The Institute

1

Tim led the bloodied-up kid, obviously still dazed but walking on his own, through Craig Jackson’s office. The owner of DuPray Storage & Warehousing lived in the nearby town of Dunning, but had been divorced for five years, and the spacious, air-conditioned room behind the office served him as auxiliary living quarters. Jackson wasn’t there now, which was no surprise to Tim; on days when ’56 stopped rather than barreling straight on through, Craig had a tendency to make himself scarce.

Past the little kitchenette with its microwave, hotplate, and tiny sink was a living area that consisted of an easy chair planted in front of an HD television set. Beyond that, old centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse looked down on a neatly made camp bed. Tim’s idea was to get the kid to lie down on it until Doc Roper came, but the boy shook his head.

“Chair.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

The kid sat. The cushion made a tired woofing sound. Tim took a knee before him. “Now how about a name?”

The kid looked at him doubtfully. He had stopped bleeding, but his cheek was covered with gore, and his right ear was a tattered horror. “Were you waiting for me?”

“For the train. I work here mornings. Longer, when the 9956 is scheduled. Now what’s your name?”

“Who was the other guy?”

“No more questions until I get a name.”

The kid thought it over, then licked his lips and said, “I’m Nick. Nick Wilholm.”

“Okay, Nick.” Tim made a peace sign. “How many fingers do you see?”

“Two.”

“Now?”

“Three. The other guy, did he say he was my uncle?”

Tim frowned. “That was Norbert Hollister. He owns the local motel. If he’s anyone’s uncle, I don’t know about it.” Tim held up a single finger. “Follow it. Let me see your eyes move.”

Nicky’s eyes followed his finger left and right, then up and down.

“I guess you’re not scrambled too badly,” Tim said. “We can hope, anyway. Who are you running away from, Nick?”

The kid looked alarmed and tried to get out of the chair. “Who told you that?”

Tim pushed him gently back. “No one. It’s just that whenever I see a kid in dirty torn-up clothes and a torn-up ear jump from a train, I make this wild assumption that he’s a runaway. Now who—”

“What’s all the shouting about? I heard… oh dear-to-Jesus, what happened to that boy?”

Tim turned and saw Orphan Annie Ledoux. She must have been in her tent behind the depot. She often went there to snooze in the middle of the day. Although the thermometer outside the station had registered eighty-five degrees at ten that morning, Annie was dressed in what Tim thought of as her Full Mexican outfit: serape, sombrero, junk bracelets, and rescued cowboy boots sprung along the seams.

“This is Nick Wilholm,” Tim said. “He’s visiting our fair village from God knows where. Jumped off the ’56 and ran full-tilt-boogie into a signal-post. Nick, this is Annie Ledoux.”

“Very pleased to meet you,” Luke said.

“Thank you, son, same goes back. Was it the signal-post that ripped off half his ear, Tim?”

“I don’t believe so,” Tim said. “I was hoping to get that story.”

“Were you waiting for the train to come in?” the boy asked her. He seemed fixated on that. Maybe because he’d had his bell rung pretty hard, maybe for some other reason.

“I’m waiting for nothing but the return of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” Annie said. She glanced around. “Mr. Jackson has naughty pictures on his wall. I can’t say I’m surprised.” Can’t came out cain’t.

Just then an olive-skinned man wearing biballs over a white shirt and dark tie came into the room. A railroader’s pillowtick cap was perched on his head. “Hello, Hector,” Tim said.

“Hello to you,” Hector said. He glanced at the bloody boy sitting in Craig Jackson’s easy chair, not showing much interest, then returned his attention to Tim. “My secondman tells me I have a couple of generators for you, a bunch of lawn tractors and such, about a ton of canned goods, and another ton of fresh produce. I am running late, Timmy my boy, and if you don’t unload me, you can send the fleet of trucks this town doesn’t have to pick up your goods in Brunswick.”

Tim stood up. “Annie, can you keep this young man company until the doctor gets here? I have to go run a forklift for awhile.”

“I can handle that. If he pitches a fit I’ll put something in his mouth.”

“I’m not going to pitch a fit,” the boy said.

“That’s what they all say,” Annie retorted, rather obscurely.

“Son,” Hector said, “did you stow away on my train?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”

“Well, since you’re off it now that’s nothing to me. The cops’ll deal with you, I guess. Tim, I see you got a situation here, but goods won’t wait, so help a man out. Where’s your goddam crew? I only seen one guy, and he’s in the office on the phone.”

“That’s Hollister from the local motel, and I can’t see him unloading anything. Except maybe for his bowels, first thing in the morning.”

“Nasty,” Orphan Annie said, although she might have been referring to the gatefolds, which she was still studying.

“The Beeman boys are supposed to be here, but those two no-accounts seem to be running late. Like you.”

“Ah, Christ.” Hector took off his cap and ran a hand through his thick black hair. “I hate these milk-runs. Unloading went slow in Wilmington, too. A goddam Lexus got stuck on one of the carriers. Well, let’s see what we can do.”

Tim followed Hector to the door, then turned back. “Your name isn’t Nick, is it?”

The boy considered, then said, “It will do for now.”

“Don’t let him move,” Tim said to Annie. “If he tries, give me a holler.” And to the bloody boy, who looked very small and badly used: “We’re going to discuss this when I get back. That work for you?”

The kid thought it over, then gave a tired nod. “I guess it has to.”

2

When the men were gone, Orphan Annie found a couple of clean rags in a basket under the sink. After wetting them with cold water, she wrung one out tight and the other loose. She handed him the tight one. “Put that on your ear.”

Luke did so. It stung. She used the other to clean the blood from his face, working with a gentleness that made him think of his mother. Annie stopped what she was doing and asked him—with equal gentleness—why he was crying.

“I miss my mom.”

“Why, now, I bet she misses you, too.”

“Not unless consciousness somehow continues after death. I’d like to believe it, but empirical evidence suggests that’s not the case.”

“Continues? Oh, it surely does.” Annie went to the sink and began rinsing blood from the rag she’d been using. “Some say that souls gone on take no interest in the earthly sphere, nummore than we care about the goings-ons of ants in anthills, but I ain’t one of those some. I believe they pay attention. I’m sorry she’s passed, son.”

“Do you think their love continues?” The idea was silly, he knew that, but it was good silly.

“Sure. Love don’t die with the earthly body, son. It’s a purely ridiculous notion. How long since she went on?”

“Maybe a month, maybe six weeks. I’ve pretty much lost track of time. They were murdered, and I was kidnapped. I know that’s hard to believe—”

Annie went to work on the rest of the blood. “Not hard if you’re in the know.” She tapped her temple below the brim of her sombrero. “Did they come in black cars?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“And were they doing experiments on you?”

Luke’s mouth dropped open. “How did you know that?”

“George Allman,” she said. “He’s on WMDK from midnight until four in the morning. His show is about walk-ins, and UFOs, and psychic powers.”

“Psychic powers? Really?”

“Yes, and the conspiracy. Do you know about the conspiracy, son?”

“Sort of,” Luke said.

“George Allman’s show is called The Outsiders. People call in, but mostly it’s just him talking. He doesn’t say it’s aliens, or the government, or the government working with aliens, he’s careful because he doesn’t want to disappear or get shot like Jack and Bobby, but he talks about the black cars all the time, and the experiments. Things that would turn your hair white. Did you know that Son of Sam was a walk-in? No? Well, he was. Then the devil that was inside him walked back out, leaving only a shell. Raise your head, son, that blood’s all down your neck, and if it dries before I can get it, I’ll have to scrub.”

3

The Beeman boys, a pair of great hulking teenagers from the trailer park south of town, showed up at quarter past noon, well into what was usually Tim’s lunch hour. By then most of the stuff for Fromie’s Small Engine Sales and Service was on the cracked concrete of the station tarmac. If it had been up to Tim, he would have fired the Beemans on the spot, but they were related to Mr. Jackson in some complicated southern way, so that wasn’t an option. Besides, he needed them.

Del Beeman got the big truck with the stake sides backed up to the door of the Carolina Produce boxcar by twelve-thirty, and they began loading in crates of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and summer squash. Hector and his secondman, interested not in fresh veggies but only in getting the hell out of South Carolina, pitched in. Norb Hollister stood in the shade of the depot overhang, doing some heavy looking-on but nothing else. Tim found the man’s continued presence a trifle peculiar—he’d shown no interest in the arrivals and departures of the trains before—but was too busy to consider it.

An old Ford station wagon pulled into the station’s small parking lot at ten to one, just as Tim was forklifting the last crates of produce into the back of the truck that would deliver them to the DuPray Grocery… assuming that Phil Beeman got it there all right. It was less than a mile, but this morning Phil’s speech was slow and his eyes were as red as those of a small animal trying to stay ahead of a brushfire. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce he’d been indulging in a bit of wacky tobacky. He and his brother both.

Doc Roper got out of his station wagon. Tim tipped him a wave and pointed to the warehouse where Mr. Jackson kept his office/apartment. Roper waved back and headed in that direction. He was old-school, almost a caricature; the kind of doctor who still survives in a thousand poor-ass rural areas where the nearest hospital is forty or fifty miles away, Obamacare is looked upon as a libtard blasphemy, and a trip to Walmart is considered an occasion. He was overweight and over sixty, a hardshell Baptist who carried a Bible as well as a stethoscope in a black bag which had been handed down, father to son, for three generations.

“What’s with that kid?” the train’s secondman asked, using a bandanna to mop his forehead.

“I don’t know,” Tim said, “but I intend to find out. Go on, you guys, rev it up and go. Unless you want to leave me one of those Lexuses, Hector. Happy to roll it off myself if you do.”

“Chupa mi polla,” Hector said. Then he shook Tim’s hand and headed back to his engine, hoping to make up time between DuPray and Brunswick.

4

Stackhouse intended to make the trip on the Challenger with the two extraction teams, but Mrs. Sigsby overruled him. She could do that because she was the boss. Nevertheless, Stackhouse’s expression of dismay at this idea bordered on insulting.

“Wipe that look off your face,” she said. “Whose head do you think will roll if this goes pear-shaped?”

“Both of our heads, and it won’t stop with us.”

“Yes, but whose will come off first and roll the farthest?”

“Julia, this is a field operation, and you’ve never been in the field before.”

“I’ll have both Ruby and Opal teams with me, four good men and three tough women. We’ll also have Tony Fizzale, who’s ex-Marines, Dr. Evans, and Winona Briggs. She’s ex-Army, and has some triage skills. Denny Williams will be in charge once the operation begins, but I intend to be there, and I intend to write my report from a ground-level perspective.” She paused. “If there needs to be a report, that is, and I’m starting to believe there will be no way to avoid it.” She glanced at her watch. Twelve-thirty. “No more discussion. We need to get this on wheels. You run the place, and if all goes well, I’ll be back here by two tomorrow morning.”

He walked with her out the door and down to the gated dirt road that eventually led to two-lane blacktop three miles east. The day was hot. Crickets sang in the thick woods through which the fucking kid had somehow found his way. A Ford Windstar soccer-mom van was idling in front of the gate, with Robin Lecks behind the wheel. Michelle Robertson was sitting beside her. Both women wore jeans and black tee-shirts.

“From here to Presque Isle,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Ninety minutes. From Presque Isle to Erie, Pennsylvania, another seventy minutes. We pick up Opal Team there. From Erie to Alcolu, South Carolina, two hours, give or take. If all goes well, we’ll be in DuPray by seven this evening.”

“Stay in touch, and remember that Williams is in charge once you go hot. Not you.”

“I will.”

“Julia, I really think this is a mistake. It ought to be me.”

She faced him. “Say it again, and I’ll haul off on you.” She walked to the van. Denny Williams unrolled the side door for her. Mrs. Sigsby started to get in, then turned to Stackhouse. “And make sure Avery Dixon is well dunked and in Back Half by the time I return.”

“Donkey Kong doesn’t like the idea.”

She gave him a terrifying smile. “Do I look like I care?”

5

Tim watched the train pull out, then returned to the shade of the depot’s overhang. His shirt was soaked with sweat. He was surprised to see Norbert Hollister still standing there. As usual, he was wearing his paisley vest and dirty khakis, today cinched with a braided belt just below his breastbone. Tim wondered (and not for the first time) how he could wear pants that high and not squash the hell out of his balls.

“What are you still doing here, Norbert?”

Hollister shrugged and smiled, revealing teeth Tim could have done without viewing before lunch. “Just passing the time. Afternoons ain’t exactly busy back at the old ranchero.”

As if mornings or evenings were, Tim thought. “Well, why don’t you put an egg in your shoe and beat it?”

Norbert pulled a pouch of Red Man from his back pocket and stuffed some in his mouth. It went a long way, Tim thought, to explaining the color of his teeth. “Who died and made you Pope?”

“I guess that sounded like a request,” Tim said. “It wasn’t. Go.”

“Fine, fine, I can take a hint. You have a good day, Mr. Night Knocker.”

Norbert ambled off. Tim looked after him, frowning. He sometimes saw Hollister in Bev’s Eatery, or down at Zoney’s, buying boiled peanuts or a hardboiled egg out of the jar on the counter, but otherwise he rarely left his motel office, where he watched sports and porn on his satellite TV. Which, unlike the ones in the rooms, worked.

Orphan Annie was waiting for Tim in Mr. Jackson’s outer office, sitting behind the desk and thumbing through the papers in Jackson’s IN/OUT basket.

“That’s not your business, Annie,” Tim said mildly. “And if you mess that stuff up, I’ll be the one in trouble.”

“Nothing in’dresting, anyway,” she said. “Just invoices and schedules and such. Although he does have a meal punch-card for that topless café down Hardeeville. Two more punches and he gets a free buffet lunch. Although eating lunch while looking at some woman’s snatchola… brrr.”

Tim had never thought of it that way, and now that he had, wished he hadn’t. “The doc’s in with the kid?”

“Yeah. I stopped the bleeding, but he’ll have to wear his hair long from now on because that ear is never gonna look the same. Now listen to me. That boy’s parents were murdered and he was kidnapped.”

“Part of the conspiracy?” He and Annie had had many conversations about the conspiracy on his night-knocker rounds.

“That’s right. They came for him in the black cars, count on it, and if they trace him to here, they’ll come for him here.”

“Noted,” he said, “and I’ll be sure to discuss it with Sheriff John. Thanks for cleaning him up and watching him, but now I think you better head out.”

She got up and shook out her serape. “That’s right, you tell Sheriff John. You-all need to be on your guard. They’re apt to come locked and loaded. There’s a town in Maine, Jerusalem’s Lot, and you could ask the people who lived there about the men in the black cars. If you could find any people, that is. They all disappeared forty or more years ago. George Allman talks about that town all the time.”

“Got it.”

She went to the door, serape swishing, then turned. “You don’t believe me, and I ain’t a bit surprised. Why would I be? I been the town weirdo for years before you came, and if the Lord doesn’t take me, I’ll be the town weirdo years after you’re gone.”

“Annie, I never—”

“Hush.” She stared at him fiercely from beneath her sombrero. “It’s all right. But pay attention, now. I’m telling you… but he told me. That boy. So that’s two of us, all right? And you remember what I said. They come in black cars.”

6

Doc Roper was putting the few tools of examination he’d used back into his bag. The boy was still sitting in Mr. Jackson’s easy chair. His face had been cleaned of blood and his ear was bandaged. He was raising a good bruise down the right side of his face from his argument with the signal-post, but his eyes were clear and alert. The doc had found a bottle of ginger ale in the little fridge, and the boy was making short work of it.

“Sit there easy, young man,” Roper said. He snapped his bag shut and walked over to Tim, who was standing just inside the door to the outer office.

“Is he okay?” Tim asked, keeping his voice low.

“He’s dehydrated, and he’s hungry, hasn’t had much to eat in quite awhile, but otherwise he seems fine to me. Kids his age bounce back from worse. He says he’s twelve, he says his name is Nick Wilholm, and he says he got on that train where it started, way up in northern Maine. I ask him what he was doing there, he says he can’t tell me. I ask him for his address, he says he can’t remember. Plausible, a hard knock on the head can cause temporary disorientation and scramble memory, but I’ve been around the block a few times, and I can tell the difference between amnesia and reticence, especially in a kid. He’s hiding something. Maybe a lot.”

“Okay.”

“My advice? Promise to feed him a big old meal at the café, and you’ll get the whole story.”

“Thanks, Doc. Send me the bill.”

Roper waved this away. “You buy me a big old meal someplace classier than Bev’s, and we’ll call it square.” In the doc’s thick Dixie accent, square came out squarr. “And when you get his story, I want to hear it.”

When he was gone, Tim closed the door so it was just him and the boy, and took his cell phone from his pocket. He called Bill Wicklow, the deputy who was scheduled to take over the night knocker’s job after Christmas. The boy watched him closely, finishing the last of his cold drink.

“Bill? This is Tim. Yeah, fine. Just wondering if you’d like a little dry run on the night-knocking job tonight. This is usually my time to sleep, but something’s come up down at the trainyard.” He listened. “Excellent. I owe you one. I’ll leave the time clock at the cop-shop. Don’t forget you have to wind it up. And thanks.”

He ended the call and studied the boy. The bruises on his face would bloom, then fade in a week or two. The look in his eyes might take longer. “You feeling better? Headache going away?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Never mind the sir, you can call me Tim. Now what do I call you? What’s your real name?”

After a brief hesitation, Luke told him.

7

The poorly lit tunnel between Front Half and Back Half was chilly, and Avery began to shiver immediately. He still had on the clothes he’d been wearing when Zeke and Carlos had hauled his small unconscious body out of the immersion tank, and he was soaked. His teeth began to chatter. Still, he held onto what he had learned. It was important. Everything was important now.

“Stop with the teeth,” Gladys said. “That’s a disgusting sound.” She was pushing him in a wheelchair, her smile nowhere in evidence. Word of what this little shit had done was everywhere now, and like all the other Institute employees, she was terrified and would remain so until Luke Ellis was hauled back and they could all breathe a sigh of relief.

“I c-c-c-can’t h-h-help ih-it,” Avery said. “I’m so c-c-cold.”

“Do you think I give a shit?” Gladys’s raised voice echoed back from the tile walls. “Do you have any idea of what you did? Do you have any idea?”

Avery did. In fact, he had many ideas, some of them Gladys’s (her fear was like a rat running on a wheel in the middle of her head), some of them entirely his own.

Once they were through the door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, it was a little warmer, and in the tatty lounge where Dr. James was waiting for them (her white lab coat misbuttoned, her hair in disarray, a big goofy smile on her face), it was warmer still.

