From his vantage at the window in the visitors’ room, Rand waited to fire on the first bulldozer until it was halfway between the gatehouse and the front doors. His shots struck plating here and there, ricocheting off without effect.
Pete Ordway, the Wittstock boys, and Dan “Treater” Treat, under cover of the second bulldozer, found themselves confronted with the crushed corpse of Nate McGee. The dead man’s gas mask was full of blood and his torso had burst out around the straps of his vest. Gore sprayed up from the crawler treads; shreds of skin flapped like streamers. Rupe Wittstock screamed and leaped away from the mess, clearing himself of the viscera, but putting himself in Rand’s line of fire.
Rand’s first shot missed his target’s head by an inch, the second by half an inch. Rand swore at himself and put his third shot square in the middle of the man’s back. The slug lodged itself in the bulletproof vest the target was wearing and bowed him over. He threw his arms skyward like a fan in a stadium doing the Wave. Rand shot a fourth time, lower. It hit the target in the buttocks and sent him sprawling.
Deputy Treat was not fazed. Treater, only a year late of the 82nd Airborne, still possessed the relative comfort with being shot at that Willy Burke had lost long ago. He hopped off Dozer Two without a second thought. (He was relieved, in fact, to settle into military mode. Action was a break from the untenable reality of his daughter, Alice, at that second propped at her play table in their apartment, wrapped up in white fibers, when she ought to have just been getting up for another day of second grade. And it was a break from the thought of his year-old son, currently in a makeshift daycare run by men.) Free of cover, Treat returned suppression fire with an M4 he’d recovered on Route 31.
At the window, Rand dropped to his knees on the table he had been standing atop. Concrete fragments rained down his neck and back.
Treater hoisted Rupe Wittstock and pulled him to safety behind a stack of smoldering tires.
Dozer One crashed into the rear end of the Fleetwood RV, slamming its hood against the front doors of the prison in an explosion of glass.
5
Jared sat on the floor of the laundry room while Michaela piled sheets around him, constructing a mound to hide him. “I feel stupid,” Jared said.
“You don’t look stupid,” Michaela said, which wasn’t true. She fluttered a sheet above his head.
“I feel like a pussy.”
Michaela hated that word. Even as she heard more shots ring out, it touched a nerve. A pussy was supposed to be soft, and although Michaela possessed one, there was nothing particularly soft about the rest of her. Janice Coates had not raised her to be a softie. She flipped up the sheet and gave Jared a hard—but not too hard—slap across the cheek.
“Hey!” He put a hand to his face.
“Don’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“Don’t say pussy when it means weak. If your mother didn’t teach you better than that, she should have.” Michaela dropped the sheet over his face.
6
“It is a fucking crime that someone is not filming this for fucking reality TV,” Low said. Eye to the scope of the bazooka, he had seen the second bulldozer squash the poor sucker who had fallen in front of the treads, seen the Rambo guy jump out from behind the second dozer, start blasting, and rescue another guy. He then witnessed—not without a mixture of wonder and glee—the first bulldozer as it smashed the RV into an accordion in front of the prison doors. It was a stellar conflict, and it was only going to get better once they spiced the soup with three or four bazooka shells.
“When do we do our thing?” May asked.
“Soon as the cops have wore themselves out a bit more.”
“How are we going to be sure we got Kitty, Low? That place must be full of slags in cocoons.”
Low didn’t appreciate his brother’s last minute naysaying. “We probably won’t be absolutely sure, May, but we are going to fire all these shells, and blow the fuck out of the place, so I like our chances. To a certain extent, I suppose we’re just going to have to hope for the best. Now are we going to enjoy this or not? Or would you rather that I do all the shooting?”
“Come on, Low, I didn’t say that,” protested May. “Be fair.”
7
On Level 32 of Boom Town, little pink spiders began to invade Evie’s field of stars, triangles, and burning orbs. The spiders doused the orbs and turned them into the irritating sparkling blue stars that clogged up all the works—booger. In A Wing, the sound of the gunfire echoed piercingly. Evie was undisturbed; she had seen and heard men killing on numerous occasions. The pink spiders did bother her, though.
“So evil,” she said to no one, sliding her colorful shapes around, searching for connections. Evie was extremely relaxed; as she played with the phone, she floated on her back a couple of centimeters above the cot.
8
Bushes twitched on the opposite side of the north fence, directly across from Billy Wettermore’s position in the alley behind the garden shed. He unleashed a dozen rounds into the mass of greenery where the twitch had come from. The bushes shook and trembled.
Drew T. Barry, a crafty insurance man who always kept to the most risk-averse course, wasn’t anywhere near Billy’s line of fire. Instead, with the prudence that not only made him Dooling’s first stop for all your indemnification needs but also an excellent deer hunter, willing to take his time to get an ideal shot, he had halted the other two men—Pearl and Peters—in the woods behind the prison gymnasium. Peters had told him that the rear door to the prison was on the west wall of the gym. The reaction produced by the rock that Drew had thrown into the brush close to that spot had told them a lot: yes, there must be a door, and yes, it was definitely defended.
“Deputy?” Drew T. Barry asked.
They were crouched behind an oak. Fifteen feet or so ahead of them, bits of leaf were still drifting down from where the gunfire had torn up the foliage. To judge by the sound, the shooter was perhaps thirty or forty yards beyond the interior fence, near the wall of the prison.
“What?” Don Peters replied. Sweat streaked his flushed face. He had been lugging the duffel bag with their masks and the bolt cutters.
“Not you, the real deputy,” Drew T. Barry said.
“Yeah?” Pearl nodded at him.
“If I kill this guy shooting here, there’s no chance of prosecution? Are you sure Geary and Coombs will swear we acted in the legal performance of our duties?”
“Yup. Scout’s honor.” Elmore Pearl raised his hand in the salute of his childhood, first three fingers raised, pinky held down by his thumb.
Peters hocked some phlegm. “You need me to hustle back and fetch you a notary, Drew?”
Drew T. Barry ignored this witless jibe, told them to stay put, and started backtracking into the woods, taking the northern incline in quick, quiet steps, his Weatherby rifle strapped to his back.
9