Dan staggered and put a hand against the Riv’s lead passenger car to hold himself up. The world inside his head was revolving. The hat woman disappeared and suddenly a crowd of concerned faces was gathered around him. They were asking if he was all right.
He remembered Abra trying to explain how the world had revolved on the day she had discovered Brad Trevor’s picture in The Anniston Shopper; how all at once Abra had been looking out of the hat woman’s eyes and the hat woman had been looking out of hers. Now he understood. It was happening again, and this time he was along for the ride.
Rose was on the ground. He could see a broad swatch of evening sky overhead. The people crowding around her were no doubt her tribe of child-killers. This was what Abra was seeing.
The question was, what was Rose seeing?
16
Snake cycled, then came back. It burned. She looked at the man kneeling in front of her.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” John asked. “I’m a doctor.”
In spite of the pain, Snake laughed. This doctor, who belonged to the men who had just shot the True’s doctor to death, was now offering to help. What would Hippocrates make of that one? “Put a bullet in me, assface. That’s the only thing I can think of.”
The nerdy one, the bastard who’d actually pulled the trigger on Walnut, joined the one who said he was a doctor. “You’d deserve it,” Dave said. “Did you think I was just going to let you take my daughter? Torture and kill her like you did that poor little boy in Iowa?”
They knew about that? How could they? But it didn’t matter now, at least not to Andi. “Your people slaughter pigs and cows and sheep. Is what we do any different?”
“In my humble opinion, killing human beings is a lot different,” John said. “Call me silly and sentimental.”
Snake’s mouth was full of blood and some lumpy shit. Teeth, probably. That didn’t matter, either. In the end, this might be more merciful than what Barry had gone through. It would certainly be quicker. But one thing needed straightening out. Just so they’d know. “We’re the human beings. Your kind . . . just rubes.”
Dave smiled, but his eyes were hard. “And yet you’re the one lying on the ground with dirt in your hair and blood all down the front of your shirt. I hope hell’s hot enough for you.”
Snake could feel the next cycle coming on. With luck it would be the last one, but for now she held tight to her physical form. “You don’t understand how it was with me. Before. Or how is with us. We’re only a few, and we’re sick. We’ve got—”
“I know what you’ve got,” Dave said. “Fucking measles. I hope they rot your whole miserable Knot from the inside out.”
Snake said, “We didn’t choose to be what we are any more than you did. In our shoes, you’d do the same.”
John shook his head slowly from side to side. “Never. Never.”
Snake began to cycle out. She managed four more words, however. “Fucking men.” A final gasp as she stared up at them from her disappearing face. “Fucking rubes.”
Then she was gone.
17
Dan walked to John and Dave slowly and carefully, putting his hand on several of the picnic tables to keep his balance. He had picked up Abra’s stuffed rabbit without even realizing it. His head was clearing, but that was a decidedly mixed blessing.
“We have to go back to Anniston, and fast. I can’t touch Billy. I could before, but now he’s gone.”
“Abra?” Dave asked. “What about Abra?”
Dan didn’t want to look at him—Dave’s face was na**d with fear—but he made himself do it. “She’s gone, too. So’s the woman in the hat. They’ve both dropped out of the mix.”
“Meaning what?” Dave grabbed Dan’s shirt in both hands. “Meaning what?”
“I don’t know.”
This was the truth, but he was afraid.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CROW
1
Get with me, Daddy, Barry the Chink had said. Lean close.
This was just after Snake had started the first of the p**n DVDs. Crow got with Barry, even held his hand while the dying man struggled through his next cycle. And when he came back . . .
Listen to me. She’s been watching, all right. Only when that p**n o started up . . .
Explaining to someone who couldn’t do the locator thing was hard, especially when the one doing the talking was mortally ill, but Crow got the gist of it. The f**ksome frolickers by the pool had shocked the girl, just as Rose had hoped they might, but they had done more than make her quit spying and pull back. For a moment or two, Barry’s sense of her location seemed to double. She was still on the midget train with her dad, riding to the place where they were going to have their picnic, but her shock had produced a ghost image that made no sense. In this she was in a bathroom, taking a leak.
“Maybe you were seeing a memory,” Crow said. “Could that be?”
“Yeah,” Barry said. “Rubes think all kinds of crazy shit. Most likely it’s nothing. But for a minute it was like she was twins, you know?”
Crow didn’t, exactly, but he nodded.
“Only if that’s not it, she might be running some kind of game. Gimme the map.”