Avery’s shivering slowed, then ceased, but the colored Stasi Lights came back. That was all right, because he could make them go away any time he wanted. Zeke had nearly killed him in that tank, in fact before Avery passed out he thought he was dead, but the tank had also done something to him. He understood that it did stuff to some of the other kids who went into it, but he thought this was something more. TK as well as TP was the least of it. Gladys was terrified of what might happen because of Luke, but Avery had an idea that he, Avery, could terrify her of him, if he wanted.

But this wasn’t the time.

“Hello, young man!” Dr. James cried. She sounded like a politician on a TV ad, and her thoughts were flying around like scraps of paper caught in a strong wind.

Something is really, really wrong with her, Avery thought. It’s like radiation poisoning, only in her brain instead of her bones.

“Hello,” Avery said.

Dr. Jeckle threw back her head and laughed as if Hello were the punchline of the funniest joke she’d ever heard. “We weren’t expecting you so soon, but welcome, welcome! Some of your friends are here!”

I know, Avery thought, and I can’t wait to see them. And I think they’ll be glad to see me.

“First, though, we need to get you out of those wet clothes.” She gave Gladys a reproachful look, but Gladys was busy scratching at her arms, trying to get rid of the buzz running over her skin (or just under it). Good luck with that, Avery thought. “I’ll have Henry take you to your room. We have nice caretakers here. Can you walk on your own?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Jeckle did some more laughing, head back and throat working. Avery got out of the wheelchair, and gave Gladys a long, measuring look. She stopped scratching and now she was the one who shivered. Not because she was wet, and not because she was cold. It was because of him. She felt him, and she didn’t like it.

But Avery did. It was sort of beautiful.

8

Because there was no other chair in Mr. Jackson’s living room, Tim brought one in from the outer office. He considered putting it in front of the boy, then decided that would be too much like the set-up in a police interrogation room. He slid it beside the La-Z-Boy instead, sitting next to the boy the way you’d sit with a friend, maybe to watch a favorite TV show. Only Mr. Jackson’s flatscreen was blank.

“Now, Luke,” he said. “According to Annie, you were kidnapped, but Annie isn’t always… completely on the beam, let’s say.”

“She’s on the beam about that,” Luke said.

“Okay, then. Kidnapped from where?”

“Minneapolis. They knocked me out. And they killed my parents.” He swiped a hand across his eyes.

“These kidnappers took you from Minneapolis to Maine. How did they do that?”

“I don’t know. I was unconscious. Probably in a plane. I really am from Minneapolis. You can check that out, all you have to do is call my school. It’s called the Broderick School for Exceptional Children.”

“Which would make you a bright boy, I’m assuming.”

“Oh, sure,” Luke said, with no pride in his voice. “I’m a bright boy. And right now I’m a very hungry boy. I haven’t had anything for a couple of days but a sausage biscuit and a fruit pie. I think a couple of days. I’ve kind of lost track of time. A man named Mattie gave them to me.”

“Nothing else?”

“A piece of doughnut,” Luke said. “It wasn’t very big.”

“Jesus, let’s get you something to eat.”

“Yes,” Luke said, then added, “Please.”

Tim took his cell phone from his pocket. “Wendy? This is Tim. I wonder if you could do me a favor.”

9

Avery’s room in Back Half was stark. The bed was your basic cot. There were no Nickelodeon posters on the walls, and no G.I. Joes on the bureau to play with. That was okay with Avery. He was only ten, but now he had to be a grownup, and grownups didn’t play with toy soldiers.

Only I can’t do it alone, he thought.

He remembered Christmas, the year before. It hurt to think about that, but he thought about it, anyway. He had gotten the Lego castle he’d asked for, but when the pieces were spread out before him, he didn’t know how to get from that scatter to the beautiful castle on the box, with its turrets and gates and the drawbridge that went up and down. He’d started to cry. Then his father (dead now, he was sure of it) knelt down beside him and said, We’ll follow the instructions and do it together. One step at a time. And they had. The castle had stayed on his bureau in his room with his G.I. Joes guarding it, and that castle was one thing they hadn’t been able to duplicate when he woke up in Front Half.

Now he lay on the cot in this barren room, dressed in dry clothes, thinking of how fine the castle had looked when it was done. And feeling the hum. It was constant here in Back Half. Loud in the rooms, louder in the halls, loudest of all down past the cafeteria, where a double-locked door beyond the caretakers’ break room led to the back half of Back Half. The caretakers often called that part Gorky Park, because the kids who lived there (if you could call it living) were gorks. Hummers. But they were useful, Avery supposed. The way the wrapper your Hershey bar came in was useful, until you licked it clean. Then you could throw it away.

The doors here had locks. Avery concentrated, trying to turn his. Not that there was anywhere to go except for the hallway with its blue carpet, but it was an interesting experiment. He could feel the lock trying to turn, but he couldn’t quite manage it. He wondered if George Iles would be able to, because George had been a strong TK-pos to begin with. Avery guessed he could, with a little help. He thought again about what his father had said: We’ll do it together. One step at a time.

At five o’clock, the door opened and a red-clad caretaker poked his unsmiling face in. They didn’t wear nametags here, but Avery didn’t need a nametag. This was Jacob, known to his colleagues as Jake the Snake. He was ex-Navy. You tried to be a SEAL, Avery thought, but you couldn’t make it. They kicked you out. I think maybe you liked hurting people too much.

“Dinner,” Jake the Snake said. “If you want it, come on. If you don’t, I’ll lock you in until movie time.”

“I want it.”

“All right. You like movies, kiddo?”

“Yes,” Avery said, and thought, But I won’t like these. These movies kill people.

“You’ll like these,” Jake said. “There’s always a cartoon to start with. Caff’s right down there on your left. And quit lollygagging.” Jake gave him a hefty swat on the ass to get him going.

In the cafeteria—a dreary room painted the same dark green as the residence corridor in Front Half—about a dozen kids sat eating what smelled to Avery like Dinty Moore Beef Stew. His mom served it at least twice a week back home, because his little sister liked it. She was probably dead, too. Most of the kids looked like zombies, and there was a lot of slobbering. He saw one kid, a girl, who was smoking a cigarette as she ate. As Avery watched, she tapped ash into her bowl, looked around vacantly, and began eating from it again.

He had felt Kalisha even down in the tunnel and now he saw her, sitting at a table near the back. He had to restrain an urge to run to her and throw his arms around her neck. That would attract attention, and Avery didn’t want to do that. Just the opposite. Helen Simms was sitting next to Sha, hands lying limply on either side of her bowl. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling. Her hair, so razzily colored when she showed up in Front Half, was now dull and dank, hanging around her face—her much thinner face—in clumps. Kalisha was feeding her, or trying to.

“Come on, Hel, come on, Hell on Wheels, here we go.” Sha got a spoonful of the stew into Helen’s mouth. When a brown lump of mystery meat tried to come out over Helen’s lower lip, Sha used the spoon to push it back in. This time Helen swallowed, and Sha smiled. “That’s right, good.”

Sha, Avery thought. Hey, Kalisha.

She looked around, startled, saw him, and broke into a broad smile.

Avester!

A drool of brown gravy ran down Helen’s chin. Nicky, sitting on her other side, used a paper napkin to wipe it off. Then he also saw Avery, grinned, and gave him a thumbs-up. George, sitting directly across from Nicky, turned around.

“Hey, check it out, it’s the Avester,” George said. “Sha thought you might be coming. Welcome to our happy home, little hero.”

“If you’re gonna eat, get a bowl,” said a hard-faced older woman. Her name was Corinne, Avery knew, and she liked slapping. Slapping made her feel good. “I gotta shut down early, on account of it’s movie night.”

Avery got a bowl and ladled up some of the stew. Yes, it was Dinty Moore. He put a piece of spongy white bread on top of it, then took his meal over to his friends and sat down. Sha smiled at him. Her headache was bad today, but she smiled anyway, and that made him feel like laughing and crying at the same time.

“Eat up, buddy,” Nicky said, but he wasn’t taking his own advice; his bowl was still mostly full. His eyes were bloodshot, and he was rubbing at his left temple. “I know it looks like diarrhea, but you don’t want to go to the movies on an empty stomach.”

Have they caught Luke? Sha sent.

No. They’re all scared shitless.

Good. Good!

Will we get hurty shots before the movie?

I don’t think so tonight, this is still a new one, we’ve only seen it once.

George was looking at them with wise eyes. He had heard. Once upon a Front Half time George Iles had only been a TK, but now he was something more. They all were. Back Half increased whatever you had, but thanks to the immersion tank, none of them were like Avery. He knew stuff. The tests in Front Half, for example. A lot of them were side projects of Dr. Hendricks, but the injections were matters of practicality. Some of them were limiters, and Avery hadn’t had those. He had gone straight to the immersion tank, where he had been taken to death’s door or maybe right through it, and as a result he could make the Stasi Lights almost any time he wanted to. He didn’t need the movies, and he didn’t need to be part of the group-think. Creating that group-think was Back Half’s main job.

But he was still only ten. Which was a problem.

As he began to eat, he probed for Helen, and was delighted to discover she was still in there. He liked Helen. She wasn’t like that bitch Frieda. He didn’t need to read Frieda’s mind to know she had tricked him into telling her stuff, then snitched on him; who else could it have been?

Helen?

No. Don’t talk to me, Avery. I have to…

The rest was gone, but Avery thought he understood. She had to hide. There was a sponge filled with pain inside her head, and she was hiding from it as best she could. Hiding from pain was a sensible response, as far as it went. The problem was how the sponge kept swelling. It would keep on until there was nowhere to hide, and then it would squash her against the back of her own skull like a fly on a wall. Then she’d be done. As Helen, at least.

Avery reached into her mind. It was easier than trying to turn the lock on the door of his room, because he’d been a powerful TP to begin with, and TK was new to him. He was clumsy and had to be careful. He couldn’t fix her, but he thought he could ease her. Shield her a bit. That would be good for her, and it would be good for them… because they were going to need all the help they could get.

He found the headache-sponge deep inside Helen’s head. He told it to stop spreading. He told it to go away. It didn’t want to. He pushed it. The colored lights started to appear in front of him, swirling slowly, like cream into coffee. He pushed harder. The sponge was pliable but firm.

Kalisha. Help me.

With what? What are you doing?

He told her. She came in, tentatively at first. They pushed together. The headache-sponge gave a little.

George, Avery sent. Nicky. Help us.

Nicky was able to, a little. George looked puzzled at first, then joined in, but after a moment he backed out again. “I can’t,” he whispered. “It’s dark.”

Never mind the dark! That was Sha. I think we can help!

George came back. He was reluctant, and he wasn’t much help, but at least he was with them.

It’s only a sponge, Avery told them. He could no longer see his bowl of stew. It had been replaced by the heartbeat swirl of the Stasi Lights. It can’t hurt you. Push it! All together!

They tried, and something happened. Helen looked down from the ceiling. She looked at Avery instead.

“Look who’s here,” she said in a rusty voice. “My headache’s a little better. Thank God.” She began to eat on her own.

“Holy shit,” George said. “That was us.”

Nick was grinning and holding up a hand. “Five, Avery.”

Avery slapped him five, but any good feeling left with the dots. Helen’s headache would come back, and it would worsen each time she watched the movies. Helen’s would, Sha’s would, Nicky’s would. His would, too. Eventually all of them would join the hum emanating from Gorky Park.

But maybe… if they were all together, in their own group-think… and if there was a way to make a shield…

Sha.

She looked at him. She listened. Nicky and George also listened, at least as well as they could. It was like they were partially deaf. But Sha heard. She ate a bite of stew, then put her spoon down and shook her head.

We can’t escape, Avery. If that’s what you’re thinking, forget it.

I know we can’t. But we have to do something. We have to help Luke, and we have to help ourselves. I see the pieces, but I don’t know how to put them together. I don’t…

“You don’t know how to build the castle,” Nicky said in a low, musing voice. Helen had stopped eating again, and had resumed her inspection of the ceiling. The headache-sponge was growing again already, swelling as it gorged on her mind. Nicky helped her to another bite.

“Cigarettes!” one of the caretakers was shouting. He held up a box. Smokes were free back here, it seemed. Encouraged, even. “Who wants a cigarette before the show?”

We can’t escape, Avery sent, so help me build a castle. A wall. A shield. Our castle. Our wall. Our shield.

He looked from Sha to Nicky to George and back to Sha again, pleading for her to understand. Her eyes brightened.

She gets it, Avery thought. Thank God, she gets it.

She started to speak, but closed her mouth again as the caretaker—his name was Clint—passed them by, bawling, “Cigarettes! Who wants one before the show?”

When he was gone, she said, “If we can’t escape, we have to take the place over.”

10

Deputy Wendy Gullickson’s original frosty attitude toward Tim had warmed considerably since their first date at the Mexican restaurant in Hardeeville. They were now an acknowledged couple, and when she came into Mr. Jackson’s back room apartment with a large paper bag, she kissed him first on the cheek and then quickly on the mouth.

“This is Deputy Gullickson,” Tim said, “but you can call her Wendy, if that’s okay with her.”

“It is,” Wendy said. “What’s your name?”

Luke looked to Tim, who gave him a slight nod.

“Luke Ellis.”

“Pleased to meet you, Luke. That’s quite a bruise you’ve got there.”

“Yes, ma’am. Ran into something.”

“Yes, Wendy. And the bandage over your ear? Did you cut yourself, as well?”

That made him smile a little, because it was the stone truth. “Something like that.”

“Tim said you might be hungry, so I grabbed some take-out from the restaurant on Main Street. I’ve got Co’-Cola, chicken, burgers, and fries. What do you want?”

“All of it,” Luke said, which made Wendy and Tim laugh.

They watched him eat two drumsticks, then a hamburger and most of the fries, finally a good-sized go-cup of rice pudding. Tim, who had missed his lunch, ate the rest of the chicken and drank a Coke.

“All right now?” Tim asked when the food was gone.

Instead of speaking, Luke burst into tears.

Wendy hugged him and stroked his hair, working some of the tangles out with her fingers. When Luke’s sobs finally eased, Tim squatted beside him.

“Sorry,” Luke said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“That’s okay. You’re allowed.”

“It’s because I feel alive again. I don’t know why that would make me cry, but it did.”

“I think it’s called relief,” Wendy said.

“Luke claims his parents were murdered and he was kidnapped,” Luke said. Wendy’s eyes widened.

“It’s not a claim!” Luke said, sitting forward in Mr. Jackson’s easy chair. “It’s the truth!”

“Bad word choice, maybe. Let’s have your story, Luke.”

Luke considered this, then said, “Will you do something for me first?”

“If I can,” Tim said.

“Look outside. See if that other guy is still there.”

“Norbert Hollister?” Tim smiled. “I told him to scram. By now he’s probably down at the Go-Mart, buying lottery tickets. He’s convinced he’s going to be South Carolina’s next millionaire.”

“Just check.”

Tim looked at Wendy, who shrugged and said, “I’ll do it.”

She came back a minute later, frowning. “As a matter of fact, he’s sitting in a rocking chair over at the depot. Reading a magazine.”

“I think he’s an uncle,” Luke said in a low voice. “I had uncles in Richmond and Wilmington. Maybe in Sturbridge, too. I never knew I had so many uncles.” He laughed. It was a metallic sound.

Tim got up and went to the door just in time to see Norbert Hollister rise and amble away in the direction of his going-to-seed motel. He didn’t look back. Tim returned to Luke and Wendy.

“He’s gone, son.”

“Maybe to call them,” Luke said. He poked at his empty Coke can. “I won’t let them take me back. I thought I was going to die there.”

“Where?” Tim asked.

“The Institute.”

“Start at the beginning and tell us everything,” Wendy said.

Luke did.

11

When he was finished—it took almost half an hour, and Luke consumed a second Coke during the telling—there was a moment of silence. Then Tim said, very quietly, “It’s not possible. Just to begin with, that many abductions would raise red flags.”

Wendy shook her head at that. “You were a cop. You should know better. There was a study a few years back that said over half a million kids go missing each year in the United States. Pretty staggering figure, wouldn’t you say?”

“I know the numbers are high, there were almost five hundred missing kids reported in Sarasota County the last year I was on the cops there, but the majority—the great majority—are kids who come back on their own.” Tim was thinking of Robert and Roland Bilson, the twins he’d spotted on their way to the Dunning Agricultural Fair in the wee hours of the morning.

“That still leaves thousands,” she said. “Tens of thousands.”

“Agreed, but how many of those disappear leaving murdered parents behind?”

“No idea. I doubt if anyone’s done a study.” She turned her attention back to Luke, who had been following their conversation with his eyes, as if watching a tennis match. His hand was in his pocket, touching the thumb drive as if it were a lucky rabbit’s foot.

“Sometimes,” he said, “they probably make it look like accidents.”

Tim had a sudden vision of this boy living with Orphan Annie in her tent, the two of them listening to that late-night kook of hers on the radio. Talking about the conspiracy. Talking about they.

“You say you cut your earlobe off because there was a tracking device in it,” Wendy said. “Is that really the truth, Luke?”

“Yes.”

Wendy didn’t seem to know where to take it from there. The expression she looked at Tim said Over to you.

Tim picked up Luke’s empty Coke can and dropped it into the take-out bag, which now contained nothing but wrappers and chicken bones. “You’re talking about a secret installation running a secret program on domestic soil, one that stretches back God knows how many years. Once upon a time that might have been possible, I suppose—theoretically—but not in the age of the computer. The government’s biggest secrets get dumped onto the Internet by this rogue outfit called—”

“WikiLeaks, I know about WikiLeaks.” Luke sounded impatient. “I know how hard it is to keep secrets, and I know how crazy this sounds. On the other hand, the Germans had concentration camps during World War II where they managed to kill seven million Jews. Also gypsies and gays.”

“But the people around those camps knew what was going on,” Wendy said. She tried to take his hand.

Luke took it back. “And I’d bet a million bucks the people in Dennison River Bend, that’s the closest town, know something’s going on. Something bad. Not what, because they don’t want to know. Why would they? It keeps them going, and besides, who’d believe it, anyway? You’ve still got people today who don’t believe the Germans killed all those Jews, as far as that goes. It’s called denial.”

Yes, Tim thought, the boy is bright. His cover story for whatever really happened to him is loony, but he does have a ton of brains.

