless behavior more irritating.)

Small things, you would say, and who could disagree? They were! But over the course of years, those things became a domestic version of an old Chinese torture she’d read about in a Time-Life book that she’d pulled out of a donation box at Goodwill. The Death of a Thousand Cuts, it was called. Frank’s bad temper had only been the worst and deepest of those cuts. Oh, sometimes there was a present, or a soft kiss on the back of the neck, or a dinner out (with candlelight!), but those things were just frosting on a stale and hard-to-chew cake. The Cake of Marriage! She was not prepared to say every man was the same, but the majority were, because the instincts came with the package. With the penis. A man’s home was his castle, so the saying went, and etched into the XY chromosome was a deep belief that every man was a king and every woman his serving maid.

The keys were still in the carts. Of course they were—there might be an occasional case of petty pilfering in Our Place, but there had been no real theft. That was one of the nice things about it. There were many nice things, but not everyone could be content with those things. Take all the whining and whingeing that went on at the Meetings, for instance. Nana had been at some of those meetings. She didn’t think Elaine knew, but Elaine did. A good mother monitors her child, and knows when she is being infected by bad companions with bad ideas.

Two days ago it had been Molly at their house, and the two girls had a wonderful time, first playing outside (hopscotch and jump-rope), then inside (re-decorating the large dollhouse Elaine had felt justified in liberating from the Dooling Mercantile), then outside again until the sun went down. They had eaten a huge supper, after which Molly had walked the two blocks back to her house in the gloaming. By herself. And why could she do that? Because in this world there were no predators. No pedophiles.

A happy day. And that was why Elaine was so surprised (and a bit fearful, why not admit it) when she had paused outside her daughter’s door on the way to bed and heard Nana crying.

Elaine chose a golf cart, turned the key, and toed the little round accelerator pedal. She rolled soundlessly out of the lot and down Main Street, past the dead streetlights and dark storefronts. Two miles out of town she reached a neat white building with two useless gas pumps out front. The sign on the roof proclaimed it the Dooling Country Living Store. The owner, Kabir Patel, was gone, of course, as were his three well-mannered (in public, at least) sons. His wife had been visiting her family in India when the Aurora struck, and was presumably cocooned in Mumbai or Lucknow or one of those other places.

Mr. Patel had sold a bit of everything—it was the only way to compete with the supermarket—but most of it was gone now. The liquor had disappeared first, of course; women liked to drink, and who taught them to enjoy it? Other women? Rarely.

Without pausing to look in the darkened store, Elaine drove her golf cart around to the back. Here was a long metal annex with a sign out front reading Country Living Store Auto Supply Shop Come Here First And SAVE! Mr. Patel had kept it neat, she would give him points for that. Elaine’s father had done small-engine repair to supplement his income as a plumber—in Clarksburg, this had been—and the two sheds out back where he worked had been dotted with cast-off parts, bald tires, and any number of derelict mowers and rototillers. An eyesore, Elaine’s mother had complained. It pays for your Fridays at the beauty salon, replied the king of the castle, and so the mess had remained.

Elaine needed to put her whole weight against one of the doors before it would move on its dirty track, but eventually she got it to slide four or five feet, and that was all she needed.

“What’s the matter, sweetie?” she had asked her crying daughter—before she’d known that damned tree existed, when she’d thought her child’s tears were the only problem she had, and that they would end as quickly as a spring shower. “Does your tummy hurt from supper?”

“No,” Nana said, “and you don’t need to call it my tummy, Mom. I’m not five.”

That exasperated tone was new, and set Elaine back on her heels a bit, but she continued to stroke Nana’s hair. “What is it, then?”

Nana’s lips had tightened, trembled, and then she had burst. “I miss Daddy! I miss Billy, he held my hand sometimes when we walked to school and that was nice, he was nice, but mostly I miss Daddy! I want this vacation to be over! I want to go back home!”

Instead of stopping, as spring showers did, her weeping had become a storm. When Elaine tried to stroke her cheek, Nana knocked her hand away and sat up in bed with her hair wild and staticky around her face. In that moment, Elaine saw Frank in her. She saw him so clearly it was scary.

“Don’t you remember how he shouted at us?” Elaine asked. “And the time he punched the wall! That was awful, wasn’t it?”

“He shouted at you!” Nana shouted. “At you, because you always wanted him to do something… or get something… or be something different… I don’t know, but he never shouted at me!”

“He pulled your shirt, though,” Elaine said. Her disquiet deepened into something like horror. Had she thought Nana had forgotten Frank? Relegated him to the junkheap along with her invisible friend, Mrs. Humpty-Dump? “It was your favorite, too.”

“Because he was afraid of the man with the car! The one who ran over the cat! He was taking care of me!”

“Remember when he yelled at your teacher, remember how embarrassed you were?”

“I don’t care! I want him!”

“Nana, that’s enough. You’ve made your p—”

“I want my Daddy!”

“You need to close your eyes and go to sleep and have sweet dr—”

“I WANT MY DADDY!”

Elaine had left the room, closing the door gently behind her. What an effort it had been not to descend to the child’s level and slam it! Even now, standing in Mr. Patel’s oil-smelling shed, she would not admit how close she had come to shouting at her daughter. It wasn’t Nana’s strident tone, so unlike her usual soft and tentative voice; it wasn’t even the physical resemblance to Frank, which she could usually overlook. It was how much she sounded like him as she made her unreasonable and unfulfillable demands. It was almost as if Frank Geary had reached across from the other side of whatever gulf separated that violent old world from this new one, and possessed her child.

Nana had seemed her old self the next day, but Elaine had been unable to stop thinking about the tears heard through the door, and the way Nana knocked away the hand that had meant only to comfort, and that ugly, yelling voice that came from Nana’s child’s mouth: I want my Daddy. Nor was that all. She had been holding hands with ugly little Billy Beeson from down the block. She missed her little boyfriend, who probably would have enjoyed taking her behind a bush so they could play doctor. It was even easy to imagine Nana and the scabrous Billy at sixteen, making out in the back of his father’s Club Cab. French kissing her and auditioning her for the position of first cook and bottle washer in his shitty little castle. Forget about drawing pictures, Nana, get out in the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans. Fold my clothes. Haul my ashes, then I’ll burp and roll over and go to sleep.

Elaine had brought a crank flashlight, which she now shone on the interior of the auto annex, which had been left alone. With no fuel to run Dooling’s autos, there was no need for fan belts and spark plugs. So what she was looking for might be here. Plenty of that stuff had been stored in her father’s workshop, and the oily smell in this one was just the same, bringing back with startling vividness memories of the pigtailed girl she’d been (but not with nostalgia, oh no). Handing her father parts and tools as he called for them, stupidly happy when he thanked her, cringing if he scolded her for being slow or grabbing the wrong thing. Because she had wanted to please him. He was her daddy, big and strong, and she wanted to please him in all things.

This world was ever so much better than the old man-driven one. No one yelled at her here, and no one yelled at Nana. No one treated them like second-class citizens. This was a world where a little girl could walk home by herself, even after dark, and feel safe. A world where a little girl’s talent could grow along with her hips and breasts. No one would nip it in the bud. Nana didn’t understand that, and she wasn’t alone; if you didn’t think so, all you had to do was listen in at one of those stupid meetings.

I think it’s a way out, Lila had said as the women stood in the tall grass, looking at that weird tree. And oh God, if she was right.

Elaine walked deeper into the auto supply shed, training the flashlight beam on the floor, because the floor was concrete, and concrete kept things cool. And there, in the far corner, was what she had been hoping for: three five-gallon cans with their pour-tops screwed down tight. They were plain metal, unmarked, but there was a thick red rubber band girdling one of them and blue bands around the other two. Her father had marked his tins of kerosene in exactly the same way.

I think it’s a way out. A way back. If we want it.

Some of them undoubtedly would. The Meeting women who couldn’t understand what a good thing they had here. What a fine thing. What a safe thing. These were the ones so socialized to generations of servitude that they would eagerly rush back into their chains. The ones from the prison would, counterintuitively, probably be the first to want to go home to the old world, and right back into the pokey from which they’d been released. So many of these childish creatures were unable or unwilling to realize that there was nearly always some unindicted male co-conspirator behind their incarceration. Some man for whom they’d degraded themselves. In her years as a volunteer, Elaine had seen it, and heard it all a million times over. “He’s got a good heart.” “He doesn’t mean it.” “He promises he’ll change.” Hell, she was vulnerable to it herself. In the midst of that endless day and night, before they fell asleep and were transported, she’d almost let herself believe, in spite of everything she’d experienced with Frank in the past, that he would do what she asked, that he would get control of his temper. Of course, he hadn’t.

Elaine didn’t believe Frank could change. It was his male nature. But he had changed her. Sometimes she thought that Frank had driven her mad. To him, she was the scold, the taskmaster, the grating alarm bell that ended recess each day. It awed her, Frank’s obliviousness to the weight of her responsibilities. Did he actually believe it made her happy, having to remind him to pay bills, to pick up things, to keep his temper in check? She was certain that he actually did. Elaine was not blind: she saw that her husband was not a contented man. But he did not see her at all.

She had to act, for the sake of Nana and all the others. That was what had come into focus that very afternoon, even as Tiffany Jones was dying in that diner, giving up the last of her poor wrecked life so that a child might live.

There would be women who wanted to return. Not a majority, Elaine had to believe most of the women here were not so insane, so masochistic, but could she take that chance? Could she, when her own sweet Nana, who had shrunk into herself every time her father raised his voice—

Stop thinking about it, she told herself. Concentrate on your business.

The red band meant cheap kerosene, and would probably be of no more use to her than the gasoline stored under the town’s various service stations. You could douse a lit match in red-band kerosene once it was old. But those blue bands meant that a stabilizer had been added, and that kind might retain its volatility for ten years or more.

The Tree they’d found that day might be amazing, but it was still a tree, and trees burned. There was the tiger to reckon with, of course, but she would take a gun. Scare it away, shoot it if necessary. (She knew how to shoot; her father had taught her.) Part of her thought that might turn out to be a needless precaution. Lila had called the tiger and the fox emissaries, and to Elaine, that felt right. She had an idea that the tiger would not try to stop her, that the Tree was essentially unguarded.

If it was a door, it needed to be closed for good.

Someday Nana would understand, and thank her for doing the right thing.

Lila did sleep, but woke shortly after five, with the coming day just a sour line of light on the eastern horizon. She got up and used the chamber pot. (Running water had come to Dooling, but it had not yet reached the house on St. George. “A week or two, perhaps,” Magda assured them.) Lila considered going back to bed, but knew she would only toss and turn and think about how Tiffany—ashy gray at the end—had lost consciousness for the final time with her newborn baby still in her arms. Andrew Jones, whose only legacy would be a stapled-together booklet of handwritten pages.

She dressed, and left the house. She had no particular destination in mind, but wasn’t entirely surprised when she saw the shattered hulk of the Municipal Building ahead of her; she had spent most of her adult life working there. It was a kind of magnetic north, even though there was nothing there now, really, to see. A fire of some sort had done the damage—started by a lightning strike, maybe, or faulty wiring. The side of the building that had contained Lila’s office was blackened rubble, while years of weather had swept through the broken walls and windows and done its work on the other half, making the drywall soft for mold, blowing in debris that had gathered in layers across the floors.

So it surprised Lila to see someone sitting on the granite steps. The steps were about all the old building had going for it anymore.

As she drew closer, the figure stood and approached her.

“Lila?” Although full of uncertainty and thick with recently shed tears, the voice was familiar. “Lila, is it you?”

New women appeared only rarely now, and if this was to be the last, there could be no better. Lila ran to her, embraced her, kissed her on both cheeks. “Linny! Oh God, it’s so good to see you!”

Linny Mars hugged her back with panicky force, then held her away so she could look at Lila’s face. Making sure. Lila understood perfectly and remained still. But Linny was smiling, and the tears on her cheeks were good ones. It felt to Lila as if some divine scale had been balanced—Tiffany’s departure on one side, Linny’s arrival on the other.

“How long have you been sitting there?” Lila asked at last.

“I don’t know,” said Linny. “An hour, maybe two. I saw the moon go down. I… I didn’t know where else to go. I was in the office, looking at my laptop, and then… how did I get here? Where is here?”

“It’s complicated,” Lila replied, and as she led Linny back to the steps, it occurred to her that this was a thing women said often, men almost never. “In a sense, you’re still in the office, only in one of the cocoons. Or at least, that’s what we think.”

“Are we dead? Ghosts? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. This is a real place.” Lila hadn’t been completely sure of this at first, but now she was. Familiarity might or might not breed contempt, but it certainly bred belief.

“How long have you been here?”

“At least eight months. Maybe more. Time moves faster on this side of—well, whatever it is that we’re on. I’d guess that over there—where you’ve come from—it’s not even been a full week since Aurora started, right?”

“Five days. I think.” Linny sat back down.

Lila felt like a woman who has been long abroad, and was eager for news of home. “Tell me what’s happening in Dooling.”

Linny squinted at Lila and then gestured at the street. “But this is Dooling, isn’t it? Only it looks kind of cracked up.”

“We’re working on that,” Lila said. “Tell me what was going on when you left. Have you heard from Clint? Do you know anything about Jared?” That was unlikely, but she had to ask.

“I can’t tell you much,” Linny said, “because the last two days all I could think about was staying awake. I kept taking those drugs in the evidence room, the ones from the Griner brothers bust, but by the end they were hardly working at all. And there was weird stuff. People coming and going. Yelling. Somebody new in charge. I think his name was Dave.”

“Dave who?” It was all Lila could do to keep from shaking her dispatcher.

Linny frowned down at her hands, concentrating, trying to remember.

“Not Dave,” she said at last. “Frank. A big guy. He was wearing a uniform, not a cop’s uniform, but then he changed it for a cop’s uniform. Frank Gearhart, maybe?”

“Do you mean Frank Geary? The animal control officer?”

“Yes,” Linny said. “Geary, that’s right. Boy, he’s intense. A man on a mission.”

Lila didn’t know what to make of the Geary news. She remembered interviewing him for the job that had gone to Dan Treat. Geary had been impressive in person—quick, confident—but his record as an animal control officer had troubled her. He’d been way too free with citations, and received too many complaints.

“What about Terry? He’s the senior officer, he should have taken my place.”

“Drunk,” Linny said. “A couple of the other deputies were laughing about it.”

“What do you—”

Linny raised her hand to stop her. “But then right before I fell asleep, some men came in and said Terry wanted the guns from the armament room because of a woman up at the prison. The one who talked to me was that public defender guy, the one you say reminds you of Will Gardner on The Good Wife.”

“Barry Holden?” Lila didn’t get it. The woman up at the prison was undoubtedly Evie Black, and Barry had helped Lila get Evie in a cell at Correctional, but why would he—

“Yes, him. And some others were with him. One was a woman. Warden Coates’s daughter, I think.”

“That can’t be,” Lila said. “She works in DC.”

“Well, maybe it was someone else. By then it was like I was in a deep fog. But I remember Don Peters, because of how he tried to feel me up on New Year’s Eve last year at the Squeaky Wheel.”

“Peters from the prison? He was with Barry?”

“No, Peters came after. He was furious when he found out some of the guns were gone. ‘They got all of the good ones,’ he said, I remember that, and there was a kid with him and that kid said… he said…” Linny looked at Lila with enormous eyes. “He said, ‘What if they’re taking them to Norcross, up at the prison? How will we get the bitch out then?’ ”

In her mind Lila pictured a tug-of-war rope, with Evie Black as the knot in the middle that would mean victory for one side or the other.

“What else do you remember? Think, Linny, this is important!” Although what could she, Lila, do about it, even if it was?

“Nothing,” Linny said. “After Peters and the young guy went running out, I fell asleep. And woke up here.” She looked around doubtfully, still not sure that there was a here. “Lila?”

“Mmm?”

“Is there anything to eat? I guess I really must not be dead, because I’m starving.”

“Sure,” Lila said, helping the other woman to her feet. “Scrambled eggs and toast, how does that sound?”

“Like heaven. I feel like I could eat half a dozen eggs and have room left over for pancakes.”

But as it turned out, Linnette Mars never got breakfast; she had, in fact, eaten her last meal the day before (two cherry Pop-Tarts microwaved in the sheriff’s station break room). As the two women turned onto St. George Street, Lila felt Linny’s hand melt away in her own. She caught just a glimpse of Linny from the corner of her eye, looking startled. Then there was nothing left but a cloud of moths, rising into the morning sky.

CHAPTER 10

There could be no telling, Lowell Griner Sr. used to say, where a deep seam of coal might begin. “Sometimes a single chisel’s worth of difference is all there is tween the shit and the Shinola,” was how he put it. This pearl had dropped from the old crank’s lips, around about the time when many of the Tri-Counties’ best miners had been marching through the fucked-up, fucked-over boonies of Southeast Asia, getting jungle rot and smoking heroin-laced fatties. This was a conflict the elder Griner had missed, given a lack of two toes on his right foot and one finger on his left hand.

Few men who ever walked the green earth spoke more nonsense than the late Lowell Griner Sr.—he had also believed in UFOs, vengeful spirits of the woods, and had taken as gold the empty promises of the coal companies. Big Lowell Griner, he was called, perhaps in honor of that old Jimmy Dean song about Big John. Big Low had rested snug in his coffin for ten years now, along with a full bottle of Rebel Yell and a pair of lungs that were as black as the bituminate he mined.

His son Lowell Jr. (naturally known as Little Low) had recalled his father’s words with rueful amusement after Sheriff Lila Norcross nipped him and his older brother Maynard with ten kilos of cocaine, a pharmacy’s worth of speed, and all of their guns. It had certainly appeared that the seam of their luck had come to an abrupt end, the Shinola magically turning to shit the moment the sheriff’s team used the department’s bull-ram on the kitchen door of the old family manse, a creekside farmhouse for which the term tumbledown was too grand.

Though Little Low (who actually stood an inch over six feet and weighed in at two-forty) was not sorry about anything that he had done, he was extremely sorry that it had all not lasted longer. In the weeks that he and Maynard had spent locked up in the county jail in Coughlin awaiting transfer, he had whiled away most of his free time dreaming on the fun they’d had: the sports cars they’d drag-raced, the fine houses they’d crashed in, the girls they’d screwed, and the numerous slobs they’d stomped, outsiders who’d tried horning in on the Griner patch and had ended up buried in the hills. For the better part of five years they’d been serious players, up and down the Blue Ridge. It had been a hell of a hot ride, but now it seemed to have turned cold.

They were, in fact, fucked in every orifice. The cops had the drugs, had the weapons, had Kitty McDavid to say that she had witnessed Lowell exchanging packets of cash for bundles of coke with their cartel connection on multiple occasions, and that she had seen him shoot that Alabama fool who had tried to pass them counterfeit bills. The cops even had the bump of C4 that they had socked away for the Fourth of July. (The plan had been to put it under a silo and see if they could get the motherfucker to lift off like one of those Cape Carnival rockets.) As good as the ride had been, Lowell wasn’t sure how long re-running the memories could sustain him. Thinking of those memories growing thin and then falling apart was a downer.

When they ran out, Little Low thought he would probably just have to kill himself. He wasn’t afraid of that. What he was afraid of was choking on boredom in some cell the way Big Low, confined to a wheelchair and sucking on Yell and bottled oxygen for the last few years of his life, had choked to death on his own snot. Maynard, quarter-wit that he was, would probably be fine for a few decades in prison. That wasn’t Little Lowell Griner Jr., though. He wasn’t interested in playing out a junk hand just to stay in the game.

Then, as they were awaiting a pre-trial conference, the shit had turned back into Shinola. God bless Aurora, the vehicle of their deliverance.

