Filaments spun and whirled around Jeanette’s face, splitting and falling and rising, burying her features. Clint knelt beside her, wanting to hold her hand, but not daring. “You were a good person,” he told her. “Your son loved you.”
“She is a good person. Her son does love her. She is not dead, she only sleeps.”
Clint went to the bars of Evie’s cell. “So you say, Evie.”
She sat on her cot. “You look like you’re getting your second wind, Clint.”
Her bearing—the downward tilt of her head, glossy black hair falling across the side of her face—was melancholy. “You can still hand me over. But not for much longer.”
“No,” he said.
“What a voice on that man you had Wettermore shoot! I could hear him all the way over here.”
Her tone wasn’t goading. It was reflective.
“People don’t like to be shot. It hurts. Maybe you didn’t know that.”
“The Municipal Building was destroyed tonight. The ones who did it blamed it on you. Sheriff Coombs took a walk. Frank Geary will bring his people in the morning. Does any of that surprise you, Clint?”
It didn’t. “You’re very good at getting what you want, Evie. I’m not going to congratulate you, though.”
“Now think of Lila and the others in the world beyond the Tree. Please believe me: they’re doing well there. They’re building something new, something fine. And there will be men. Better men, raised from infancy by women in a community of women, men who will be taught to know themselves and to know their world.”
Clint said, “Their essential nature will assert itself in time. Their maleness. One will raise a fist against another. Believe me, Evie. You’re looking at a man who knows.”
“Indeed so,” Evie agreed. “But such aggression isn’t sexual nature, it’s human nature. If you ever doubt the aggressive capacity of women, ask your own Officer Lampley.”
“She’ll be asleep somewhere by now,” Clint said.
Evie smiled, as if she knew better. “I am not so foolish as to promise you the women on the far side of the Tree have utopia. What they will have is a better start, and a good chance of a better finish. You are standing in the way of that chance. You and only you, of all the men on earth. I need you to know that. If you let me die, those women will be set free to live lives of their own choosing.”
“Lives of your choosing, Evie.” His voice sounded parched to his own ears.
The being on the other side of the cell door tapped a rhythm on the frame of the cot with her fingertips. “Linny Mars was in the sheriff’s station when it was destroyed. She’s gone forever. She didn’t get a choice.”
“You took it from her,” Clint said.
“We could go on like this forever. He said, she said. The oldest story in the universe. Go fight your war, Clint. That’s one thing men know how to do. Make me see another sunset if you can.”
CHAPTER 13
1
As the rim of the sun appeared over the woods behind Dooling Correctional, a line of bulldozers clanked up West Lavin, end-to-end. All three were Caterpillars, two D9s and a big D11. The assault team was eighteen men in total. Fifteen of them were with the bulldozers, headed for the front gate; three of them were advancing around the backside of the prison fence. (They’d left Selectman Miller at the roadblock with a bottle of Vicodin and his bandaged leg propped on a camp chair.)
Frank had organized twelve in the forward group—his dirty dozen—into three quartets. Each quartet, in vests and masks, hunkered behind a bulldozer, using it for cover. The windows and grills of the dozers had been jury-rigged with scrap steel. Retired Deputy Jack Albertson drove the first in line, Coach JT Wittstock drove the second, and the former Golden Gloves boxer, Carson Struthers, drove the third. Frank was with Albertson’s bulldozer.
The men in the woods were Deputy Elmore Pearl, the deer hunter Drew T. Barry (his office now in ruins), and Don Peters.
2
Clint spotted the bulldozers from the high window on B Wing and bolted for the stairs, pulling on his bulletproof vest as he went. “Have fun gettin fucked, Doc,” Scott Hughes called cheerfully as he ran past.
“Like they’ll give you a pass if they get in,” Clint said. This wiped the smile from Scott’s face.
Clint hurried down Broadway, stopping to put his head in the visitors’ room. “Rand, they’re coming. Lay down the teargas.”
“Okay,” said Rand from the family alcove at the end of the room, and calmly donned the gas mask he had at the ready.
Clint continued to the security station at the main door.
The station was your basic bulletproof tollbooth where visitors were required to check in. The little room had a long facing window and a drawer for passing IDs and valuables through to the officer on duty. There was a communications board like the ones in the Booth and the gatehouse, with monitors that could flip through views of the various inner and outer areas of the prison. Tig was at the board.
Clint rapped on the door and Tig opened it.
“What have you got on the monitors?”
“Sunrise is flaring the lenses. If there’s men behind the bulldozers, I can’t see them yet.”
They had eight or nine gas grenades to go with the launcher. On the central monitor, below the spirals of glare, Clint saw several of these strike the parking lot and spew white fumes to mix with the tarry smoke still leaking from the tires. He told Tig to keep watching and ran on.
His next destination was the break room. Jared and Michaela were at a table with a deck of cards and cups of coffee.
“Make yourselves scarce. It’s starting.”
Michaela toasted him with her cup. “Sorry, Doc. I’m legal to vote and everything. I think I’ll stick around. Who knows, there might be a Pulitzer in my future.”
Jared’s color was chalky. He looked from Michaela to his father.
“Fine,” Clint said. “Far be it for me to abridge the freedom of the press. Jared, hide, and don’t tell me where.”
He jogged on before his son could respond. His breath was short by the time he reached the rear door that opened near the shed and the fields. The reason that, until the morning of Aurora, he’d never before suggested to Lila that they should go running was because he hadn’t wanted her to have to limit her pace for him; it would have been embarrassing. What was the root here, vanity or laziness? Clint promised himself to give the question real consideration when he had a free second and, if he should be so lucky as to live through the morning, and ever get to speak to his wife again, possibly to repeat his proposal that they take up jogging together.