“I want to be sure I have this straight,” Wendy said. She was speaking gently. They both were. Luke got it. You didn’t have to be a child fucking prodigy to know this was how people talked to someone who was mentally unbalanced. He was disappointed but not surprised. What else could he have expected? “They somehow find kids who are telepaths and what you call teleki-something—”

“Telekinetics. TK. Usually the talents are small—even TK-pos kids don’t have much. But the Institute doctors make them stronger. Shots for dots, that’s what they say, what we all say, only the dots are really the Stasi Lights I told you about. The shots that bring on the lights are supposed to boost what we have. I think some of the others might be to make us last longer. Or…” Here was something he just thought of. “Or to keep us from getting too much. Which could make us dangerous to them.”

“Like vaccinations?” Tim asked.

“I guess you could say that, yeah.”

“Before you were taken, you could move objects with your mind,” Tim said in his gentle I’m-talking-to-a-lunatic voice.

“Small objects.”

“And since this near-death experience in the immersion tank, you can also read thoughts.”

“Even before. The tank… boosted it higher. But I’m still not…” He massaged the back of his neck. This was hard to explain, and their voices, so low and so calm, were getting on his nerves, which were already raw. Soon he would be as nuts as they thought he was. Still, he had to try. “But I’m still not very strong. None of us are, except maybe for Avery. He’s awesome.”

Tim said, “Let me make sure I have this straight. They kidnap kids who have weak psychic powers, feed them mental steroids, then get them to kill people. Like that politician who was planning to run for president. Mark Berkowitz.”

“Yes.”

“Why not Bin Laden?” Wendy asked. “I would have thought he’d be a natural target for this… this mental assassination.”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. He sounded exhausted. The bruise on his cheek seemed to be growing more colorful by the minute. “I don’t have a clue how they pick their targets. I talked about it one time with my friend Kalisha. She didn’t have any idea, either.”

“Why wouldn’t this mystery organization just use hit men? Wouldn’t that be simpler?”

“It looks simple in the movies,” Luke said. “In real life I think they mostly fail, or get caught. Like the guys who killed Bin Laden almost got caught.”

“Let’s have a demonstration,” Tim said. “I’m thinking of a number. Tell me what it is.”

Luke tried. He concentrated and waited for the colored dots to appear, but they didn’t come. “I can’t get it.”

“Move something, then. Isn’t that your basic talent, the one they grabbed you for?”

Wendy shook her head. Tim was no telepath, but he knew what she was thinking: Stop badgering him, he’s disturbed and disoriented and on the run. But Tim thought if he could break through the kid’s cockamamie story, maybe they could get to something real and figure out where to go from there.

“How about the take-out bag? No food in it now, it’s light, you should be able to move it.”

Luke looked at it, his brow furrowing more deeply. For a moment Tim thought he felt something—a whisper along his skin, like a faint draft—but then it was gone, and the bag didn’t move. Of course it didn’t.

“Okay,” Wendy said, “I think that enough for n—”

“I know you two are boyfriend and girlfriend,” Luke said. “I know that much.”

Tim smiled. “Not too impressive, kiddo. You saw her kiss me when she came in.”

Luke turned his attention to Wendy. “You’re going on a trip. To see your sister, is it?”

Her eyes went wide. “How—”

“Don’t fall for it,” Tim said… but gently. “It’s an old medium’s trick—the educated guess. Although I’ll admit the kid does it well.”

“What education have I had about Wendy’s sister?” Luke asked, although without much hope. He had played his cards one by one, and now there was only one left. And he was so tired. What sleep he’d gotten on the train had been thin and haunted by bad dreams. Mostly of the immersion tank.

“Will you excuse us for a minute?” Tim asked. Without waiting for a reply, he took Wendy over to the door to the outer office. He spoke to her briefly. She nodded and left the room, taking her phone from her pocket as she went. Tim came back. “I think we better take you to the station.”

At first Luke thought he was talking about the train station. Putting him on another freight, so he and his girlfriend didn’t have to deal with the runaway kid and his crazy story. Then he realized that wasn’t the kind of station Tim meant.

Oh, so what? Luke thought. I always knew I’d end up in a police station somewhere. And maybe a small one is better than a big one, where they’d have a hundred different people—perps—to deal with.

Only they thought he was just being paranoid about that guy Hollister, and that wasn’t good. For now he’d have to hope they were right, and Hollister was nobody special. They probably were right. After all, the Institute couldn’t have guys everywhere, could they?

“Okay, but first I need to tell you something and show you something.”

“Go for it,” Tim said. He leaned forward, looking intently into Luke’s face. Maybe he was just humoring the crazy kid, but at least he was listening, and Luke supposed that was the best he could expect for now.

“If they know I’m here, they’ll come for me. Probably with guns. Because they’re scared to death someone might believe me.”

“Duly noted,” Tim said, “but we’ve got a pretty good little police force here, Luke. I think you’ll be safe.”

You have no idea what you might be up against, Luke thought, but he couldn’t try to convince this guy anymore just now. He was just too worn out. Wendy came back and gave Tim a nod. Luke was too beat to care about that, either.

“The woman who helped me escape from the Institute gave me two things. One was the knife I used to cut off the part of my ear that had the tracker in it. The other was this.” From his pocket he drew out the flash drive. “I don’t know what’s on it, but I think you should look at it before you do anything else.”

He handed it to Tim.

12

The residents of Back Half—the front half of Back Half, that was; the eighteen currently in Gorky Park remained behind their locked door, humming away—were given twenty minutes of free time before the movie started. Jimmy Cullum zombie-walked his aching head to his room; Hal, Donna, and Len sat in the cafeteria, the two boys staring at their half-eaten desserts (chocolate pudding tonight), Donna regarding a smoldering cigarette she seemed to have forgotten how to smoke.

Kalisha, Nick, George, Avery, and Helen went down to the lounge with its ugly thrift-store furniture and the old flatscreen, which showed only prehistoric sitcoms like Bewitched and Happy Days. Katie Givens was there. She didn’t look around at them, only at the currently blank TV. To Kalisha’s surprise, they were joined by Iris, who looked better than she had in days. Brighter.

Kalisha was thinking hard, and she could think, because she felt better than she had in days. What they had done to Helen’s headache—Avery, mostly, but they had all pitched in—had helped her own. The same was true of Nicky and George. She could see it.

Take the place over.

A bold and delicious idea, but questions immediately arose. The most obvious was how they were supposed to do it, when there were at least twelve caretakers on duty—there were always more on movie days. The second was why they had never thought of this before.

I did, Nicky told her… and was his mental voice stronger? She thought it was, and she thought Avery might have also played a part in that. Because he was stronger now. I thought about it when they first brought me here.

That was as much as Nicky could manage to tell her mind to mind, so he put his mouth to her ear and whispered the rest. “I was the one who always fought, remember?”

It was true. Nicky with his black eyes. Nicky with his bruised mouth.

“We’re not strong enough,” he murmured. “Even in here, even after the lights, we only have little powers.”

Avery, meanwhile, was looking at Kalisha with desperate hope. He was thinking into her head, but hardly needed to. His eyes said it all. Here are the pieces, Sha. I’m pretty sure all of them are here. Help me put them together. Help me build a castle where we can be safe, at least for awhile.

Sha thought of the old, faded Hillary Clinton sticker on the back bumper of her mom’s Subaru. It said STRONGER TOGETHER, and of course that was how it worked here in Back Half. That was why they watched the movies together. That was why they could reach across thousands of miles, sometimes even halfway around the world, to the people who were in the movies. If the five of them (make it six, if they could work on Iris’s headache the way they had worked on Helen’s) were able to create that united mental force, a kind of Vulcan mind meld, shouldn’t that be enough to mutiny and take Back Half over?

“It’s a great idea, but I don’t think so,” George said. He took her hand and gave it a brief squeeze. “We might be able to screw with their heads a little, maybe scare the hell out of them, but they’ve got those zap-sticks, and as soon as they jolted one or two of us, it would be game over.”

Kalisha didn’t want to admit it, but told him he was probably right.

Avery: One step at a time.

Iris said, “I can’t hear what you guys are thinking. I know you’re thinking something, but my head still hurts bad.”

Avery: Let’s see what we can do for her. All of us together.

Kalisha looked at Nick, who nodded. At George, who shrugged and also nodded.

Avery led them into Iris Stanhope’s head like an explorer leading his party into a cave. The sponge in her mind was very big. Avery saw it as blood-colored, so they all saw it that way. They ranged themselves around it and began to push. It gave a little… and a little more… but then it stopped, resisting their efforts. George backed out first, then Helen (who hadn’t had all that much to contribute, anyway), then Nick and Kalisha. Avery came last, dealing the headache-sponge a petulant mental kick before withdrawing.

“Any better, Iris?” Kalisha asked, without much hope.

“What’s better?” It was Katie Givens. She had drifted to join them.

“My headache,” Iris said. “And it is. A little, anyway.” She smiled at Katie, and for a moment the girl who had won the Abilene Spelling Bee was in the room.

Katie turned her attention back to the TV. “Where’s Richie Cunningham and the Fonz?” she asked, and began rubbing at her temples. “I wish mine was better, my headache hurts like poop.”

You see the problem, George thought to the others.

Kalisha did. They were stronger together, yes, but still not strong enough. No more than Hillary Clinton had been when she ran for president a few years back. Because the guy running against her, and his supporters, had had the political equivalent of the caretakers’ zap-sticks.

“It helped me, though,” Helen said. “My own headache is almost gone. It’s like a miracle.”

“Don’t worry,” Nicky said. Hearing him sound so defeated scared Kalisha. “It’ll be back.”

Corinne, the caretaker who liked to slap, came into the room. She had one hand on her holstered zap-stick, as if she had felt something. Probably did, Kalisha thought, but she doesn’t know what it was.

“Movie time,” she said. “Come on, kiddies, move your asses.”

13

Two caretakers, Jake and Phil (known respectively as the Snake and the Pill), were standing outside the screening room’s open doors, each holding a basket. As the kids filed in, those with cigarettes and matches (lighters weren’t allowed in Back Half ) deposited them in the baskets. They could have them back when the show was over… if they remembered to take them, that was. Hal, Donna, and Len sat in the back row, staring vacantly at the blank screen. Katie Givens sat in a middle row next to Jimmy Cullum, who was lackadaisically picking his nose.

Kalisha, Nick, George, Helen, Iris, and Avery sat down front.

“Welcome to another fun-filled evening,” Nicky said in a loud announcer’s voice. “This year’s feature, an Academy Award winner in the category of Shittiest Documentary—”

Phil the Pill slapped him across the back of the head. “Shut up, asshole, and enjoy the show.”

He retreated. The lights went down, and Dr. Hendricks appeared on the screen. Just seeing the unlit sparkler in his hand made Kalisha’s mouth dry up.

There was something she was missing. Some vital piece of Avery’s castle. But it wasn’t lost; she just wasn’t seeing it.

Stronger together, but not strong enough. Even if those poor almost-gorks like Jimmy and Hal and Donna were with us, we wouldn’t be. But we could be. On nights when the sparkler is lit, we are. When the sparkler is lit, we’re destroyers, so what am I missing?

“Welcome, boys and girls,” Dr. Hendricks was saying, “and thank you for helping us! Let’s begin with a few laughs, shall we? And I’ll see you later.” He wagged the unlit sparkler and actually winked. It made Kalisha feel like vomiting.

If we can reach all the way to the other side of the world, then why can’t we—

For a moment she almost had it, but then Katie gave a loud cry, not of pain or sorrow but of joy. “Road Runner! He’s the best!” She began to sing in a half-screaming falsetto that drilled into Kalisha’s brain. “Road Runner, Road Runner, the coyote’s after YOU! Road Runner, Road Runner, if he catches you you’re THROUGH!”

“Shut it, Kates,” George said, not unkindly, and as Road Runner went meep-meeping down a deserted desert highway, and as Wile E. Coyote looked at him and saw a Thanksgiving dinner, Kalisha felt whatever had almost been in her grasp float away.

When the cartoon was over and Wile E. Coyote had once more been vanquished, a guy in a suit came on the screen. He had a microphone in his hand. Kalisha thought he was a businessman, and maybe he was, sort of, but that wasn’t his main claim to fame. He was really a preacherman, because when the camera drew back you could see a big old cross behind him outlined in red neon, and when the camera panned away you could see an arena, or maybe it was a sports stadium, filled with thousands of people. They rose to their feet, some waving their hands back and forth in the air, some waving Bibles.

At first he did a regular sermon, citing chapters and verses from the Bible, but then he got off onto how the country was falling apart because of OPE-e-oids and for-ni-CAY-tion. Then it was politics, and judges, and how America was a shining city on a hill that the godless wanted to smirch with mud. He was starting about how sorcery had bewitched the people of Samaria (what that had to do with America was unclear to Kalisha), but then the colored dots came, flashing on and off. The hum rose and fell. Kalisha could even feel it in her nose, vibrating the tiny hairs in there.

When the dots cleared, they saw the preacherman getting on an airplane with a woman who was probably Mrs. Preacherman. The dots came back. The hum rose and fell. Kalisha heard Avery in her head, something that sounded like they see it.

Who sees it?

Avery didn’t answer, probably because he was getting into the movie. That was what the Stasi Lights did; they got you into it bigtime. Preacherman was hitting it again, hitting it hard, this time from the back of a flatbed truck, using a bullhorn. Signs said HOUSTON LOVES YOU and GOD GAVE NOAH THE RAINBOW SIGN and JOHN 3:16. Then the dots. And the hum. Several of the empty movie theater seats began to flap up and down by themselves, like unmoored shutters in a strong wind. The screening room doors flew open. Jake the Snake and Phil the Pill slammed them shut again, putting their shoulders into it.

Now the preacherman was in some kind of homeless shelter, wearing a cook’s apron and stirring a huge vat of spaghetti sauce. His wife was by his side, both of them grinning, and this time it was Nick in her head: Smile for the camera! Kalisha was vaguely aware that her hair was standing up, like in some kind of electrical experiment.

Dots. Hum.

Next, the preacherman was on a TV news show with some other people. One of the other people accused the preacherman of being… something… big words, college words she was sure Lukey would have understood… and the preachman was laughing like it was the biggest joke in the world. He had a great laugh. It made you want to laugh along. If you weren’t going crazy, that was.

Dots. Hum.

Each time the Stasi Lights came back, they seemed brighter, and each time they seemed to delve deeper into Kalisha’s head. In her current state, all the clips that made up the movie were fascinating. They had levers. When the time came—probably tomorrow night, maybe the next—the kids in Back Half would pull them.

“I hate this,” Helen said in a small, dismayed voice. “When will it be over?”

Preacherman was standing in front of a fancy mansion where a party seemed to be going on. Preacherman was in a motorcade. Preacherman was at an outdoor barbecue and there was red, white, and blue bunting on the buildings behind him. People were eating corndogs and big slices of pizza. He was preaching about perverting the natural order of things which God had ordained, but then his voice cut out and was replaced by that of Dr. Hendricks.

“This is Paul Westin, kids. His home is in Deerfield, Indiana. Paul Westin. Deerfield, Indiana. Paul Westin, Deerfield, Indiana. Say it with me, boys and girls.”

Partly because they had no choice, partly because it would bring a merciful end to the colored dots and the rising and falling of the hum, mostly because now they were really into it, the ten children in the screening room began to chant. Kalisha joined in. She didn’t know about the others, but for her, this was the absolute worst part of movie nights. She hated that it felt good. She hated that feeling of levers just waiting to be yanked. Begging for it! She felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy on that fucking doctor’s knee.

“Paul Westin, Deerfield, Indiana! Paul Westin, Deerfield, Indiana! PAUL WESTIN, DEERFIELD, INDIANA!”

Then Dr. Hendricks came back on the screen, smiling and holding the unlit sparkler. “That’s right. Paul Westin, Deerfield, Indiana. Thank you, kids, and have a good night. See you tomorrow!”

The Stasi Lights came back one final time, blinking and swirling and spiraling. Kalisha gritted her teeth and waited for them to be gone, feeling like a tiny space capsule hurtling into a storm of giant asteroids. The hum was louder than ever, but when the dots disappeared the hum cut off instantly, as if a plug had been pulled on an amplifier.

They see it, Avery had said. Was that the missing piece? If so, who was they?

The screening room lights came up. The doors opened, Jake the Snake on one and Phil the Pill on the other. Most of the kids walked out, but Donna, Len, Hal, and Jimmy sat where they were. Might sit there lolling in the comfortable seats until the caretakers came to shoo them back to their rooms, and one or two or maybe even all four might be in Gorky Park after the show tomorrow. The big show. Where they did whatever was supposed to be done to the preacherman.

They were allowed another half hour in the lounge before being locked in their rooms for the night. Kalisha went there. George, Nicky, and Avery followed. After a few minutes, Helen shuffled in and sat on the floor with an unlit cigarette in her hand and her once bright hair hanging in her face. Iris and Katie came last.

“Headache’s better,” Katie announced.

Yes, Kalisha thought, the headaches get better after the movies… but only for a little while. A shorter little while each time.

“Another fun night at the movies,” George muttered.

“All right, children, what have we learned?” Nicky asked. “That somebody somewhere don’t much care for the Reverend Paul Westin, of Deerfield, Indiana.”

Kalisha zipped a thumb across her lips and looked at the ceiling. Bugs, she thought at Nicky. Be careful.

Nick put a finger-gun to his head and pretended to shoot himself. It made the others smile. It would be different tomorrow, Kalisha knew. No smiles then. After tomorrow’s show, Dr. Hendricks would appear with his sparkler lit, and the hum would rise to a white-noise roar. Levers would be pulled. There would be a period of unknown length, both sublime and horrible, when their headaches would be banished completely. Instead of a clear fifteen or twenty minutes afterward, there might be six or eight hours of blessed relief. And somewhere, Paul Westin of Deerfield, Indiana, would do something that would change his life or end it. For the kids in Back Half, life would go on… if you could call it living. The headaches would come back, and worse. Worse each time. Until instead of just feeling the hum, they would become part of it. Just another one of the—

The gorks!

That was Avery. No one else could project with such clean strength. It was as if he were living inside her head. That’s how it works, Sha! Because they—

“They see it,” Kalisha whispered, and there it was, bingo, the missing piece. She put the heels of her hands against her forehead, not because the headache was back, but because it was so beautifully obvious. She grasped Avery’s small, bony shoulder.

The gorks see what we see. Why else would they keep them?

Nicky put his arm around Kalisha and whispered in her ear. The touch of his lips made her shiver. “What are you talking about? Their minds are gone. Like ours will be, before long.”

Avery: That’s what makes them stronger. Everything else is gone. Stripped away. They’re the battery. All we are is…

“The switch,” Kalisha whispered. “The ignition switch.”

Avery nodded. “We need to use them.”

When? Helen Simms’s mental voice was that of a small, frightened child. It has to be soon, because I can’t take much more of this.

