“You aren’t going to come through the pipe. You’re going to walk straight across the causeway. There are friends waiting on the other side with boats. They’ll take you to safety.”
“Lady, we been hidin’ in a culvert for twenty hours. Ain’t neither of us up to sprinting across that road. My pard here can barely stand. I thank you for thinking of us. I sincerely do. But it’s not happening. It doesn’t matter if your boats are only a hundred feet away. They might as well be on the moon. There’s fifty men up in that parking lot, most of ’em armed. If we break cover and make a dash for it—and a hobble would be more like it—they will shoot first and ask questions never.”
“You aren’t going to run,” she said, remembering what the Fireman had said. “You’re going to walk. And you won’t be seen. There’ll be a distraction.”
“What distraction?”
“You’ll know it when you see it,” she said, because that sounded better than admitting she had no idea.
He grinned to show a gold tooth in the back of his mouth. He was what her father would’ve called an ugly cuss. “Why don’t you come out here? Come on out and sit with us, darlin’.”
“I have to get back. Just be ready,” she said.
“You aren’t gonna back all the way down that pipe, are you? Wouldn’t it be better to crawl out and get yourself turned around?”
She hadn’t thought about going back until now—ridiculous but true—and didn’t know how to reply. He was right, of course. She could no more get out of the pipe by crawling in reverse then she could by turning to smoke and vanishing; in fact, turning to smoke was a far more likely possibility.
If she went forward, though, even a foot, she imagined the bearish man snatching a handful of her hair, his smile going away and his eyes going dead. He and his friend could do whatever they wanted to her; she wasn’t going to scream, bring down the law on them, give up the location of her friends. The Fireman had said they wanted to get away, not get caught, and that was true. But it was also true that they were convicts and she was a pregnant woman who couldn’t call for help. It was entirely possible, she saw now, for them to have their cake and rape and murder it, too.
She was stuck again, maybe worse than she had been when she was halfway through the pipe. She could not see a way back and she didn’t dare go forward. Why don’t you sing him something from one of your favorite musicals? she thought, and almost laughed.
But as it happened there was nothing to figure out; it was a problem that never required solving. The big man was distracted by something up on the causeway. His eyes—reflecting the firelight—were bewildered and glassy with fright.
“Haaaaa—” he sighed. “Holy . . . holy . . .”
She assumed he was trying to say Holy shit, but he never got out anything more than that first word. And later it occurred to her that maybe he had said exactly what he meant: that what was happening up on the road was a kind of holy manifestation, as unlikely as a burning bush or a night sky full of angels, twinkling over Bethlehem.
Although holy wasn’t the word that came to her mind when she saw what was happening up on the road.
Infernal was more like it.
11
The light dimmed. It was as if a great black curtain had been dropped between the water and the bonfires up in the parking lot.
The prisoner’s eyes widened by degrees.
“What?” she asked.
He didn’t reply, only gave his head a short, distracted shake. He put a hand on his knee and pushed, rising to his full height with some effort. She could see his legs were hurting. He stepped to her left, out of sight. She heard him whispering to someone, a low groan of pain, and the scuffle of shoes on rock. Then nothing.
No: not nothing. From a distance, she heard yells, startled cries.
It was as if all light were being swallowed, were being drowned. She could not for the life of her imagine what could smother the night that way.
She darted her head out of the pipe for a look, meaning to scuttle straight back if she saw the man in orange. But there was no one waiting for her. To her left was another sloped, six-foot-high wall of irregular granite blocks. A wide, concrete-lined culvert was set into it, sunk beneath the parking lot above. There was room for perhaps two men to crouch out of sight, under the concrete soffit, but rusted bars blocked the way into the darkened passage beyond. That was where they had hidden . . . jammed into that cramped space, huddled together for warmth against the wrought-iron bars.
Harper craned her neck to see up onto the causeway, but she was still most of the way in the pipe and from that angle couldn’t make out much. What she could see was smoke: a bub bling black cloud, pouring into the sky, spreading across the road and the parking lot.
She slid forward on her knees, freed herself from the pipe, stood up, and gazed dumbly at the top of the embankment.
The devil stood in that immense cloud: a devil that towered two stories high, a broad-shouldered demon with a vast rack of horns. He was a flickering apparition of flame, buried deep in that boiling thunderhead of smoke. In one hand he held a hammer and he raised an arm as thick as a telephone pole and brought it down on a burning red anvil. Steel clanged—she heard it quite distinctly. Sparks flew from somewhere in the black cloud. The devil’s tail—a slender, twelve-foot whip braided from fire—lashed behind him.
The black cloud was so immense, Harper could no longer see the police station or the parking lot or the bonfires. The smoke spread over the causeway, an impenetrable bank of toxic fog.
Men screamed, hollered, ran about on the other side of the smoke.
The devil brought the hammer down again and again, each time with another ringing clang! He tossed his burning head back, his eyes two red, delighted coals. In profile, it was impossible not to recognize him as the Fireman.
The devil finished his work, set aside his hammer, and lifted his new-forged instrument: a lance of fire, a pitchfork fashioned from pure flame, as long as his own body.
Someone on the other side of the smoke wailed. Harper had never heard a voice raised in such despair. It was the cry of a man afraid for his own soul.
Several ideas occurred to her in rapid succession, a string of firecrackers rattling off.
First: It was a shadow show. She didn’t know how he was doing it, but she was sure that what she was seeing was no different than a little boy shining a flashlight at his hand and conjuring the shadow of an elephant on his bedroom wall.
Second: If she was going to go, she had to go now. This couldn’t possibly last.
Third: John needed to go himself. To end his performance and slip away. He had made more than enough smoke and chaos to allow the prisoners to limp across the causeway unseen.
Fourth and last: Maybe he didn’t care if he got away or not. Maybe he had never cared. Maybe the possibility of his own capture and death was not a concern but an enticement.
Harper climbed the slope on all fours, digging her fingers into the mossy gaps between stone blocks.
She struggled to her feet and stood up in that dense black cloud of smoke. She knew not to inhale, but her throat and nostrils began to burn anyway. It was a little better if she sank low, but only a little.
Harper advanced into the cloud. She could see the asphalt directly beneath her feet, but no more. The smoke was too dense to see any farther than that.
From the far side of the smoke bank, she heard a new noise—a chorus of organized, authoritative shouts—the sound of several men calling to one another as they worked in unison.
The blast of water hit the smoke bank, aimed at the devil’s burning chest. Satan flickered, lifted his arms to protect his face, and for a moment the pitchfork quivered and took on the shape of an enormous halligan bar.
The Fireman shouted somewhere in the smoke, a surprised yell. Steel banged and clattered.