کتاب 08-08

8

Michael bent forward and gently—reverently—set Carol back on her feet in the shadows of the foyer.

“Are you hurt?” he cried, his voice cracking. “Oh, God, please—please—don’t be shot. I don’t know what I’d do.”

Her eyes rolled in the way of a panicked horse’s. She hardly seemed to know him. “Yes. Unhurt. The Bright. I think it was the Bright! It turned their bullets aside. It was like a force field made of love. I think it protected you, too!”

Harper cleared her throat and nudged Carol gently aside with one elbow. In her left fist was a rock bigger than a golf ball, the rock Jamie Close had shoved in her mouth fifteen impossible minutes before. It was smoking by now, had been heating steadily in her Dragonscale-scrawled hand. She swept it down across Michael Lindqvist Jr.’s jaw, knocking in two of his teeth.

“Nope,” Harper said. “No force field on him.” As he doubled over and sank down, she brought her knee up into his broken face. At the same time she clubbed him in the shoulder with the molten rock. Sparks flew. The shoulder popped out of its socket with a sound like someone pulling a cork.

She could’ve kept hitting him. She didn’t know herself anymore. Her arm was operating on its own and her arm wanted to kill him. But it would’ve meant getting down on her knees, and she was having little contractions and that seemed like a lot of effort. Besides, the Fireman had an arm around her, and while he was too weak to pull her back, he was at least trying.

“Wait,” she said. “I’m okay. I’m all done.”

She thought she was, too, but then he let go of her and she booted Michael in the neck.

“He was a sweet old man,” Harper said, as the Fireman tugged her out of kicking range. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

Carol gave them a bewildered, wondering look. One side of her face was pink and swollen, the skin peeling off her ear. The falling hand of God had given her an instant sunburn on one cheek.

“And you!” Harper said to her. “I guess your force field was never switched on when Mikey was in the mood to finger your pussy.”

Carol flinched as if Harper had slapped her. Her left cheek began to turn the same shade as the side of her face that had been burned.

“You can kill me now if you want,” Carol said. “You will only be sending me back into the arms of my father. He waits for me in the Bright. Everyone we’ve lost waits in the Bright. That’s our only escape now anyway.”

Harper said, “I’m not going to kill you, and I never was. I don’t need to kill you. The people outside are going to take care of that for me. This place is a box and they’ve got all the guns. But we might have another five or ten minutes. While it lasts, you think about this. Michael killed your father . . . for you. To save you. And himself. Your father was going to send you away for what you did to Harold Cross. Mikey bashed his head in to keep him from telling the camp about the way you set Harold up and had him shot. When you sent Harold to his grave? You sent your father into the dirt with him. One led naturally to the other. You take that into the Bright with you.”

Harper’s voice dropped steadily as she spoke, and by the time she had said the last of it, she was trembling, her voice little more than a husky whisper. She was not, after all, really good at being cruel to people, even people who had it coming. Carol’s frightened, pale, confused face sickened her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her skin had a gray cast beneath the pink of her burns. Harper thought she finally looked like a grown-up: a washed-out, weary, and not terribly attractive woman who had done some hard living.

Carol turned her baffled gaze toward Allie, who stood there holding Nick in both arms. When she saw her niece, her face shriveled, and she began to weep.

“Allie,” she said, and held out her arms. “Let me hold Nick. Let me see him. Please.”

Allie spat in Carol’s face. Carol blinked, her cheeks and brow dappled in red drops. She held up her hands defensively and Allie spat on them, too, a shower of mucus and stringy blood.

“Fuck I will,” Allie said through her slashed mouth. “I don’t want you touching him. You got something worse than Dragonscale and I don’t want him anywhere near it, in case it’s contagious.” Blood flew on every other syllable. The gash across her lips was a bad one. Harper thought it would need stitches and was likely to scar badly.

“We don’t have time for this,” the Fireman said. “We need to get up in the bell tower. We can make a fight of it from up there.”

Harper thought this was the most hopeless thing she had ever heard, and opened her mouth to say so, but Jamie spoke first.

“There’s at least one rifle up there,” she said. Her face was filthy and she was shuddering furiously, although whether from shock or terror, Harper couldn’t have said. “And a box of shells. There’s always at least one gun there for whoever’s on watch up in the steeple.”

Jamie Close was a harsh little savage, but she was nobody’s fool. She could grasp the situation as well as they could and had shifted her loyalties to the most likely survivors with the businesslike efficiency of a bank teller making change.

The Fireman nodded. “Good. That’s good, Jamie. Get up there. We’ll follow. We can direct our fire down from the steeple to open up a path, from the basement doors across to—” He paused, eyes straining in his head. He had lost his glasses somewhere. Harper knew he was visualizing the camp, and seeing how the double doors down into the basement opened onto the north field: a vast stretch of bare ground with no cover. There were two trucks over there full of men and guns. Harper had already thought it through and didn’t see a way out.

“Where’s Gillian!” Gail was shrieking. “Did anyone see my sister? Did anyone see if my sister made it inside?” She turned away from the double doors and staggered into the nave, where most of the congregation had gathered.

Harper squeezed John’s shoulder. “Do you think you can make it up those stairs?”

“Go,” he said. “I’ll follow.”

“I’m not leaving you behind. There’s no way. We’ll take the steps together.”

He nodded, swiped blood away from his cheek. “Come on, then. We’ll have a good position on them from up there. I don’t care how many of them there are. That’s a sniper’s nest. We might still be able to shoot and burn our way out. Somehow. It’s not too late, Willowes.”

It was though. The first of the Molotov cocktails hit the south side of the church a moment later, in a crash and rush of blue flame.