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?”