“None of us can,” George said. “Besides, right now that bitch—”

Kalisha gave her head a warning shake, and George continued mentally. He wasn’t very good at it, at least not yet, but Kalisha got the gist. They all did. Right now that bitch Mrs. Sigsby would be concentrating on Luke. Stackhouse, too. Everyone in the Institute would be, because they all knew he’d escaped. This was their chance, while everyone was scared and distracted. They would never get another one so good.

Nicky began to smile. No time like the present.

“How?” Iris asked. “How can we do it?”

Avery: I think I know, but we need Hal and Donna and Len.

“Are you sure?” Kalisha asked, then added, They’re almost gone.

“I’ll get them,” Nicky said. He got up. He was smiling. The Avester’s right. Every little bit helps.

His mental voice was stronger, Kalisha realized. Was that on the sending or receiving end?

Both, Avery said. He was smiling, too. Because now we’re doing it for ourselves.

Yes, Kalisha thought. Because they were doing it for themselves. They didn’t have to be a bunch of dazed dummies sitting on the ventriloquist’s knee. It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.

14

Around the time Avery—dripping wet and shivering—was being pushed through the access tunnel between Front Half and Back Half, the Institute’s Challenger aircraft (940NF on the tail and MAINE PAPER INDUSTRIES on the fuselage) was lifting off from Erie, Pennsylvania, now with its full assault team on board. As the plane reached cruising altitude and set out for the small town of Alcolu, Tim Jamieson and Wendy Gullickson were escorting Luke Ellis into the Fairlee County Sheriff’s Department.

Many wheels moving in the same machine.

“This is Luke Ellis,” Tim said. “Luke, meet Deputies Faraday and Wicklow.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Luke said, without much enthusiasm.

Bill Wicklow was studying Luke’s bruised face and bandaged ear. “How’s the other guy look?”

“It’s a long story,” Wendy said before Luke could reply. “Where’s Sheriff John?”

“In Dunning,” Bill said. “His mother’s in the old folks’ home there. She’s got the… you know.” He tapped one temple. “Said he’d be back around five, unless she was having a good day. Then he might stay and eat dinner with her.” He looked at Luke, a beat-up boy in dirty clothes who might as well have been wearing a sign reading RUNAWAY. “Is this an emergency?”

“A good question,” Tim said. “Tag, did you get that info Wendy requested?”

“I did,” the one named Faraday said. “If you want to step into Sheriff John’s office, I can give it to you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Tim said. “I don’t think you’re going to tell me anything Luke doesn’t already know.”

“You sure?”

Tim glanced at Wendy, who nodded, then at Luke, who shrugged. “Yes.”

“Okay. This boy’s parents, Herbert and Eileen Ellis, were murdered in their home about seven weeks ago. Shot to death in their bedroom.”

Luke felt as if he were having an out-of-body experience. The dots didn’t come back, but this was the way he felt when they did. He took two steps to the swivel chair in front of the dispatch desk and collapsed onto it. It rolled backward and would have tipped him over if it hadn’t banged into the wall first.

“Okay, Luke?” Wendy asked.

“No. Yes. As much as I can be. The assholes in the Institute—Dr. Hendricks and Mrs. Sigsby and the caretakers—told me they were okay, just fine, but I knew they were dead even before I saw it on my computer. I knew it, but it’s still… awful.”

“You had a computer in that place?” Wendy asked.

“Yes. To play games with, mostly, or look at YouTube music videos. Non-substantive stuff like that. News sites were supposed to be blocked, but I knew a work-around. They should have been monitoring my searches and caught me, but they were just… just lazy. Complacent. I wouldn’t have gotten out, otherwise.”

“What the hell’s he talking about?” Deputy Wicklow asked.

Tim shook his head. He was still focused on Tag. “You didn’t get this from the Minneapolis police, right?”

“No, but not because you told me not to. Sheriff John will decide who to contact and when. That’s the way it works here. Meanwhile, though, Google had plenty.” He gave Luke a you might be poison stare. “He’s listed in the database of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and there are also beaucoup stories about him in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. According to the papers, he’s supposed to be brilliant. A child prodigy.”

“Sounds that way to me,” Bill said. “Uses a lot of big words.”

I’m right here, Luke thought. Talk about me like I’m here.

“The police aren’t calling him a person of interest,” Tag said, “at least not in the newspaper stories, but they sure do want to question him.”

Luke spoke up. “You bet they do. And the first question they ask will probably be ‘Where’d you get the gun, kid?’ ”

“Did you kill them?” Bill asked the question casually, as if just passing the time. “Tell the truth now, son. It’ll do you a world of good.”

“No. I love my parents. The people who killed them were thieves, and I was what they came to steal. They didn’t want me because I scored fifteen-eighty on the SATs, or because I can do complex equations in my head, or because I know that Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping off a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. They killed my mom and dad and kidnapped me because sometimes I could blow out a candle just by looking at it, or flip a pizza pan off the table at Rocket Pizza. An empty pizza pan. A full one would have stayed right where it was.” He glanced at Tim and Wendy and laughed. “I couldn’t even get a job in a lousy roadside carnival.”

“I don’t see anything funny about any of this,” Tag said, frowning.

“Neither do I,” Luke said, “but sometimes I laugh, anyway. I laughed a lot with my friends Kalisha and Nick in spite of everything we were going through. Besides, it’s been a long summer.” He didn’t laugh this time, but he smiled. “You have no idea.”

“I’m thinking you could use some rest,” Tim said. “Tag, have you got anybody in the cells?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, why don’t we—”

Luke took a step backward, alarm on his face. “No way. No way.”

Tim held up his hands. “Nobody’s going to lock you up. We’d leave the door wide open.”

“No. Please don’t do that. Please don’t make me go in a cell.” Alarm had become terror, and for the first time Tim began to believe at least one part of the boy’s story. The psychic stuff was bullshit, but he had seen before what he was seeing now, while on the cops—the look and behavior of a child who has been abused.

“Okay, how about the couch in the waiting area?” Wendy pointed. “It’s lumpy, but not too bad. I’ve stretched out on it a few times.”

If she had, Tim had never seen her do it, but the kid was clearly relieved. “Okay, I’ll do that. Mr. Jamieson—Tim—you still have the flash drive, right?”

Tim took it out of his breast pocket and held it up. “Right here.”

“Good.” He trudged to the couch. “I wish you’d check on that Mr. Hollister. I really think he might be an uncle.”

Tag and Bill gave Tim identical looks of puzzlement. Tim shook his head.

“Guys who watch for me,” Luke said. “They pretend to be my uncle. Or maybe a cousin or just a friend of the family.” He caught Tag and Bill rolling their eyes at each other, and smiled again. It was both tired and sweet. “Yeah, I know how it sounds.”

“Wendy, why don’t you take these officers into Sheriff John’s office and bring them up to speed on what Luke told us? I’ll stay here.”

“That’s right, you will,” Tag said. “Because until Sheriff John gives you a badge, you’re just the town night knocker.”

“Duly noted,” Tim said.

“What’s on the drive?” Bill asked.

“I don’t know. When the sheriff gets here, we’ll all look at it together.”

Wendy escorted the two deputies into Sheriff Ashworth’s office and closed the door. Tim heard the murmur of voices. This was his usual time to sleep, but he felt more fully awake than he had in a long time. Since leaving the Sarasota PD, maybe. He wanted to know who the boy beneath the nutty story really was, and where he had been, and what had happened to him.

He got a cup of coffee from the Bunn in the corner. It was strong but not undrinkable, as it would be by ten o’clock, when he usually stopped in on his night-knocking rounds. He took it back to the dispatch chair. The boy had either gone to sleep or was doing a hell of a good job faking it. On a whim, he grabbed the looseleaf binder that listed all of DuPray’s businesses, and called the DuPray Motel. The phone went unanswered. Hollister hadn’t gone back to his rat trap of a motel after all, it seemed. Which meant nothing, of course.

Tim hung up, took the flash drive out of his pocket, and looked at it. It also meant nothing, more than likely, but as Tag Faraday had been at pains to point out, that was Sheriff Ashworth’s call. They could wait.

In the meantime, let the boy get his sleep. If he really had come all the way from Maine in a boxcar, he could use it.

15

The Challenger carrying its eleven passengers—Mrs. Sigsby, Tony Fizzale, Winona Briggs, Dr. Evans, and the combined Ruby Red and Opal teams—touched down in Alcolu at quarter past five. For purposes of reporting back to Stackhouse at the Institute, this short dozen was now called Gold team. Mrs. Sigsby was first off the plane. Denny Williams from Ruby Red and Louis Grant from Opal remained onboard, taking care of Gold team’s rather specialized baggage. Mrs. Sigsby stood on the tarmac in spite of the staggering heat and used her cell to call her office landline. Rosalind answered and handed her off to Stackhouse.

“Have you—” she began, then paused to let the pilot and co-pilot pass, which they did without speaking. One was ex–Air Force, one ex-ANG, and both were like the Nazi guards in that old sitcom Hogan’s Heroes: they saw nothing, they heard nothing. Their job was strictly pickup and delivery.

Once they were gone, she asked Stackhouse if he had heard anything from their man in DuPray.

“Indeed I have. Ellis sustained a booboo when he jumped off the train. Did a header into a signal-post. Instant death from a subdural hematoma would have solved most of our problems, but this Hollister says it didn’t even knock him out. A guy running a forklift saw Ellis, took him inside a warehouse near the station, called the local sawbones. He came. A little later a female deputy showed up. Deputy and forklift guy took our boy to the sheriff’s office. The ear that had the tracker in it was bandaged.”

Denny and Louis Grant emerged from the plane, each on one end of a long steel chest. They muscled it down the air-stairs and carried it inside.

Mrs. Sigsby sighed. “Well, we might have expected it. We did, in fact. This is a small town we’re talking about, right? With small-town law enforcement?”

“Middle of nowhere,” Stackhouse agreed. “Which is good news. And there might be more. Our guy says the sheriff drives a big old silver Titan pickup, and it wasn’t parked in front of the station or in the lot for town employees out back. So Hollister took a walk down to the local convenience store. He says the ragheads who work there—his term, not mine—know everything about everyone. The one on duty told him the sheriff stopped in for a pack of Swisher Sweets and said he was going to visit his mother, who’s in a retirement home or hospice or something in the next town over. But the next town over is like thirty miles away.”

“And this is good news for us how?” Mrs. Sigsby fanned the top of her blouse against her neck.

“Can’t be completely sure cops in a one-stoplight town like DuPray will follow protocol, but if they do, they’ll just hold the kid until the big dog gets back. Let him decide what to do next. How long will it take you to get there?”

“Two hours. We could do it in less, but we’re carrying a lot of mother’s helpers, and it would be unwise to exceed the speed limit.”

“Indeed it would,” Stackhouse said. “Listen, Julia. The DuPray yokels could contact the Minneapolis cops at any time. May have contacted them already. It makes no difference either way. You understand that, right?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll worry about any messes that need to be cleaned up later. For now, just deal with our wandering boy.”

Killing was what Stackhouse meant, and killing was what it would probably take. Ellis, and anyone who tried to get in their way. That sort of mess would mean calling the Zero Phone, but if she could assure the gentle, lisping voice on the other end that the crucial problem had been solved, she thought she might escape with her life. Possibly even her job, but she would settle for her life, if it came to that.

“I know what needs to be done, Trevor. Let me get to it.”

She ended the call and went inside. The air conditioning in the little waiting room hit her sweaty skin like a slap. Denny Williams was standing by.

“Are we set?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Ready to rock and roll. I’ll take over when you give me the word.”

Mrs. Sigsby had been busy with her iPad on the flight from Erie. “We’ll be making a brief stop at Exit 181. That’s where I’ll turn command of the operation over to you. Are you good with that?”

“Excellent with it.”

They found the others standing outside. There were no black SUVs with tinted windows, only three more mom vans in unobtrusive colors: blue, green, and gray. Orphan Annie would have been disappointed.

16

Exit 181 dumped the Gold team caravan off the turnpike and into your basic Nowheresville. There was a gas station and a Waffle House, and that was the whole deal. The nearest town, Latta, was twelve miles away. Five minutes past the Waffle House, Mrs. Sigsby, riding up front in the lead van, directed Denny to pull in behind a restaurant that looked as if it had gone broke around the time Obama became president. Even the sign reading OWNER WILL BUILD TO SUIT looked desolate.

The steel case Denny and Louis had carried off the Challenger was opened, and Gold team gunned up. The seven members of Ruby Red and Opal took Glock 37s, the weapon they carried on their extraction missions. Tony Fizzale was issued another, and Denny was glad to see him immediately rack the slide and make sure the chamber was empty.

“A holster would be nice,” Tony said. “I don’t really want to stuff it down my belt in back, like some MS-13 gangbanger.”

“For now, just stow it under the seat,” Denny said.

Mrs. Sigsby and Winona Briggs were issued Sig Sauer P238s, petite enough to fit in their purses. When Denny offered one to Evans, the doctor held up his hands and took a step back. Tom Jones of Opal bent to the portable armory and brought out one of two HK37 assault rifles. “How about this, Doc? Thirty-round clip, blow a cow through the side of a barn. Got some flash-bangs, too.”

Evans shook his head. “I’m here under protest. If you mean to kill the boy, I’m not sure why I’m here at all.”

“Fuck your protest,” said Alice Green, also of Opal. This was greeted by the kind of laughter—brittle, eager, a little crazy—that only came before an op where there was apt to be shooting.

“That’s enough,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Doctor Evans, it’s possible that we can take the boy alive. Denny, you have a map of DuPray on your pad?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then this operation is now yours.”

“Very good. Gather round, people. You too, Doc, don’t be shy.”

They gathered around Denny Williams in the simmering late-day heat. Mrs. Sigsby checked her watch. Quarter past six. An hour from their destination, maybe a bit more. Slightly behind schedule, but acceptable, given the speed with which this had been put together.

“Here’s downtown DuPray, what there is of it,” Denny Williams said. “Just one main street. Halfway down it is the County Sheriff’s Department, right between the Town Office and the DuPray Mercantile Store.”

“What’s a mercantile store?” This was Josh Gottfried, of Opal.

“Like a department store,” Robin Lecks said.

“More like an old-time five-and-dime.” That was Tony Fizzale. “I spent about ten years in Alabama, most of it on MP duty, and I can tell you that these small southern towns, it’s like you went back fifty years in a time machine. Except for the Walmart. Most of em have one of those.”

“Stow the chatter,” Mrs. Sigsby said, and nodded for Denny to go on.

“Not much to it,” Denny said. “We park here, behind the town movieshow, which is closed down. We get confirmation from Mrs. Sigsby’s source that the target is still in the police station. Michelle and I will play a married couple, on a vacation taking us through little-visited towns in the American south—”

“Crazy, in other words,” Tony said, which produced more of that brittle laughter.

“We will idle our way up the street, checking the surroundings—”

“Holding hands like the lovebirds we are,” Michelle Robertson said, taking Denny’s and giving him a coy but worshipful smile.

“What about having your local man check things out?” Louis Grant asked. “Wouldn’t that be safer?”

“Don’t know him, therefore don’t trust his intel,” Denny said. “Also, he’s a civilian.”

He looked to Mrs. Sigsby, who nodded for him to go on.

“Maybe we’ll go into the station and ask directions. Maybe not. We’ll play that part by ear. What we want is an idea of how many officers are present, and where they are. Then…” He shrugged. “We hit em. If there’s a firefight, which I don’t expect, we terminate the boy there. If not, we extract him. Less mess to clean up if it looks like an abduction.”

Mrs. Sigsby left Denny to fill them in on where the Challenger would be waiting, and called Stackhouse for an update.

“Just hung up with our pal Hollister,” he said. “The sheriff pulled up in front of the station five or so minutes ago. By now he’ll be getting introduced to our wayward boy. Time to get a move on.”

“Yes.” She felt a not entirely unpleasurable tightening in her stomach and groin. “I’ll call you when it’s over.”

“Do the deed, Julia. Bail us out of this fucking mess.”

She ended the call.

17

Sheriff John Ashworth got back to DuPray around six-twenty. Fourteen hundred miles north, dazed children were dumping cigarettes and matches into baskets and filing into a screening room where the star of that evening’s film would be a megachurch minister from Indiana with many powerful political friends.

The sheriff stopped just inside the door and surveyed the big main room of the station with his hands on his well-padded hips, noting that his entire staff was there with the exception of Ronnie Gibson, who was vacationing at her mother’s time-share in St. Petersburg. Tim Jamieson was there as well.

“Wellnow, howdy-do,” he said. “This can’t be a surprise party, because it’s not my birthday. And who might that be?” He pointed to the boy on the small waiting room couch. Luke was curled into as much of a fetal position as it would allow. Ashworth turned to Tag Faraday, the deputy in charge. “Also, just by the way, who beat him up?”

Instead of answering, Tag turned to Tim and swept out a hand in an after you gesture.

“His name is Luke Ellis, and nobody here beat him up,” Tim said. “He jumped off a freight and ran into a signal-post. That’s where the bruises came from. As for the bandage, he says he was kidnapped and the kidnappers put a tracking device in his ear. He claims he cut off his earlobe to get rid of it.”

“With a paring knife,” Wendy added.

“His parents are dead,” Tag said. “Murdered. That much of his story is true. I checked it out. Way to hell and gone in Minnesota.”

“But he says the place he escaped from was in Maine,” Bill Wicklow said.

Ashworth was silent for a moment, hands still on his hips, looking from his deputies and his night knocker to the boy asleep on the couch. The conversation showed no sign of bringing Luke around; he was dead to the world. At last Sheriff John looked back at his assembled law enforcement crew. “I’m starting to wish I’d stayed to have dinner with my ma.”

“Aw, was she poorly?” Bill asked.

Sheriff John ignored this. “Assuming y’all haven’t been smoking dope, could I get a coherent story here?”

“Sit down,” Tim said. “I’ll bring you up to speed, and then I think we might want to watch this.” He put the flash drive down on the dispatch desk. “After that, you can decide what comes next.”

“Also might want to call the police in Minneapolis, or the State Police in Charleston,” Deputy Burkett said. “Maybe both.” He tilted his head toward Luke. “Let them figure out what to do with him.”

Ashworth sat. “On second thought, I’m glad I came back early. This is kind of interesting, wouldn’t you say?”

“Very,” Wendy said.

“Well, that’s all right. Not much interesting around here as a general rule, we can use the change. Do the Minneapolis cops think he killed his folks?”

“That’s the way the newspaper stories sound,” Tag said. “Although they’re careful, him being a minor and all.”