Said deliverance had arrived last Thursday afternoon, the day the sleeping sickness had come to Appalachia. Lowell and Maynard were shackled to a bench outside a meeting room at the Coughlin courthouse. Both the prosecutor and their lawyer should have arrived an hour earlier.

“What the fuck,” announced the prick from the Coughlin Police Department who was keeping an eye on them. “This is stupid. I don’t get paid enough to babysit you murdering peckerwoods all day. I’m going to see what the judge wants to do.”

Through the reinforced glass opposite their bench, Lowell could see that Judge Wainer, the only one of the three officials who had seen fit to show up for the hearing, had lowered her head between her arms and dropped off for a little snooze. Neither of the brothers had, at this point, any idea about Aurora. Nor had the prick cop.

“Hope she bites his head off for wakin her up,” Maynard had remarked.

This was not exactly what happened when the horrified officer tore away the mask of webbing that had grown over the Honorable Judge Regina Alberta Wainer’s face, but it was, as the saying went, close enough for government work.

Lowell and Maynard, chain-locked to the bench, saw it all through the reinforced glass. It was awesome. The judge, no more than five-one in heels, rose up righteous and smote the cop, say hallelujah, in the chest with a gold-tipped fountain pen. That put the bastard on the carpet and she pressed the advantage, scooping up her nearby gavel and beating his face in before he had chance to fart sideways or holler Your Honor, I object. Then Judge Wainer tossed aside her gory gavel, sat down again, lowered her head back to her crossed arms, and resumed snoozing.

“Brother, did you see that?” Maynard asked.

“I did.”

Maynard had shaken his head, making the unwashed clots of his long hair fly. “That was amazin. I be dog.”

“Court is fucking adjourned,” Lowell agreed.

Maynard—firstborn but named for an uncle when his parents felt sure the baby would die before the sun went down on his natal day—had a caveman beard and wide dull eyes. Even when he was dropping fists on some poor sonofabitch, he tended to look dumbfounded. “What do we do now?”

What they did was bang around until they broke the arms of the bench they were shackled to, and enter the conference room, laying a trail of shattered wood behind them. Careful not to disturb the sleeping Judge Wainer—the webbing was spinning around her head, thickening again—they nicked the cop’s keys and unlocked themselves. The brothers also requisitioned the dead prick’s gun, his Taser, and the keys to his GMC pickup.

“Look at this spider shit,” Maynard whispered, gesturing at the judge’s new coating.

“No time,” Little Low said.

A door at the end of the hall—opened with the prick’s pass card—led to a second hall. As they passed the open door of a staff room, not a single one of the dozen-plus men and women inside—cops, secretaries, lawyers—paid them any mind. They were all focused on NewsAmerica, where bizarre and horrific footage showed some Amish chick on a table rearing up and biting the nose off a man attending to her.

At the end of this second hall was an exit into the parking lot. Lowell and Maynard strolled out into bright sunshine and free air, big as life and happy as hound dogs in a barking contest. The dead cop’s GMC was parked nearby, and in the center console was a goodly supply of shitkicking music. The Brothers Griner agreed on Brooks and Dunn, followed by Alan Jackson, who was a good old boy for sure.

They boot-scooted their way to a nearby campground and parked the Jimmy-Mac behind a forest ranger outpost that had been closed in a round of cutbacks years before. The lock on the outpost door popped with one shove. A woman’s uniform hung in the closet. Luckily, she had been a large lady, and at Lowell’s command, Maynard squeezed into it. Dressed as such, it was easy to convince the driver of a Chevy Silverado in the campground parking lot to step away for a word.

“Is there something wrong with my camping permit?” Silverado Man asked Maynard. “This disease news has got me all turned around, I’ll tell you what. I mean, whoever heard of such a thing?” Then, with a glance at the tag on Maynard’s chest: “Say, how’d you get the name Susan?”

Little Low gave this question the answer it deserved by stepping out from behind a tree and using a junk of firewood to split Silverado Man’s skull. He was approximately Lowell’s height and weight. After Low dressed in Silverado Man’s clothes, the brothers wrapped the body in a tarp and put it in the back of their new vehicle. They transferred the dead cop’s music and drove to a hunting cabin that they had stocked for a rainy day long before. On the way, they burned through the rest of the CDs, agreeing that this James McMurtry fellow was probably a communist, but Hank III was the total package.

Once at the cabin, they alternated between the radio and the police scanner they kept there, hoping to glean intelligence concerning the police response to their escape.

Initially, Lowell found the complete inattention to said escape unnerving. By the second day, however, the snowballing events of the Aurora phenomenon—which explained the lady judge’s rough treatment of the Coughlin cop and the crap on her face—were so encompassing and cataclysmic that Lowell’s apprehension evaporated. Who had time for two country outlaws amid mass riots, plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns, and people incinerating chicks in their sleep?

On Monday, as Frank Geary was planning his assault on the women’s prison, Lowell was reclining on the moldy couch in the hunting cabin, gnawing on deer jerky and visualizing their own next moves. Though the authorities were currently in disarray, they would be reestablished in some form or another before long. Moreover, if things turned out the way they appeared to be headed, those authorities would likely be all-rooster, which meant that it would be the Wild West—hang em now, hang em high, ask questions later. The Griner brothers wouldn’t stay forgotten forever, and when they were remembered, the jackboots would be polished and primed to kick ass.

The news on the radio had initially caused Maynard to fall into gloom. “Is this the end of fuckin, Lowell?” he’d asked.

A little blue at the thought himself, Low had replied that they’d think of something… as if there might be some alternative. He was thinking of some old song about how birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.

His older brother’s mood had improved, however, at the discovery of a jigsaw puzzle in a cabinet. Now Maynard, in his camo underwear, on his knees by the coffee table, was drinking a Schlitz and working away on it. The puzzle showed Krazy Kat with his finger in a socket, getting electrocuted. Maynard enjoyed puzzles as long as they weren’t too hard. (This was another reason why Lowell had felt good about his brother’s possible prison future. They had a shit-ton of puzzles in prison.) The picture of Krazy Kat in the center was pretty much done, but the pale green wall surrounding the figure was giving May fits. He complained it all looked the same, which was cheating.

“We need to clean up,” Lowell announced.

“I told you,” Maynard said, “I put that old boy’s head inside a hollow log and dropped the rest of him down a hole.” (Low’s older brother broke down bodies the way other folks broke down turkeys. It was eccentric, but it seemed to bring May satisfaction.)

“That’s a start, May, but it’s not enough. We need to clean up even better while everything is still fucked up. A clean sweep, so to speak.”

Maynard finished his beer, pitched the can away. “How do we do that?”

“We burn down the Dooling Sheriff’s Department to start with. That’ll take care of the evidence,” Lowell explained. “That’s big numero uno.”

His brother’s slack-faced expression of puzzlement suggested elaboration was necessary.

“Our drugs, May. They got everthing in the bust. We burn those up, they got nothing solid.” Lowell could envision it—just wonderful. He had never known how much he wanted to obliterate a police station. “Then, just to make sure we’ve got our t’s crossed, we make a visit to the prison up there and deal with Kitty McDavid.” Low sawed a finger across his unshaven neck to show his brother exactly how that deal would go down.

“Aw, she’s probly asleep.”

Low had considered this. “What if the scientists figure out how to wake them all up?”

“Maybe her memory will be wiped out even if they do. You know, amnesia, like on Days of Our Lives.”

“And what if it’s not, May? When does anything work out as convenient as that? The McDavid cunt can put us away for the rest of our lives. That ain’t even the important thing. She snitched, that’s the important thing. She needs to go for that, wakin or sleepin.”

“You really think we can get to her?” asked Maynard.

In truth, Lowell didn’t know, but he thought they had a shot. Fortune favored the brave—he’d seen that in a movie, or maybe on a TV show. And what better chance would they have? Practically half the world was asleep, and the rest of it was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. “Come on. Clock’s ticking, May. No time like the present. Plus, it’ll be dark soon. Always a better time to move around.”

“Where do we go first?” Maynard asked.

Lowell didn’t hesitate. “To see Fritz.”

Fritz Meshaum had done some engine and detailing work for Lowell Griner, and had also moved some blow. In exchange, Lowell had connected the Kraut with a few gunrunners. Fritz, besides being a stellar mechanic and an excellent detailer, had a bee in his hat about the federal government, so he was always eager for opportunities to enhance his personal arsenal of heavy weaponry. When the inevitable day came that the FBI decided to capture all of the nation’s shanty-dwelling asshole mechanics and ship them off to Guantánamo, Fritz would have to defend himself, and to the death, if need be. Each time Lowell saw him, Fritzie had to show off one cannon or another, and brag about how well it could vaporize someone. (The hilarious part: it was widely rumored that Fritz had been beaten within an inch of his life by a dogcatcher. He was tough, was li’l Fritz.) The last time Lowell had seen him, the bearded gnome had gleefully displayed his latest toy: an actual goddam bazooka. Russian surplus.

Low needed to get into the women’s prison to assassinate a snitch. That was the sort of mission where a bazooka could actually come in handy.

Jared and Gerda Holden had not known each other well—Gerda was in her first year of middle school and Jared was in high school—but he knew her from dinners when the two families got together. Sometimes they played video games in the basement, and Jared always let her win a couple. A lot of bad had happened since the Aurora outbreak, but this was the first time Jared had seen a person shot.

“She must be dead, right, Dad?” He and Clint were in the bathroom of the administrative wing. Some of Gerda’s blood had splattered Jared’s face and shirt. “From the fall on top of the shot?”

“I don’t know,” Clint said. He was leaning against the tiled wall.

His son, patting water from his face with a paper towel, found Clint’s eyes in the mirror over the sink.

“Probably,” Clint said. “Yes. Based on what you’ve told me happened, she’s almost certainly dead.”

“And the guy, too? The doctor? Flickinger?”

“Yes. Him, too, probably.”

“All because of this woman? This Evie person?”

“Yes,” Clint said. “Because of her. We have to keep her safe. From the police and from anyone else. I know it seems crazy. She could be the key to understanding what’s happened, the key to turning it around, and—just trust me, okay, Jared?”

“Okay, Dad. But one of the guards, that Rand guy, he said she’s, like—magic?”

“I can’t explain what she is, Jared,” he said.

Although he was trying to sound calm, Clint was livid—with himself, with Geary, with Evie. That bullet could have hit Jared. Could have blinded him. Left him comatose. Killed him. Clint had not beaten up his old friend Jason in the Burtells’ yard so that his own son could die before him; he had not shared beds with kids who pissed themselves in their sleep for that; he had not left behind Marcus and Shannon and all the others for that; and he had not worked his way through college or medical school for it.

Shannon had told him, all those years before, that if he just hung on and kept from killing anyone, he would make it out. But to make it out of the current situation, they might have to kill people. He might have to kill people. The idea did not upset Clint as much as he would have expected. The situation changed, and the prizes changed, but maybe, at bottom, it was the same deal: if you wanted the milkshake, you’d better be ready to fight.

“What?” asked Jared.

Clint cocked his head.

“You look,” his son said, “Sort of tense.”

“Just tired.” He touched Jared’s shoulder and excused himself. He needed to make sure everyone was placed.

There was no need to say I told you so.

Terry caught Frank’s eye as they stepped away from the group around the bodies. “You were right,” Terry said. He produced the flask. Frank thought about stopping him, didn’t. The acting sheriff took a healthy swallow. “You were right all the way down the line. We’ll have to take her.”

“You sure?” Frank said it as if he himself wasn’t.

“Are you kidding? Look at this goddam mess! Vern dead, girl there did it, she’s shot to pieces and dead, too. Lawyer’s skull caved in. Think he might have lived for awhile, but he’s sure dead now. Other guy, driver’s license says he’s an MD named Flickinger—”

“Him too? Really?” If so, it was too bad. Flickinger had been a mess, but he’d had enough soul left in him to try to help Nana.

“And that’s not the worst part. Norcross and the Black woman and the rest of them have got serious armaments now, most everything high-powered that we could have used to make them stand down.”

“Do we know who was with them?” Frank asked. “Who was behind the wheel of that RV when they hauled ass out of here?”

Terry tipped the flask again, but there was nothing left inside. He swore and kicked a chunk of broken macadam.

Frank waited.

“Codger named Willy Burke.” Terry Coombs breathed out between his teeth. “Cleaned up his act in the last fifteen or twenty years, does a lot of community stuff, but he’s still a poacher. Used to be a moonshiner, too, back when he was young. Maybe he still is. Vet. Can handle himself. Lila always gave him the right-of-way, felt like it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to try and get him for something. And I guess she liked him.” He inhaled. “I felt the same.”

“All right.” Frank had decided to keep Black’s phone call to himself. It had infuriated him so much, in fact, that he would have been hardpressed to recount the details of the conversation. One part had stayed with him, though, and tugged at his sleeve: how the woman had praised him for protecting his daughter at the hospital. How could she have known about that? Eve Black had been in the jail that morning. It kept coming back to him and he kept pushing it away. As with the moths that had burst from the lit fragment of Nana’s cocoon, Frank could not fathom an explanation. He could only see that Eve Black had meant to tweak him—and she had succeeded. But he didn’t believe she understood what tweaking him meant.

In any case, Terry was back on track—he didn’t need any extra motivation. “You want me to start putting together a group? I’m willing, if that’s your pleasure.”

Although pleasure had nothing to do with it, Terry seconded the motion.

The prison defenders hurriedly removed the tires from the various cars and trucks in the parking lot. There were about forty vehicles altogether, counting the prison vans. Billy Wettermore and Rand Quigley rolled the tires out and arranged them in pyramids of three in the dead space between the inner and outer fences, then doused them in gasoline. The petrol stench quickly overwhelmed the ambient odor of damp, charred wood from the still-smoldering fire in the woods. They left the tires on Scott Hughes’s truck but parked it crossways right behind the interior gate, as an extra barrier.

“Scott loves that truck,” Rand said to Tig.

“You want to put yours there instead?” Tig asked.

“Hell no,” said Rand. “Are you crazy?”

The only vehicle they left untouched was Barry Holden’s RV, situated in the handicap space by the cement path to the Intake doors.

Minus Vern Rangle, Roger Elway, and the department’s female officers, all of whom had been confirmed as asleep during Frank’s cataloging operation, seven deputies remained from Sheriff Lila Norcross’s duty roster: Terry Coombs, Pete Ordway, Elmore Pearl, Dan “Treater” Treat, Rupe Wittstock, Will Wittstock, and Reed Barrows. It was a solid group, in Terry’s opinion. They were all force veterans of at least a year, and Pearl and Treater had both served in Afghanistan.

The three retired deputies—Jack Albertson, Mick Napolitano, and Nate McGee—made ten.

Don Peters, Eric Blass, and Frank Geary made lucky thirteen.

Frank quickly martialed a half-dozen other volunteers including Coach JT Wittstock, father of the deputies who shared his surname, and the defense-first coach of the Dooling High School varsity football team; Pudge Marone, bartender at the Squeaky Wheel, who brought along his Remington shotgun from beneath the bar; Drew T. Barry of Drew T. Barry Indemnity Company, by-the-book insurance agent and prize-winning deer hunter; Carson “Country Strong” Struthers, Pudge’s brother-in-law, who had fought to a 10-1 Golden Gloves record before his doctor told him he had to quit while he still had some brain left; and two town board members, Bert Miller and Steve Pickering, both of whom, like Drew T. Barry, knew their way around a deer stand. That was nineteen, and once they were informed that the woman inside the prison might have information related to the sleeping sickness, maybe even knowledge of a cure, every single one was eager to serve.

Terry was pleased, but wanted an even twenty. The sight of Vern Rangle’s bleached-out face and torn neck was something he would never be able to forget. He could feel it the way he could feel Geary, silent as a shadow, following everything he did, judging every choice he made.

But never mind. The only way out was through: through Norcross to Eve Black, and through the Black woman to the end of this nightmare. Terry didn’t know what would happen when they got to her, but he knew it would be the end. Once the end came, he could work at blurring the memory of Vern Rangle’s bloodless face. Not to mention the faces of his wife and daughter, which no longer exactly existed. Seriously drinking his brain into submission, in other words. He was aware that Frank had been encouraging him to use the booze, and so what? So fucking what?

Don Peters had been tasked with calling around to the male officers on Dooling Correctional’s roll, and it didn’t take him long to figure out that Norcross had four officers on duty, max. One of those, Wettermore, was a swish, and another, Murphy, had been a history teacher. Throw in the Black woman and the old coot, Burke, plus maybe a couple or three others they didn’t know about just to be generous, and that meant they were up against less than a dozen, few if any of whom could be expected to stand fast if things got hot, no matter how much armament they had acquired.

Terry and Frank stopped at the liquor store on Main Street. It was open, and busy.

“She didn’t love me anyway!” one fool announced to the entire store, waving a bottle of gin. He smelled like a polecat.

The shelves were largely empty, but Terry found two pints of gin, and paid with money that would soon be worthless, he supposed, if this terrible fuck-up went on. He filled the flask with one pint, carried the other in a paper bag, and walked with Frank to a nearby alley. It opened into a courtyard piled with garbage bags and rain-softened cardboard boxes. Johnny Lee Kronsky’s scuffed apartment door was here, at ground level, between two windows with plastic sheeting for glass.

Kronsky, a mythic figure in this part of West Virginia, answered and spied the bottle in the bag. “Those who come bearing gifts may enter,” he said and took the bottle.

There was only one chair in the living room. Kronsky claimed it for himself. He drank half the pint in two ginormous swallows, his Adam’s apple rolling like a bobber at the end of a hooked line, paying no attention to Terry or Frank. A muted television sat on a stand, showing footage of several cocooned women floating on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. They looked like weird life rafts.

What if a shark decided to bite one? Terry wondered. He guessed that if that happened, the shark might be in for a surprise.

What did any of it mean? What was the point?

Terry decided the point might be gin. He got out Frank’s flask and had a tug.

“Those women are from the big plane that crashed,” Johnny Lee said. “Interesting that they float like that, isn’t it? The stuff must be mighty light. Like kapok, or something.”

“Look at them all,” Terry marveled.

“Yes, yes, quite a sight.” Johnny Lee smacked his lips. He was a licensed private investigator, but not the kind that checked up on cheating spouses or solved mysteries. Until 2014, he had worked for Ulysses Energy Solutions, the coal company, cycling through their various operations, posing as a miner and listening for rumors of union organizing, working to undercut leaders who seemed particularly effective. A company dog, in other words.

Then had come trouble. A right smart of trouble, one could say. There was a cave-in. Kronsky had been the man handling the explosives. The three miners who had been buried under the rock had been talking loudly about holding a vote. Almost as damning, one had been wearing a tee-shirt with the face of Woody Guthrie on it. Lawyers hired by Ulysses had prevented the levying of charges—a tragic accident, they successfully argued before the grand jury—but Kronsky had been forced into retirement.

That was why Johnny Lee had come home to Dooling, where he had been born. Now, in his ideally located apartment—right around the corner from the liquor store—he was in the process of drinking himself to death. Each month, a check from UES arrived via Federal Express. A woman Terry knew at the bank told him that the notation on the stub was always the same: FEES. Whatever his FEES amounted to wasn’t a fortune, as the crummy apartment proved, but Kronsky managed on it. The whole story was familiar to Terry because hardly a month passed that the police weren’t called out to the man’s apartment by a neighbor who had heard breaking glass—a rock or a brick thrown through one of Kronsky’s windows, undoubtedly by union spooks. Johnny Lee never called himself. He had let it be known that he was not overly concerned—J. L. Kronsky didn’t give Shit One about the union.

One afternoon not long before the Aurora outbreak, when Terry had been partnered with Lila in Unit One, the conversation had turned to Kronsky. She said, “Eventually some disaffected miner—probably a relative of one of the guys Kronsky got killed—is going to blow his head off, and the miserable son of a bitch will probably be glad to go.”

“There’s a situation at the prison,” Terry said.

