“Wait,” she said. “I’m okay. I’m all done.”
She thought she was, too, but then he let go of her and she booted Michael in the neck.
“He was a sweet old man,” Harper said, as the Fireman tugged her out of kicking range. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
Carol gave them a bewildered, wondering look. One side of her face was pink and swollen, the skin peeling off her ear. The falling hand of God had given her an instant sunburn on one cheek.
“And you!” Harper said to her. “I guess your force field was never switched on when Mikey was in the mood to finger your pussy.”
Carol flinched as if Harper had slapped her. Her left cheek began to turn the same shade as the side of her face that had been burned.
“You can kill me now if you want,” Carol said. “You will only be sending me back into the arms of my father. He waits for me in the Bright. Everyone we’ve lost waits in the Bright. That’s our only escape now anyway.”
Harper said, “I’m not going to kill you, and I never was. I don’t need to kill you. The people outside are going to take care of that for me. This place is a box and they’ve got all the guns. But we might have another five or ten minutes. While it lasts, you think about this. Michael killed your father . . . for you. To save you. And himself. Your father was going to send you away for what you did to Harold Cross. Mikey bashed his head in to keep him from telling the camp about the way you set Harold up and had him shot. When you sent Harold to his grave? You sent your father into the dirt with him. One led naturally to the other. You take that into the Bright with you.”
Harper’s voice dropped steadily as she spoke, and by the time she had said the last of it, she was trembling, her voice little more than a husky whisper. She was not, after all, really good at being cruel to people, even people who had it coming. Carol’s frightened, pale, confused face sickened her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her skin had a gray cast beneath the pink of her burns. Harper thought she finally looked like a grown-up: a washed-out, weary, and not terribly attractive woman who had done some hard living.
Carol turned her baffled gaze toward Allie, who stood there holding Nick in both arms. When she saw her niece, her face shriveled, and she began to weep.
“Allie,” she said, and held out her arms. “Let me hold Nick. Let me see him. Please.”
Allie spat in Carol’s face. Carol blinked, her cheeks and brow dappled in red drops. She held up her hands defensively and Allie spat on them, too, a shower of mucus and stringy blood.
“Fuck I will,” Allie said through her slashed mouth. “I don’t want you touching him. You got something worse than Dragonscale and I don’t want him anywhere near it, in case it’s contagious.” Blood flew on every other syllable. The gash across her lips was a bad one. Harper thought it would need stitches and was likely to scar badly.
“We don’t have time for this,” the Fireman said. “We need to get up in the bell tower. We can make a fight of it from up there.”
Harper thought this was the most hopeless thing she had ever heard, and opened her mouth to say so, but Jamie spoke first.
“There’s at least one rifle up there,” she said. Her face was filthy and she was shuddering furiously, although whether from shock or terror, Harper couldn’t have said. “And a box of shells. There’s always at least one gun there for whoever’s on watch up in the steeple.”
Jamie Close was a harsh little savage, but she was nobody’s fool. She could grasp the situation as well as they could and had shifted her loyalties to the most likely survivors with the businesslike efficiency of a bank teller making change.
The Fireman nodded. “Good. That’s good, Jamie. Get up there. We’ll follow. We can direct our fire down from the steeple to open up a path, from the basement doors across to—” He paused, eyes straining in his head. He had lost his glasses somewhere. Harper knew he was visualizing the camp, and seeing how the double doors down into the basement opened onto the north field: a vast stretch of bare ground with no cover. There were two trucks over there full of men and guns. Harper had already thought it through and didn’t see a way out.
“Where’s Gillian!” Gail was shrieking. “Did anyone see my sister? Did anyone see if my sister made it inside?” She turned away from the double doors and staggered into the nave, where most of the congregation had gathered.
Harper squeezed John’s shoulder. “Do you think you can make it up those stairs?”
“Go,” he said. “I’ll follow.”
“I’m not leaving you behind. There’s no way. We’ll take the steps together.”
He nodded, swiped blood away from his cheek. “Come on, then. We’ll have a good position on them from up there. I don’t care how many of them there are. That’s a sniper’s nest. We might still be able to shoot and burn our way out. Somehow. It’s not too late, Willowes.”
It was though. The first of the Molotov cocktails hit the south side of the church a moment later, in a crash and rush of blue flame.
9
Carol spun on her heel. The high vault of the nave echoed with cries for help, for Jesus, for mercy, for forgiveness. Carol stared into the long and crowded room, her gaze stricken and confused.
Some sprawled on the floor. Some huddled in the pews, holding one another. Many sat at the foot of the altar. Norma sat on the steps leading up to the stage, rocking back and forth, shaking her head.
“What are you crying for?” she cried out. “Why are you crying? You think we can’t get out of here? You think we’re trapped? The Bright is a-waitin’ for us and ain’t no one can stop us from flying into it to be free! It ain’t time to cry! It’s time to sing!”
The stained-glass windows that lined the long hall were covered with plywood sheets, nailed up on the outside of the building. One of these plywood sheets was in flames, and the rippling fire cast garish, candy-store colors across the pews.
“Time to sing!” Norma screamed again. “Come on! Come on, now!” Her wild gaze found Carol across the full length of the room, through the tumult of the crowd. “Mother Carol! You know what we need to do! You know!”
Carol looked back at her for a long moment, something like incomprehension on her face. But then she drew breath and lifted her voice and began to sing.
“O come all ye faithful—” Carol sang. It was hard to hear her, at first, over the moans and shouts.
Bullets drummed against the exterior of the chapel, falling like a hard rain.
“Joyful and triumphant,” Carol went on, her voice tragic, and terrified, and sweet. She walked into the nave, stepping around Michael and holding her hands out to either side of her. Blood dripped from her fingertips.
Gail stood nearby. She seemed to have given up looking for her sister, was just swaying there. Carol took her by the hand. Gail looked down at it in surprise, jumping a little, as if Carol had pinched her.
Carol squeezed her fingers and went on: “O come ye . . . o come ye . . . to Bethlehem.”
“Yes!” Norma roared. “Yes! To Bethlehem! To the Bright!”
A second voice joined Carol’s, someone singing with her in a frightened, off-key lilt.
Someone else was crying out, over and over, “We’re going to die! We’re going to die in here! Oh God, we’re going to die!”
Gail looked at Carol’s hand holding hers and began to weep. She wept so hard her shoulders shook. But then she began to sing as well.
Half a dozen of them now, their voices rising together, into the rafters: “Come and behold him! Born the king of angels!”
And a silvery rose-hued light raced along the ridges and whorls of Carol’s Dragonscale. Harper could see her lighting up through the thin silk of her pajamas.