“He’s awesomely bright,” Wendy said, “but otherwise he seems like a nice enough kid.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh, how nice or nasty he is will end up being someone else’s concern, but for now my curiosity’s up. Bill, stop fiddling with that time clock before you bust it, and bring me a Co’-Cola from my office.”

18

While Tim was telling Sheriff Ashworth the story Luke had told him and Wendy, and while Gold team was approaching the I-95 Hardeeville exit, where they would double back to the little town of DuPray, Nick Wilholm was herding the kids who had remained in the screening room into the little Back Half lounge.

Sometimes kids lasted a surprisingly long time; George Iles was a case in point. Sometimes, however, they seemed to unravel all at once. That appeared to be happening to Iris Stanhope. What Back Half kids called the bounce—a brief post-movie respite from the headaches—hadn’t happened for her this time. Her eyes were blank, and her mouth hung open. She stood against the wall of the lounge with her head down and her hair in her eyes. Helen went to her and put an arm around her, but Iris didn’t seem to notice.

“What are we doing here?” Donna asked. “I want to go back to my room. I want to go to sleep. I hate movie nights.” She sounded querulous and on the verge of tears, but at least she was still present and accounted for. The same seemed true of Jimmy and Hal. They looked dazed, but not exactly hammered, the way Iris did.

Not going to be any more movies, Avery said. Not ever.

His voice was louder in Kalisha’s head than it had ever been, and for her that just about proved it—they really were stronger together.

“A bold prediction,” Nicky said. “Especially coming from a little shit like you, Avester.”

Hal and Jimmy smiled at that, and Katie even giggled. Only Iris still seemed completely lost, now scratching unselfconsciously at her crotch. Len had been distracted by the television, although nothing was on. Kalisha thought maybe he was studying his own reflection.

We don’t have much time, Avery said. One of them will come soon to take us back to our rooms.

“Probably Corinne,” Kalisha said.

“Yeah,” Helen said. “The Wicked Bitch of the East.”

“What do we do?” George asked.

For a moment Avery seemed at a loss, and Kalisha was afraid. Then the little boy who had thought earlier in the day that his life was going to end in the immersion tank held out his hands. “Grab on,” he said. Make a circle.

All of them except Iris shuffled forward. Helen Simms took Iris’s shoulders and steered her into the rough circle the others had formed. Len looked longingly back over his shoulder at the TV, then sighed and put out his hands. “Fuck it. Whatever.”

“That’s right, fuck it,” Kalisha said. “Nothing to lose.” She took Len’s right hand in her left, and Nicky’s left hand in her right. Iris was the last one to join up, and the instant she was linked to Jimmy Cullum on one side and Helen on the other, her head came up.

“Where am I? What are we doing? Is the movie over?”

“Hush,” Kalisha said.

“My head feels better!”

“Good. Hush, now.”

And the others joined in: Hush… hush… Iris, hush.

Each hush was louder. Something was changing. Something was charging.

Levers, Kalisha thought. There are levers, Avery.

He nodded at her from the other side of their circle.

It wasn’t power, at least not yet, and she knew it would be a fatal mistake to believe it was, but the potential for power was present. Kalisha thought, This is like breathing air just before the summer’s biggest thunderstorm lets rip.

“Guys?” Len said in a timid voice. “My head’s clear. I can’t remember the last time it was clear like this.” He looked at Kalisha with something like panic. “Don’t let go of me, Sha!”

You’re okay, she thought at him. You’re safe.

But he wasn’t. None of them were.

Kalisha knew what came next, what had to come next, and she dreaded it. Of course, she also wanted it. Only it was more than wanting. It was lusting. They were children with high explosives, and that might be wrong, but it felt so right.

Avery spoke in a low, clear voice. “Think. Think with me, guys.”

He began, the thought and the image that went with it strong and clear. Nicky joined him. Katie, George, and Helen chimed in. So did Kalisha. Then the rest of them. They chanted at the end of the movies, and they chanted now.

Think of the sparkler. Think of the sparkler. Think of the sparkler.

The dots came, brighter than they had ever been. The hum came, louder than it had ever been. The sparkler came, spitting brilliance.

And suddenly they weren’t just eleven. Suddenly they were twenty-eight.

Ignition, Kalisha thought. She was terrified; she was exultant; she was holy.

OH MY GOD

19

When Tim finished telling Luke’s story, Sheriff Ashworth sat silent for several seconds in the dispatch chair, his fingers laced together on his considerable belly. Then he picked up the flash drive, studied it as if he had never seen such a thing before, and set it down. “He told you he doesn’t know what’s on it, is that right? Just got it from the housekeeper, along with a knife he used to do surgery on his earlobe.”

“That’s what he said,” Tim agreed.

“Went under a fence, went through the woods, took a boat downriver just like Huck and Jim, then rode a boxcar most of the way down the East Coast.”

“According to him, yes,” Wendy said.

“Well, that’s quite a tale. I especially like the part about the telepathy and mind over matter. Like the stories the old grannies tell at their quilting bees and canning parties about rains of blood and stumpwater cures. Wendy, wake the boy up. Do it easy, I can see he’s been through a lot no matter what his real story is, but when we look at this, I want him looking with us.”

Wendy crossed the room and shook Luke’s shoulder. Gently at first, then a little harder. He muttered, moaned, and tried to pull away from her. She took his arm. “Come on, now, Luke, open your eyes and—”

He surged up so suddenly that Wendy stumbled backward. His eyes were open but unseeing, his hair sticking up in front and all around his head like quills. “They’re doing something! I saw the sparkler!”

“What’s he talking about?” George Burkett asked.

“Luke!” Tim said. “You’re okay, you were having a dre—”

“Kill them!” Luke shouted, and in the station’s small holding annex, the doors of all four cells clashed shut. “Obliterate those motherfuckers!”

Papers flew up from the dispatch desk like a flock of startled birds. Tim felt a gust of wind buffet past him, real enough to ruffle his hair. Wendy gave a little cry, not quite a scream. Sheriff John was on his feet.

Tim gave the boy a single hard shake. “Wake up, Luke, wake up!”

The papers fluttering around the room fell to the floor. The assembled cops, Sheriff John included, were staring at Luke with their mouths open.

Luke was pawing at the air. “Go away,” he muttered. “Go away.”

“Okay,” Tim said, and let go of Luke’s shoulder.

“Not you, the dots. The Stasi Li…” He blew out a breath and ran a hand through his dirty hair. “Okay. They’re gone.”

“You did that?” Wendy asked. She gestured at the fallen paperwork. “You really did that?”

“Something sure did it,” Bill Wicklow said. He was looking at the night knocker’s time clock. “The hands on this thing were going around… whizzing around… but now they’ve stopped.”

“They’re doing something,” Luke said. “My friends are doing something. I felt it, even way down here. How could that happen? Jesus, my head.”

Ashworth approached Luke and held out a hand. Tim noticed he kept the other on the butt of his holstered gun. “I’m Sheriff Ashworth, son. Want to give me a shake?”

Luke shook his hand.

“Good. Good start. Now I want the truth. Did you do that just now?”

“I don’t know if it was me or them,” Luke said. “I don’t know how it could be them, they’re so far away, but I don’t know how it could be me, either. I never did anything like that in my life.”

“You specialize in pizza pans,” Wendy said. “Empty ones.”

Luke smiled faintly. “Yeah. You didn’t see the lights? Any of you? A bunch of colored dots?”

“I didn’t see anything but flying papers,” Sheriff John said. “And heard those cell doors slam shut. Frank, George, pick that stuff up, would you? Wendy, get this boy an aspirin. Then we’re going to see what’s on that little computer widget.”

Luke said, “This afternoon all your mother could talk about was her barrettes. She said someone stole her barrettes.”

Sheriff John’s mouth fell open. “How do you know that?”

Luke shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not even trying. Christ, I wish I knew what they were doing. And I wish I was with them.”

Tag said, “I’m thinking there might be something to this kid’s story, after all.”

“I want to look at that flash drive, and I want to look at it right now,” Sheriff Ashworth said.

20

What they saw first was an empty chair, an old-fashioned wingback placed in front of a wall with a framed Currier & Ives sailing ship on it. Then a woman’s face poked into the frame, staring at the lens.

“That’s her,” Luke said. “That’s Maureen, the lady who helped me get out.”

“Is this on?” Maureen said. “The little light’s on, so I guess it is. I hope so, because I don’t think I have the strength to do this twice.” Her face left the screen of the laptop computer the officers were watching. Tim found that something of a relief. The extreme closeup was like looking at a woman trapped inside a fishbowl.

Her voice faded a bit, but was still audible. “But if I have to, I will.” She sat down in the chair and adjusted the hem of her floral skirt over her knees. She wore a red blouse above it. Luke, who had never seen her out of her uniform, thought it was a pretty combination, but bright colors couldn’t conceal how thin her face was, or how haggard.

“Max the audio,” Frank Potter said. “She should have been wearing a lav mike.”

Meanwhile, she was talking. Tag reversed the video, turned up the sound, and hit play again. Maureen once more returned to the wingback chair and once more adjusted the hem of her skirt. Then she looked directly into the camera’s lens.

“Luke?”

He was so startled by his name out of her mouth that he almost answered, but she went on before he could, and what she said next put a dagger of ice into his heart. Although he had known, hadn’t he? Just as he hadn’t needed the Star Tribune to give him the news about his parents.

“If you’re looking at this, then you’re out and I’m dead.”

The deputy named Potter said something to the one named Faraday, but Luke paid no attention. He was completely focused on the woman who’d been his only grownup friend in the Institute.

“I’m not going to tell you my life story,” the dead woman in the wingback chair said. “There’s no time for that, and I’m glad, because I’m ashamed of a lot of it. Not of my boy, though. I’m proud of the way he turned out. He’s going to college. He’ll never know I’m the one who gave him the money, but that’s all right. That’s good, the way it should be, because I gave him up. And Luke, without you to help me, I might have lost that money and that chance to do right by him. I only hope I did right by you.”

She paused, seeming to gather herself.

“I will tell one part of my story, because it’s important. I was in Iraq during the second Gulf war, and I was in Afghanistan, and I was involved in what was called enhanced interrogation.”

To Luke, her calm fluency—no uhs, no you-knows, no kinda or sorta—was a revelation. It made him feel embarrassment as well as grief. She sounded so much more intelligent than she had during their whispered conversations near the ice machine. Because she had been playing dumb? Maybe, but maybe—probably—he had seen a woman in a brown housekeeper’s uniform and just assumed she didn’t have a lot going on upstairs.

Not like me, in other words, Luke thought, and realized embarrassment didn’t accurately describe what he was feeling. The right word for that was shame.

“I saw waterboarding, and I saw men—women, too, a couple—standing in basins of water with electrodes on their fingers or up their rectums. I saw toenails pulled out with pliers. I saw a man shot in the kneecap when he spit in an interrogator’s face. I was shocked at first, but after awhile I wasn’t. Sometimes, when it was men who’d planted IEDs on our boys or sent suicide bombers into crowded markets, I was glad. Mostly I got… I know the word…”

“Desensitized,” Tim said.

“Desensitized,” Maureen said.

“Christ, like she heard you,” Deputy Burkett said.

“Hush,” Wendy said, and something about that word made Luke shiver. It was as if someone else had said it just before her. He turned his attention back to the video.

“—never took part after the first two or three, because they gave me another job. When they wouldn’t talk, I was the kindly noncom who came in and gave them a drink or snuck them something to eat out of my pocket, a Quest Bar or a couple of Oreos. I told them the interrogators had all gone off on a break or to eat a meal, and the microphones were turned off. I said I felt sorry for them and wanted to help them. I said that if they didn’t talk, they would be killed, even though it was against the rules. I never said against the Geneva Convention, because most of them didn’t know what that was. I said if they didn’t talk, their families would be killed, and I really didn’t want that. Usually it didn’t work—they suspected—but sometimes when the interrogators came back, the prisoners told them what they wanted to hear, either because they believed me or wanted to. Sometimes they said things to me, because they were confused… disoriented… and because they trusted me. God help me, I had a very trustworthy face.”

I know why she’s telling me this, Luke thought.

“How I wound up at the Institute… that story’s too long for a tired, sick woman to go into. Someone came to see me, leave it at that. Not Mrs. Sigsby, Luke, and not Mr. Stackhouse. Not a government man, either. He was old. He said he was a recruiter. He asked me if I wanted a job when my tour was over. Easy work, he said, but only for a person who could keep her lip buttoned. I’d been thinking about re-upping, but this sounded better. Because the man said I’d be helping my country a lot more than I ever could in sandland. So I took the job, and when they put me in housekeeping, I was okay with that. I knew what they were doing, but at first I was okay with that, too, because I knew why. Good for me, because the Institute is like what they say about the mafia—once you’re in, you can’t get out. When I came up short on money to pay my husband’s bills, and when I started to be afraid the vultures would take the money I’d saved for my boy, I asked for the job I’d been doing downrange, and Mrs. Sigsby and Mr. Stackhouse let me try.”

“Tattling,” Luke murmured.

“It was easy, like slipping on an old pair of shoes. I was there for twelve years, but only snitched the last sixteen months or so, and by the end I was starting to feel bad about what I was doing, and I’m not just talking about the snitching part. I got desensitized in what we called the black houses, and I stayed desensitized in the Institute, but eventually that started to wear off, the way a wax shine will wear off a car if you don’t put on a fresh coat every now and then. They’re just kids, you know, and kids want to trust a grownup who’s kind and sympathetic. It wasn’t as if they had ever blown anybody up. They were the ones who got blown up, them and their families. But maybe I would have kept on with it, anyway. If I’m going to be honest—and it’s too late to be anything else—I guess I probably would have. But then I got sick, and I met you, Luke. You helped me, but that’s not why I helped you. Not the only reason, anyway, and not the main reason. I saw how smart you were, way beyond any of the other kids, way beyond the people who stole you away. I knew they didn’t care about your fine mind, or your little sense of humor, or how you were willing to help an old sick bag like me, even though you knew it might get you in trouble. To them you were just another cog in the machine, to be used until it wore out. In the end you would have gone the way of all the others. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands, going all the way back to the beginning.”

“Is she crazy?” George Burkett asked.

“Shut up!” Ashworth said. He was leaning forward over his belly, eyes fixed on the screen.

Maureen had stopped to take a drink of water and then to rub her eyes, which were sunk deep in their hollows of flesh. Sick eyes. Sad eyes. Dying eyes, Luke thought, staring eternity right in the face.

“It was still a hard decision, and not just because of what they might do to me or to you, Luke. It was hard because if you do get away, if they don’t catch you in the woods or in Dennison River Bend, and if you can find someone to believe you… if you get past all those ifs, you might be able to drag what’s been going on here for fifty or sixty years out into the open. Bring it all down on their heads.”

Like Samson in the temple, Luke thought.

She leaned forward, looking directly into the lens. Directly at him.

“And that might mean the end of the world.”

21

The westering sun turned the railroad tracks running close to State Route 92 into pinkish-red lines of fire, and seemed to spotlight the sign just ahead:

Denny Williams pulled the lead van onto the dirt shoulder. The others followed. He spoke to those in his own van—Mrs. Sigsby, Dr. Evans, Michelle Robertson—then went to the other two. “Radios off, earpieces out. We don’t know what frequencies the locals or the Staties might be listening to. Cell phones off. This is now a sealed operation and will remain so until we are back at the airfield.”

He returned to the lead van, got back behind the wheel, and turned to Mrs. Sigsby. “All good, ma’am?”

“All good.”

“I am here under protest,” Dr. Evans said again.

“Shut up,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Denny? Let’s go.”

They rolled into Fairlee County. There were barns and fields and stands of pine on one side of the road; railroad tracks and more trees on the other. The town itself was now just two miles away.

22

Corinne Rawson was standing in front of the screening room, shooting the shit with Jake “the Snake” Howland and Phil “the Pill” Chaffitz. Abused as a child by both her father and two of her four older brothers, Corinne had never had a problem with her work in Back Half. She knew the kiddos called her Corinne the Slapper, and that was okay. She had been slapped plenty in the Reno trailer park where she had grown up, and the way she looked at it, what goes around comes around. Plus, it was for a good cause. What you called your basic win-win situation.

Of course there were drawbacks to working in Back Half. For one thing, your head got jammed up with too much information. She knew that Phil wanted to fuck her and Jake didn’t because Jake only liked women with double-wide racks in front and extra junk in the trunk. And she knew that they knew she didn’t want anything to do with either of them, at least not in that way; since the age of seventeen, she had batted strictly for the other side.

Telepathy always sounded great in stories and movies, but it was annoying as fuck in real life. It came with the hum, which was a drawback. And it was cumulative, which was a major drawback. The housekeepers and janitors swapped back and forth between Front Half and Back Half, which helped, but the red caretakers worked here and nowhere else. There were two teams, Alpha and Beta. Each worked four months on, then had four months off. Corinne was almost at the end of her current four-month swing. She would spend a week or two decompressing in the adjacent staff village, recovering her essential self, and then would go to her little house in New Jersey, where she lived with Andrea, who believed her partner worked in a top-secret military project. Top-secret it was; military it was not.

The low-level telepathy would fade during her time in the village, and by the time she got back to Andrea, it would be gone. Then, a few days into her next swing, it would start to creep back. If she had been able to feel sympathy (a sensibility that had been mostly beaten out of her by the age of thirteen), she would have felt it for Dr. Hallas and Dr. James. They were here almost all of the time, which meant they were almost constantly exposed to the hum, and you could see what it was doing to them. She knew that Dr. Hendricks, the Institute’s chief medical officer, gave the Back Half docs injections that were supposed to limit the constant erosion, but there was a big difference between limiting a thing and halting it.

Horace Keller, a red caretaker with whom she was friendly, called Heckle and Jeckle high-functioning crazies. He said that eventually one or both of them would freak out, and then the topsiders would have to find fresh medical talent. That was nothing to Corinne. Her job was to make sure the kids ate when they were supposed to eat, went into their rooms when they were supposed to go to their rooms (what they did in there was also no concern of hers), attended the movies on movie nights, and didn’t get out of line. When they did, she slapped them down.

“The gorks are restless tonight,” Jake the Snake said. “You can hear them in there. Tasers at the ready when we do the eight o’clock feeding, right?”

“They’re always worse at night,” Phil said. “I don’t… hey, what the fuck?”