“There’s a situation everywhere, Mister Man.” Kronsky had a beaten face, pouched and haggard, and dark eyes.

“Forget everywhere,” Frank said. “We’re here.”

“I don’t give a tin shit where you are,” Johnny Lee said, and polished off the pint.

“We might need to blow something up,” Terry said.

Barry Holden and his station-robbing friends had taken a lot of firepower, but had missed the Griner brothers’ bump of C4. “You know how to work with plastic, don’t you?”

“Could be I do,” Kronsky said. “What’s in it for me, Mister Man?”

Terry calculated. “I tell you what. Pudge Marone from the Squeak is with us, and I think he’ll let you run an endless tab for the rest of your life.” Which Terry guessed wouldn’t be long.

“Hm,” Johnny Lee said.

“And of course, it’s also a chance to do your town a great service.”

“Dooling can go fuck itself,” Johnny Lee Kronsky said, “but still—why not? Just why the fuck not?”

That gave them twenty.

Dooling Correctional did not have guard towers. It had a flat tarpaper roof, piped with vents, ducts, and exhaust stems. There wasn’t much in the way of cover beyond a half-foot of brick edging. After assessing this roof, Willy Burke told Clint he liked the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree perspective of the entire perimeter, but he liked his balls even more. “Nothing up here that could stop a bullet, see. How about that shed there?” The old man pointed down below.

Although labeled EQUIPMENT SHED on the prison blueprints, it was your basic catch-all, containing the riding lawnmower that inmates (trustworthy ones) used to groom the softball field, plus gardening tools, sports equipment, and stacks of moldering newspapers and magazines bound with twine. Most importantly, it was built of cement blocks.

They had a closer look. Clint dragged a chair out behind the shed and Willy had a seat there beneath the overhang of the shed’s roof.

From this position, a man would be sheltered from the view of anyone at the fence, but would still be visible at either end of a firing line that stretched between the shed and the prison. If they’re just on one side, I should be all right,” said Willy. “I’ll see em from the corner of my eye and take cover.”

“Both sides at the same time?” Clint asked.

“If they do that, I’ll be for it.”

“You need help. Backup.”

“When you say that, Doc, it makes me wish I’d done more churchin in the days of my youth.”

The old fellow regarded him amiably. Upon arriving at the prison, the only explanation that he had required of Clint was a further assurance that the stand they were making was what Lila would have wanted. Clint had readily given it to Willy, although at this stage he was no longer sure what Lila would have wanted. It seemed like Lila had been gone for years.

Clint tried to reflect the same amiability—a bit of lighthearted savoir faire in the face of the enemy—but what remained of his sense of humor seemed to have fallen out of the back of Barry Holden’s RV along with Gerda Holden and Garth Flickinger. “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Willy?”

Willy held up his left hand. The meat of his palm was gouged with scar tissue. “As it happens, a few bits of me are still there.”

“How did it feel?” Clint asked. “When you were there? You must have lost friends.”

“Oh, yes,” Willy said. “I lost friends. As to how I felt, mostly just scared. Confused. All the time. Is that how you feel right now?”

“It is,” Clint admitted. “I never trained for this.”

They stood there in the milky afternoon light. Clint wondered if Willy sensed what Clint was really feeling—some fear and confusion, that was true, but also excitement. A certain euphoria infused the preparations, the prospect of pouring the frustration and dismay and loss and impossibility of everything into action. Clint could observe it happening to himself, a rush of aggressive adrenalin that was as old as apes.

He told himself he shouldn’t be thinking that way, and maybe not, but it felt good. It was as if some guy who looked exactly like him, driving a coupe with the top down, had pulled up beside the old Clint at a stoplight, nodded once in recognition, then, at the flip of the green, his doppelganger had planted the accelerator, and the old Clint was watching him roar off. The new Clint had to hurry, because he was on a mission, and being on a mission was good.

While they were making their way to the rear of the prison, Willy told him about the moths and the fairy footprints he’d seen near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. Millions of moths, it seemed, coating the branches of trees, rolling above the canopy of the woods in swarms. “Was it from her?” Like everyone else, Willy had heard the rumors. “That woman you got?”

“Yes,” Clint said. “And that’s not even the half of it.”

Willy said he didn’t doubt it.

They dragged out a second chair and issued an auto to Billy Wettermore. It had been converted (legally or not Clint didn’t know, nor did he care) to full auto. That put a man on each end of the shed. It wasn’t perfect, just the best they could do.

Behind the front desk at the sheriff’s station, the body of Linny Mars lay cocooned on the floor with her laptop beside her and still broadcasting that Vine of the falling London Eye. It appeared to Terry that she had slid out of her chair when she finally drifted off to sleep. She was in a heap, partly blocking the hallway that led to the official areas of the facility.

Kronsky stepped over her and walked down the hallway, in search of the evidence locker. Terry didn’t like that. He called after him, “Hey, you notice the fucking person here? On the floor?”

“It’s okay, Terry,” Frank said. “We’ll take care of her.”

They carried Linny to a holding cell and lowered her gently to the mattress. She hadn’t been out for long. The webs were thin across her eyes and mouth. Her lips were twisted up in an expression of delirious happiness—who knew why, maybe just because her struggle to stay awake was over.

Terry had another drink. He lowered the flask and the wall of the cell rushed at him and he stuck out his hand to stop it. After a moment he was able to push up straight again.

“I’m worried about you,” Frank said. “You’re—overmedicating.”

“I’m perfecto.” Terry waved his hand at a moth that was bothering his ear. “Are you happy we’re arming up, Frank? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Frank gave Terry a long look. It was totally unthreatening, totally blank. He stared at Terry the way that kids looked at television screens—as if they were gone from their bodies.

“No,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t say I’m too happy. It’s the job, that’s all. The one in front of us.”

“Do you always tell yourself that before you kick somebody’s ass?” Terry asked, genuinely interested, and was surprised when Frank recoiled, as if from a slap.

Kronsky was in the waiting room when they came out. He’d found the plastic explosive, also a bundle of dynamite someone had found in a gravel pit near the Griner property and turned in for disposal. Johnny Lee looked disapproving. “This dyno had no business back there, folksies. It gets old and cranky. The C4, now—” He shook it, making Frank wince. “You could run it over with a truck and nothing would happen.”

“So you want to leave the dynamite?” Terry asked.

“Jesus, no.” Kronsky looked offended. “I love me some dyno. Always have. Dyno’s what you call old-school. Need to wrap it in a blanket, is all. Or maybe Sleeping Beauty there’s got a nice thick sweater in the closet. Oh, and I’ll need to get some items from the hardware store. I trust the sheriff’s department has an open account?”

Before Terry and Frank left, they packed a duffel bag with the handguns and ammo that hadn’t been looted, and carried out all the vests and helmets they could rustle up. There wasn’t much, but their posse—really no sense calling it anything else—would bring plenty of armament from home.

Linny hadn’t left a sweater in the closet, so Johnny Lee had wrapped the dynamite in a couple of towels from the bathroom. He held it to his chest as if carrying an infant.

“Getting late in the day for any kind of assault,” Frank observed. “If that’s what it comes to.”

Terry said, “I know. We’ll get the boys out there tonight, make sure everyone knows what’s what and who’s in charge.” He looked pointedly at Frank as he said this. “Requisition a couple schoolbuses from the town motor pool and park them at the intersection of Route 31 and West Lavin, where the roadblock was, so the fellas don’t have to sleep raw. Keep six or eight of em on watch, in a… you know…” He made a circle in the air.

Frank helped him out. “A perimeter.”

“Yeah, that. If we have to go in, we’ll do it tomorrow morning, from the east. We’ll need a couple of bulldozers to bust through. Send Pearl and Treater to pick out a couple from the public works yard. Keys are in the office trailer there.”

“Good,” Frank said, because it was. He wouldn’t have thought of bulldozers.

“First thing tomorrow morning, we bulldoze the fences and come at the main building across the parking lot. That way the sun will be in their eyes. Step one, push em deep, away from the doors and windows. Step two, Johnny Lee blows the front doors and we’re inside. Press em to throw down their weapons. At that point, I think they will. Send a few around the far side to make sure they can’t bolt for it.”

“Makes sense,” Frank said.

“But first…”

“First?”

“We talk to Norcross. Tonight. Face to face, if he’s man enough. Offer him a chance to give the woman up before something happens that can’t be taken back.”

Frank’s eyes expressed what he felt.

“I know what you’re thinking, Frank, but if he’s a reasonable man, he’ll see it’s the right thing. He’s responsible for more lives than just hers, after all.”

“And if he still says no?”

Terry shrugged. “Then we go in and take her.”

“No matter what?”

“That’s right, no matter what.” They went out, and Terry locked the glass double doors of the station behind him.

Rand Quigley got his toolbox and spent two hours chiseling and hammering out the small wire-reinforced window that was embedded in the concrete wall of the visitors’ room.

Tig Murphy sat nearby, drinking Coke and smoking a cigarette. The no-smoking reg had been lifted. “If you were an inmate,” he said, “that’d get about five years added to your sentence.”

“Good thing I’m not an inmate, then, isn’t it?”

Tig tapped ash on the floor and decided not to say what he was thinking: if being locked in meant you were an inmate, that’s what they were now. “Man, they really built this place, didn’t they?”

“Uh-huh. Like it was a prison, or something,” Rand said.

“Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck.”

When the glass finally fell out, Tig clapped.

“Thank ya, ladies and gentlemen,” Rand said, doing Elvis. “Thank ya very much.”

With the window removed, Rand could stand on top of the table they had pulled below as a shooting platform, and stick his weapon through. This was his spot, with clean angles on the parking lot and the front gate.

“They think we are pussies,” Rand said. “But we are not.”

“Got that right, Rand-o.”

Clint poked his head in. “Tig. With me.”

The two of them walked up the stairs to the raised level of B Wing. This was the prison’s highest point, the only second floor in the structure. There were windows in the cells that faced out on West Lavin. These were stronger even than the window in the visitors’ room—thick, reinforced, and sandwiched between layers of concrete. It was hard to imagine Rand knocking one out of the wall with just hand tools.

“We can’t defend this end,” Tig said.

“No,” Clint said, “but it makes a helluva lookout post, and we don’t need to defend it, right? There’s no way through here.”

That seemed inarguable to Clint, and to Scott Hughes, too, who was relaxing a few cells down the line and listening in. “I’m sure you guys are going to get yourselves killed one way or another, and I won’t be crying any tears when it happens,” he called, “but Shrink Boy’s right. It’d take a bazooka to blow a hole in this wall.”

On the day two opposing groups of Dooling men armed up, preparing to make war, less than a hundred women were still awake in the Tri-Counties. One was Eve Black; one was Angel Fitzroy; one was Jeanette Sorley.

Vanessa Lampley was a fourth. Earlier that day, her husband finally nodded off in his armchair, allowing Van to do what she had decided to do. Since she had returned home from the prison after shooting and killing Ree Dempster, Tommy Lampley had tried to stay awake with her as long as he could. Van had been glad for the company. A cooking competition show had done him in, though, lulling him to dreamland with a tutorial on molecular gastronomy. Van waited to make sure he was soundly out before she left. She wasn’t about to assign her husband, ten years her senior, with titanium hips and afflicted by angina, the thankless task of somehow taking care of her body for however many years remained to him. Nor did Van have any interest in becoming the world’s most dismal piece of furniture.

Tired as she was, she was still light on her feet, and crept from the room without disturbing his thin sleep. In the garage she got her hunting rifle and loaded it. She yanked up the door, fired up the ATV, and rolled out.

Her plan was simple: cut through the woods to the ridge above the road, breathe in the fresh air, take in the view, jot a note to her husband, and put the barrel under her chin. Goodnight. At least there were no kids to worry about.

She went slow because she was afraid, weary as she was, of crashing. The ATV’s heavy tires sent every root and rock jolting up her thick arms and deep into her bones. Van didn’t mind. The thin rain was all right, too. Despite the exhaustion—her thoughts crawled—she was intensely aware of every physical sensation. Would it have been better to die without knowing you were going to, like Ree? Van could ask the question, but her brain could not break it down in a way that allowed a satisfactory answer. Any response dissolved before it could form. Why did it feel so bad, that she had shot an inmate who would have killed another inmate if she hadn’t? Why did it feel so bad, just to have done her job? Those answers wouldn’t coalesce, either, couldn’t even begin to.

Van arrived at the top of the ridge. She shut off the ATV and dismounted. Far away, in the direction of the prison, a haze of black hovered over the dying day, damp residue from the forest fire that had burned itself out. Directly below, the land descended in a long, easy grade. At the base of the grade was a muddy stream, fattening in the rain. Above the stream a few hundred feet away was a hunting cabin with a mossy roof. Smoke scribbles pumped from the stovepipe chimney.

She patted her pockets and realized that she had completely forgotten paper and something to write with. Van wanted to laugh—suicide really wasn’t that complex, was it?—but a sigh was the best she could manage.

There was no help for it, and her reasoning ought not to be that hard to figure out. If she were found at all, that was. And if anyone cared. Van unstrapped the rifle from her back.

The door of the cabin banged open just as she located the barrel against the shelf of her chin.

“He just better still have that fucking boom-tube,” said a man, his voice carrying crisp and clear, “or he’ll wish that dogcatcher had finished the job on him. Oh, and bring along the scanner. I want to keep up on what the cops are doing.”

Van lowered her rifle and watched as two men climbed into a shiny Silverado truck and drove away. She was sure she knew them, and looking like they did—a couple of rode-hard and put-away wet woods-rats—it wasn’t from any chamber of commerce awards ceremony. Their names would have come to her immediately if she hadn’t been so sleep-deprived. Her mind felt full of mud. She could still feel the jouncing ATV, even though it was no longer moving. Phantom dots of light went zooming across her vision.

When the truck was gone, she decided to visit the cabin. There would be something to write on inside, if only the back of a calendar years out of date. “And I’ll need something to pin it to my shirt,” she said.

Her voice sounded foggy and foreign. The voice of someone else. And there was someone else, standing just beside her. Only when she turned her head, the someone was gone. That was happening more and more: watchers lurking at the farthest reach of her vision. Hallucinations. How long could you stay awake before all rational thought broke down and you lost your mind completely?

Van remounted her ATV and drove it along the ridge until the land descended and she could switchback along the rutted track that led to the cabin.

The cabin smelled of beans, beer, fried deermeat, and man-farts. Dishes cluttered the table, the sink was filled with more, and there were clotted pots on the woodburning stove. On the mantel was a picture of a fiercely grinning man with a pick over his shoulder and a countryman’s battered fedora pulled so low on his head that the brim bent the tops of his ears. Looking at the sepia-toned photo, Vanessa realized exactly who it was she had seen, because her father had pointed out the man in that picture to her when she had been no more than twelve. He had been going into the Squeaky Wheel.

“That is Big Lowell Griner,” Daddy had said, “and I want you to keep clear of him, honey. If he should ever say hello to you, say hello back, ain’t it a nice day, and keep walking.”

So that’s who those two were: Big Lowell’s no-account boys. Maynard and Little Low Griner, big as life and driving a new pickup when they were supposed to be jugged over in Coughlin, awaiting trial for, among other things, a murder Kitty McDavid had witnessed, and agreed to testify about.

On a pine-paneled wall of the short corridor that probably led to the cabin’s bedrooms, Van saw a battered notebook hanging from a piece of string. A sheet from that would do just fine for a suicide note, but she suddenly decided she wanted to stay awake and alive at least a little longer.

She left, glad to escape the stink, and drove her ATV away from the cabin as fast as she dared. After a mile or so, the track emptied into one of Dooling County’s many dirt roads. Dust hung on the left—not much, on account of the drizzle, but enough to tell her which way the fugitives had turned. They had a good lead on her by the time she reached Route 7, but the land here was downsloping and open, which made it easy to see the truck, diminished by distance but clearly headed for town.

Van slapped herself briskly across each cheek and followed. She was wet through now, but the cold would help her stay awake a little while longer. If she were on the lam from a murder charge, she’d be halfway to Georgia by now. Not these two; they were headed back to town, no doubt to do something nasty, as was their wont. She wanted to know what it was, and maybe stop it.

Atonement for what she’d had to do to Ree was not out of the question.

CHAPTER 11

Fritz Meshaum didn’t want to give up his bazooka, at least not without payment. When May seized him firmly by the shoulders and Low twisted his right arm nearly up to his shoulder blades, however, he changed his mind and lifted a trapdoor in the floor of his ramshackle cabin, revealing the treasure for which the Griner brothers had come.

Little Low had expected it to be green, like the ones in World War II movies, but Fritz’s bazooka was painted a dusty black, with a long serial number running up the side and some of those funny Russian letters beneath. A scale of rust rimmed the mouth. Lying beside it was a duffel bag containing a dozen shells stenciled with more words in Russian. There were also eight or ten rifles and as many as twenty handguns, most semi-auto. The brothers stuffed a couple in their belts. There was nothing like pistols in a man’s belt to make him feel like he had the right-of-way.

“What’s that thing?” asked May, pointing to a shiny black square of plastic above the bazooka’s trigger housing.

“Dunno,” Fritz said, peering at it. “Some kind of inventory control for the bean-counters, most likely.”

“It’s got words in English on it,” May said.

Fritz shrugged. “So what? I got a John Deere cap with Chinese shit on the tag inside. Everybody sells everything to anyone. Thanks to the Jews, that’s just the way the world works. The Jews, they—”

“Never you mind the damn Jews,” Little Low said. If he let Fritz get on a roll about the Jews, he’d shortly be on to the federal government, and they’d be hunkered around this fucking hole in the floor for the rest of the spring. “All I care about is does it work. If it don’t, tell me now, lest we come back here and tear off your ballsack.”

“I think we should tear off his ballsack, anyhow, Low,” May said. “That’s what I think. I bet it’s small.”

“It works, it works,” Fritz said, presumably talking about the bazooka rather than his ballsack. “Now let loose of me, you scum.”

“Got a mouth on him, don’t he, brother?” Maynard observed.

“Yes,” Little Low said. “Yes he does. But we’ll forgive him this time. Get a couple of those grease-guns.”

“Those ain’t grease-guns,” Fritz said indignantly. “Those’re fully automatic army—”

“It’d suit me fine if you shut up,” Low said, “and what suits me is going to suit you. We’re going now, but if this bazooka of yours don’t work, we will return and make it disappear up your saggy ass all the way to the trigger housing.”

“Yessir, what he said!” May exclaimed. “Try shittin after takin a load like that!”

“What are you going to do with my boom-tube?”

Little Low Griner smiled gently. “Hush, now,” he said, “and don’t worry about what don’t concern you.”

From a hilltop a quarter of a mile away, Van Lampley observed the Silverado pull into Fritz Meshaum’s scabrous dooryard. She observed the Griners get out and return to their stolen truck a few minutes later, carrying stuff—no doubt more stolen goods—which they put in the truckbed. Then they took off again, once more in the direction of Dooling. She considered pulling into Meshaum’s place once they left, but in her current state, she felt incapable of asking any questions that would make sense. And really, did she have to? Everyone in Dooling knew that Fritz Meshaum was in love with anything that had a trigger and went bang. The Griner brothers had stopped to gun up. It was as plain as the nose on her face.

Well, she had a gun herself, her good old .30-.06. Probably not much of a shake compared to what was now in the bed of that stolen truck, but so what? Did she really have anything to lose that she hadn’t been planning, just an hour ago, to give away to the universe?

“Want to mess with me, boys?” Van said, keying the ATV and revving it (a mistake, as she had never bothered to check how much gas was in the Suzuki’s tank before setting out). “Well, why don’t we see just who messes with who?”

The Griners had listened to their scanner only off and on during their days at the cabin, but they did so constantly on the trip to town, because the police band had gone crazy. The transmissions and crosstalk meant little to Maynard, whose brains rarely got out of first gear, but Lowell picked up the general drift.

