کتاب 08-07

7

Nelson Heinrich arched his spine, as if he had been struck across the small of the back with a steel rod. Red smoke burst from his chest in puffs, made a crimson mist in the air around him. He tried to run, got two steps, and then the rope circling his neck jerked him off his feet and he hit the dirt.

The Mazz turned and ran, too. He took one step, and a second, and then bullets shredded his legs. Other bullets hit his back with a sound like rain falling on a drum. The last slug caught a shoulder as he fell and spun him around as he dropped into the road, so he landed faceup to the smoky night sky.

The Humvee took off, banging over the rutted road, raising a cloud of white chalk. It accelerated into the darkness between the church and the cafeteria, cutting off the path of escape in that direction. The headlights lurched across the muddy ground and fell upon Nick. The Hummer did not slow, but accelerated, rushing toward him. Harper screamed his name. He didn’t hear, of course.

The Humvee went over the Mazz with a crunch and a pop and jolted as if it had slammed into a deep pothole. Nick turned, almost casually, as in a dream. He raised his right hand. Sparks whirled up off it, rising in a funnel into the night, into the stars, a thousand hot stars flying up off his hand. Only instead of winking out as they climbed, in the usual manner of sparks, they brightened and swelled. They rose into a flock of burning sparrows, not one of them any bigger than a golf ball, a hundred darting birds of flame, and then they dived.

They hit the Humvee in a spattering rain of red light when it was still fifty feet away. The burning darts struck in a flurry of wet-sounding smacks and cracked the windshield; hit the men in the front seat and turned them into screaming effigies; lashed the tires and made spinning wheels of fire; pelted a box of ammunition and set it off with a rattling thud and a burst of strobing white lights.

The Humvee swerved to the left. The right edge of the fender clipped Nick on the way by and threw him aside. The Humvee kept going, skewing left. The passenger-side tires struck a half-buried white rock. The Hummer rose up on two wheels, then turned over with a shattering crash. A burning corpse—the driver—vaulted through the night.

Allie screamed Nick’s name again and again. She couldn’t move. She was stuck in place. She tried to go to him, but the Fireman tightened the arm over her shoulders.

“Ben will get him, Ben—” the Fireman said, holding Allie against him for half a moment before she twisted free and began to sprint for her brother.

Ben Patchett was well ahead of her, though. He ran in a shambling waddle, but for all that he was already two-thirds of the way to the boy on the ground. In one hand he held his pistol and he shot blindly at the Freightliner. A bullet hit the plow and threw blue sparks. Ben dropped to one knee, gathered the smoking boy up in his arms, and slung him over his shoulder. He fired again, just once, then began to run back, not so fast this time.

There were men standing behind the snow-wing plow, using it for cover. Muzzles flashed. Guns thudded. Ben stumbled, reeled off course, kept going. Harper couldn’t see where the first bullet hit him. The second struck him in the right shoulder and half turned him around. It seemed sure he would go down, or drop Nick. He did neither. He steadied himself and came on, in a sort of exhausted jog, a man at the end of a long run on a hot day. The third bullet to hit him blew off the top of his head. Harper could only think of a wave dashing itself to foam against a rock. His skull came off in a blast of red foam, hair and bone and brain scattering into the darkness.

And still he jogged on, another step, and a second, and by the time he fell to his knees, Allie was right there, her arms outstretched. Ben passed Nick to her almost gently, settling him into her arms with an unhurried care, as if losing the top half of his skull were a matter of no consequence. Before Ben dropped onto his face, Harper had a last look at his expression. It seemed to her he was smiling.

“Run!” Carol screamed. “Run for the church! Everyone run!” She was standing on the stone bench again, her arms raised out to either side, lit from behind by headlights. Bullets rattled and thwacked on the towering stones all around her and once Harper thought she saw the hem of Carol’s robe jerk, as if something had snapped at it. Not a single bullet struck her. Smoke rose from the blackened rock beneath her feet. She looked like an illustration from the Old Testament, a mad prophet in a scene of midnight desolation, calling for God to deliver a stroke of redemptive violence.

The people of Camp Wyndham were already on their way, the whole mass of them. They stampeded for the stairs, 170 of them, shoving and shrieking. Emily Waterman, who was still on the ground, was stepped on by half a dozen people. The last to trample over her, a woman named Sheila Duckworth, a former dentist’s assistant, put her foot on the back of Emily’s head, driving her face down into the mud, which was where the eleven-year-old suffocated. Her neck was broken by then, and she couldn’t lift her face to breathe.

Harper looked around for Renée and saw her at the far corner of the church. Gilbert stood with her, pulling Renée along by one arm. They weren’t going into the chapel, but around the side and behind. Renée’s eyes were damp and frightened and pleading and it looked like she wanted to stay, but Gil hauled her on, and Harper thought, Go, just go. It felt like a deep breath of clean, fresh air to see Renée slip away and out of sight. It was too far to go with John—John could barely stand—but Renée and Gil had already made it, could escape down the hill and into the trees. Maybe they would find their way to a kayak, paddle out to Don Lewiston, if he was out there somewhere, watching from offshore. She hoped they did. She hoped they didn’t look back.

Michael was out from under the altar, reaching up to take Carol’s hands. She paid him no mind. She stood there screaming for her congregation to run, and when he caught at her wrists, she pulled them free. Michael grabbed her about the waist and lifted her bodily off the stone. He turned and ran with her, much as Ben had run with Nick only a moment before. He ran for the chapel. Most of the rest of camp had already shoved their way in through the red doors.

“Come on,” the Fireman said. “The church.”

His legs buckled and Harper lugged him back up.

“No,” Harper said. “That’s a trap—”

“It’s shelter, now go.”

Her insides tightened, as if being squeezed by a steel brace. Her abdomen hurt so badly it took her breath away and she wondered, wildly, if this was it, if the stress had induced labor a month early.

Then she pushed the thought down and began to make her stumbling way toward the chapel. The Fireman pedaled his feet, mimicking the act of walking, but for all that, she was carrying him. Allie fell in next to them with Nick in her arms. Blood ran from the tip of her chin, but her lips were open in a kind of savage grin.

They thudded up the steps together: Allie carrying Nick, Harper carrying the Fireman, and Michael hauling Carol. No sooner had they reached the top of the steps than the stairs exploded, bullets chewing them up and filling the night with the sweet odor of fresh-sawn wood.

That Chevy Intimidator—a flaming WKLL decal on the passenger-side door—went off-road, booming down the hill, swinging around the outer edge of the ring of stones. It pulled in on the southern side of the chapel, in the narrow strip of open ground between the church and the woods. A fully automatic gun of some sort rattled from the flatbed. Harper didn’t know what it was, but it had a flat, plasticky sound that was different from the Bushmasters.

Two other pickups slammed over the open ground to the north, roaring into position to cover the other side of the building. The Freightliner remained at the top of the hill, idling in place, as if Jakob were waiting and watching to see where he might be of the most use.

Gail Neighbors stood just inside the entrance at one of the great red doors. The wispy, elfin boy who looked like young David Bowie was at the other. They were already swinging the doors closed as Harper and the Fireman lurched inside, into dimness, sobbing, shouts, and terror. The doors banged shut behind them—and never opened again.