Corinne felt it, too. They were used to the hum, the way you got used to the sound of a noisy fridge or a rattling air conditioner. Now, suddenly, it ramped up to the level they had to endure on movie nights that were also sparkler nights. Only on movie nights it mostly came from behind the closed and locked doors of Ward A, also known as Gorky Park. She could feel it coming from there now, but it was also coming from another direction, like the push of a strong wind. From the lounge, where those kids had gone to spend their free time when the show was over. First one bunch went down there, those who were still high-functioning, then a couple Corinne thought of as pre-gorks.

“What the fuck are they doing?” Phil shouted. He put his hands to the sides of his head.

Corinne ran for the lounge, pulling her zap-stick. Jake was behind her. Phil—perhaps more sensitized to the hum, maybe just scared—stayed where he was, palms pressed to his temples as if to keep his brains from exploding.

What Corinne saw when she got to the door was almost a dozen children. Even Iris Stanhope, who would certainly go to Gorky Park after tomorrow’s movie, was there. They were standing in a circle, hands joined, and now the hum was strong enough to make Corinne’s eyes water. She thought she could even feel her fillings vibrating.

Get the new one, she thought. The shrimp. I think he’s the one driving this. Zap him and it might break the circuit.

But even as she thought it, her fingers opened and her zap-stick dropped to the carpet. Behind her, almost lost in the hum, she heard Jake shouting for the kids to stop whatever they were doing and go to their rooms. The black girl was looking at Corinne, and there was an insolent smile on her lips.

I’ll slap that look right off you, missy, Corinne thought, and when she raised her hand, the black girl nodded.

That’s right, slap.

Another voice joined Kalisha’s: Slap!

Then all the others: Slap! Slap! Slap!

Corinne Rawson began to slap herself, first with her right hand, then with her left, back and forth, harder and harder, aware that her cheeks were first hot and then burning, but that awareness was faint and far away, because now the hum wasn’t a hum at all but a huge BWAAAAAA of internal feedback.

She was knocked to her knees as Jake rushed past her. “Stop whatever you’re doing, you fucking little—”

His hand swept up and there was a crackle of electricity as he zapped himself between the eyes. He jerked backward, legs first splaying out and then coming together in a funky dance floor move, eyes bulging. His mouth dropped open and he plugged the barrel of his zap-stick into it. The crackle of electricity was muffled, but the results were visible. His throat swelled like a bladder. Momentary blue light shone from his nostrils. Then he fell forward on his face, cramming the zap-stick’s slim barrel into his mouth all the way to the butt, his finger still convulsing on the trigger.

Kalisha led them into the resident corridor with their hands linked, like first-graders on a school outing. Phil the Pill saw them and cringed back, holding his zap-stick in one hand and gripping one of the screening room doors in the other. Farther down the corridor, between the cafeteria on one side and Ward A on the other, stood Dr. Everett Hallas, with his mouth hanging open.

Now fists began to hammer on Gorky Park’s locked double doors. Phil dropped his zap-stick and raised the hand that had been holding it, showing the oncoming children that it was empty.

“I won’t be a problem,” he said. “Whatever you mean to do, I won’t be a prob—”

The screening room doors slammed shut, cutting off his voice and also three of his fingers.

Dr. Hallas turned and fled.

Two other red caretakers emerged from the staff lounge beyond the stairway to the crematorium. They ran toward Kalisha and her makeshift cadre, both with drawn zap-sticks. They stopped outside the locked doors of Ward A, zapped each other, and dropped to their knees. There they continued to exchange bolts of electricity until both of them collapsed, insensible. More caretakers appeared, either saw or felt what was happening, and retreated, some few down the stairs to the crematorium (a dead end in more ways than one), others back to the staff lounge or the doctors’ lounge beyond it.

Come on, Sha. Avery was looking down the hall, past Phil—howling over the spouting stumps of his fingers—and the two dazed caretakers.

Aren’t we getting out?

Yes. But we’re letting them out, first.

The line of children began to walk down the hall to Ward A, into the heart of the hum.

23

“I don’t know how they pick their targets,” Maureen was saying. “I’ve often wondered about that, but it must work, because no one has dropped an atomic bomb or started a world-wide war in over seventy-five years. Think about what a fantastic accomplishment that is. I know some people say God is watching out for us, and some say it’s diplomacy, or what they call MAD, mutual assured destruction, but I don’t believe any of that. It’s the Institute.”

She paused for another drink of water, then resumed.

“They know which kids to take because of a test most children have at birth. I’m not supposed to know what that test is, I’m just a lowly housekeeper, but I listen as well as snitch. And I snoop. It’s called BDNF, which stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Kids with a high BDNF are targeted, followed, and eventually taken and brought to the Institute. Sometimes they’re as old as sixteen, but most are younger. They grab those with really high BDNF scores as soon as possible. We’ve had kids here as young as eight.”

That explains Avery, Luke thought. And the Wilcox twins.

“They’re prepared in Front Half. Part of the prep is done with injections, part of it with exposure to something Dr. Hendricks calls the Stasi Lights. Some of the kids who come in here have telepathic ability—thought-readers. Some are telekinetics—mind over matter. After the injections and exposure to the Stasi Lights, some of the kids stay the same, but most get at least a little stronger in whatever ability they were taken for. And there are a few, what Hendricks calls pinks, who get extra tests and shots and sometimes develop both abilities. I heard Dr. Hendricks say once that there might be even more abilities, and discovering them could change everything for the better.”

“TP as well as TK,” Luke murmured. “It happened to me, but I hid it. At least I tried to.”

“When they’re ready to… to be put to work, they’re moved from Front Half into Back Half. They see movies that show the same person over and over. At home, at work, at play, at family get-togethers. Then they get a trigger image that brings back the Stasi Lights and also binds them together. You see… the way it works… when they’re alone, their powers are small even after the enhancements, but when they’re together, their strength increases in a way… there’s a math word for it…”

“Exponentially,” Luke said.

“I don’t know the word. I’m tired. The important thing is these children are used to eliminate certain people. Sometimes it looks like an accident. Sometimes it looks like suicide. Sometimes like murder. But it’s always the kids. That politician, Mark Berkowitz? That was the kids. Jangi Gafoor, that man who supposedly blew himself up by accident in his bomb-making factory in Kunduz Province two years ago? That was the kids. There have been plenty of others, just in my time at the Institute. You’d say there was no rhyme or reason to any of it—six years ago it was an Argentinian poet who swallowed lye—and there’s none that I can see, but there must be, because the world is still here. I once heard Mrs. Sigsby, she’s the big boss, say that we were like people constantly bailing out a boat that would otherwise sink, and I believe her.”

Maureen once more scrubbed at her eyes, then leaned forward, looking intently into the camera.

“They need a constant supply of children with high BDNF scores, because Back Half uses them up. They have headaches that get worse and worse, and each time they experience the Stasi Lights, or see Dr. Hendricks with his sparkler, they lose more of their essential selves. By the end, when they get sent to Gorky Park—that’s what the staff calls Ward A—they’re like children suffering from dementia or advanced Alzheimer’s disease. It gets worse and worse until they die. It’s usually pneumonia, because they keep Gorky Park cold on purpose. Sometimes it’s like…” She shrugged. “Oh God, like they just forget how to take the next breath. As for getting rid of the bodies, the Institute has a state-of-the-art crematorium.”

“No,” Sheriff Ashworth said softly. “Ah, no.”

“The staff in Back Half works in what they call long swings. That’s a few months on and a few months off. It has to be that way, because the atmosphere is toxic. But because none of the staff has high BDNF scores, the process works slower on them. Some it hardly seems to affect at all.”

She paused for a sip of water.

“There are two docs who work there almost all of the time, and they’re both losing their minds. I know, because I’ve been there. Housekeepers and janitors have shorter swings between Front Half and Back Half. Same with the cafeteria staff. I know this is a lot to take in, and there’s more, but that’s all I can manage now. I have to go, but I have something to show you, Luke. You and whoever might be watching this with you. It’s hard to look at, but I hope you can, because I risked my life to get it.”

She drew in a trembling breath and tried to smile. Luke began to cry, soundlessly at first.

“Luke, helping you escape was the hardest decision of my life, even with death staring me in the face and hell, I have no doubt, on the other side of death. It was hard because now the boat may sink, and that will be my fault. I had to choose between your life and maybe the lives of the billions of people on earth who depend on the Institute’s work without even knowing it. I chose you over all of them, and may God forgive me.”

The screen went blue. Tag reached for the laptop’s keyboard, but Tim grabbed his hand. “Wait.”

There was a line of static, a stutter of sound, and then a new video began. The camera was moving down a corridor with a thick blue carpet on the floor. There was an intermittent rasping noise, and every now and then the picture was interrupted by darkness that came and went like a shutter.

She’s shooting video, Luke thought. Shooting it through a hole or a rip she made in the pocket of her uniform. That rasping noise is cloth rubbing over the mic.

He doubted if cell phones even worked for making calls in the deep woods of northern Maine, but guessed they were absolutely verboten in the Institute just the same, because the cameras would still work. If Maureen had been caught, she wouldn’t have just had her salary docked or lost her job. She really had risked her life. It made the tears come faster. He felt Officer Gullickson—Wendy—put an arm around him. He leaned gratefully against her side, but he kept his eyes on the laptop screen. Here, finally, was Back Half. Here was what he had escaped. Here was where Avery undoubtedly was now, assuming he was still alive.

The camera passed open double doors on the right. Maureen turned briefly, giving the watchers a view of a screening room with maybe two dozen plush seats. A couple of kids were sitting in there.

“Is that girl smoking?” Wendy asked.

“Yes,” Luke said. “I guess they let them have cigarettes in Back Half, too. The girl is one of my friends. Her name is Iris Stanhope. They took her away before I got out. I wonder if she’s still alive? And if she can still think, if she is?”

The camera swiveled back to the corridor. A couple of other kids passed, looking up at Maureen with no appreciable interest before leaving the frame. A caretaker in a red smock appeared. His voice was muffled by the pocket in which Maureen’s phone was hidden, but the words were understandable: he was asking her if she was glad to be back. Maureen asked him if she looked crazy, and he laughed. He said something about coffee, but the cloth of the pocket was rustling loudly, and Luke couldn’t pick it up.

“Is that a pistol he’s wearing?” Sheriff John asked.

“It’s a zap-stick,” Luke said. “You know, a Taser. There’s a dial on them that ramps up the voltage.”

Frank Potter: “You’re shitting me!”

The camera passed another set of open double doors, this time on the left, went two or three dozen steps further, and then stopped at a door that was closed. Printed on it in red was WARD A. In a low voice, Maureen said, “This is Gorky Park.”

Her hand, clad in a blue latex glove, came into the frame. She was holding a key card. Except for the color, bright orange, it looked to Luke like the one he had stolen, but he had an idea that people who worked in Back Half weren’t so careless with these. Maureen pressed it to the electronic square above the doorknob, there was a buzz, and then she opened the door.

Hell was beyond it.

24

Orphan Annie was a baseball fan, and she usually spent warm summer evenings in her tent, listening to the Fireflies, a minor league team out of Columbia. She was happy when one of their players got sent up to the Rumble Ponies, the Double-A franchise in Binghamton, but she was always sorry to lose them. When the game was over, she might sleep a little, then wake and tune to George Allman’s show, and see what was going on in what George called the Wonderful World of Weird.

Tonight, however, she was curious about the boy who had jumped from the train. She decided to drift on over to the sheriff’s station and see if she could find anything out. They probably wouldn’t let her in the front, but sometimes Frankie Potter or Billy Wicklow came out into the alley, where she kept her air mattress and spare supplies, to have a smoke. They might tell her what the kid’s story was if she asked nice. After all, she had cleaned him up and comforted him some, and that gave her a rooting interest.

A path from her tent near the warehouses ran through the woods on the west side of town. When she went to the alley to spend the night on her air mattress (or inside, if it was chilly—they let her do that now, thanks to helping Tim with his go-slow banner), she followed the path as far as the backside of the Gem, the town’s movie theater, where she had seen many interesting movies as a younger (and slightly saner) woman. Ole Gemmie had been closed for the last fifteen years, and the parking lot behind it was a wilderness of weeds and goldenrod. She usually cut through this and went up the old theater’s crumbling brick flank to the sidewalk. The sheriff’s station and the DuPray Mercantile were on the other side of Main Street, with her alley (so she thought of it) running between them.

This evening, just as she was about to leave the path for the parking lot, she saw a vehicle turn down Pine Street. It was followed by another… and another. Three vans, going just about nose to tail. And although twilight was advancing, they didn’t even have their parking lights on. Annie stood in the trees, watching, as they entered the lot she had been about to cross. They turned as if in formation, and stopped in a row, with their noses pointed back toward Pine Street. Almost like they might need to make a quick getaway, she thought.

The doors opened. Some men and women got out. One of the men was wearing a sportcoat and nice-looking trousers with a crease in them. One of the women, older than the others, was wearing a dark red pant suit. Another was wearing a dress with flowers on it. That one had a purse. The other four women didn’t. Most of them were wearing jeans and dark shirts.

Except for the sportcoat man, who just stood back and watched, they moved quickly and purposefully, like folks on a mission. To Annie they looked sort of military, and this impression was confirmed in short order. Two of the men and one of the younger women opened the back doors of the vans. The men took a long steel box from one of them. From the back of another van came holster-belts, which the woman handed around to everyone except for the sportcoat man, another man with short blond hair, and the woman in the flower-dress. The steel box was opened, and from this came a couple of long guns that were not hunting rifles. They were what Annie Ledoux thought of as school shooter guns.

The woman in the flower-dress put a small handgun in her purse. The man beside her stuck a bigger one in his belt at the small of his back, then dropped the tail of his shirt over it. The others holstered up. They looked like a raiding party. Hell, they were a raiding party. Annie didn’t see how they could be anything else.

A normally wired person—one who didn’t get her nightly news from George Allman, for instance—might have merely stared in dismayed confusion, wondering what on earth a bunch of armed men and women might be doing in a sleepy South Carolina town where there was only a single bank, and that one locked up for the night. A normally wired person might have whipped out her cell phone and called 911. Annie, however, was not a normally wired person, and she knew exactly what these armed men and women, at least ten of them and maybe more, were up to. They hadn’t come in the black SUVs she would have expected, but they were here for the boy. Of course they were.

Calling 911 to alert the folks in the sheriff’s station wasn’t an option in any case, because she wouldn’t have carried a cell phone even if she’d been able to afford one. Cell phones shot radiation into your head, any fool knew that, and besides, they could track you that way. So Annie continued along the path, running now, until she reached the back of the DuPray Barber Shop two buildings down. A rickety flight of stairs led to the apartment above. Annie climbed them as fast as she could, holding up her serape and the long skirt beneath so she wouldn’t trip and take a tumble. At the top, she hammered on the door until she saw Corbett Denton through the ragged curtain, shuffling toward her with his big belly leading the way. He pushed the curtain aside and peered out, his bald head gleaming beneath the light of the kitchen’s fly-specked overhead globe.

“Annie? What do you want? I’m not giving you anything to eat, if that’s—”

“There’s men,” she said, panting to catch her breath. She could have added there were also women, but just saying men sounded more fearsome, at least to her. “They’re parked behind the Gem!”

“Go away, Annie. I don’t have time for your foolish—”

“There’s a boy! I think those men mean to go to the station and take him away! I think there’s going to be shooting!”

“What the hell are you—”

“Please, Drummer, please! They had machine guns, I think, and that boy, he’s a nice boy!”

He opened the door. “Let me smell your breath.”

She seized him by the front of his pajama shirt. “I haven’t had a drink in ten years! Please, Drummer, they came for the boy!”

He sniffed, frowning now. “No booze. Are you hallucinating?”

“No!”

“You said machine guns. Do you mean automatic rifles, like AR-15s?” Drummer Denton was beginning to look interested.

“Yes! No! I don’t know! But you have guns, I know you do! You should bring them!”

“You’re out of your mind,” he said, and that was when Annie began to cry. Drummer had known her most of his life, had even gone stepping with her a time or two when they were much younger, and he had never seen her cry. She really believed something was going on, and Drummer decided what the hell. He had only been doing what he did every night, which was thinking about the basic stupidity of life.

“All right, let’s go look.”

“And your guns? You’ll bring your guns?”

“Hell no. I said we’re going to look.”

“Drummer, please!”

“Look,” he said. “That’s all I’m willing to do. Take it or leave it.”

With no other choice, Orphan Annie took it.

25

“Oh my dear God, what am I looking at?”

Wendy’s words were muffled, because she had a hand over her mouth. No one answered. They were staring at the screen, Luke as frozen with wonder and horror as the rest.

The back half of Back Half—Ward A, Gorky Park—was a long, high room that looked to Luke like the sort of abandoned factory where shoot-outs always happened at the end of the action movies he and Rolf had liked to watch a thousand years ago, back when he had been a real kid. It was lit by fluorescent bars behind wire mesh that cast shadows and gave the ward an eerie undersea look. There were long, narrow windows covered by heavier mesh. There were no beds, only bare mattresses. Some of these had been pushed into the aisles, a couple were overturned, and one leaned drunkenly against a bare cinderblock wall. It was splotched with yellow gunk that might have been vomit.

A long gutter filled with running water ran alongside one cinderblock wall, where a stenciled motto read YOU ARE SAVIORS! A girl, naked except for a pair of dirty socks, squatted over this gutter with her back against the wall and her hands on her knees. She was defecating. There was that rasping sound as cloth rubbed across the phone in Maureen’s pocket, where it was perhaps taped in place, and the image was momentarily blotted out as the slit the camera was peering through closed. When it opened again, the girl was walking away in a kind of drunken amble, and her shit was being carried down the gutter.

A woman in a brown housekeeper’s uniform was using a Rinsenvac to clean up what might have been more puke, more shit, spilled food, God knew what. She saw Maureen, waved, and said something none of them could pick up, not just because of the Rinsenvac but because Gorky Park was a looneybin of mingled voices and cries. A girl was doing cartwheels down one of the ragged aisles. A boy in dirty underpants with pimples on his face and smeary glasses sliding down his nose walked past. He was yelling “ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya” and hitting the top of his head on every emphasized syllable. Luke remembered Kalisha mentioning a boy with zits and glasses. On his first day at the Institute, that had been. Seems like Petey’s been gone forever, but it was only last week, she had said, and here that boy was. Or what was left of him.

“Littlejohn,” Luke murmured. “I think that’s his name. Pete Littlejohn.”

No one heard him. They were staring at the screen as if hypnotized.

