Well, not entirely helpless.
If there is one thing the Blinds has going for it, Cooper thinks, it’s that there’s no shortage of people living here who know what to do with a gun. Or did once, and can possibly be prodded to remembrance.
Some of those people being worse than Dietrich. Or were, once.
He marches across the porch and knocks hard on the door.
35.
THE CHAPEL IS a low-slung cinder block building, not much more than a bunker, really, painted white then tinted brown by years of wind-borne dirt. The structure’s facade makes no exterior concession to holiness. No stained glass or saints or hung crucifix. Just a dented red metal door, with a single small square window in the center of it, at eye level, like a peephole. Two long but narrow recessed windows flank the entrance, and there’s a scrubby stretch of withered grass out front. The building’s set about twenty yards off the main road at the west end of the town’s central thoroughfare, a stone’s throw from the busier commercial outposts. Dawes has been inside this chapel exactly once before, during her initial tour of the grounds, on her very first day of work. She never returned. She’s not much for faith. Though as she unlocks the impressive deadbolt on the door, she suspects she could use some faith right now.
She swings the heavy door open with a grunt and hustles Fran and Isaac inside, along with about a half dozen or so stragglers they’ve picked up. Most everyone else in town is holed up in their houses, but there were a few people just wandering the streets in a daze. Panic will do that to people. Dawes tried as best she could to wave them down but many of them just scampered off, skittish, as though scared she was beckoning them to their doom. Who knows—maybe she was. If there’s a plan to all this, she’s not privy to it, beyond getting everyone inside this building and locking the door.
The small party she’s collected spreads out inside the room, which, like the building’s exterior, is spare and rather notably un-churchlike. Three rows of plastic folding chairs face a wooden lectern. Other than that, it’s just a large bare room with musty gray carpeting and dingy white cinder block walls that, she suspects, hasn’t had too many recent visitors.
Once everyone’s inside, Dawes locks the door. It’s a formidable lock that takes a little doing. Then she sits—slumps, really—into a plastic chair, and only then realizes how painfully her side throbs. The brown coat is stiff with blood over the bullet hole. She unzips it, gingerly. Fran pulls up a chair. “Let me have a look at that,” she says.
“What, you’re a doctor now?”
“No, I’m a poet, apparently.”
Dawes shrugs the coat off.
“Why are you wearing a winter coat, anyway?” asks Fran, as she tugs the coat off Dawes’s arms and tosses it aside to the floor.
“You ever read a biography of Andrew Jackson?” says Dawes weakly. It’s all catching up to her now.
“No,” says Fran.
“Jackson once challenged a man to a duel. He knew the man was a better shot than him. So he wore an oversized coat, and let the man take the first shot. Which hit the coat, but only winged Jackson. Then Jackson took his shot and shot the man dead. For some reason, I remembered that fact just as I was running out the door to come find you. So I grabbed this coat.”
Fran pries the torn cloth of Dawes’s uniform shirt away from the wound and sees it. It’s ugly.
A grizzled, heavyset black man, maybe fifty, walks over and interrupts them both. He’s unshaven. Clearly angry. Fran knows him. Chester Holden, Chet for short. He likes to garden out front of his house. She’s seen him out there on his knees, in his dungarees. That’s about as much as she knows about him. He’s wearing a work shirt and jeans and, Fran only notices now, he’s barefoot. He must have run out of his house to follow them without his shoes on. He must be petrified, she thinks.
He says to Dawes: “At some point, are you going to tell us just what the hell is going on?” Behind him, other residents stand, listening.
“I don’t know,” says Dawes. “But these agents aren’t who they say they are. And someone’s loose in the town right now. He’s armed. Sheriff Cooper’s dealing with it.”
“Yeah? How?” says Holden. “And what are we supposed to do? Just sit here and wait?”
“You can go back out there if you like,” says Fran sharply.
A younger man steps forward from the cluster that loiters behind Holden. A big guy with a goombah vibe. Dawes recognizes him from intake day, back on Monday, which seems like a lifetime ago. “Isn’t whoever he is just going to come here and kill us all?” he says. “We’re big, fat sitting ducks in here.”
“No, we’re not,” says Dawes.
“He’s right,” says Holden, angry. “We’re sitting ducks.” A few voices from the group concur.
“Cooper told me to bring you here for a reason,” says Dawes.
“To a fucking church?” says the goombah. “Why? For last rites?”
“Look, I know for some of you, memory isn’t your strong suit, but think back to your orientation. This isn’t just a church,” Dawes says.
Dietrich walks out again into the middle of the street, his rifle hot, thinking, There is no joy in shooting an old man in a chair holding a Bible.
Not joy, exactly. There is some joy. But sport.
There is no sport in it.
And as much as he looked forward to stalking through the town, he’s finding the residents old and weary and, in their way, far too welcoming. Those two agents were a challenging diversion, but they’re dead and there’s only four more like them. Plus, the sheriff and his two deputies. He had planned to hold off on those three till the end, since he already has their tattoos, and it would be kind of funny for them to watch the whole town die. But at this point he’s getting impatient and starts thinking of the most efficient way to bring it all to an end. The only question is whether he should take the kid. He should probably take the kid. He definitely gets a sense that whoever is bankrolling all of this, the only survivor they really care about is the kid.
He spots a person running, way up the block, hunched over, like how they saw it once in some movie about survival. He hefts the rifle. Sights the person scampering.
Pop pop.
Finally, some sport.
Then he spots another figure. In the distance. Walking toward him. Hands up. Like he’s begging for mercy.
Dietrich sights the rifle, then stops. Lowers it.
Squints.
Now, lookie here. It’s the fucking sheriff.