Van fired the pistol Fritz Meshaum had tried to kill her with. The range was short, but she was exhausted, and instead of taking Maynard in the chest, the bullet only clipped his shoulder and sent him sprawling over the depleted bag of bazooka shells. His unfired gun fell into some bushes and caught by the trigger guard. “Brother!” he shouted. “Shot! She shot me!”
Low dropped the bazooka and snatched up the rifle lying beside him. With one of them out of commission, Van could afford to focus. She secured the butt of the pistol at the center of her considerable bosom, and pulled the trigger. Little Low’s mouth exploded, his brains exited the back of his skull, and he aspirated his teeth with his final breath.
“Low!” Maynard screamed. “Brother!”
He grabbed the gun hanging in the bushes, but before he could bring it to bear, his wrist was gripped by something more like an iron manacle than a human hand.
“You should know better than to point a gun at an arm-wrestling champ, even when she’s been awake for a week,” Van said in an oddly gentle voice, and twisted. From inside May’s wrist came a sound like breaking twigs. He shrieked. The gun dropped from his hand and she kicked it away.
“You shot Low,” Maynard blubbered. “Kilt him!”
“So I did.” Van’s head was ringing; her hip was throbbing; it felt like she was standing on a deck in rough waters. She was near the end of her considerable endurance, and she knew it. But this had been a sight more useful than killing herself, no doubt about that. Only now what?
May had the same question, it seemed. “What are you going to do with me?”
I can’t tie him up, Van thought. I’ve got nothing to tie him up with. Am I just going to go to sleep and let him get away? Probably after he puts a few rounds in me while I’m growing my cocoon?
She looked down at the prison, where a crushed RV and a blazing bulldozer blocked the main doors. She meditated on the hole the first bazooka shell had put in C Wing, where dozens of women had been sleeping, defenseless in their cocoons. How many had been killed by these two country-fried assholes?
“Which one are you? Lowell or Maynard?”
“Maynard, ma’am.” He tried on a smile.
“You the stupid one or the smart one, Maynard?”
His smile grew. “I’m the stupid one, no doubt. Failed out of school in the eighth grade. I just do whatever Lowell says.”
Van returned the smile. “Well, I guess I’ll just let you go, Maynard. No harm and no foul. You’ve got a truck down there. I took a peek, and the keys are in the ignition. Even driving one-handed, I think you could be most of the way to Pedro’s South of the Border by noon, if you don’t spare the horses. So why don’t you get going, before I change my mind?”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
May started jogging back among the tombstones of the little country graveyard. Van briefly considered following through on her promise, but the chances were fair to good that he’d double back and discover her sleeping beside his dead brother. Even if he didn’t, they’d been laughing over their dirty ambush like boys throwing baseballs at wooden bottles during county fair week. She didn’t dare let him get far, either, because she no longer trusted her aim.
At least he won’t know what hit him, she thought.
Van raised Meshaum’s pistol and—not without regret—put a round in May’s back. “Oof,” was his final word on mother earth, as he tripped forward into a pile of dry leaves.
Van sat down with her back against a leaning gravestone—so old the name once carved thereon was almost completely worn away—and closed her eyes. She felt bad about shooting a man from behind, but this feeling was quickly smothered beneath a rising wave of sleep.
Oh, it felt so good to give in.
Threads began to spin from her skin. They blew prettily back and forth in a morning breeze. It was going to be another beautiful day in mountain country.
13
The glass was supposed to be bulletproof, but two close-range shots from the M4 Willy was toting blew Clint’s office window out of its frame. Clint hauled himself in, and landed on his desk. (It seemed to him that he had sat behind it writing reports and evaluations in another lifetime.) He heard screams and shouting from the direction of the gymnasium, but that was nothing he could deal with now.
He turned to assist Willy and saw the old man leaning against the building with his head lowered. His breathing was harsh and rapid.
Willy raised his arms. “Hope you’re strong enough to pull me in, Doc, because I ain’t gonna be able to give you much help.”
“Give me your gun first.”
Willy handed up the M4. Clint put it on his desk with his own weapon, atop a stack of Good Report forms. Then he seized Willy’s hands and pulled. The old man was able to help after all, pedaling his workshoes against the building below the window, and he practically flew in. Clint went over on his back. Willy landed on top of him.
“This is what I’d call pretty goddam intimate,” Willy said. His voice was strained, and he looked worse than ever, but he was grinning.
“In that case, you better call me Clint.” He got Willy to his feet, handed him the M4, and grabbed his own gun. “Let’s get our asses down to Evie’s cell.”
“What are we going to do when we get there?”
“I have no idea,” said Clint.
14
Drew T. Barry couldn’t believe what he was seeing: two women who looked like corpses and Elmore Pearl with his mouth pulled into a yawning cavern. His lower jaw seemed to be lying on his chest.
Pearl staggered away from the creature that held him. He made almost a dozen steps before Maura caught him by the sweat-soaked collar. She drew him against her and stuck a thumb deep into his right eye. There was a pop, like a cork coming out of a bottle. Viscous liquid spilled down Pearl’s cheek, and he went limp.
Kayleigh turned jerkily toward Don Peters, like a wind-up toy with a tired spring. He knew he should run, but an incredible lassitude seemed to have filled him. I have gone to sleep, he reasoned, and this is the world’s worst nightmare. Has to be, because that’s Kayleigh Rawlings. I put that bitch on Bad Report just last month. I’ll let her get me, and that’s when I’ll wake up.
Drew T. Barry, whose life’s work involved imagining the worst things that could happen to people, never considered the old I-must-be-dreaming scenario. This was happening, even though it seemed like something straight out of that show where rotting dead people came back to life, and he had every intention of surviving it. “Duck!” he shouted.
Don might not have done so if the plastic explosive hadn’t detonated at that instant on the other side of the prison. It was actually more of a fall than a duck, but it did the job; instead of grasping the soft meat of his face, Kayleigh’s pallid fingers slapped off the hard plastic shell of the football helmet. There was a gunshot, amplified to monstrous levels in the empty gymnasium, and a point-blank round from the Weatherby—a gun that could literally stop an elephant—did the job on Kayleigh. Her throat simply exploded and her head lolled back, all the way back. Her body crumpled.
Maura cast Elmore aside and lurched toward Don, a boogeylady whose hands opened and snapped closed, opened and snapped closed.