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.
5
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.”
6
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.
7
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?”