Someone—a bunch of someones, actually—had taken a mess of guns from the armory at the sheriff’s station, and the cops were just as mad as hornets in a shook-up nest. At least two of the gun-robbers had been killed, a cop had also been killed, and the rest of the gang had gotten away in a big RV. They had taken the stolen guns up to the women’s prison. The cops also kept talking about some woman they wanted to pull out of the Ho Hotel, and it seemed like the gun-robbers wanted to keep her for themselves. Low couldn’t follow that part. He didn’t much care, either. What he cared about was the cops had raised up a posse and were preparing for a big fight, maybe starting tomorrow morning, and they planned to rendezvous at the intersection of Route 31 and West Lavin Road. That meant the station would be undefended. It also gave Lowell a brilliant idea about how they might be able to nail Kitty McDavid.

“Low?”

“Yes, brother?”

“I can’t make out from all that bibble-babble who’s in charge. Some say Deputy Coombs took over from the Norcross bitch, and some say a fella named Frank. Who’s Frank?”

“Don’t know and don’t care,” Little Low said. “But when we get into town, you keep an eye peeled for a kid by himself.”

“Which kid, brother?”

“One old enough to ride a bike and carry a tale,” said Low, just as the stolen Silverado passed the sign reading WELCOME TO DOOLING, A NICE PLACE TO RAISE YOUR FAMILY.

The Suzuki ATV could do sixty on the open road, but with night coming down and her reflexes shot to perdition, Van dared no more than forty. By the time she passed the WELCOME TO DOOLING sign, the Silverado containing the Griner brothers had disappeared. Maybe she’d lost them, but maybe not. Main Street was nearly deserted, and she hoped to spot it there, either parked or cruising slowly while those bad boys looked for something worth holding up. If she didn’t spot it, she supposed the best she could do was pop into the sheriff’s station and report them to whoever was on duty. That would be sort of an anticlimax for a woman who was hoping to do something good to make up for a shooting she still felt bad about, but it was like her daddy always said—sometimes you get what you want, but mostly you get what you get.

The beginning of downtown proper was marked by Barb’s Beauty Salon and Hot Nails on one side of the road and Ace Hardware (recently visited by Johnny Lee Kronsky, in search of tools, wires, and batteries) on the other. It was between these two fine business establishments that Vanessa’s ATV chugged twice, backfired, and died. She checked the gauge, and saw the needle resting on E. Wasn’t that just the perfect end to a perfect fucking day?

There was a Zoney’s one block up where she could buy a few gallons of gas, assuming anyone was bothering to run the place. But it was getting dark, those damn Griners could be anywhere, and even walking a block seemed like quite a trek in her current state. It might be better to go ahead and end it, as she’d set out to do earlier… except she hadn’t become a statewide arm-wrestling champion by giving up when the going got tough, had she? And wasn’t that what she was thinking of? Giving up?

“Not until my damn hand’s down on the damn table,” Van told her beached ATV, and began plodding up the deserted sidewalk toward the sheriff’s.

The business directly across from the cop-shop was the Drew T. Barry Indemnity Company, proprietor currently out at West Lavin Road with the rest of the posse. Low parked the Silverado behind it in a space marked RESERVED FOR BARRY EMPLOYEE, ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED. The back door was locked, but two slams of May’s beefy shoulder fixed that. Low followed him inside, dragging the kid they had found riding his bike down by the bowling alley. The kid in question happened to be Kent Daley, member of the high school tennis team and close friend of Eric Blass. Kent’s bike was now in the back of the Silverado. He was sniveling, although he was really too old for such behavior; it was Low’s opinion that sniveling was okay for teenage girls, but boys should start to taper off at ten and be done with it by twelve or so. He was willing to give this one a pass, however. After all, he probably thought he was going to be raped and murdered.

“You need to shut up, youngster,” he said. “You’ll be all right, if you behave.”

He frog-marched Kent into the big front room, which was filled with desks and posters telling how the right insurance policy could save your family from a life of poverty. On the front window, which faced the deserted business district, Drew T. Barry’s name was printed backward in tall gold-flake letters. As Low looked out, he saw a woman come slowly up the sidewalk on the other side. Not much of a looker, heavyset, lesbo haircut, but seeing any woman today was a rarity. She glanced at the Barry establishment, but with no lights inside, could see nothing but the reflection of the streetlights, which had just flicked on. She climbed the steps to the cop-shop and tried the door. Locked, and wasn’t that smalltown police for you? Low thought. Lock the front door after the guns are stolen. Now she was trying the intercom.

“Mister?” Kent whined. “I want to go home. You can have my bike, if you want it.”

“We can have anything we want, you pimply little peckerwood,” May said.

Low twisted the boy’s wrist, making him holler. “What part of shut up don’t you understand? Brother, go get Mr. Bazooky. And the shells.”

May left. Low turned to the kid. “Card in your wallet says your name is Kent Daley and you live at 15 Juniper Street. That right?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said, wiping snot from his nose up one cheek with the heel of his hand. “Kent Daley, and I don’t want any trouble. I want to go home.”

“You’re in a real pickle, Kent. My brother is an awful sick man. There is nothing he loves more than to wreck a human being. What’d you do, caused you to be so unlucky, do you suppose?”

Kent licked his lips and blinked rapidly. He opened his mouth and shut it.

“You did something, all right.” Low laughed; guilt was hilarious. “Who’s at home?”

“My dad and my mom. Only my mom’s, you know…”

“Catchin forty winks, is she? Or four hundred and forty?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But your dad’s fine?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you like me to go to 15 Juniper Street and blow your dad’s fuckin head off?”

“No, sir,” Kent whispered. Tears rolled down his pale cheeks.

“No, course you wouldn’t, but I will, unless you do just as I say. Will you do as I say?”

“Yes, sir.” Not even a whisper now, just a breeze through the boy’s lips.

“How old are you, Kent?”

“Suh-Suh-Seventeen.”

“Jesus, almost old enough to vote and grizzling like a baby. Quit on it.”

Kent did his best.

“Ride that bike pretty fast, can you?”

“I guess so. I won the Tri-County 40K last year.”

Little Low didn’t know a 40K from a serving tray, and didn’t care. “You know where Route 31 meets up with West Lavin Road? The road that goes to the prison?”

Maynard had returned with the bazooka and the case of shells. Across the street, the heavyset woman had given up on the intercom and was heading back the way she had come with her head hanging down. The drizzle had ceased at last.

Low gave Kent, who was staring at the bazooka with dreadful fascination, a shake. “Know that road, do you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. There are a bunch of men up there and I’m going to give you a message. You will give it to the one named Terry, or the one named Frank, or both of them. Now listen.”

Terry and Frank were at that moment getting out of Unit One and approaching the double gates of Dooling Correctional, where Clint and another guy stood waiting for them. Ten members of the posse were back at the intersection; the rest had taken up positions around the prison at what Terry called the compass rose: north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, and northwest. There were woods, and they were damp, but none of the guys seemed to mind. They were high on excitement.

And they’ll stay that way until the first one takes a bullet and starts screaming, Terry thought.

Someone’s tricked-out truck was blocking the inner gate. The dead space had been filled with tires. And soaked in gasoline, from the smell. Not a bad move. Terry could almost admire it. He shone his light on Norcross, then on the bearded man standing next to him.

“Willy Burke,” said Terry. “I’m sorry to see you here.”

“And I’m sorry to see you here,” Willy responded. “Doing what you shouldn’t be doing. Overstepping your authority. Playing the vigilante man.” He took his pipe from the pocket of his biballs and started to load it.

Terry had never been sure if Norcross was a doctor or just a mister, so he settled on his given name. “Clint, this has almost gone beyond talking. One of my deputies has been killed. Vern Rangle. I think you knew him.”

Clint sighed and shook his head. “I did, and I’m sorry. He was a fine man. I hope you feel equally sorry about Garth Flickinger and Gerda Holden.”

“The Holden girl’s death was an act of self-defense,” Frank said. “She was ripping Deputy Rangle’s goddam throat out.”

“I want to talk to Barry Holden,” Clint said.

“He’s dead,” Frank said. “And it’s your fault.”

Terry turned to Frank. “You need to let me handle this.”

Frank raised his hands and stepped back. He knew Coombs was right—there was his damn temper, getting the best of him again—but he hated him for it, just the same. What he felt like doing was climbing that fence, barbed wire rolls at the top be damned, and knocking the heads of those two smug sons of bitches together. Evie Black’s goading voice was still in his head.

“Clint, listen to me,” Terry said. “I’m willing to say there’s blame on both sides, and I’m willing to guarantee that no charges will be brought against any of you here if you let me take the woman into custody now.”

“Is Barry really dead?” Clint asked.

“Yes,” the acting sheriff said. “He attacked Vern, too.”

Willy Burke reached over and gripped Clint’s shoulder.

“Let’s talk about Evie,” Clint said. “What exactly do you plan to do with her? What can you do?”

Terry appeared stumped, but Frank was ready, speaking with assurance. “We’re going to take her to the sheriff’s station. While Terry’s questioning her, I’m going to get a team of doctors from the state hospital down here double-quick. Between the cops and the docs, we’re going to find out what she is, what she did to the women, and whether or not she can fix it.”

“She says she did nothing,” Clint said, staring off into the distance. “She says she’s just an emissary.”

Frank turned to Terry. “You know what? I think this man is totally full of shit.”

Terry gave him a reproachful (if slightly red-eyed) look; Frank once again raised his hands and stepped back.

“You don’t have a single medical doctor in there,” Terry said, “and you don’t have any PAs you can call, because I seem to remember that they’re both women and they’ll be in cocoons by now. So, bottom line, you’re not examining her, you’re just holding her—”

“Holding onto her,” Frank growled.

“—and listening to what she tells you—”

“Swallowing it, you mean!” Frank shouted.

“Be quiet, Frank.” Terry spoke mildly, but when he turned back to Clint and Willy his cheeks were flushed. “But he’s right. You’re swallowing it. Drinking the Kool-Aid, so to speak.”

“You don’t understand,” Clint said. He sounded weary. “She’s not a woman at all, at least not in the sense we understand. I don’t think she’s entirely human. She has certain abilities. She can call rats, that much I’m sure of. They do what she wants. It’s how she got Hicks’s cell phone. All those moths people have been seeing around town have something to do with her, too, and she knows things. Things she can’t know.”

“You saying she’s a witch?” Terry asked. He pulled out the flask and had a sip. Probably not the best way to negotiate, but he needed something, and right now. “Come on, Clint. Next you’ll be telling me she can walk on water.”

Frank thought of the fire spinning in the air in his living room, and then exploding into moths; and of the phone call, Evie Black saying that she had seen him protect Nana. He tightened his arms across his chest, squeezing down his anger. What did it matter what Eve Black was? What mattered was what had happened, was happening, and how to fix it.

“Open your eyes, son,” Willy said. “Look at what’s happened to the world over the last week. All the women asleep in cocoons, and you’re sticking at the idea the Black woman may be something supernatural? You boys need to do better. Need to quit on sticking your fingers where they don’t belong and let this thing play out like the doc says she wants.”

Because Terry could think of no adequate reply, he took another drink. He saw the way Clint was looking at him and had a third, just to spite the bastard. Who was he to judge, hiding behind prison walls while Terry tried to hold the rest of the world together?

“What she’s asked for is a few more days,” Clint said, “and that’s what I want you to give her.” He nailed Terry’s eyes with his own. “She’s expecting bloodshed, she’s made that much clear. Because she believes that’s the only way men know how to solve their problems. Let’s not give her what she expects. Stand down. Give it seventy-two hours. Then we can revisit the situation.”

“Really? And what do you think will change?” The liquor hadn’t taken over Terry’s mind yet, so far it was only visiting, and he thought, almost prayed: Give me an answer I can believe in.

But Clint only shook his head. “I don’t know. She says it’s not entirely in her hands. But seventy-two hours without shooting would be the right first step, of that I’m sure. Oh, and she says that the women have to take a vote.”

Terry nearly laughed. “How the fuck are sleeping women going to do that?”

“I don’t know,” Clint said.

He’s playing for time, Frank thought. Spouting any old made-up thing that comes into his shrinky-dink brain. Surely you’re still sober enough to see that, aren’t you, Terry?

“I need to think it over,” Terry said.

“All right, but you need to think clearly, so do yourself a favor and pour the rest of that liquor out on the ground.” His eyes shifted to Frank, and they were the cold ones of the orphan boy who had fought for milkshakes. “Frank here thinks he’s the solution, but I think he’s the problem. I think she knew there’d be a guy like him. I think she knows there always is.”

Frank leaped forward, reached through the fence, seized Norcross by the throat, and choked him until his eyeballs first bulged, then dropped out to dangle on his cheeks… but only in his mind. He waited.

Terry considered, then spat in the dirt. “Fuck you, Clint. You’re no real doctor.”

And when he raised the flask and took another long, defiant swallow, Frank raised an inward cheer. By tomorrow, Acting Sheriff Coombs would be in the bag. Then he, Frank, would take over. There would be no seventy-two hours, and he didn’t care if Eve Black was a witch, a fairy princess, or the Red Queen of Wonderland. Everything he needed to know about Eve Black had been in that one short phone call.

Stop this, he had told her—almost begged her—when she called him on her stolen cell. Let the women go.

You’ll have to kill me first, the woman had replied.

Which was what Frank intended to do. If it brought the women back? Happy ending. If not? Revenge for taking away the only person in his life who mattered. Either way? Problem solved.

Just as Van Lampley reached her stalled ATV—with no idea what to do next—a kid tore past on one of those bikes with the apehanger handlebars. He was making enough speed to blow his hair back from his forehead, and he wore an expression of stark, bug-eyed terror. It could have been caused by any one of a dozen things, the way the world was now, but Van had no doubt what had lit a fire under the boy. It wasn’t an intuition; it was a rock-solid certainty.

“Kid!” she shouted. “Kid, where are they?”

Kent Daley paid her no mind, only pedaled faster. He was thinking about the old homeless woman they had been goofing with. They never should have done it. This was God, paying them back. Paying him back. He pedaled faster still.

Although Maynard Griner had left the halls of academe while still in the eighth grade (and those halls had been delighted to see him go), he was good with machinery; when his younger brother passed him the bazooka and one of the shells, May handled them as if he had been doing so all his life. He examined the shell’s high-explosive tip, the wire that ran down the side of the thing, and the fins at the base. He grunted, nodded, and aligned the shell’s fins with the grooves inside the tube. It slid in easy-peasy. He pointed to a lever above the trigger and below the black plastic inventory tag. “Pull that back. Should lock her in.”

Low did, and heard a click. “Is that it, May?”

“Should be, as long as Fritz put in a fresh battery. I believe it’s a lectric charge that fires the rocket.”

“If he didn’t, I’ll go on back there and ramguzzle him,” Low said. His eyes were sparkling as he faced Drew T. Barry’s plate glass window and rested the bazooka on his shoulder in the best war-movie style. “Stand clear, brother!”

The battery in the trigger housing turned out to be just fine. There was a hollow whoosh. Exhaust shot from the tube. The display window blew out into the street, and before either man had time to draw a breath, the front of the sheriff’s station exploded. Chunks of sand-colored brick and shards of glass rained down on the street.

“Hoooo-EEEE!” May slapped his brother on the back. “Did you see that, brother?”

“I did,” Low replied. An alarm was braying somewhere deep inside the wounded station. Men were running to look. The front of the building was now a gaping mouth filled with broken teeth. They could see flames inside, and paperwork fluttering around like singed birds. “Reload me.”

May aligned the fins of a second shell and latched it tight. “All set!” May was hopping with excitement. This was more fun than the time they’d thrown a package of dynamite into the trout tank up at Tupelo Crossing.

“Fire in the hole!” Low shouted, and pulled the bazooka’s trigger. The shell flew across the street on a trail of smoke. The men who had come out to gawk saw it and either turned tail or hit the deck. The second explosion gutted the center of the building. Linny’s cocoon had survived the first blast, but not this second one. Moths flew up from where she had been, and caught fire.

“Let me have a turn!” May held out his hands for the bazooka.

“No, we need to get out of here,” Low said. “But you’ll get your chance, brother. That I promise.”

“When? Where?”

“Up to the prison.”

Van Lampley stood by her ATV, stunned. She had seen the first contrail cross Main Street, and knew what it meant even before the blast. Those son-of-a-bitching Griner brothers had gotten an RPG launcher or something like it from Fritz Meshaum. As the smoke from the second blast began to clear, she could see flames licking out from holes that had been windows. One of the triple doors was lying in the street, twisted into a corkscrew of chromed steel. The others were nowhere to be seen.

Woe to anyone who was in there, she thought.

Red Platt, one of the salesmen at Dooling Kia, came swaying and staggering toward her. Blood was sheeting down the right side of his face, and his lower lip no longer looked completely attached—although with all the blood, it was hard to tell.

“What was that?” Red shouted in a cracked voice. Shards of glass glittered in his thinning hair. “What the fuck was that?”

“The work of two swinging dicks who need a broomhandle stuck in their spokes before they hurt anyone else,” Van said. “You ought to get patched up, Red.”

She walked toward the Shell station, feeling like herself for the first time in days. She knew it wouldn’t last, but while it did, she intended to ride the adrenalin. The gas station was open, but unattended. Van found a ten-gallon can in the garage bay, filled it at one of the pumps, and left a twenty on the counter beside the cash register. The world might be ending, but she had been raised to pay her bills.

She toted the can back to her ATV, filled the tank, and headed out of town in the direction the Griner brothers had come from.

Kent Daley was having a very bad night, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. He had no more than turned off Route 31 and accelerated toward the buses blocking West Lavin Road when he was clotheslined off his bike and driven to the ground. His head hit the asphalt and bright lights flashed in front of his eyes. When they cleared, he saw the muzzle of a rifle three inches from his face.

“Shit fire!” exclaimed Reed Barrows, the deputy who had taken Kent down. Reed had been placed at the southwest point of Terry’s compass rose. He put his gun down and hauled Kent up by the front of his shirt. “I know you, you’re the kid who was putting firecrackers in mailboxes last year.”

Men were running toward them from the new and improved roadblock, Frank Geary in the lead. Terry Coombs brought up the rear, weaving slightly. They knew what had happened in town; there had already been a dozen calls on a dozen cell phones, and they could easily see the fire burning in the middle of Dooling from this high vantage point. Most of them wanted to go tear-assing back, but Terry, fearing it was a diversion to get the woman out, had ordered them to hold their positions.

“What are you doing out here, Daley?” Reed asked. “You could have gotten yourself shot.”

“I’ve got a message,” Kent said, rubbing the back of his head. It wasn’t bleeding, but a large knot was forming there. “It’s for Terry or Frank, or both of them.”

“What the fuck’s going on?” Don Peters asked. He had donned a football helmet at some point; his close-set eyes, deep in the shadow of the forehead shield, looked like those of a small and hungry bird. “Who’s this?”

Frank pushed Don aside and dropped to one knee beside the kid. “I’m Frank,” he said. “What’s the message?”

Terry also took a knee. His breath was redolent of booze. “Come on, son. Take a beep death… deep breath… and pull yourself together.”

Kent groped among his scattered thoughts. “That woman in the prison there, the special one, she’s got friends in town. Lots of them. Two of them grabbed me. They said to tell you to stop what you’re doing and go away, or the police station will only be the first thing to go.”

Frank’s lips stretched in a smile that came nowhere near his eyes. He turned to Terry. “So what do you think, Sheriff? Are we going to be good boys and go away?”