Across from the gutter used for eliminatory purposes was a long trough on steel legs. Two girls and a boy were standing there. The girls were using their hands to scoop some brown gunk into their mouths. Tim, staring at this with disbelief and sickened wonder, thought it looked like Maypo, the cereal of his childhood. The boy was bent over with his face in the stuff, his hands held out at his sides, snapping his fingers. A few other kids just lay on their mattresses, staring up at the ceiling, their faces tattooed with the shadows of the mesh.

As Maureen walked toward the Rinsenvac woman, presumably to take over her job, the picture cut out and the blue screen came back. They waited to see if Maureen would appear again in her wingback chair, perhaps to offer some further explanation, but there was nothing else.

“My God, what was that?” Frank Potter asked.

“The back half of Back Half,” Luke said. He was whiter than ever.

“What kind of people would put children in a—”

“Monsters,” Luke said. He got up, then put a hand to his head and staggered.

Tim grabbed him. “Are you going to faint?”

“No. I don’t know. I need to get outside. I need to breathe some fresh air. It’s like the walls are closing in.”

Tim looked at Sheriff John, who nodded. “Take him out in the alley. See if you can get him right.”

“I’ll come with you,” Wendy said. “You’ll need me to open the door, anyway.”

The door at the far end of the holding area had big white capital letters printed across it: EMERGENCY EXIT ALARM WILL SOUND. Wendy used a key from her ring to turn off the alarm. Tim hit the push-bar with the heel of his hand and used the other to lead Luke, not staggering now but still horribly pale, out into the alley. Tim knew what PTSD was, but had never seen it except on TV. He was seeing it now, in this boy who wouldn’t be old enough to shave for another three years.

“Don’t step on any of Annie’s stuff,” Wendy said. “Especially not her air mattress. She wouldn’t thank you for that.”

Luke didn’t ask what an air mattress, two backpacks, a three-wheeled grocery cart, and a rolled-up sleeping bag were doing in the alley. He walked slowly toward Main Street, taking deep breaths, pausing once to bend over and grip his knees.

“Any better?” Tim asked.

“My friends are going to let them out,” Luke said, still bent over.

“Let who out?” Wendy asked. “Those…” She didn’t know how to finish. It didn’t matter, because Luke didn’t seem to hear her.

“I can’t see them, but I know. I don’t understand how I can, but I do. I think it’s the Avester. Avery, I mean. Kalisha is with him. And Nicky. George. God, they’re so strong! So strong together!”

Luke straightened up and began walking again. As he stopped at the mouth of the alley, Main Street’s six streetlights came on. He looked at Tim and Wendy, amazed. “Did I do that?”

“No, honey,” Wendy said, laughing a little. “It’s just their regular time. Let’s go back inside, now. You need to drink one of Sheriff John’s Cokes.”

She touched his shoulder. Luke shook her off. “Wait.”

A hand-holding couple was crossing the deserted street. The man had short blond hair. The woman was wearing a dress with flowers on it.

26

The power the kids generated dropped when Nicky let go of Kalisha’s and George’s hands, but only a little. Because the others were gathered behind the Ward A door now, and they were providing most of the power.

It’s like a seesaw, Nick thought. As the ability to think goes down, TP and TK goes up. And the ones behind that door have almost no minds left.

That’s right, Avery said. That’s how it works. They’re the battery.

Nicky’s head was clear—absolutely no pain. Looking at the others, he guessed they were the same. Whether the headaches would come back—or when—was impossible to say. For now he was only grateful.

No more need for the sparkler; they were past that now. They were riding the hum.

Nicky bent over the caretakers who had Tased themselves into unconsciousness and started going through their pockets. He found what he was looking for and handed it to Kalisha, who handed it to Avery. “You do it,” she said.

Avery Dixon—who should have been home eating supper with his parents after another hard day of being the smallest boy in his fifth-grade class—took the orange key card and pressed it to the sensor panel. The lock thumped, and the door opened. The residents of Gorky Park were clustered on the other side like sheep huddled together in a storm. They were dirty, mostly undressed, dazed. Several of them were drooling. Petey Littlejohn was going “ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya” as he thumped his head.

They are never coming back, Avery thought. Their gears are too stripped to recover. Maybe Iris, too.

George: But the rest of us might have a chance.

Yes.

Kalisha, knowing it was cold, also knowing it was necessary: In the meantime, we can use them.

“What now?” Katie asked. “What now what now?”

For a moment none of them answered, because none of them knew. Then Avery spoke up.

Front Half. Let’s get the rest of the kids and get out of here.

Helen: And go where?

An alarm began to blare, whoop-whoop-whooping in rising and falling cycles. None of them paid any attention.

“We’ll worry about where later,” Nicky said. He joined hands with Kalisha and George again. “First, let’s get some payback. Let’s do some damage. Anyone got a problem with that?”

No one did. Hands once more linked, the eleven who had begun the revolt started back down the hall toward the Back Half lounge, and the elevator lobby beyond. The residents of Ward A followed in a kind of zombie shuffle, perhaps drawn by the magnetism of children who could still think. The hum had dropped to a drone, but it was there.

Avery Dixon reached out, searching for Luke, hoping to find him in a place too far away to be of any help to them. Because that would mean at least one of the Institute’s child slaves was safe. There was a good chance the rest of them were going to die, because the staff of this hellhole would do anything to keep them from escaping.

Anything.

27

Trevor Stackhouse was in his office down the hall from Mrs. Sigsby’s, pacing up and down because he was too wired to sit, and would remain that way until he heard from Julia. Her news might be good or bad, but any news would be better than this waiting.

A telephone rang, but it was neither the traditional jingle of the landline or the brrt-brrt of his box phone; it was the imperative double-honk of the red security phone. The last time it had rung was when the shit-show with those twins and the Cross boy had gone down in the cafeteria. Stackhouse picked it up, and before he could say a word, Dr. Hallas was gibbering in his ear.

“They’re out, the ones who watch the movies for sure and I think the gorks are out, too, they’ve hurt at least three of the caretakers, no, four, Corinne says she thinks Phil Chaffitz is dead, electrocu—”

“SHUT UP!” Stackhouse yelled into the phone. And then, when he was sure (no, not sure, just hopeful) that he had Heckle’s attention, he said: “Put your thoughts in order and tell me what happened.”

Hallas, shocked back to an approximation of his once-upon-a-time rationality, told Stackhouse what he had seen. As he was nearing the end of his story, the Institute’s general alarm began to go off.

“Christ, did you turn that on, Everett?”

“No, no, not me, it must have been Joanne. Dr. James. She was in the crematory. She goes there to meditate.”

Stackhouse was almost sidetracked by the bizarre image this raised in his mind, Dr. Jeckle sitting crosslegged in front of the oven door, perhaps praying for serenity, and then he forced his mind back to the situation at hand: the Back Half children had raised some kind of half-assed mutiny. How could it have happened? It had never happened before. And why now?

Heckle was still talking, but Stackhouse had heard all he needed. “Listen to me, Everett. Get every orange card you can find and burn them, okay? Burn them.”

“How… how am I supposed to…”

“You’ve got a goddam furnace on E-Level!” Stackhouse roared. “Use the fucking thing for something besides kids!”

He hung up and used the landline to call Fellowes in the computer room. Andy wanted to know what the alarm was about. He sounded scared.

“We have a problem in Back Half, but I’m handling it. Feed the cameras from over there to my computer. Don’t ask questions, just do it.”

He turned on his desktop—had the elderly thing ever booted up so slowly?—and clicked on SECURITY CAMERAS. He saw the Front Half cafeteria, mostly empty… a few kids in the playground…

“Andy!” he shouted. “Not Front Half, Back Half! Stop fucking arou—”

The picture flipped, and he saw Heckle through a film of lens dust, cowering in his office just as Jeckle came in, presumably from her interrupted meditation session. She was looking back over her shoulder.

“Okay, that’s better. I’ll take it from here.”

He flipped the image and saw the caretakers’ lounge. A bunch of them were cowering in there with the door to the corridor closed and presumably locked. No help there.

Flip, and here was the blue-carpeted main corridor, with at least three caretakers down. No, make it four. Jake Howland was sitting on the floor outside the screening room, cradling his hand against his smock top, which was drenched with blood.

Flip, and here was the cafeteria, empty.

Flip, and here was the lounge. Corinne Rawson was kneeling next to Phil Chaffitz, blabbing to someone on her walkie-talkie. Phil did indeed look dead.

Flip, and here was the elevator lobby, the door to the elevator just beginning to slide shut. The car was the size of those used to transport patients in hospitals, and it was crammed with residents. Most undressed. The gorks from Ward A, then. If he could stop them there… trap them there…

Flip, and through that irritating film of dust and smear, Stackhouse saw more kids on E-Level, close to a dozen, milling around in front of the elevator doors and waiting for them to open and disgorge the rest of the kiddie mutineers. Waiting outside the access tunnel leading to Front Half. Not good.

Stackhouse picked up the landline and heard nothing but silence. Fellowes had hung up on his end. Cursing the wasted time, Stackhouse dialed him back. “Can you kill the power to the Back Half elevator? Stop it in the shaft?”

“I don’t know,” Fellowes said. “Maybe. It might be in the Emergency Procedures booklet. Just let me ch—”

But it was already too late. The elevator doors slid open on E-Level and the escapees from Gorky Park wandered out, staring around at the tiled elevator lobby as if there was something to see there. That was bad, but Stackhouse saw something worse. Heckle and Jeckle could collect dozens of Back Half key cards and burn them, but it would make no difference. Because one of the kids—it was the pipsqueak who’d collaborated with the housekeeper on Ellis’s escape—had an orange key card in his hand. It would open the door to the tunnel, and it would also open the door that gave on F-Level in Front Half. If they got to Front Half, anything might happen.

For a moment, one that seemed endless, Stackhouse froze. Fellowes was squawking in his ear, but the sound was far away. Because yes, the little shit was using the orange card and leading his merry band into the tunnel. A two-hundred-yard walk would take them to Front Half. The door closed behind the last of them, leaving the lower elevator lobby empty. Stackhouse flipped to a new camera and got them walking along the tiled tunnel.

Dr. Hendricks came bursting in, good old Donkey Kong with his shirttail flapping and his fly half-zipped and his eyes all red-rimmed and buggy. “What’s happening? What’s—”

And, just to add to the lunacy, his box phone began its brrt-brrt-brrt. Stackhouse held his hand up to silence Hendricks. The box phone continued its demands.

“Andy. They’re in the tunnel. They’re coming, and they have a key card. We need to stop them. Do you have any ideas at all?”

He expected nothing but more panic, but Fellowes surprised him. “I guess I could kill the locks.”

“What?”

“I can’t deactivate the cards, but I can freeze the locks. The entry codes are computer generated, and so—”

“Are you saying you can bottle them up?”

“Well, yes.”

“Do it! Do it right now!”

“What is it?” Hendricks asked. “Jesus, I was just getting ready to leave and the alarm—”

“Shut up,” Stackhouse said. “But stay here. I may need you.”

The box phone continued braying. Still watching the tunnel and the marching morons, he picked it up. Now he was holding a phone to each ear, like a character in some old slapstick comedy. “What? What?”

“We are here, and the boy is here,” Mrs. Sigsby said. The connection was good; she might have been in the next room. “I expect to have him back in our custody shortly.” She paused. “Or dead.”

“Good for you, Julia, but we have a situation here. There’s been a—”

“Whatever it is, handle it. This is happening now. I’ll call you when we’re on our way out of town.”

She was gone. Stackhouse didn’t care, because if Fellowes didn’t work computer magic, Julia might have nothing to come back to.

“Andy! Are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Did you do it?”

Stackhouse felt a dreadful certainty that Fellowes would say that their old computer system had picked this critical moment to seize up.

“Yes. Well, pretty sure. I’m looking at a message on my screen that says ORANGE KEY CARDS INVALID INSERT NEW AUTHORIZATION CODE.”

A pretty-sure from Andy Fellowes did jackshit to ease Stackhouse’s mind. He sat forward in his chair, hands locked together, watching the screen of his computer. Hendricks joined him, peering over his shoulder.

“My God, what are they doing out?”

“Coming for us would be my guess,” Stackhouse said. “We’re about to find out if they can.”

The parade of potential escapees left the view of one camera. Stackhouse punched the key that swapped the images, briefly got Corinne Rawson holding Phil’s head in her lap, then got the one he wanted. It showed the door to F-Level on the Front Half end of the access tunnel. The kids reached it.

“Crunch time,” Stackhouse said. He was clenching his fists hard enough to leave marks in his palms.

Dixon raised the orange card and laid it on the reader pad. He tried the knob and when nothing happened, Trevor Stackhouse finally relaxed. Beside him, Hendricks gusted out a breath that smelled strongly of bourbon. Drinking on duty was as verboten as carrying a cell phone, but Stackhouse wasn’t going to worry about that now.

Flies in a jar, he thought. That’s all you are now, boys and girls. As to what happens to you next…

That, thankfully, wasn’t his problem. What happened to them after the loose end in South Carolina had been snipped off was up to Mrs. Sigsby.

“That’s why they pay you the big bucks, Julia,” he said, and settled back in his chair to watch a bunch of the kids—now led by Wilholm—go back and try the door they had come through. With no result. The Wilholm brat threw back his head. His mouth opened. Stackhouse wished for audio, so he could hear that scream of frustration.

“We have contained the problem,” he said to Hendricks.

“Um,” Hendricks said.

Stackhouse turned to look at him. “What does that mean?”

“Maybe not quite.”

28

Tim put a hand on Luke’s shoulder. “If you feel up to it now, we really need to go back inside and sort this out. We’ll get you that Coke, and—”

“Wait.” Luke was staring at the hand-holding couple crossing the street. They hadn’t noticed the trio standing at the mouth of Orphan Annie’s alley; their attention was focused on the cop-shop.

“Got off the interstate and got lost,” Wendy said. “Bet you anything. We get half a dozen a month. Want to go back in now?”

Luke paid no attention. He could still sense the others, the kids, and they sounded dismayed now, but they were far back in his mind, like voices coming through a ventilator from another room. That woman… the one in the flowery dress…

Something falls over and wakes me up. It must be the trophy from when we won the Northwest Debate Tourney, because that’s the biggest and it makes a hell of a clatter. Someone is bending over me. I say mom because even though I know it isn’t her, she’s a woman and mom is the first word to come into my still-mostly-asleep mind. And she says—

“Sure,” Luke said. “Whatever you want.”

“Great!” Wendy said. “We’ll just—”

“No, that’s what she said.” He pointed. The couple had reached the sidewalk in front of the sheriff’s station. They were no longer holding hands. Luke turned to Tim, his eyes wide and panicky. “She’s one of the ones who took me! I saw her again, in the Institute! In the break room! They’re here! I told you they’d come and they’re here!”

Luke whirled and ran for the door, which was unlocked on this side, so Annie could get in late at night, should she so desire.

“What—” Wendy began, but Tim didn’t let her finish. He ran after the boy from the train, and the thought in his mind was that just maybe the kid had been right about Norbert Hollister after all.

29

“Well?” Orphan Annie’s whisper was almost too fierce to be called one. “Do you believe me now, Mr. Corbett Denton?”

Drummer didn’t reply at first, because he was trying to process what he was looking at: three vans parked side by side, and beyond them, a cluster of men and women. Looked like nine of them, enough to field a damn baseball team. And Annie was right, they were armed. It was twilight now, but the light lingered long in late summer, and besides, the streetlights had come on. Drummer could see holstered sidearms and two long guns that looked to him like HKs. People-killing machines. The baseball team was clustered near the front of the old movie theater, but mostly shielded from the sidewalk by its brick flank. They were obviously waiting for something.

“They got scouts!” Annie hissed. “See them crossing the street? They’ll be checking the sheriff’s to see how many are in there! Will you get your goddam guns now, or do I have to go get em myself?”

Drummer turned, and for the first time in twenty years, maybe even thirty, broke into a full-out run. He mounted the steps to the apartment over his barber shop and stopped on the landing long enough to tear in three or four huge breaths. Also long enough to wonder if his heart would be able to stand the strain or if it would simply explode.

His .30–06, which he planned to shoot himself with one of these fine South Carolina nights (might have done it already, if not for an occasional interesting conversation with the town’s new night knocker) was in the closet, and it was loaded. So were the .45 automatic pistol and .38 revolver on the high shelf.

He took all three weapons and ran back down the stairs, panting and sweating and probably stinking like a hog in a steambath, but feeling fully alive for the first time in years. He listened for the sound of shooting, but so far there was nothing.

Maybe they’re cops, he thought, but that seemed unlikely. Cops would have walked right in, showed their IDs, and announced their business. Also, they would have come in black SUVs, Suburbans or Escalades.

At least that was the way they did it on TV.

30

Nick Wilholm led the ragtag troop of lost boys and girls back down the slightly slanted tunnel to the locked door on the Front Half side. Some of the Ward A inmates followed; some just milled around. Pete Littlejohn began to hit the top of his head again, yelling, “Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya.” There was an echo in the tunnel that made his rhythmic chant not just annoying but maddening.

“Join hands,” Nicky said. “All of us.” He lifted his chin to indicate the milling gorks, and added, I think it will bring them.

Like bugs to a bug light, Kalisha thought. It wasn’t very nice, but the truth so seldom was.

They came. As each one joined the circle, the hum became louder. The sides of the tunnel forced their circle into more of a capsule shape, but that was okay. The power was here.

Kalisha understood what Nicky was thinking, not just because she was picking it up but because it was the only play they had left.

Stronger together, she thought, and then, out loud to Avery: “Bust that lock, Avester.”

The hum rose to that feedback scream, and if any one of them had still had a headache, it would have fled in terror. Once again Kalisha had that sense of sublime power. It came on sparkler nights, but then it was dirty. This was clean, because it was them. The Ward A children were silent, but smiling. They felt it, too. And liked it. Kalisha supposed it was the closest to thinking they might ever get.

There was a faint creaking noise from the door, and they could see it settle back in its frame, but that was all. Avery had been standing on his tiptoes, his small face clenched in concentration. Now he slumped and let out his breath.

George: No?

Avery: No. If it was just locked, I think we could, but it’s like the lock isn’t even there.

“Dead,” Iris said. “Dead, dead, can’t be fed, that’s what I said, the lock is dead.”

“Froze them somehow,” Nicky said. And we can’t bust through, can we?

Avery: No, solid steel.

“Where’s Superman when you need him?” George said. He scrubbed his hands up his cheeks, producing a humorless smile.

Helen sat down, put her hands to her face, and began to cry. “What good are we?” She said it again, this time as a mental echo: What good are we?

Nicky turned to Kalisha. Any ideas?

No.

He turned to Avery. What about you?

Avery shook his head.

31

“What do you mean, not quite?” Stackhouse asked.

