She knew then that this wasn’t a good life lesson, but if they stayed here together in this gated town forever, maybe it wouldn’t matter.
But now, in this chapel, she realizes there’s nowhere left for them to go. No further hole to hide in, no further fallout shelter buried below this shelter, no hiding place left on this earth where the world won’t arrive one day and find you. He never struck her as an evil person, all those years, even up to the moment when she shot him. He certainly never looked like the bad guy. But now she sees. She knows. She understands. About evil, or whatever you care to name it. It comes. It’s relentless. It doesn’t care if you forgot it. It searches, and it finds you, and it arrives on your doorstep one day, and it lights up a screen, it calls you by your real name, it smiles at you, it says hello, it eyes your son and promises to take him home.
Cooper arrives at the chapel at the same time as Robinson.
“You look like you just ran a marathon,” says Robinson.
“Fuck you, too,” Cooper says. “Where have you been?”
“Trying to find people. Figured we’d all rendezvous here.” He nods to a small group of people, four or five, who are trailing him.
“That’s all you found?” says Cooper.
“All that were alive.”
“Where’s Nurse Breckinridge? We’re going to need her.”
Robinson shakes his head.
“How about Ginger Van Buren? Vivien King?”
Robinson shakes his head again. Cooper decides to stop asking about specific people. “And what about Santayana and the other agents?” he says.
“I saw them headed that way, toward the intake trailer. I figured they went to find Rigo. Tell him we’re massing here in the chapel.”
“You think they know about the chapel?”
Robinson shrugs. “If they did, I imagine they’d be here, trying to stop us.”
Cooper nods, then pounds on the red metal door.
“What happened to you?” says Santayana, in a pitying tone, in the intake trailer, as Rigo sits bloodied and doubled over in a plastic chair.
“He kicked me in the fucking nuts. Twice,” Rigo says, trying to affect an uncompromised posture. “I’ve just been waiting for you.”
Santayana suppresses a smile. You don’t often get to see a man who’s just been kicked in the nuts, but she always enjoys it. All that male weakness, so comically concentrated in one convenient anatomical target.
“I thought the sheriff was supposed to be with us,” she says.
“It turns out he feels some attachment to that kid.”
“And no one thought to tell us that?”
“No one knew. And it gets worse.”
“What?”
“He’s got a thing for the woman, too.”
“Well, fuck him, then,” she says. “He can die like the rest of them.” She’s annoyed now. Rigo assumed they could just ride in, make trouble, wreak havoc, unleash Dietrich, and slip out again. She understood, however, that in a community that’s lived in isolation for eight years, there are bound to be some emotional entanglements. Fucking shitty intel, she thinks. It will fuck you every time. Two years spent to track this whore down, and then Vincent finds out she has a kid.
His kid.
Now, here we are in this clusterfuck, she thinks.
The other two agents, Burly and Gains, linger in the background, slightly abashed, like children in the presence of bickering parents.
“Where are Corey and Bigelow?” she asks.
“They’re trailing Dietrich.”
“Okay,” she says, “at this point, I vote we just let Dietrich finish up, then we take care of him, then we take the kid, then we go. We torch this whole town on the way out. We’ll say the residents lit it. We can say they went full Waco on us. Just burned their own compound to the ground.”
“Sounds like a plan,” says Rigo. He stands, gingerly, feeling emboldened. “I want that sheriff, though. I want to strangle that fucker myself. I want to personally drop his dead body in a ditch.”
“Don’t worry, you can have him. And he won’t be hard to find,” she says. “None of them are now.”
Rigo turns to the other agents. “Everyone else in this town is to be considered target practice. Understood? Scorched earth. No witnesses. No regrets.”
Santayana says to the agents: “You two go find Corey and Bigelow. Tell them to take care of Dietrich and wrap things up. Then meet us back at the chapel in the center of town.”
Rigo turns. “Why the chapel?”
“Because everyone who’s left in the town is holed up there,” she says. “Convenient, right?”
“Oh, fuck me.” Rigo looks caught between distress and fury. He also looks like someone just kicked him in the balls again. “Santayana, did you not read the fucking briefing?”
“Of course I did,” she says, trying to remember if she read the whole thing right to the end.
“Did you read the part about tornados? That this place is in Tornado Alley?”
“Yes.” She definitely did not read the part about tornados. What the fuck is Tornado Alley? she thinks.
Rigo starts pacing. Fretting. Muttering. “Oh, fuck me.”
“What?” she says. For once, she’s earnestly confused. And genuinely annoyed. And ever-so-slightly concerned.
He turns to her sharply. “That’s not just a fucking chapel. It’s a fucking safe house.”
37.
DIETRICH WANDERS SLOWLY BACK DOWN the middle of a street he just came from, his eyes on the last house on the left. He wonders how he should do it. Quick shots aren’t much of a story. He should do it by hand, up close. How old is Unruh, anyway? Dietrich wishes he had a knife. Some hefty combat type of knife, with a serrated edge on it. He’s used so many improvisatory things to cut so many people that it’s funny for him to think about how long it’s been since he held a proper knife.
What he could do with a proper knife.
There should be some sense of ceremony. He wishes he knew more about this man. He remembers the guy in the Colorado supermax who wouldn’t shut up about Unruh. Said he’d run up against him once, or knew someone who had, or heard about it—his stories never added up too much, sense-wise. He said Unruh came from the North, stood seven feet tall, had a tattoo of a bloodstain on his face. Even to Dietrich, whose tattoos never failed to enthrall once their stories were revealed, the idea of a facial tattoo seemed impressive. Like war paint.
I was born at the wrong time, Dietrich thinks, as he mounts the stairs to the porch. There have been times in human history when it was simply understood that you moved from man to man and each man fought without rules or mercy or restraint. That was simply the way of the world. Maybe we’ll fight a little bit today, he thinks. He’d like to find out how this old man smells. These will all be good details for the story. And, if it gets out of hand for some reason, I’m the one with the guns.
He walks up to the door. Knocking seems polite. He’d like this man to answer the door. Frankly, he’d like to be invited in.
So he knocks. And waits.
Notices light through the peephole.
Sees a shadow swallow the light.
He steps back slightly and squares himself to the door, and with his rifle held waist-high in two hands he fires twice.
Door blisters.
He hears a thud.