Little Low was no Mensa candidate himself, but he possessed a degree of cunning that had kept the Griner operation afloat for almost six years before he and his brother had finally been brought down. (Low blamed his generous nature; they had let the McDavid cunt, who was hardly a ten, hang around and she had repaid them by becoming a snitch.) He had an instinctive grasp of human psychology in general and male psychology in particular. When you told men they oughtn’t to do a thing, that was what they did.

Terry didn’t hesitate. “Not going away. Going in at sunrise. Let them blow up the whole goddam town.”

The men who had gathered around raised a cheer so hoarse and so savage that Kent Daley flinched. What he wanted more than anything was to take his sore head home, lock all the doors, and go to sleep.

So far, the adrenalin was holding out; Van hammered on Fritz Meshaum’s door hard enough to rattle it in its frame. A long-fingered hand that looked as if it had too many knuckles pulled aside a filthy curtain. A stubble-spackled face peered out. A moment later, the door opened. Fritz opened his mouth, but Van seized him and began to shake him like a terrier with a rat before he could utter a word.

“What did you sell them, you scrawny little shitepoke? Was it a rocket launcher? It was, wasn’t it? How much did those bastards pay you so they could blow a hole in the middle of downtown?”

By then they were inside, Van roughly steering Fritz across his cluttered living room. He beat feebly at one of her shoulders with his left hand; the other arm was bound in a makeshift sling that looked as if it had been made from a bedsheet.

“Quit it!” Fritz shouted. “Quit it, woman, I already had my damn arm dislocated by them two cretins!”

Van shoved him down in a filthy armchair with a stack of old skin magazines beside it. “Talk.”

“It wasn’t a rocket launcher, it was a vintage Russian bazooka, coulda sold it for six, seven thousand dollars at one of those parkin lot gun sales up in Wheeling, and those two country-fried fuckers stole it!”

“Well, of course you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Van was panting.

“It’s the truth.” Fritz looked at her more closely, his eyes sliding from her round face to her big breasts to her wide hips, then back up again. “You’re the first woman I’ve seen in two days. How long you been awake?”

“Since last Thursday morning.”

“Holy moly, that must be a record.”

“Not even close.” Van had Googled it. “Never mind that. Those boys just blew up the sheriff’s station.”

“I heard a hell of a bang,” admitted Fritz. “Guess that bazooka works pretty good.”

“Oh, it worked fine,” Van said. “I don’t suppose you’d know where they’re going next.”

“Nope, not a clue.” Fritz began to grin, exposing teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in a good long while, if ever. “But I could find out.”

“How?”

“Damn fools looked right at it, and when I told em it was an inventory tag, they believed me!” His laugh sounded like a file scraping on a rusty hinge.

“What are you talking about?”

“GPS tracker. I put em on all my high-end items, case they get stolen. Which that bazooka was. I can track it on my phone.”

“Which you will give me,” Van said, and held out her hand.

Fritz looked up at her, his eyes a sly and watery blue under wrinkled lids. “If you get my bazooka, will you give it back before you go to sleep?”

“No,” Van said, “but I won’t give you a broken arm to go with the one they dislocated. How’s that?”

The little man chuckled and said, “All righty, but it’s just cause I got a soft spot for wide women.”

If she had felt more like herself Van might’ve had to beat the shit out of him for a comment like that—it wouldn’t be hard and it would be public service—but in her exhaustion, she hardly considered it. “Come on, then.”

Fritz pushed up from the couch. “Phone’s on the kitchen table.” She backed up, keeping the rifle on him.

He led her down a short, dark hall and into the kitchen. There was a stench of ash that made Van gag. “What have you been cooking?”

“Candy,” Fritz said. He thumped down at a linoleum-topped table.

“Candy?” It didn’t smell like any candy she knew of. Gray scraps, like bits of burned newspaper, were scattered around the floor.

“Candy’s my wife,” he said. “Now deceased. Lit the mouthy old bag up with a kitchen match. Never realized she had such a spark.” His black and brown teeth were revealed in a ferocious grin. “Get it? Spark?”

No avoiding it now. Tired or not, she was going to have to put a hurting on the vile bastard. That was Van’s first thought. The second was, there was no cell phone on the linoleum-topped table.

A gun banged and the air went out of Van. She thumped against the refrigerator and down to the floor. Blood spilled from a bullet wound at her hip. The rifle she had been holding had flown from her hands. Smoke curled from around the edge of the eating table directly in front of her. She spotted the barrel then; the pistol that Meshaum had strapped underneath the tabletop.

Fritz pulled it free of the duct tape that had held it, stood, and came around the table. “Never can be too careful. Keep a loaded gun in every room.” He squatted down beside her and jammed the barrel of a pistol against her forehead. His breath smelled like tobacco and meat. “This one was my opa’s. What you think about that, you fat pig?”

She didn’t think much of it, and didn’t have to. Van Lampley’s right arm—the arm that had put down Hallie “Wrecker” O’Meara in the championship match of the 2010 Ohio Valley Women’s 35–45 Year-Old Division, and snapped one of Erin Makepeace’s elbow ligaments in 2011 to repeat—was like a spring trap. Her right hand swung up, catching Fritz Meshaum’s wrist and squeezing with fingers made of steel, jerking down so violently that he was pitched forward on top of her. The antique pistol went off, putting a bullet into the floor between Van’s arm and side. Bile rose in her throat as the weight of his body pressed into her wound, but she kept twisting his wrist, and at that angle all he could do was fire into the floor again before the gun slipped from his hand. Bones popped. Ligaments twanged. Fritz screamed. He bit her hand, but she just turned harder on his wrist, and began to methodically punch him in the back of the head with her left fist, driving down with the diamond of her engagement ring.

“Okay, okay! Uncle! Fuckin uncle! I give!” screamed Fritz Meshaum. “That’s enough!”

But Van did not think so. Her bicep flexed and the tattoo of the headstone—YOUR PRIDE—swelled.

She kept twisting with one hand and punching with the other.

CHAPTER 12

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Evie’s rules were:

“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.

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.

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?

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.

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.”

CHAPTER 13

As the rim of the sun appeared over the woods behind Dooling Correctional, a line of bulldozers clanked up West Lavin, end-to-end. All three were Caterpillars, two D9s and a big D11. The assault team was eighteen men in total. Fifteen of them were with the bulldozers, headed for the front gate; three of them were advancing around the backside of the prison fence. (They’d left Selectman Miller at the roadblock with a bottle of Vicodin and his bandaged leg propped on a camp chair.)

Frank had organized twelve in the forward group—his dirty dozen—into three quartets. Each quartet, in vests and masks, hunkered behind a bulldozer, using it for cover. The windows and grills of the dozers had been jury-rigged with scrap steel. Retired Deputy Jack Albertson drove the first in line, Coach JT Wittstock drove the second, and the former Golden Gloves boxer, Carson Struthers, drove the third. Frank was with Albertson’s bulldozer.

The men in the woods were Deputy Elmore Pearl, the deer hunter Drew T. Barry (his office now in ruins), and Don Peters.

Clint spotted the bulldozers from the high window on B Wing and bolted for the stairs, pulling on his bulletproof vest as he went. “Have fun gettin fucked, Doc,” Scott Hughes called cheerfully as he ran past.

“Like they’ll give you a pass if they get in,” Clint said. This wiped the smile from Scott’s face.

Clint hurried down Broadway, stopping to put his head in the visitors’ room. “Rand, they’re coming. Lay down the teargas.”

“Okay,” said Rand from the family alcove at the end of the room, and calmly donned the gas mask he had at the ready.

Clint continued to the security station at the main door.

The station was your basic bulletproof tollbooth where visitors were required to check in. The little room had a long facing window and a drawer for passing IDs and valuables through to the officer on duty. There was a communications board like the ones in the Booth and the gatehouse, with monitors that could flip through views of the various inner and outer areas of the prison. Tig was at the board.

Clint rapped on the door and Tig opened it.

“What have you got on the monitors?”

“Sunrise is flaring the lenses. If there’s men behind the bulldozers, I can’t see them yet.”

They had eight or nine gas grenades to go with the launcher. On the central monitor, below the spirals of glare, Clint saw several of these strike the parking lot and spew white fumes to mix with the tarry smoke still leaking from the tires. He told Tig to keep watching and ran on.

His next destination was the break room. Jared and Michaela were at a table with a deck of cards and cups of coffee.

“Make yourselves scarce. It’s starting.”

Michaela toasted him with her cup. “Sorry, Doc. I’m legal to vote and everything. I think I’ll stick around. Who knows, there might be a Pulitzer in my future.”

Jared’s color was chalky. He looked from Michaela to his father.

“Fine,” Clint said. “Far be it for me to abridge the freedom of the press. Jared, hide, and don’t tell me where.”

He jogged on before his son could respond. His breath was short by the time he reached the rear door that opened near the shed and the fields. The reason that, until the morning of Aurora, he’d never before suggested to Lila that they should go running was because he hadn’t wanted her to have to limit her pace for him; it would have been embarrassing. What was the root here, vanity or laziness? Clint promised himself to give the question real consideration when he had a free second and, if he should be so lucky as to live through the morning, and ever get to speak to his wife again, possibly to repeat his proposal that they take up jogging together.

“Three bulldozers on the road,” Clint announced as he emerged outside.

“We know,” Willy Burke said. He walked over to Clint from his spot behind the shed. There was a weird contrast between his bulletproof vest and his festive red suspenders, now lolling in loops at his hips. “Tig radioed. Billy’s going to hold tight here, watch the north fence. I’m gonna sidle on up along this wall to the corner and see if I can get a few clean shots. You’re welcome to join me, but you’ll need one of these.” He handed Clint a gas mask and put on his own.

At the ninety-degree turn from the road to the gate, Frank pounded the metal plate over the door, a signal to Albertson to hang a right. Jack did so—slowly and carefully. The men slipped back further, keeping the mass of metal in front of them at all times as it swung around. Frank was wearing a vest, and he had a Glock in his right hand. He could see licks of smoke spilling down the road. This was expected: he’d heard the pops of the gas grenades being fired. They couldn’t have too many. There had been a lot more masks than grenades in the armaments room of the sheriff’s station.

The first bulldozer completed its adjustment and the four men climbed on the back, pressed together shoulder to shoulder.

In the bulldozer cockpit Jack Albertson was safe behind the steel blade, which was raised to the upper position, therefore blocking the window. He gave it plenty of gas as it headed for the gate.

Frank used his walkie, although not everyone in his attack force had them; all of this had been done on the fly. “Get ready, everyone. This is going to happen.” And please, he thought, with as little bloodshed as possible. He was already two men down, and the attack hadn’t even started.

“What do you think?” Clint asked Willy.

On the other side of the double fences, the first bulldozer, blade high, was crunching forward. For a half-second there’d been a glimpse of movement slipping around to the back of the machine.

Willy didn’t respond. The old moonshiner was revisiting an unnamed square meter of hell in Southeast Asia in ’68. Everything had been still, swamp water up to his Adam’s apple, a layer of smoke closing out the sky, him sandwiched in the middle; everything had been so still, and a bird, red and blue and yellow and massive, eagle-sized, had floated up beside him, dead, its eye clouded. The creature was so vivid and so incongruous in the strange light. Its glorious feathers had grazed Willy’s shoulder, and the faint current had drawn it away, and it had vanished back into the smoke.

(Once, he had told his sister about that. “Never saw a bird like that before. Not the whole time I was there. Never saw one since, either, of course. I wonder sometimes if it was the last of its kind.” The Alzheimer’s had taken most of what made her herself by then, but there had been a small piece left, and she had said, “Maybe it was just—hurt, Willy,” and Willy had said to her, “I sure love you, you know.” His sister had blushed.)

The dozer blade hit the middle of the fence with a rattling crash. The links bowed inward before the whole section tore free of the ground and flopped back against the second layer of fence across the median. Ghosts of teargas broke across the front of the bulldozer as it ground forward, bashing against the second fence with the tangled fragment of the first. The inner fence buckled and collapsed, the bulldozer jouncing over the debris. It continued across the smoke-filled parking lot, a length of fencing stuck shrieking under its nose.

The second and third bulldozers followed the first through the gap.

A brown shoe, visible behind the rear left corner of the first bulldozer, appeared in Willy’s sight. He fired. A man shouted and fell out from behind the bulldozer, one pinwheeling arm casting off a shotgun. It was a banty-legged little guy wearing a gas mask and a vest. (Willy wouldn’t have known it was Pudge Marone, saloonkeeper of the Squeaky Wheel, even if Pudge’s face had been visible. Willy hadn’t drunk in bars, not for years.) While the man’s torso was covered, his legs and arms were not, and that was just fine because Willy did not want to kill anyone if he could help it. He shot again, not quite where he wanted, but close enough, and the .223-caliber bullet, expressed by an M4 assault rifle that had been the property of the Dooling Sheriff’s Department until the previous day, blew off Pudge Marone’s thumb.

An arm reached out from behind the bulldozer to assist the prone man, an understandable and perhaps commendable attempt, though definitely unwise. The arm in question belonged to retired Deputy Nate McGee, who, having lost over a hundred dollars playing dice on the tarmac of Route 31 the previous evening, had soothed himself with a pair of false thoughts: one, that if he’d known for certain that Mrs. McGee might some day reawaken, he wouldn’t have bet at all; and two, that at least he had used up his bad luck for the week. Not so. Willy shot a third time, catching the elbow of the reaching arm. There was another shout and McGee tumbled from behind the bulldozer. Willy squeezed off four more quick shots, testing the steel plate that had been mounted over the bulldozer’s grill, and heard them zing off uselessly.

Frank leaned out from the cover of the first bulldozer with a pistol and fired a series of rapid shots at Willy. In 1968 Willy might have been able to judge by the angle of Geary’s arm that his aim would be way off, and thus stayed in position and taken him out, but 1968 was fifty years ago, and getting shot at was something you lost your coziness with pretty swiftly. Willy and Clint scooted to cover.

As Jack Albertson’s bulldozer rolled through the tangles of teargas and black smoke, straight on for the RV and the front doors, the debris under its nose grinding, the second bulldozer, driven by Coach Wittstock, barreled through the hole in the fence.

Like Albertson before him and Carson Struthers behind him, Coach Wittstock’s blade was raised for protection. He could hear the shots, could hear the shouts, but he couldn’t see Nate McGee clutching his elbow on the ground in front of him, and when the bulldozer rolled over the disabled man, Coach Wittstock assumed it was just one of the burned tires that the machine’s crawlers were climbing.

He whooped. He was breaking through just like he taught his linebackers to do, reckless and relentless!

From his vantage at the window in the visitors’ room, Rand waited to fire on the first bulldozer until it was halfway between the gatehouse and the front doors. His shots struck plating here and there, ricocheting off without effect.

Pete Ordway, the Wittstock boys, and Dan “Treater” Treat, under cover of the second bulldozer, found themselves confronted with the crushed corpse of Nate McGee. The dead man’s gas mask was full of blood and his torso had burst out around the straps of his vest. Gore sprayed up from the crawler treads; shreds of skin flapped like streamers. Rupe Wittstock screamed and leaped away from the mess, clearing himself of the viscera, but putting himself in Rand’s line of fire.

Rand’s first shot missed his target’s head by an inch, the second by half an inch. Rand swore at himself and put his third shot square in the middle of the man’s back. The slug lodged itself in the bulletproof vest the target was wearing and bowed him over. He threw his arms skyward like a fan in a stadium doing the Wave. Rand shot a fourth time, lower. It hit the target in the buttocks and sent him sprawling.

Deputy Treat was not fazed. Treater, only a year late of the 82nd Airborne, still possessed the relative comfort with being shot at that Willy Burke had lost long ago. He hopped off Dozer Two without a second thought. (He was relieved, in fact, to settle into military mode. Action was a break from the untenable reality of his daughter, Alice, at that second propped at her play table in their apartment, wrapped up in white fibers, when she ought to have just been getting up for another day of second grade. And it was a break from the thought of his year-old son, currently in a makeshift daycare run by men.) Free of cover, Treat returned suppression fire with an M4 he’d recovered on Route 31.

At the window, Rand dropped to his knees on the table he had been standing atop. Concrete fragments rained down his neck and back.

Treater hoisted Rupe Wittstock and pulled him to safety behind a stack of smoldering tires.

Dozer One crashed into the rear end of the Fleetwood RV, slamming its hood against the front doors of the prison in an explosion of glass.

Jared sat on the floor of the laundry room while Michaela piled sheets around him, constructing a mound to hide him. “I feel stupid,” Jared said.

“You don’t look stupid,” Michaela said, which wasn’t true. She fluttered a sheet above his head.

“I feel like a pussy.”

Michaela hated that word. Even as she heard more shots ring out, it touched a nerve. A pussy was supposed to be soft, and although Michaela possessed one, there was nothing particularly soft about the rest of her. Janice Coates had not raised her to be a softie. She flipped up the sheet and gave Jared a hard—but not too hard—slap across the cheek.

“Hey!” He put a hand to his face.

“Don’t say that.”

“Say what?”

“Don’t say pussy when it means weak. If your mother didn’t teach you better than that, she should have.” Michaela dropped the sheet over his face.

“It is a fucking crime that someone is not filming this for fucking reality TV,” Low said. Eye to the scope of the bazooka, he had seen the second bulldozer squash the poor sucker who had fallen in front of the treads, seen the Rambo guy jump out from behind the second dozer, start blasting, and rescue another guy. He then witnessed—not without a mixture of wonder and glee—the first bulldozer as it smashed the RV into an accordion in front of the prison doors. It was a stellar conflict, and it was only going to get better once they spiced the soup with three or four bazooka shells.

“When do we do our thing?” May asked.

“Soon as the cops have wore themselves out a bit more.”

“How are we going to be sure we got Kitty, Low? That place must be full of slags in cocoons.”

Low didn’t appreciate his brother’s last minute naysaying. “We probably won’t be absolutely sure, May, but we are going to fire all these shells, and blow the fuck out of the place, so I like our chances. To a certain extent, I suppose we’re just going to have to hope for the best. Now are we going to enjoy this or not? Or would you rather that I do all the shooting?”

“Come on, Low, I didn’t say that,” protested May. “Be fair.”

On Level 32 of Boom Town, little pink spiders began to invade Evie’s field of stars, triangles, and burning orbs. The spiders doused the orbs and turned them into the irritating sparkling blue stars that clogged up all the works—booger. In A Wing, the sound of the gunfire echoed piercingly. Evie was undisturbed; she had seen and heard men killing on numerous occasions. The pink spiders did bother her, though.

“So evil,” she said to no one, sliding her colorful shapes around, searching for connections. Evie was extremely relaxed; as she played with the phone, she floated on her back a couple of centimeters above the cot.

Bushes twitched on the opposite side of the north fence, directly across from Billy Wettermore’s position in the alley behind the garden shed. He unleashed a dozen rounds into the mass of greenery where the twitch had come from. The bushes shook and trembled.

Drew T. Barry, a crafty insurance man who always kept to the most risk-averse course, wasn’t anywhere near Billy’s line of fire. Instead, with the prudence that not only made him Dooling’s first stop for all your indemnification needs but also an excellent deer hunter, willing to take his time to get an ideal shot, he had halted the other two men—Pearl and Peters—in the woods behind the prison gymnasium. Peters had told him that the rear door to the prison was on the west wall of the gym. The reaction produced by the rock that Drew had thrown into the brush close to that spot had told them a lot: yes, there must be a door, and yes, it was definitely defended.

“Deputy?” Drew T. Barry asked.

They were crouched behind an oak. Fifteen feet or so ahead of them, bits of leaf were still drifting down from where the gunfire had torn up the foliage. To judge by the sound, the shooter was perhaps thirty or forty yards beyond the interior fence, near the wall of the prison.

“What?” Don Peters replied. Sweat streaked his flushed face. He had been lugging the duffel bag with their masks and the bolt cutters.

“Not you, the real deputy,” Drew T. Barry said.

“Yeah?” Pearl nodded at him.

