With the bulldozer halted, Frank continued to aim at the southwest corner of the prison, ready to pick off the rifleman there if he showed his face. The shooting had rattled him; had made it all real. He felt nauseated by the blood and the bodies on the ground, obscured and revealed as the clouds of teargas shifted in the wind, but his determination was still strong. He felt horror but no remorse. His life was Nana’s life, which made the risk acceptable. So he told himself.
Kronsky joined him. “Hurry,” Frank said. “The sooner this is over, the better.”
“You got a point there, Mister Man,” Kronsky said, on one knee with his backpack on the ground. He unzipped the pack, removed the bundle of dynamite, and snipped off three-quarters of the fuse.
The armored door of the bulldozer swung open. Jack Albertson climbed down, carrying his old service weapon, a .38.
“Cover us from yonder shitbird down the way,” Kronsky said to Albertson, pointing in the direction of Willy Burke’s position. Then Kronsky turned to Frank. “Come on, and you’d best high-step it.”
The two men hustled along the northwest wall of the prison, ducking low. Beneath the cutout window that was one of the defenders’ firing points, Kronsky stopped. He had the dynamite in his right hand and a blue plastic lighter in the other. The defender’s rifle barrel that had been there before poked back out.
“Grab that thing,” he said to Frank.
Frank didn’t question the order, just reached up and closed his left hand around the metal tube. He jerked it out of the grip of the man inside. He heard a muffled curse. Kronsky flicked his lighter, lit the shortened fuse on the bundle, and casually tossed it, hook-shot-style, up and through the hole. Frank released the rifle and hit the ground.
Three seconds later there was a thundercrack. Smoke and chunks of bloody flesh flew from the cutout window.
10
The earth trembled and gave an outraged roar.
Clint, shoulder to shoulder with Willy Burke at the west wall, saw a tidal wave of teargas curl from the parking lot, swept along by whatever had just exploded. Chimes rang through his skull and his joints vibrated. Beneath the noise, all he could think was that things were not going as well as he had hoped. These guys were going to kill Evie and all the rest of them. His fault, his failing. The pistol that he had been carrying around, ridiculously—never once in their fifteen years of marriage had he taken up Lila’s invitation to go to the gun range with her—had nevertheless slid into his hand, begging to be fired.
He leaned around Willy Burke, scanned the pile-up at the front doors, and locked on the figure standing at the rear of the first bulldozer. This man was staring at the cloud of dust boiling from Rand Quigley’s window, which had been—like everything else this morning—exploded out of its former normal shape.
(Jack Albertson had not expected the blast. It startled him and he dropped his guard to look. While the chaos did not upset him—as a miner in his youth, one who had survived a good many rumbles in the earth, his nerves were cool—it did perplex him. What was wrong with these folks, that they would prefer a shootout to surrendering some damned wild woman to the law? In his view, the world got crazier and crazier with each passing year. His personal Waterloo had been Lila Norcross’s election as Dooling’s sheriff. A skirt in the sheriff’s office! It didn’t get much more ludicrous than that. Jack Albertson had put in his retirement papers there and then, and returned home to enjoy his lifelong bachelorhood in peace.)
Clint’s arm lifted the pistol, the gunsight found the man behind the bulldozer, and Clint’s finger pulled the trigger. The shot was followed by a succulent pop, the sound of a bullet punching through the faceplate of the man’s gas mask. Clint saw the head snap back and the body crumple.
Ah, Jesus, he thought. That was probably someone I knew.
“Come on,” Willy cried, hauling him away to the rear door. Clint went, his legs doing what they needed to do. It had been easier than he might have guessed to kill someone. Which only made it worse.
CHAPTER 14
1
When Jeanette opened her eyes, a fox was lying down outside the door to Evie’s cell. Its snout rested on the fissured cement floor, from which ridges of green moss sprouted.
“Tunnel,” Jeanette said to herself. Something about a tunnel. She said to the fox, “Did I go through one? I don’t remember, if I did. Are you from Evie?”
It didn’t answer, as she had almost expected it might. (In dreams animals could talk, and this felt like a dream . . . yet at the same time didn’t.) The fox only yawned, looked at her slyly, and pushed itself to its feet.
A Wing was empty, and a hole gaped in the wall. Beams of morning sunlight poured through. There was frost on the chunks of broken cement, beading and liquefying as the temperature rose.
Jeanette thought, I feel awake again. I believe I am awake.
The fox made a mewling noise and trotted to the hole. It glanced at Jeanette, mewled a second time, and went through, and was swallowed by the light.
2
She gingerly picked her way through the hole, stooping under the sharp edges of gashed cement, and found herself in a field of knee-high weeds and dead sunflowers. The morning light made Jeanette squint. Her feet crunched frozen undergrowth and the cool air raised gooseflesh under the thin fabric of her uniform.
The strong sensations of fresh air and sunshine awakened her completely. Her old body, exhausted by trauma and stress and lack of sleep, was a skin that had been shucked. Jeanette felt new.
The fox cut briskly through the grass, taking her past the east side of the prison toward Route 31. Jeanette had to walk fast to keep up as her eyes adjusted to the sharp daylight. She flashed a glance at the prison: naked brambles choked the walls; the rusted hump of a bulldozer and an RV were jammed against the front of the building, also thick with brambles; extravagant clumps of yellow grass sprouted from cracks and gashes in the parking lot; other rusted vehicles were stranded across the tarmac. Jeanette looked in the opposite direction. The fences were down—she could see flattened chainlink glinting among the weeds. Although Jeanette couldn’t make sense of the how or the why, she immediately absorbed the what. This was Dooling Correctional, but the world had spun on for years.