“If I kill this guy shooting here, there’s no chance of prosecution? Are you sure Geary and Coombs will swear we acted in the legal performance of our duties?”

“Yup. Scout’s honor.” Elmore Pearl raised his hand in the salute of his childhood, first three fingers raised, pinky held down by his thumb.

Peters hocked some phlegm. “You need me to hustle back and fetch you a notary, Drew?”

Drew T. Barry ignored this witless jibe, told them to stay put, and started backtracking into the woods, taking the northern incline in quick, quiet steps, his Weatherby rifle strapped to his back.

With the bulldozer halted, Frank continued to aim at the southwest corner of the prison, ready to pick off the rifleman there if he showed his face. The shooting had rattled him; had made it all real. He felt nauseated by the blood and the bodies on the ground, obscured and revealed as the clouds of teargas shifted in the wind, but his determination was still strong. He felt horror but no remorse. His life was Nana’s life, which made the risk acceptable. So he told himself.

Kronsky joined him. “Hurry,” Frank said. “The sooner this is over, the better.”

“You got a point there, Mister Man,” Kronsky said, on one knee with his backpack on the ground. He unzipped the pack, removed the bundle of dynamite, and snipped off three-quarters of the fuse.

The armored door of the bulldozer swung open. Jack Albertson climbed down, carrying his old service weapon, a .38.

“Cover us from yonder shitbird down the way,” Kronsky said to Albertson, pointing in the direction of Willy Burke’s position. Then Kronsky turned to Frank. “Come on, and you’d best high-step it.”

The two men hustled along the northwest wall of the prison, ducking low. Beneath the cutout window that was one of the defenders’ firing points, Kronsky stopped. He had the dynamite in his right hand and a blue plastic lighter in the other. The defender’s rifle barrel that had been there before poked back out.

“Grab that thing,” he said to Frank.

Frank didn’t question the order, just reached up and closed his left hand around the metal tube. He jerked it out of the grip of the man inside. He heard a muffled curse. Kronsky flicked his lighter, lit the shortened fuse on the bundle, and casually tossed it, hook-shot-style, up and through the hole. Frank released the rifle and hit the ground.

Three seconds later there was a thundercrack. Smoke and chunks of bloody flesh flew from the cutout window.

The earth trembled and gave an outraged roar.

Clint, shoulder to shoulder with Willy Burke at the west wall, saw a tidal wave of teargas curl from the parking lot, swept along by whatever had just exploded. Chimes rang through his skull and his joints vibrated. Beneath the noise, all he could think was that things were not going as well as he had hoped. These guys were going to kill Evie and all the rest of them. His fault, his failing. The pistol that he had been carrying around, ridiculously—never once in their fifteen years of marriage had he taken up Lila’s invitation to go to the gun range with her—had nevertheless slid into his hand, begging to be fired.

He leaned around Willy Burke, scanned the pile-up at the front doors, and locked on the figure standing at the rear of the first bulldozer. This man was staring at the cloud of dust boiling from Rand Quigley’s window, which had been—like everything else this morning—exploded out of its former normal shape.

(Jack Albertson had not expected the blast. It startled him and he dropped his guard to look. While the chaos did not upset him—as a miner in his youth, one who had survived a good many rumbles in the earth, his nerves were cool—it did perplex him. What was wrong with these folks, that they would prefer a shootout to surrendering some damned wild woman to the law? In his view, the world got crazier and crazier with each passing year. His personal Waterloo had been Lila Norcross’s election as Dooling’s sheriff. A skirt in the sheriff’s office! It didn’t get much more ludicrous than that. Jack Albertson had put in his retirement papers there and then, and returned home to enjoy his lifelong bachelorhood in peace.)

Clint’s arm lifted the pistol, the gunsight found the man behind the bulldozer, and Clint’s finger pulled the trigger. The shot was followed by a succulent pop, the sound of a bullet punching through the faceplate of the man’s gas mask. Clint saw the head snap back and the body crumple.

Ah, Jesus, he thought. That was probably someone I knew.

“Come on,” Willy cried, hauling him away to the rear door. Clint went, his legs doing what they needed to do. It had been easier than he might have guessed to kill someone. Which only made it worse.

CHAPTER 14

When Jeanette opened her eyes, a fox was lying down outside the door to Evie’s cell. Its snout rested on the fissured cement floor, from which ridges of green moss sprouted.

“Tunnel,” Jeanette said to herself. Something about a tunnel. She said to the fox, “Did I go through one? I don’t remember, if I did. Are you from Evie?”

It didn’t answer, as she had almost expected it might. (In dreams animals could talk, and this felt like a dream… yet at the same time didn’t.) The fox only yawned, looked at her slyly, and pushed itself to its feet.

A Wing was empty, and a hole gaped in the wall. Beams of morning sunlight poured through. There was frost on the chunks of broken cement, beading and liquefying as the temperature rose.

Jeanette thought, I feel awake again. I believe I am awake.

The fox made a mewling noise and trotted to the hole. It glanced at Jeanette, mewled a second time, and went through, and was swallowed by the light.

She gingerly picked her way through the hole, stooping under the sharp edges of gashed cement, and found herself in a field of knee-high weeds and dead sunflowers. The morning light made Jeanette squint. Her feet crunched frozen undergrowth and the cool air raised gooseflesh under the thin fabric of her uniform.

The strong sensations of fresh air and sunshine awakened her completely. Her old body, exhausted by trauma and stress and lack of sleep, was a skin that had been shucked. Jeanette felt new.

The fox cut briskly through the grass, taking her past the east side of the prison toward Route 31. Jeanette had to walk fast to keep up as her eyes adjusted to the sharp daylight. She flashed a glance at the prison: naked brambles choked the walls; the rusted hump of a bulldozer and an RV were jammed against the front of the building, also thick with brambles; extravagant clumps of yellow grass sprouted from cracks and gashes in the parking lot; other rusted vehicles were stranded across the tarmac. Jeanette looked in the opposite direction. The fences were down—she could see flattened chainlink glinting among the weeds. Although Jeanette couldn’t make sense of the how or the why, she immediately absorbed the what. This was Dooling Correctional, but the world had spun on for years.

Her guide continued up from the ditch that edged Route 31, crossed the cracked and disintegrating road, and entered the blue-green dark of the rising woods on the other side. As the fox ascended, his orange brush bobbed and flashed in the dimness.

Jeanette ran across the road, keeping her eye on the flicking tail. One of her sneakers skated in a patch of damp, and she had to snatch for a branch to keep from losing her feet. The freshness of the air—tree sap and composting leaves and wet earth—burned down her throat and into her chest. She was out of prison, and a memory of playing Monopoly as a girl surfaced: Get Out of Jail Free! This wondrous new reality excised the square of forest from time itself, and made it an island beyond reach—of industrial cleaners, of orders, of jangling keys, of cellmate snores and farts, of cellmate crying, of cellmate sex, of cell doors banging shut—where she was the sole ruler; Queen Jeanette, evermore. It was sweet, sweeter even than she’d fantasized, to be free.

But then:

“Bobby.” She whispered it to herself. That was the name she had to remember, had to bring with her, so she would not be tempted to stay.

Judging distance was difficult for Jeanette; she was used to the level rubber track that circled the yard at the prison, each loop about half a mile. The steady southwest climb was more demanding than that and she had to lengthen her strides, making her thigh muscles sing in a way that hurt and felt wonderful at the same time. The fox stopped once in awhile to let her close some of the distance before he trotted on. She was sweating hard despite the chill. The air felt like that knife-edge of time when winter teetered on the edge of spring. A few green-tipped buds flashed in the gray-brown of the woods, and where the earth was naked to the sky, it was squishy with melt.

Maybe it was two miles, maybe three, when the fox led Jeanette around the rear side of a fallen trailer beached in a sea of weeds. Ancient yellow police tape fluttered on the ground. She had an idea she was getting close now. She heard a faint buzz in the air. The sun was higher and it was getting toward noon. She was starting to feel thirsty and hungry, and there might be something to eat and drink at her destination—how perfect a cold pop would be just now! But never mind, Bobby was what she needed to be thinking about. Seeing Bobby again. Ahead, the fox disappeared beneath an arch of broken trees.

Jeanette hurried after, passing a pile of rubble wigged in weeds. It might once have been a small cabin or shed. Here moths covered the branches of the trees, their countless tan bodies pressed together so that they resembled strange barnacles. Which followed somehow, Jeanette thought, understanding innately that the world she found herself in was outside of all she had ever known, like a land at the bottom of the sea. The moths appeared still, but she could hear them crackling softly, as if speaking.

Bobby, they seemed to say. It’s not too late to start again, they seemed to say.

The slope finally topped out. Through the last of the woods, Jeanette could see the fox standing in the faded grasses of a winter field. She sucked at the air. A kerosene scent, wholly unexpected and seemingly unattached to anything, tingled in her nose and mouth.

Jeanette stepped into the open and saw something that could not be. Something that made her sure she was no longer in the Appalachian country she had always known.

It was a white tiger, coat tipped with black, fin-shaped markings. It rolled its head and roared, sounding like the MGM lion. Behind it soared a tree—a Tree—bursting up from the earth in a tangle of a hundred trunks that twisted into a looming, sprawling fountain of branches, dripping with leaves and curling mosses, alive with the flitting bodies of tropical birds. A massive red snake, shining and glittering, coursed up the center.

The fox trotted up to a gaping split in the bole, tossed a somehow roguish look at Jeanette, and vanished into the depths. That was it, that was the tunnel that went both ways. The tunnel that would take her back to the world she had left, the one where Bobby waited. She started toward it.

“Stop where you are. And raise your hands.”

A woman in a checked yellow button-down and blue jeans stood in grass that came up to her knees, pointing a pistol at Jeanette. She had come around the side of the Tree, which was, at its base, roughly the size of an apartment building. In the hand that wasn’t holding the pistol she had a canister with a blue rubber band around its middle.

“No closer. You’re new, aren’t you? And your clothes say you’re from the prison. You must be confused.” A peculiar smile touched Ms. Yellow Shirt’s lips, a futile attempt to soften the oddness of the situation—the Tree, the tiger, the gun. “I want to help you. I will help you. We’re all friends here. I’m Elaine, okay? Elaine Nutting. Just let me do this one thing and we’ll talk more.”

“What thing?” Jeanette asked, although she was pretty sure she knew; why else the kerosene stink? The woman was getting ready to light the Impossible Tree on fire. If it burned, the way back to Bobby burned. Evie had pretty much said so. It couldn’t be allowed, but how was the woman to be stopped? She was at least six yards away, too far to rush her.

Elaine went down on one knee, watching Jeanette carefully as she laid the pistol aside in the dirt (but close at hand) and quickly unscrewed the cap of the kerosene canister. “I already spread the first two around. I just need to finish making a circle. To be sure it’ll go up.”

Jeanette took a couple of steps forward. Elaine snatched up the gun and got to her feet. “Stay back!”

“You can’t do this,” Jeanette said. “You have no right.”

The white tiger sat near the crevice that had absorbed the fox. It thumped its tail back and forth and watched with half-closed eyes of a brilliant amber.

Elaine splashed kerosene against the Tree, staining the wood a deeper brown. “I have to do this. It’s better this way. It solves all the problems. How many men have hurt you? Plenty, I imagine. I’ve worked with women like you for my entire adult life. I know you didn’t just walk into prison on your own. A man pushed you.”

“Lady,” Jeanette said, offended by the idea that one look at her could tell anyone anything that mattered. “You don’t know me.”

“Maybe not personally, but I’m right, aren’t I?” Elaine dumped the last of the kerosene onto some roots and pitched the canister aside. Jeanette thought, you ain’t Elaine Nutting, you’re Elaine Nuts.

“There was a man who hurt me, yes. But I hurt him worse.” Jeanette took a step toward Elaine. She was about fifteen feet away now. “I killed him.”

“Good for you, but don’t come any closer.” Elaine waved the pistol back and forth, as if she could brush Jeanette away. Or erase her.

Jeanette took another step. “Some people say he deserved it, even some who were his friends once. Okay, they can believe that. But the DA didn’t believe it. More important, I don’t believe it, although it’s true I wasn’t in my right mind when it happened. And it’s true that no one helped me when I needed help. So I killed him, and I wish I hadn’t. It’s on me, not him. I have to live with that. And I do.”

Another step, just a small one.

“I’m strong enough to take my share of the blame, okay? But I’ve got a son who needs me. He needs to know how to grow up right, and that’s something I can teach him. I’m done being pushed around by anyone, man or woman. The next time Don Peters tries to get me to give him a handjob, I won’t kill him, but I… I’ll scratch his eyes out, and if he hits me, I’ll keep right on scratching. I’m done being a punching bag. So you can take what you think you know about me, and you can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.”

“I believe you may have lost your mind,” said Elaine.

“Aren’t there women here who want to go back?”

“I don’t know.” Elaine’s eyes shifted. “Probably. But they’re misguided.”

“And you get to make that decision for them?”

“If no one else has the guts,” Elaine said (with absolutely no awareness of how like her husband she sounded), “then yes. In that case, it’s down to me.” From the pocket of her jeans, she withdrew a long-barreled trigger lighter, the kind people used to fire up the coals in a barbecue. The white tiger was watching and purring—a deep rumbling sound like an idling engine. It didn’t look to Jeanette as if there would be any help from that direction.

“Guess you don’t have any kids, huh?” Jeanette asked.

The woman looked hurt. “I have a daughter. She’s the light of my life.”

“And she’s here?”

“Of course she is. She’s safe here. And I intend to keep her that way.”

“What does she say about that?”

“What she says doesn’t matter. She’s just a child.”

“Okay, what about all the women who had to leave boy children behind? Don’t they have a right to raise their kids and keep them safe? Even if they do like it here, don’t they have that responsibility?”

“See,” Elaine said, smirking, “that statement alone is enough to tell me you’re foolish. Boys grow up to be men. And it’s men who cause all the trouble. They’re the ones who shed the blood and poison the earth. We are better off here. There are male babies here, yes, but they’re going to be different. We’ll teach them to be different.” She took a deep breath. The smirk spread, as if she were inflating it with crazy-gas. “This world will be kind.”

“Let me ask you again: You mean to close the door on the life all them other ladies left behind without even asking them?”

Elaine’s smile faltered. “They might not understand, so I… I’m making…”

“What’re you making, lady? Besides a mess?” Jeanette slid her hand in her pocket.

The fox reappeared and sat beside the tiger. The red snake slithered weightily across one of Jeanette’s sneakers, but she did not so much as look down. These animals did not attack, she understood; they were from what some preacher, back in the dim days of her optimistic churchgoing childhood, had called the Peaceable Kingdom.

Elaine flicked the lighter’s switch. Flame wavered from the tip. “I am making an executive decision!”

Jeanette pulled her hand from her pocket and hurled a handful of peas at the other woman. Elaine flinched, raised her hand with the gun in an instinctive motion of defense, and stepped back. Jeanette closed the remaining distance and caught her around the waist. The gun tumbled from Elaine’s hand and fell into the dirt. She hung onto the lighter, though. Elaine stretched, the flame at the tip curling toward the knot of kerosene-dampened roots. Jeanette banged Elaine’s wrist against the ground. The lighter slipped from her hand and went out, but too late—guttering blue flames danced along one of the roots, moving up toward the trunk.

The red snake slithered up the Tree, wanting away from the fire. The tiger rose, lazily, went to the burning root, and planted a paw on it. Smoke rose around the paw, and Jeanette smelled singeing fur, but the tiger remained planted. When it stepped away, the blue flames were gone.

The woman was weeping as Jeanette rolled off her. “I just want Nana to be safe… I just want her to grow up safe…”

“I know.” Jeanette had never met this woman’s daughter and probably never would, but she recognized the sound of true pain, spirit pain. She had experienced plenty of that herself. She picked up the barbecue lighter. Examined it. Such a small tool to close the door between two worlds. It might have worked, if not for the tiger. Was it supposed to do that, Jeanette wondered, or had it gone beyond its purview? And if that was so, would it be punished?

So many questions. So few answers. Never mind. She whipped her arm in a circle, and watched the barbecue lighter go spinning away. Elaine gave a cry of despair as it disappeared into the grass forty or fifty feet distant. Jeanette bent and picked up the pistol, meaning to put it in her belt, but of course she was wearing her inmate browns and had no belt. Belts were a no-no. Inmates sometimes hung themselves with belts, if they had them. There was a pocket in her drawstring pants, but it was shallow and still half full of peas; the gun would fall right out. What to do with it? Throwing it away seemed to be the wisest course.

Before she could do that, leaves rustled behind her. Jeanette swung around with the pistol in her hand.

“Hey! Drop it! Drop the gun!”

At the edge of the woods stood another armed woman, her own pistol trained on Jeanette. Unlike Elaine, this one held her weapon in both hands and with her legs planted wide, as if she knew what she was doing. Jeanette, no stranger to orders, started to lower the gun, meaning to put it in the grass beside the Tree… but a prudent distance away from Elaine Nutball, who might make a grab for it. As she bent, the snake rustled along the branch above her. Jeanette flinched and raised the hand holding the gun to protect her head from a half-glimpsed falling object. There was a crack, then a faint tink, two coffee mugs clicking together in a cabinet, and she seemed to hear Evie in her head—an inarticulate cry of mingled pain and surprise. After that, Jeanette was on the ground, the sky was nothing but leaves, and there was blood in her mouth.

The woman with the gun came forward. The muzzle was smoking, and Jeanette understood she had been shot.

“Put it down!” the woman ordered. Jeanette opened her hand, not knowing she still held the pistol until it rolled free.

“I know you,” Jeanette whispered. It felt as if there was a large warm weight on her chest. It was hard to breathe, but it didn’t hurt. “You were the one who brought Evie to the prison. The cop. I seen you through the window.”

“That smells like kerosene,” Lila said. She picked up the overturned canister, sniffed at it, then dropped it.

Outside that morning’s Meeting at the Shopwell, someone had mentioned that one of the golf carts was missing, and no one had signed the register for it; a girl named Maisie Wettermore had volunteered that she had seen Elaine Nutting just a few minutes earlier, driving one in the direction of Adams Lumberyard. Lila, who had come with Janice Coates, had exchanged a glance with the ex-warden. There were only two things in the direction of Adams Lumberyard these days: the desiccated ruins of a meth lab, and the Tree. It had worried both of them, the idea of Elaine Nutting going out there alone. Lila had remembered Elaine’s doubts about the animals there—the tiger, especially—and it occurred to her that she might try to kill it. This, Lila was certain, would be unwise. So, the two of them had taken out a golf cart of their own, and followed.

And now Lila had shot a woman she had never seen before, who lay bleeding on the ground, badly wounded.

“What the hell were you going to do?” she asked.

“Not me,” Jeanette said, and looked over at the weeping woman. “Her. She was the one. Her kerosene. Her gun. I stopped her.”

Jeanette knew she was dying. Coldness like well water rising up through her, taking away her toes, then the rest of her feet, then her knees, slipping up toward the heart of her. Bobby had been afraid of water when he was little.

And Bobby had been afraid someone was going to take his Coke and his Mickey Mouse hat. That was the moment captured in the photo on her little block of paint in the cell. No, honey, no, she had told him. Don’t you worry. Those are yours. Your mother’s not going to let anyone take them from you.

And if Bobby were here now, asking about this water? This water that his mother was sinking down into? Oh, she’d tell him, that’s nothing to worry about, either. It’s just a shock at first, but you get used to it.

But Jeanette was no Lying for Prizes champion. She wasn’t that caliber of contestant. She might have been able to get a fib past Bobby, but not Ree. If Ree had been there, she’d have had to admit, though the well water didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel right, either.

She could hear the host’s disembodied voice: That’s all for Jeanette Sorley, I’m afraid, but we’re sending her home with some lovely parting gifts. Tell her about them, Ken! The host sounded like Warner Wolf, Mr. Let’s-Go-to-the-Videotape himself. Hey, if you had to be sent home, you couldn’t ask for a better announcer.

Warden Coates, her hair now as white as chalk, interrupted Jeanette’s sky. It kind of suited her, the hair. She was too thin, though, big dents under her eyes, hollows at her cheeks.

“Sorley?” Coates went to a knee and took her hand. “Jeanette?”

“Oh, shit,” the cop said. “I think I just made a very bad mistake.” She dropped to her knees and put her palms against Jeanette’s wound, applying pressure, knowing it was pointless. “I only meant to wing her, but the distance… and I was so afraid for the Tree… I’m sorry.”

Jeanette felt blood leaking from both corners of her mouth. She began to gasp. “I have a son—his name is Bobby—I have a son—”

Jeanette’s last words were directed at Elaine, and the last thing she saw was that woman’s face, her wide, scared eyes. “—Please—I have a son—”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

“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?”

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.

“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.

CHAPTER 16

Drew T. Barry reached the Booth and saw what had stopped Peters before the woman grabbed him: two men, one of them possibly Norcross, the arrogant bastard who had instigated this mess. He had his arm around the other one. This was good. They had no idea he was here, and were probably on their way to the woman. To protect her. It was insane, given the size of the force Geary had mustered, but look how much damage they’d managed to inflict already. Good townspeople killed and wounded! They deserved to die just for that.

And then, two more came out of the smoke: a woman and a younger man. All with their backs to Drew T. Barry.

Better and better.

“Jesus Christ,” Clint said to his son. “You were supposed to be hiding.” He looked reproachfully at Michaela. “You were supposed to take care of that.”

Jared replied before Michaela could. “She did what you told her, but I couldn’t hide. I just couldn’t. Not if there’s a chance we can get Mom back. And Mary. Molly, too.” He pointed to the woman in the cell at the end of the corridor. “Dad, look at her! She’s floating! What is she? Is she even human?”

Before Clint could answer, a burst of music came from Hicks’s phone, followed by the proclamation of a tiny electronic voice: “Congratulations, Player Evie! You have survived! Boom Town is yours!”

Evie dropped to her bunk, swung her legs onto the floor, and approached the bars. Clint would have thought he was beyond surprise at this point, but was shocked to see her pubic hair was mostly green. Not hair at all, in fact—it was some kind of vegetation.

“I won!” she cried happily, “and not a minute too soon! I was down to the last two percent of battery. Now I can die happy!”

“You’re not going to die,” Clint said. He no longer believed it, though. She was going to die, and when what remained of Geary’s force got here—which would be momentarily—it was likely that they were going to die with her. They had killed too many. Frank’s men wouldn’t stop.

Drew T. Barry slid around the side of the Booth, liking what he saw more and more. Unless some of the defenders were hiding in the cells, all that remained of Norcross’s little cabal was at the end of this corridor, clustered together like pins in a bowling alley. They had no place to hide, and they were all out of running room. Excellent.

He raised the Weatherby… and a chisel pressed into his throat, just below the angle of his jaw.

“No-no-no,” Angel said in the voice of a cheery primary school teacher. Her face, shirt, and baggy pants were stippled with blood. “Move and I’ll cut open your juggler vein. I got the blade right on it. Only reason you’re not dead already is you let me finish my business with Officer Peters. Put that elephant gun on the floor. Don’t bend, just drop it.”

“This is a very valuable weapon, ma’am,” said Drew T. Barry.

“Ask me if I give a shit.”

“It might go off.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

Drew T. Barry dropped it.

“Now hand me the one you got slung over your shoulder. Don’t try anything weird, either.”

From behind them: “Lady, whatever you’re holding on his throat, put it down.”

Angel snatched a quick look over her shoulder and saw four or five men with their rifles pointed. She smiled at them. “You can shoot me, but this one here will die with me. That’s a stone promise.”

Frank stood, indecisive. Drew T. Barry, hoping to live a little longer, handed over Don’s M4.

“Thank you,” Angel said, and hooked it over her own shoulder. She stepped back, dropped the chisel, and raised her hands to either side of her face, showing Frank and the others that they were empty. Then she backed slowly down the short hall to where Clint was standing with his arm still around Willy, supporting him. She kept her hands up the whole way.

Drew T. Barry, surprised to be alive (but grateful), picked up his Weatherby. He felt lightheaded. He supposed anyone would feel lightheaded after having a lunatic female inmate hold a chisel to his throat. She had told him to put the gun down… then let him pick it up again. Why? So she could be on the killing ground with her friends? It seemed the only answer. A crazy one, but she was crazy. They all were.

Drew T. Barry decided it was up to Frank Geary to make the next move. He had inaugurated this colossal shit-show, let him figure out how to clean it up. That was best, because to the outside world, what they had done in the last half hour would look a lot like a vigilante action. And there were parts of it—the walking corpses in the gym, for instance, or the naked green woman he spied standing at the cell bars a few steps behind Norcross—that the outside world would simply not believe, Aurora or no Aurora. Drew T. Barry felt lucky to be alive, and would be happy to fade into the background. With luck, the world might never know he’d even been here.

“What the fuck?” said Carson Struthers, who had seen the green woman down the hall. “That ain’t right nor normal. What do you want to do with her, Geary?”

“Take her and take her alive,” Frank said. He had never felt so tired in his life, but he would see this through. “If she really is the key to Aurora, let the docs figure her out. We’ll drive her to Atlanta and hand her over.”

Willy started to raise his rifle, but slowly, as if it weighed a thousand pounds. It wasn’t hot in A Wing, but his round face was wet with sweat. It had darkened his beard. Clint grabbed the rifle away from him. At the end of the corridor, Carson Struthers, Treater, Ordway, and Barrows raised their own guns.

“That’s it!” Evie cried. “Here we go! Shootout at the OK Corral! Bonnie and Clyde! Die Hard in a Women’s Prison!”

But before the short A Wing corridor could become a free-fire zone, Clint dropped Willy’s rifle and yanked the M4 from Angel’s shoulder. He held it over his head for Frank’s group to see. Slowly, and with some reluctance, the men who had raised their guns now lowered them.

“No, no,” Evie said. “People won’t pay to see such a poor excuse for a climax. We need a rewrite.”

Clint paid no attention; he was focused on Frank. “I can’t let you take her, Mr. Geary.”

In an eerily good John Wayne imitation, Evie drawled, “If ya hurt the little lady, you’re gonna have to answer to me, ya varmint.”

Frank also ignored her. “I appreciate your dedication, Norcross, although I’ll be damned if I understand it.”

“Maybe you don’t want to,” Clint said.

“Oh, I think I’ve got the picture,” Frank said. “You’re the one who’s not seeing clearly.”

“Too much shrinky-dink shit in his head,” Struthers said, and this brought a few grunts of tense laughter.

Frank spoke patiently, as if lecturing a slow pupil. “So far as we know, she’s the only woman on earth who can sleep and wake up again. Be reasonable. I only want to take her to doctors who can study her, and maybe figure out how to reverse what’s happened. These men want their wives and daughters back.”

There was a rumble of agreement at this from the invaders.

“So stand aside, tenderfoot,” Evie said, still doing the Duke. “Ah reckon—”

“Oh, shut up,” Michaela said. Evie’s eyes flew wide, as if she had been unexpectedly slapped. Michaela stepped forward, fixing Frank with a stare that burned. “Do I look sleepy to you, Mr. Geary?”

“I don’t care what you are,” said Frank. “We’re not here for you.” This raised another chorus of agreement.

“You ought to care. I’m wide awake. So is Angel. She woke us up. Breathed into us and woke us up.”

“Which is what we want for all the women,” Frank said, and this brought a louder chorus of agreement. The impatience that Michaela read on the faces of the men gathered before her was close to hate. “If you’re really awake, you should get that. It’s not rocket science.”

“You don’t get it, Mr. Geary. She was able to do that because Angel and I weren’t in cocoons. Your wives and daughters are. That’s not rocket science, either.”

Silence. She finally had their attention, and Clint allowed himself to hope. Carson Struthers spoke one flat word. “Bullshit.”

Michaela shook her head. “You stupid, willful man. All of you, stupid and willful. Evie Black isn’t a woman, she’s a supernatural being. Don’t you understand that yet? After all that’s happened? Do you think doctors can take DNA from a supernatural being? Put her in an MRI tube and figure out how she ticks? All the men who have died here, it was for nothing!”

Pete Ordway raised a Garand rifle. “I could put a bullet in you, ma’am, and stop your mouth. Tempted to do it.”

“Put it down, Pete.” Frank could feel this thing dancing on the edge of control. Here were men with guns faced with a seemingly insoluble problem. To them, the easiest way to deal with it would be to shoot it to pieces. He knew this because he felt it himself.

“Norcross? Have your people stand aside. I want a good look at her.”

Clint stepped back, one arm around Willy Burke to hold him up and one hand laced through Jared’s fingers. Michaela flanked Jared on the other side. Angel stood defiantly in front of the soft cell for a moment, shielding Evie with her body, but when Michaela took her hand and pulled gently, Angel gave in and stood beside her.

“Better not hurt her,” Angel said. Her voice was trembling; tears stood in her eyes. “Just better not, you bastards. She’s a fuckin goddess.”

Frank took three steps forward, not knowing or caring if his remaining men followed. He looked at Evie so long and hard that Clint turned to look himself.

The greenery that had twined in her hair was gone. Her naked body was beautiful, but in no way extraordinary. Her pubic hair was a dark triangle above the joining of her thighs.

“What the fuck,” Carson Struthers said. “Wasn’t she—just—green?”

“It’s—nice to finally make your acquaintance in person, ma’am,” Frank said.

“Thank you,” said Evie. Bold nakedness not withstanding, she sounded as shy as a schoolgirl. Her eyes were downcast. “Do you like it, Frank, putting animals in cages?”

“I only cage those that need to be caged,” said Frank, and for the first time in days, he really smiled. If there was one thing he knew, it was that wild went two ways—the danger a wild animal presented to others, and the danger that others presented to a wild animal. In general, he cared more about keeping the animals safe from the people. “And I’ve come to let you out of yours. I want to take you to doctors who can examine you. Would you allow me to do that?”

“I think not,” Evie said. “They would find nothing, and change nothing. Remember the story of the golden goose? When the men cut it open, there was nothing inside but guts.”

Frank sighed and shook his head.

He doesn’t believe her because he doesn’t want to believe her, Clint thought. Because he can’t afford to believe her. Not after all he’s done.

“Ma’am—”

“Why don’t you call me Evie,” she said. “I don’t like this formality. I thought we had a lovely little rapport when we talked on the phone, Frank.” But her eyes were still downcast. Clint wondered what was in them that she had to hide. Doubt about her mission here? That was probably wishful thinking, but possible—hadn’t Jesus Christ himself prayed to have the cup taken from his lips? As, he supposed, Frank wished that scientists at the CDC would take the cup from his. That they would look at Evie’s scans and bloodwork and DNA and say aha.

“Evie it is,” Frank said. “This inmate…” He tilted his head toward Angel, who was staring at him with wrath. “She says that you’re a goddess. Is that true?”

“No,” Evie said.

At Clint’s side, Willy began to cough and rub the left side of his chest.

“This other woman…” This time the tilt went toward Michaela. “She says you’re a supernatural being. And—” Frank didn’t like to say it aloud, to get close to the fury that it could lead to, but he had to. “—you knew things about me that you couldn’t have known.”

“Plus she can float!” Jared blurted. “You may have noticed that? She levitated! I saw it! We all did!”

Evie looked at Michaela. “You’re wrong about me, you know. I am a woman, and in most ways like any other. Like the ones these men love. Although love is a dangerous word when it comes from men. Quite often they don’t mean the same thing as women do when they say it. Sometimes they mean they’ll kill for it. Sometimes when they say it they don’t mean much of anything. Which, of course, most women come to know. Some with resignation, many with sorrow.”

“When a man says he loves you, that means he wants to get his pecker up inside your pants,” Angel put in helpfully.

Evie returned her attention to Frank and the men standing behind him. “The women you want to save, are at this very moment living their lives in another place. Happy lives, by and large, although of course most miss their little boys and some miss their husbands and fathers. I won’t say they never behave badly, they are far from saints, but for the most part, they’re in harmony. In that world, Frank, no one ever pulls your daughter’s favorite shirt, shouts in her face, embarrasses her, or terrifies her by putting his fist through the wall.”

“They’re alive?” Carson Struthers asked. “Do you swear it, woman? Do you swear to God?”

“Yes,” Evie said. “I swear to your god and every god.”

“How do we get them back, then?”

“Not by poking me or prodding me or taking my blood. Those things wouldn’t work, even if I were to allow them.”

“What will?”

Evie spread her arms wide. Her eyes flickered, the pupils expanding to black diamonds, the irises roiling from pale green to brilliant amber, turning to cat’s eyes. “Kill me,” she said. “Kill me and they’ll awake. Every woman on earth. I swear this is true.”

Like a man in a dream, Frank raised his rifle.

Clint stepped in front of Evie.

“No, Dad, no!” Jared screamed.

Clint took no notice. “She’s lying, Geary. She wants you to kill her. Not all of her—I think part of her has changed her mind—but it’s what she came here to do. What she was sent here to do.”

“Next you’ll be saying she wants to be hung on a cross,” Pete Ordway said. “Stand aside, Doc.”

Clint didn’t. “It’s a test. If we pass it, there’s a chance. If we don’t, if you do what she expects you to do, the door closes. This will be a world of men until all the men are gone.”

He thought of the fights he’d had growing up, battling not for milkshakes, not really, but just for a little sun and space—a little room to fucking breathe. To grow. He thought of Shannon, his old friend, who had depended on him to pull her out of that purgatory as much as he had depended on her. He had done so to the best of his ability, and she had remembered. Why else would she have given her daughter his last name? But he still owed a debt. To Shannon, for being a friend. To Lila, for being a friend and his wife and his son’s mother. And those who were with him, here in front of Evie’s cell? They also had women to whom they owed debts—yes, even Angel. It was time to pay off.

The fight he’d wanted was over. Clint was punched out and he hadn’t won a thing.

Not yet.

He held his hands out to either side, palms up, and beckoned. Evie’s last defenders came and stood in a line in front of her cell, even Willy, who appeared on the verge of passing out. Jared stood next to Clint, and Clint put a hand on his son’s neck. Then, very slowly, he picked up the M4. He handed it to Michaela, whose mother slept in a cocoon not far from where they now stood.

“Listen to me, Frank. Evie’s told us that if you don’t kill her, if you just let her go, there’s a chance the women can come back.”

“He’s lying,” Evie said, but now that he couldn’t see her, Frank heard something in her voice that gave him pause. It sounded like anguish.

“Enough bullshit,” Pete Ordway said, and spat on the floor. “We lost a lot of good men getting this far. Let’s just take her. We can decide what comes next later.”

Clint lifted Willy’s rifle. He did so reluctantly, but he did it.

Michaela turned to Evie. “Whoever sent you here thinks this is how men solve all their problems. Isn’t that right?”

Evie made no reply. Michaela had an idea that the remarkable creature in the soft cell was being torn in ways she had never expected when she appeared in the woods above that rusted trailer.

She turned back to the armed men, now halfway down the corridor. Their guns were pointed. At this range, their bullets would shred the little group in front of the strange woman.

Michaela raised her weapon. “It doesn’t have to go this way. Show her it doesn’t have to.”

“Which means doing what?” Frank asked.

“It means letting her go back to where she came from,” Clint said.

“Not on your life,” said Drew T. Barry, and that was when Willy Burke’s knees buckled and he went down, no longer breathing.

Frank handed his rifle to Ordway. “He needs CPR. I took the course last summer—”

Clint pointed his rifle at Frank’s chest. “No.”

Frank stared at him. “Man, are you crazy?”

“Step back,” Michaela said, pointing her own gun at Frank. She didn’t know what Clint was doing, but she had an idea he was playing the last card in his hand. In our hand, she thought.

“Let’s shoot em all,” Carson Struthers said. He sounded near hysterics. “That devil-woman, too.”

“Stand down,” Frank said. And, to Clint: “You’re just going to let him die? What would that prove?”

“Evie can save him,” Clint said. “Can’t you, Evie?”

The woman in the cell said nothing. Her head was lowered, her hair obscuring her face.

“Geary—if she saves him, will you let her go?”

“That old cocksucker’s fakin!” Carson Struthers shouted. “It’s all a set-up they planned!”

Frank began, “Can I just check if—?”

“Okay, yes,” Clint said. “But be quick. Brain damage starts after three minutes, and I don’t know if even a supernatural being could reverse that.”

Frank hurried to Willy, dropped to one knee, and put his fingers to the old man’s throat. He looked up at Clint. “His clock’s stopped. I should start CPR.”

“A minute ago, you were ready to kill him,” Reed Barrows grumbled.

Officer Treat, who thought he had witnessed some shit in Afghanistan, groaned. “I don’t understand any of this. Just tell me what it’s going to take to get my kid back and I’ll do it.” To whom, exactly, this statement was directed, was unclear.

“No CPR.” Clint turned to Evie, who stood with her head down. Which, he thought, was good, because she couldn’t help seeing the man on the floor.

“This is Willy Burke,” said Clint. “His country told him to serve, and he served. These days he goes out with the volunteer fire department to fight brushfires in the spring. They do it without pay. He helps at every bean supper the Ladies’ Aid puts on for indigent families the state is too chintzy to support. He coaches Pop Warner football in the fall.”

“He was a good coach, too,” Jared said. His voice was thick with tears.

Clint continued. “He took care of his sister for ten years when she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He fed her, he brought her back when she took it into her head to wander, he changed her shitty diapers. He came out here to defend you because he wanted to do the right thing by you and by his conscience. He never hurt a woman in his life. Now he’s dying. Maybe you’ll let him. After all, he’s just another man, right?”

Someone was coughing on the smoke drifting down Broadway. For a moment there was no other sound, then Evie Black shrieked. Lights burst in their overhead cages. Cell doors that had been locked slammed open and then banged shut in a sound that was like iron hands applauding. Several of the men in Frank’s group screamed, one of them in a pitch so high that he sounded like a little girl of six or seven.

Ordway turned and ran. His footfalls echoed through the cinderblock halls.

“Pick him up,” Evie said. Her cell door had opened with the others. If, that was, it had ever been locked in the first place. Clint had no doubt that she could have left whenever she wished at any time during the last week. The rats had only been part of her theater.

Clint and Jared Norcross lifted Willy’s limp form. He was heavy, but Evie took him as if he were no more than a bag of goosefeathers.

“You played on my heart,” she said to Clint. “That was a cruel thing to do, Dr. Norcross.” Her face was solemn, but he thought that he saw a glint of amusement in her eyes. Maybe even merriment. She encircled Willy’s considerable waistline with her left arm and placed her right hand on the matted, sweat-soaked hair at the back of the old man’s head. Then she pressed her mouth to his.

Willy shuddered all over. His arms lifted to encircle Evie’s back. For a moment the old man and the young woman remained in a deep embrace. Then she let him go and stood back. “How do you feel, Willy?”

“Damn good,” Willy Burke said. He sat up.

“My God,” Reed Barrows said. “He looks twenty years younger.”

“I ain’t been kissed like that since I was in high school,” said Willy. “If ever. Ma’am, I think you saved my life. I thank you for that, but I think the kiss was even better.”

Evie began to smile. “I’m glad you enjoyed it. I rather liked it myself, although it wasn’t as good as beating Boom Town.”

Clint’s blood was no longer up; exhaustion and Evie’s latest miracle had cooled it. He looked on the rage he had felt so recently like a man looking at a stranger who has broken into his house and cluttered the kitchen while making himself an extravagant and gluttonous breakfast. He felt sad and regretful and terribly tired. He wished he could just go home, sit beside his wife, share space with her, and not have to say a word.

“Geary,” Clint said.

Frank was slow to look at him, like a man shaking off a daze.

“Let her go. It’s the only way.”

“Maybe, but even that’s not sure, is it?”

“No,” Clint agreed. “What in this fucked-up life is?”

Angel spoke up then. “Bad times and good times,” she said. “Bad times and good. All the rest is just horseshit in the barn.”

“I thought it would take at least until Thursday, but…” Evie laughed, a sound like tinkling bells. “I forgot how fast men can move when they set their minds to a thing.”

“Sure,” Michaela said. “Just think of the Manhattan Project.”

At ten minutes past eight on that fine morning, a line of six vehicles drove down West Lavin Road, while behind them the prison smoldered like a discarded cigar butt in an ashtray. They turned onto Ball’s Hill Road. Unit Two led the way with its flashers turning slowly. Frank was behind the wheel. Clint was in the shotgun seat. Behind them sat Evie Black, exactly where she had been sitting after Lila arrested her. Then she had been half-naked. On this return trip, she was wearing a Dooling Correctional red top.

“How we’re ever going to explain this to the state police, I don’t know,” Frank said. “Lot of men dead, lot of men wounded.”

“Right now everyone’s got their hands full with Aurora,” Clint said, “and probably half of them aren’t even showing up. When all the women come back—if they come back—no one will care.”

From behind them, Evie spoke quietly. “The mothers will. The wives. The daughters. Who do you think cleans up the battlefields after the shooting stops?”

Unit Two stopped in the lane leading to Truman Mayweather’s trailer, where yellow CRIME SCENE tape still fluttered. The other vehicles—two more police cruisers, two civilian cars, and Carson Struthers’s pickup truck—pulled up behind them. “Now what?” Clint asked.

“Now we’ll see,” Evie said. “If one of these men doesn’t change his mind and shoot me after all, that is.”

“That won’t happen,” Clint replied, not nearly as confident as he sounded.

Doors slammed. For the moment, the trio in Unit Two sat where they were.

“Tell me something, Evie,” Frank said. “If you’re just the emissary, who’s in charge of this rodeo? Some… I don’t know… life force? Big Mama Earth, maybe, hitting the reset button?”

“Do you mean the Great Lesbian in the sky?” Evie asked. “A short, heavyset deity wearing a mauve pantsuit and sensible shoes? Isn’t that the image most men get when they think a woman is trying to run their lives?”

“I don’t know.” Frank felt listless, done up. He missed his daughter. He even missed Elaine. He didn’t know what had happened to his anger. It was like his pocket had torn, and it had fallen out somewhere along the way. “What comes to mind when you think about men, smartass?”

“Guns,” she said. “Clint, there appear to be no doorhandles back here.”

“Don’t let that stop you,” he said.

She didn’t. One of the back doors opened, and Evie Black stepped out. Clint and Frank joined her, one on each side, and Clint was reminded of the Bible classes he’d been forced to attend at one foster home or another: Jesus on the cross, with the disbelieving bad guy on one side and the good thief on the other—the one who would, according to the dying messiah, shortly join him in paradise. Clint remembered thinking that the poor guy probably would have settled for parole and a chicken dinner.

“I don’t know what force sent me here,” she said. “I only know I was called, and—”

“You came,” Clint finished.

“Yes. And now I’ll go back.”

“What do we do?” asked Frank.

Evie turned to him, and she was no longer smiling. “You’ll do the job usually reserved for women. You’ll wait.” She drew in a deep breath. “Oh, the air smells so fresh after that prison.”

She walked past the clustered men as if they weren’t there, and took Angel by the shoulders. Angel looked up at her with shining eyes. “You did well,” Evie said, “and I thank you from my heart.”

Angel blurted, “I love you, Evie!”

“I love you, too,” said Evie, and kissed her lips.

Evie walked toward the ruins of the meth shed. Beyond it sat the fox, its brush curled around its paws, panting and looking at her with bright eyes. She followed it, and then the men followed her.

“Dad,” Jared said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. “Do you see it? Tell me you see it.”

“Oh my God,” Deputy Treat said. “What is that?”

They stared at the Tree with its many twisting trunks and its flocks of exotic birds. It rose so high that the top could not be seen. Clint could feel a force radiating out from it like a strong electric current. The peacock spread his tail for their admiration, and when the white tiger appeared from the other side, its belly swishing in the high grass, several guns were raised.

“Lower those weapons!” Frank shouted.

The tiger lay down, its remarkable eyes peering at them through the high grass. The guns were lowered. All but one.

“Wait here,” Evie said.

“If the women of Dooling come back, all the women of earth come back?” Clint asked. “That’s how it works?”

“Yes. The women of this town stand for all women, and it must be all of your women who come back. Through there.” She pointed at a split in the Tree. “If even one refuses…” She didn’t have to finish. Moths flew and fluttered around her head in a kind of diadem.

“Why would they want to stay?” Reed Barrows asked, sounding honestly bewildered.

Angel’s laugh was as harsh as a crow’s caw. “I got a better question—if they built up a good thing, like Evie says, why would they want to leave?”

Evie started toward the Tree, the long grass whickering against her red pants, but stopped when she heard the snap-clack of someone racking a shell into the chamber of a rifle. A Weatherby, as it happened. Drew T. Barry was the only man who hadn’t lowered his gun at Frank’s command, but he wasn’t pointing it at Evie. He was pointing it at Michaela.

“You go with her,” he said.

“Put it down, Drew,” said Frank.

“No.”

Michaela looked at Evie. “Can I go with you to wherever it is? Without being in one of the cocoons?”

“Of course,” Evie said.

Michaela returned her attention to Barry. She no longer looked afraid; her brow was furrowed in puzzlement. “But why?”

“Call it insurance,” said Drew T. Barry. “If she’s telling the truth, maybe you can persuade your mother, and your mother can persuade the rest of them. I’m a strong believer in insurance.”

Clint saw Frank raising a pistol. Barry’s attention was fixed on the women, and it would have been an easy shot, but Clint shook his head. In a low voice he said, “There’s been enough killing.”

Besides, Clint thought, maybe Mr. Double Indemnity is right.

Evie and Michaela walked past the white tiger to the split in the Tree, where the fox sat waiting for them. Evie stepped in without hesitation, and was lost to sight. Michaela hesitated, and then followed.

The remaining men who had attacked the prison, and those remaining who had defended it, settled down to wait. At first they paced, but as time passed and nothing happened, most of them sat down in the high grass.

Not Angel. She strode back and forth, as if she couldn’t get enough of being beyond the confines of her cell, and the woodshop, and the Booth, and Broadway. The tiger was dozing. Once Angel approached it, and Clint held his breath. She was truly insane.

It raised its head when Angel dared to stroke its back, but then the great head dropped back to its paws, and those amazing eyes closed.

“It’s purrin!” she called to them, in what sounded like exultation.

The sun rose to the roof of the sky and seemed to pause there.

“I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Frank said. “And if it doesn’t, I’m going to spend the rest of my life wishing I’d killed her.”

Clint said, “I don’t think it’s been decided yet.”

“Yeah? How do you know?”

It was Jared who answered. He pointed at the Tree. “Because that’s still there. If it disappears or turns into an oak or a weeping willow, then you can give up.”

They waited.

CHAPTER 17

In the Shopwell supermarket, where the Meetings were traditionally held, Evie spoke to a large gathering of those who now called Our Place home. It didn’t take long for her to speak her piece, which boiled down to one thing: it was their choice.

“If you stay here, every woman, from Dooling to Marrakesh, will appear in this world, in the place where they fell asleep. Free to begin again. Free to raise their children the way they want to. Free to make peace. It’s a good deal, or so it seems to me. But you can go. And if you do, every woman will awaken where they fell asleep in the world of men. But you all must go.”

“What are you?” Janice Coates, holding Michaela tight, spoke to Evie over her daughter’s shoulder. “Who gave you this power?”

Evie smiled. A green light hovered around her. “I’m just an old woman who looks young for the time being. And I don’t have any power. Like the fox, I’m only an emissary. It’s you, all of you, who have the power.”

“Well,” Blanche McIntyre said, “let’s talk it out. Like a jury. Because I guess that’s what we are.”

“Yes,” Lila said. “But not here.”

It took until the afternoon to gather the inhabitants of the new world. Messengers were sent to every corner of the town to call forth the women who hadn’t been at the supermarket.

They walked from Main Street in a quiet column and climbed up Ball’s Hill. Blanche McIntyre’s feet were bothering her, so Mary Pak drove her in one of the golf carts. Blanche held Andy Jones, the infant orphan, bundled in a blue blanket and told him a very short story: “Once upon a time, there was a little guy, who went here and there, and every lady in the place loved him.”

Tufts of green were sprouting. It was cold, but spring was on the verge. They had almost caught up to the time of year it had been in the old world when they had left. The realization surprised Blanche. It felt to her as though a far longer period had elapsed.

When they left the road and started up the moth-lined path through the woods, the fox appeared to conduct them the rest of the way.

Once Evie’s terms had been re-explained for those who needed to be caught up, Michaela Coates stood on a milk crate, donned her reporter’s hat (perhaps for the last time, perhaps not), and told them all what had happened on the outside.

“Dr. Norcross convinced the vigilantes to stand down,” she said. “A number of men gave their lives before reason prevailed.”

“Who died?” one woman shouted out. “Please say my Micah wasn’t one of them!”

“What about Lawrence Hicks?” asked another.

There was a babble of questioning voices.

Lila raised her hands. “Ladies, ladies!”

“I ain’t no lady,” grumbled an ex-inmate named Freida Elkins. “Speak for yourself, Sheriff.”

“I can’t tell you who’s dead,” Michaela resumed, “because during most of the fighting I was stuck in the prison. I know that Garth Flickinger is dead, and…” She was about to mention Barry Holden, then saw his wife and remaining daughters looking at her expectantly, and lost her nerve. “… and that’s about all I know. But I can tell you that all the boy children and infants in Dooling are fine and well.” Praying with all her heart that this was so.

The audience erupted in cheers, whoops, and applause.

When Michaela was finished, Janice Coates took her place, and explained that everyone would be given a turn to make her choice known.

“For myself,” she said, “I vote, with some regret, to return. This is a much better place than the one we left, and I believe the sky is the limit. Without men, we make decisions fairly, and with less fuss. We share resources with less argument. There has been very little in the way of violence among the members of our community. Women have irritated me my entire life, but they have nothing on men.” Her personal irony, that her own husband, poor Archie, bounced from life by that early heart attack, was such an equable, sensible man, she did not mention. Exceptions were not the point. The point was the general case. The point was history.

Where Janice’s features had once been lean, now they were burned down to the bone. Her white hair flowed down her back. Plunged in their sockets, her eyes had a distant shine. It struck Michaela that her mother, no matter how straight she stood or how clearly she spoke, had become ill. You need a doctor, Mom.

“However,” Janice went on, “I also believe I owe it to Dr. Norcross to go back. He risked his life, and the others risked theirs, for the women of the prison when I doubt many others would have. Related to that, I want to make it known to you women who were inmates at the prison that I will do whatever I can to see your sentences commuted, or at the very least lessened. And if you want to double-time it for the hills, I will inform the authorities in Charleston and Wheeling that I believe you were killed in the attack.”

Those former prisoners came forward in a bloc. There were fewer than there had been that morning. Kitty McDavid, among others, had vanished without a trace (except for a brief flurry of moths). No doubt remained about what that might mean—those women were dead in both worlds. Men had killed them.

And yet every single inmate voted to go back. This might have surprised a man, but it didn’t surprise Warden Janice Coates, who knew a telling statistical fact: when women escaped prison, most were recaptured almost immediately, because they did not usually double-time it for the hills, as men were wont to do. What women did was go home. First on the minds of the former inmates who spoke at that final meeting were the male children in that other world.

For example, Celia Frode: Celia said Nell’s boys would need mothering, and even if Celia had to go back to lockup, Nell’s sister could be counted on to stand for them. “But Nell’s sister won’t be much use to them if she’s asleep, will she?”

Claudia Stephenson spoke to the ground so softly that the crowd called for her to repeat herself. “I don’t want to hold anybody down,” she repeated. “I’ll go along with the majority.”

The First Thursdays also voted to return. “It’s better here,” Gail said, speaking for all of them, “Janice is right about that. But it’s not really Our Place. It’s someplace else. And who knows, maybe all that’s apparently happened over there will make that place better.”

Michaela thought she was probably right, but likely just in the short term. Men promised never to raise another hand to their wives or children often enough, and meant it at the time, but were only able to keep their promises for a month or two, if that. The rage came around again, like a recurring bout of malaria. Why would this be different?

Large, cool gusts rippled through the high grass. V-shaped flocks of geese, returning from the uninhabited south, crossed the blue pane above the crowd.

It feels like a funeral, Mary Pak thought. It was so undeniable—like death was—bright enough to scald your eyes, cool enough to go through your coat and your sweater and raise goosebumps along your skin.

When it was her turn, she said, “I want to find out what it feels like to really fall in love with a boy.” This confession surely would have sundered Jared Norcross’s heart, had he been present to hear it. “I know the world’s easier for men, and it’s lousy, and it’s stacked, but I want a chance at a regular life like I always expected to have, and maybe that’s selfish, but that’s what I want, okay? I might even want to have a baby. And… that’s all I got.” These last words broke apart into sobs and Mary stepped down, waving away the women who tried to comfort her.

Magda Dubcek said that of course she had to go back. “Anton needs me.” Her smile was terrible in its innocence. Evie saw that smile, and her heart broke.

(From a spot a few yards distant, scraping his back against a pin oak, the fox eyed the blue bundle that was Andy Jones, nestled in the rear of the golf cart. The baby was fast asleep, unguarded. There it was, the dream of dreams. Forget the hen, forget the whole fucking henhouse, forget all the henhouses that had ever been. The sweetest of all morsels, a human baby. Did he dare? Alas, he did not. He could only fantasize—but, oh, what a fantasy! Pink and aromatic flesh like butter!)

One woman spoke of her husband. He was a great guy, he really, really was, did his share, pulled for her, all that. Another woman talked about her songwriting partner. He was nobody’s idea of a picnic, but there was a connection they had, a way they were in tune. He was words; she was music.

Some just missed home.

Carol Leighton, the civics teacher at the high school, said she wanted to eat a Kit Kat that wasn’t stale and sit on her couch and watch a movie on Netflix and pet her cat. “My experiences with men have been one hundred percent lousy, but I am not cut out for starting over in a new world. Maybe I’m a coward for that, but I can’t pretend.” She was not alone in her wish for ordinary creature comforts left behind.

Mostly it was the sons, though, that drew them back. A new start for every woman in the world was goodbye forever to their precious sons and they couldn’t bear that. This also made Evie’s heart break, too. Sons killed sons. Sons killed daughters. Sons left guns out where other sons could find them and accidentally shoot themselves or their sisters. Sons burned forests and sons dumped chemicals into the earth as soon as the EPA inspectors left. Sons didn’t call on birthdays. Sons didn’t like to share. Sons hit children, choked girlfriends. Sons figured out they were bigger and never forgot it. Sons didn’t care about the world they left for their sons or for their daughters, although they said they did when the time came to run for office.

The snake glided down the Tree and drooped into the blackness, lolling before Evie. “I saw what you did,” she said to it. “I saw how you distracted Jeanette. And I hate you for it.”

The snake said nothing in return. Snakes do not need to justify their behavior.

Elaine Nutting stood beside her daughter, but she wasn’t present, not really. In her mind, she was still seeing the dead woman’s wet eyes. They were almost gold, those eyes, and very deep. The look in them wasn’t angry, just insistent. Elaine couldn’t deny those eyes. A son, the woman had said, I have a son.

“Elaine?” someone asked. It was time for her to make a decision.

“I have things I need to do,” Elaine said. She put her arm around Nana. “And my daughter loves her father.”

Nana hugged her back.

“Lila?” asked Janice. “What about you?”

They all turned to her, and Lila understood she could talk them out of it, if she wanted to. She could ensure the safety of this new world and destroy the old one. It would only take a few words. She could say, I love you all, and I love what we made here. Let’s not lose it. She could say, I’m going to lose my husband, no matter how heroic he may have tried to be, and I don’t want to lose this. She could say, You women will never be what you were, and what they expect, because part of you will always be here, where you were truly free. You’ll carry Our Place with you from now on, and because of that, you will always mystify them.

Except, really, when had men not been mystified by women? They were the magic that men dreamed of, and sometimes their dreams were nightmares.

The mighty blue sky had faded. The last streaks of light were magnesium smears above the hills. Evie was watching Lila, knowing it all came down to her.

“Yeah,” she told them. “Yeah. Let’s go back and get those guys in shape.”

They cheered.

Evie cried.

By twos, they departed, as if from the ark beached on Ararat. Blanche and baby Andy, Claudia and Celia, Elaine and Nana, Mrs. Ransom and Platinum Elway. They went hand-in-hand, carefully stepping over the giant riser of a gnarled root, and then into the deep night inside the Tree. In the space between, there was a glimmer, but it was diffuse, as if the light source came from around a corner—but the corner of what? It deepened the shadows without revealing much of anything. What each traveler did recall was noise and a feeling of warmth. Inside that faintly lit passage there was a crackling reverberation, a tickling sensation over the skin, like moths’ wings brushing—and then they awakened on the other side of the Tree, in the world of men, their cocoons melting away… but there were no moths. Not this time.

Magda Dubcek sat up in the hospital room where the police had conveyed her body after they discovered her asleep in the room with the body of her dead son. She wiped the webbing from her eyes, astonished to see a whole ward of women, rising up from their hospital beds, tearing at the shreds of their cocoons in an orgy of resurrection.

Lila watched the Tree shed its glossy leaves, as if it were weeping. They sifted to the ground and formed shiny mounds. Strings of moss slid down, whooshing from the branches. She watched a parrot, its marvelous green wings banded with silver marks, arise from the Tree and pierce the sky—watched it flap right into the dark and cease to be. Whorls of speckles, not unlike the Dutch Elm that Anton had warned her about, rapidly spread along the Tree’s roots. There was a sick smell in the air, like rot. She knew that the Tree had become infested, that something was devouring it from the inside while it died on the outside.

“See you back there, Ms. Norcross,” said Mary Pak, waving one hand, holding Molly’s hand with the other.

“You can call me Lila,” said Lila, but Mary had already gone through.

The fox trotted after them.

In the end, it was Janice, Michaela, Lila, and Jeanette’s body. Janice brought a shovel from one of the golf carts. The grave they made was only three feet deep, but Lila didn’t think it mattered. This world wouldn’t exist after they left it; there would be no animals to get at the body. They’d wrapped Jeanette in some coats, and covered her face with an extra baby blanket.

“It was an accident,” Janice said.

Lila bent down, scooped a handful of dirt, and tossed it on the shrouded figure in the hole. “The cops always say that after they shoot some poor black man or woman or child.”

“She had a gun.”

“She didn’t mean to use it. She came to save the Tree.”

“I know,” said Janice. She patted Lila’s shoulder. “But you didn’t. Remember that.”

A thick branch of the Tree moaned and cracked, smashing to the ground with an explosion of leaves.

“I’d give anything to take it back,” Lila said. She wasn’t crying. For now, tears were beyond her. “I’d give my soul.”

“I think it’s time to go,” said Michaela. “While we still can.” She took her mother’s hand and drew her into the Tree.

For a handful of minutes, Lila was the last woman in Our Place. She did not ponder this wonder, however. She had decided to be practical, starting right now. Her focus was on the dirt, on the shovel, and on filling the grave. Only when the work was done did she enter the dark of the Tree and cross over. She went without looking back. Doing that, she felt, would break her fragile heart.