Instead of answering, Donkey Kong hurried across the room to Stackhouse’s intercom. The top of the casing was thick with dust. Stackhouse had never used it a single time—it wasn’t as if he had to announce upcoming dances or trivia nights. Dr. Hendricks bent to inspect the rudimentary controls and flicked a switch, lighting a green go-lamp.

“What do you mean—”

It was Hendricks’s turn to say shut up, and instead of being angry, Stackhouse felt a certain admiration. Whatever the good doctor was up to, he thought it was important.

Hendricks took the microphone, then paused. “Is there a way to make sure those escaped children don’t hear what I’m going to say? No sense giving them ideas.”

“There are no speakers in the access tunnel,” Stackhouse said, hoping he was correct about that. “As for Back Half, I believe they have their own separate intercom system. What are you up to?”

Hendricks looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Just because their bodies are locked up, that doesn’t mean their minds are.”

Oh shit, Stackhouse thought. I forgot what they’re here for.

“Now how does this… never mind, I see.” Hendricks depressed the button on the side of the mic, cleared his throat, and began to speak. “Attention, please. All staff, attention. This is Dr. Hendricks.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair, making what had been crazy to begin with crazier still. “Children have escaped from Back Half, but there is no cause for alarm. I repeat, no cause for alarm. They are penned up in the access tunnel between Front Half and Back Half. They may attempt to influence you, however, the way they…” He paused, licking his lips. “The way they influence certain people when they do their jobs. They may attempt to make you harm yourselves. Or… well… to turn you against one another.”

Oh, Jesus, Stackhouse thought, there’s a cheerful idea.

“Listen carefully,” Hendricks said. “They are only able to succeed in such mental infiltration if the targets are unsuspecting. If you feel something… if you sense thoughts that are not your own… remain calm and resist them. Expel them. You will be able to do this quite easily. It may help to speak aloud. To say I am not listening to you.”

He started to put the mic down, but Stackhouse took it. “This is Stackhouse. Front Half personnel, all children must go back to their rooms immediately. If any resist, zap them.”

He flicked off the intercom and turned to Hendricks. “Maybe the little fucks in the tunnel won’t think of it. They’re only children, after all.”

“Oh, they’ll think of it,” Hendricks said. “After all, they’ve had practice.”

32

Tim overtook Luke as the boy opened the door to the holding area. “Stay here, Luke. Wendy, you’re with me.”

“You don’t really think—”

“I don’t know what I think. Don’t draw your gun, but make sure the strap is off.”

As Tim and Wendy hurried up the short aisle between the four empty cells, they heard a man’s voice. He sounded pleasant enough. Good humored, even. “My wife and I were told there are some interesting old buildings in Beaufort, and we thought we’d take a shortcut, but our GPS kinda screwed the pooch.”

“I made him stop to ask for directions,” the woman said, and as Tim entered the office, he saw her looking up at her husband—if that was what the blond man really was—with amused exasperation. “He didn’t want to. Men always think they know where they’re going, don’t they?”

“I tell you what, we’re a little busy just now,” Sheriff John said, “and I don’t have time—”

“It’s her!” Luke shouted from behind Tim and Wendy, making them both jump. The other officers looked around. Luke shoved past Wendy hard enough to make her stagger against the wall. “She’s the one who sprayed me in the face and knocked me out! You bitch, you killed my parents!”

He tried to run at her. Tim caught him by the neck of his shirt and yanked him back. The blond man and the flower-dress woman looked surprised and puzzled. Completely normal, in other words. Except Tim thought he’d seen another expression on the woman’s face, just for an instant: a look of narrow recognition.

“I think there’s some kind of mistake,” she was saying. She tried on a bewildered smile. “Who is this boy? Is he crazy?”

Although he was only the town night knocker and would be for the next five months, Tim reverted to cop mode without thinking, as he had on the night those kids had stuck up the Zoney’s and shot Absimil Dobira. “I’d like to see your IDs, folks.”

“Really, there’s no need of that, is there?” the woman said. “I don’t know who that boy thinks we are, but we’re lost, and when I was a little girl, my mom used to tell me that if you get lost, ask a policeman.”

Sheriff John stood up. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, that may be true, and if it is, you won’t mind showing us your drivers’ licenses, will you?”

“Not at all,” the man said. “Just let me get my wallet.” The woman was already reaching into her purse, looking exasperated.

“Look out!” Luke shouted. “They have guns!”

Tag Faraday and George Burkett looked astounded, Frank Potter and Bill Wicklow perplexed.

“Whoa a second!” Sheriff John said. “Hands where I can see them!”

Neither of them paused. Michelle Robertson’s hand came out of her purse holding not her driver’s license but the Sig Sauer Nightmare Micro she had been issued. Denny Williams had reached behind him for the Glock in his belt rather than his wallet. Both the sheriff and Deputy Faraday were reaching for their service weapons, but they were slow, slow.

Tim was not. He pulled Wendy’s gun from her holster and pointed it with both hands. “Drop the weapons, drop them!”

They did not. Robertson aimed at Luke, and Tim shot her a single time, driving her backward against one of the station’s big double doors hard enough to crack the frosted glass.

Williams dropped to one knee and aimed at Tim, who had just time to think, This guy’s a pro and I’m dead. But the man’s gun jerked upward, as if pulled by an invisible cord, and the bullet meant for Tim went into the ceiling. Sheriff John Ashworth punted the blond man in the side of the head, sending him sprawling. Billy Wicklow stomped on his wrist.

“Give it up, motherfucker, just give it—”

That was when Mrs. Sigsby, realizing things had gone wrong, told Louis Grant and Tom Jones to open up with the big guns. Williams and Robertson weren’t important.

The boy was.

33

The two HK37s filled DuPray’s formerly peaceful twilight with thunder. Grant and Jones raked the brick front of the sheriff’s station, raising puffs of pinkish-red dust, blowing the windows and the glass door panels inward. They were on the sidewalk; the rest of Gold team was standing spread out behind them in the street. The only exception was Dr. Evans, standing off to one side, his hands over his ears.

“Yeah!” Winona Briggs shouted. She was dancing from foot to foot, as if she needed to go to the bathroom. “Kill their asses!”

“Go!” Mrs. Sigsby shouted. “All of you go now! Take the boy or kill him! Take him or—”

Then, from behind them: “You’re not going anywhere, ma’am. I swear by the Savior a bunch of you goan be dead if you try. You two fellas up front, put down those grease guns this minute.”

Louis Grant and Tom Jones turned, but did not put down the HKs.

“Do it fast,” Annie said, “or you’re dead. This isn’t playin, boys. You’re in the south now.”

They looked at each other, then put the autos carefully down on the pavement.

Mrs. Sigsby saw two unlikely ambushers standing beneath the Gem’s sagging marquee: a fat bald man in a pajama top and a wild-haired woman in what looked like a Mexican serape. The man had a rifle. The woman in the serape had an automatic in one hand and a revolver in the other.

“Now the rest of you folks do the same,” Drummer Denton said. “You’re covered.”

Mrs. Sigsby looked at the two yokels standing in front of the abandoned theater, and her thought was both simple and weary: Would this never end?

A gunshot from inside the sheriff’s station, a brief pause, then another. When the yokels glanced that way, Grant and Jones bent to pick up their weapons.

“Don’t you do it!” the woman in the serape shouted.

Robin Lecks, who not so long ago had shot Luke’s father through a pillow, took that small window of opportunity to draw her Sig Micro. The other members of Gold team dropped, to give Grant and Jones a clear field of fire. This was how they had been taught to react. Mrs. Sigsby stood where she was, as if her anger at this unexpected problem would protect her.

34

As the confrontation in South Carolina began, Kalisha and her friends were sitting in slumped postures of disconsolation near the access door to Front Half. The door they couldn’t open because Iris was right: the lock was dead.

Nicky: Maybe we can still do something. Get the staff in Front Half the way we got the red caretakers.

Avery was shaking his head. He looked less like a little boy and more like a weary old man. I tried. Reached out to Gladys, because I hate her. Her and her fake smile. She said she wasn’t listening and pushed me away.

Kalisha looked at the Ward A kids, who were once more wandering off, as if there were anywhere to go. A girl was doing cartwheels; a boy wearing filthy board shorts and a torn tee-shirt was knocking his head lightly against the wall; Pete Littlejohn was still getting his ya-ya’s out. But they would come if called, and there was plenty of power there. She took Avery’s hand. “All of us together—”

“No,” Avery said. We might be able to make them feel a little weird, dizzy and sick to their stomachs… “… but that’s all.”

Kalisha: But why? Why? If we could kill that bomb-making guy way over in Afghanistan—

Avery: Because the bomb-making guy didn’t know. The preacher, that Westin guy, he doesn’t know. When they know…

George: They can keep us out.

Avery nodded.

“Then what can we do?” Helen asked. “Anything?”

Avery shook his head. I don’t know.

“There’s one thing,” Kalisha said. “We’re stuck here, but we know someone who isn’t. But we’ll need everybody.” She tilted her head toward the wandering exiles from Ward A. “Let’s call them.”

“I don’t know, Sha,” Avery said. “I’m pretty tired.”

“Just this one more thing,” she coaxed.

Avery sighed and held out his hands. Kalisha, Nicky, George, Helen, and Katie linked up. After a moment, Iris did, too. Once again, the others drifted to them. They made the capsule shape, and the hum rose. In Front Half, caretakers and techs and janitors felt it and feared it, but it wasn’t directed at them. Fourteen hundred miles away, Tim had just put a bullet between Michelle Robertson’s breasts; Grant and Jones were just raising their automatic rifles to rake the front of the sheriff’s station; Billy Wicklow was standing on Denny Williams’s hand with Sheriff John beside him.

The children of the Institute called out to Luke.

35

Luke didn’t think about reaching out with his mind to knock the blond man’s gun up; he just did it. The Stasi Lights came back, momentarily blotting out everything. When they began to fade, he saw one of the cops standing on the blond man’s wrist, trying to make him let go of the gun in his hand. The blond man’s lips were stretched in a snarl of pain, and blood was pouring down the side of his face, but he was holding on. The sheriff brought his foot back, apparently meaning to kick the blond man in the head again.

Luke saw this much, but then the Stasi Lights returned, brighter than ever, and the voices of his friends hit him like a hammer blow in the middle of his head. He stumbled backward through the doorway to the holding area, raising his hands as if to ward off a punch, and tripped over his own feet. He landed on his butt just as Grant and Jones opened up with their automatic rifles.

He saw Tim tackle Wendy and bring her to the floor, shielding her body with his own. He saw bullets tear into the sheriff and the deputy standing on the blond man’s hand. They both went down. Glass flew. Somebody was screaming. Luke thought it was Wendy. Outside, Luke heard the woman who sounded weirdly like Mrs. Sigsby shout something that sounded like all of you now.

For Luke, dazed from a double dose of the Stasi Lights and the combined voices of his friends, the world seemed to slow down. He saw one of the other deputies—wounded, there was blood running down his arm—pivot toward the broken main doors, probably to see who had been shooting. He seemed to be moving very slowly. The blond man was getting to his knees, and he also seemed to be moving slowly. It was like watching an underwater ballet. He shot the deputy in the back, then began turning toward Luke. Faster now, the world speeding up again. Before the blond man could fire, the redheaded deputy bent down, almost bowing, and shot him in the temple. The blond man flew sideways and landed on top of the woman who had claimed to be his wife.

A woman outside—not the one who sounded like Mrs. Sigsby, another one with a southern accent—shouted, “Don’t you do it!”

More gunfire followed, and then the first woman yelled, “The boy! We have to get the boy!”

It is her, Luke thought. I don’t know how it can be, but it is. That’s Mrs. Sigsby out there.

36

Robin Lecks was a good shot, but the twilight was deepening and the distance was long for a handgun as small as the Micro. Her bullet got Drummer Denton high in the shoulder instead of hitting him center mass. It drove him back against the boarded-up box office, and her next two shots went wild. Orphan Annie stood her ground. She had been raised that way in the Georgia canebrakes by a father who told her, “You don’t back down, girl, not for nothin.” Jean Ledoux had been a crack shot whether drunk or sober, and he had taught her well. Now she opened fire with both of Drummer’s handguns, compensating for the .45 auto’s heavier recoil without even thinking about it. She took down one of the automatic riflemen (it was Tony Fizzale, who would never wield a zap-stick again), never minding the three or four bullets that whizzed past her, one of them giving a flirty little flick to the hem of her serape.

Drummer came back and aimed at the woman who had shot him. Robin was down on one knee in the middle of the street, cursing her Sig, which had jammed. Drummer socked the .30–06 into the hollow of the shoulder that wasn’t bleeding and put her down the rest of the way.

“Stop shooting!” Mrs. Sigsby was screaming. “We have to get the boy! We have to make sure of the boy! Tom Jones! Alice Green! Louis Grant! Wait for me! Josh Gottfried! Winona Briggs! Hold steady!”

Drummer and Annie looked at each other. “Do we keep shooting or not?” Annie asked.

“Fuck if I know,” Drummer said.

Tom Jones and Alice Green were flanking the battered doors of the sheriff’s station. Josh Gottfried and Winona Briggs walked backward, likewise flanking Mrs. Sigsby and keeping their guns on the unexpected shooters who had blindsided them. Dr. James Evans, who had not been assigned a position, assigned his own. He walked past Mrs. Sigsby and approached Drummer and Orphan Annie with his hands raised and a placating smile on his face.

“Get back here, you fool!” Mrs. Sigsby snapped.

He ignored her. “I’m not a part of this,” he said, speaking to the fat man in the pajama top, who looked to be the saner of the two ambushers. “I never wanted to be a part of this, so I think I’ll just—”

“Oh, sit down,” Annie said, and shot him in the foot. She was considerate enough to do it with the .38, which would cause less damage. In theory, at least.

That left the woman in the red pant suit, the one in charge. If the shooting started again, she would probably be cut to pieces in the crossfire, but she showed no fear, only a kind of pissed-off concentration.

“I’m going into the station now,” she said to Drummer and Orphan Annie. “There doesn’t need to be any more of this nonsense. Stand pat and you’ll be fine. Start shooting and Josh and Winona will take you out. Understood?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, simply turned away and walked toward the remains of her force, low heels clacking on the pavement.

“Drummer?” Annie said. “What do we do?”

“Maybe we don’t have to do anything,” he said. “Look to your left. Don’t move your head, just cut your eyes.”

She did, and saw one of the Dobira brothers hustling up the sidewalk. He had a pistol. Later he would tell the State Police that although he and his brother were peaceful men, they had thought it wise to keep a gun in the store since the holdup.

“Now to the right. Don’t move your head.”

She cut her eyes that way and saw the widow Goolsby and Mr. Bilson, father of the Bilson twins. Addie Goolsby was in her robe and slippers. Richard Bilson was wearing madras shorts and a red Crimson Tide tee-shirt. Both had hunting rifles. The cluster in front of the sheriff’s station didn’t see them; their attention was on whatever business they’d come here to transact.

You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was.

“Tom and Alice,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Go in. Make sure you get the boy.”

They went.

37

Tim pulled Wendy to her feet. She looked dazed, not entirely sure where she was. There was a shredded piece of paper caught in her hair. The shooting outside had stopped, at least for the moment. It had been replaced by talking, but Tim’s ears were ringing, and he couldn’t make out the words. And it didn’t matter. If they were making peace out there, good. It would be prudent, however, to expect more war.

“Wendy, okay?”

“They… Tim, they killed Sheriff John! How many others?”

He shook her. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “Y-Yes. I think s—”

“Take Luke out the back.”

She reached for him. Luke evaded her and ran for the sheriff’s desk. Tag Faraday tried to grab his arm, but Luke evaded him, too. A bullet had clipped the laptop, knocking it askew, but the home screen, although cracked, was still up, and the flash drive’s little orange ready light was blinking steadily. His ears were also ringing, but he was close to the door now, and heard Mrs. Sigsby say Make sure you get the boy.

Oh you bitch, he thought. You relentless bitch.

Luke grabbed the laptop and dropped to his knees, cradling it to his chest as Alice Green and Tom Jones came through the shattered double doors. Tag raised his sidearm but took a burst from the HK before he could fire, the back of his uniform shirt shredding. The Glock flew from his hand and spun across the floor. The only other deputy still standing, Frank Potter, never moved to defend himself. There was a stunned, unbelieving expression on his face. Alice Green shot him once in the head, then ducked as more gunfire erupted in the street behind them. There were yells and a scream of pain.

The gunfire and the scream momentarily distracted the man with the HK. Jones wheeled in that direction, and Tim double-tapped him, one in the back of the neck and the other in the head. Alice Green straightened and came on, stepping over Jones, her face set, and now Tim saw another woman crowding in behind her. An older woman wearing a red pant suit, also holding a gun. Dear Christ, he thought, how many are there? Did they send an army for one little boy?

“He’s behind the desk, Alice,” the older woman said. Considering the carnage, she sounded eerily calm. “I can see a bandage on his ear sticking up. Pull him out and shoot him.”

The woman named Alice came around the desk. Tim didn’t bother telling her to stop—they were way past that—only pulled the trigger of Wendy’s Glock. It clicked dry, although there should have been at least one more round in the clip, and probably two. Even in this do-or-die moment, he understood the reason: Wendy hadn’t fully reloaded after the last time she took target practice with it on the gun-range over in Dunning. Such things were not high on her list of priorities. He even had time to think—as he had during his early days in DuPray—that Wendy had never been cut out to be a cop.

Should have stuck to dispatch, he thought, but too late now. I think we’re all going to die.

Luke rose up from behind the dispatch desk, the laptop held in both hands. He swung it and hit Alice Green full in the face. The cracked screen shattered. Green staggered back into the woman in the pant suit, her nose and mouth bleeding, then raised her gun again.

“Drop it, drop it, drop it!” Wendy screamed. She had scooped up Tag Faraday’s Glock. Green took no notice. She was aiming at Luke, who was pulling Maureen Alvorson’s flash drive from the laptop’s port instead of ducking for cover. Wendy fired three times, eyes slitted, uttering a shrill cry with each trigger-pull. The first bullet took Alice Green just above the bridge of her nose. The second went through one of the empty holes in the door where a frosted glass panel had been only a hundred and fifty seconds before.

The third struck Julia Sigsby in the leg. Her gun flew from her hand and she folded to the floor, a look of unbelief on her face. “You shot me. Why did you shoot me?”

“Are you stupid? Why do you think?” Wendy said. She walked to the woman sitting against the wall, her shoes crunching on broken glass. The air stank of gunpowder, and the office—once neat, now a shambles—was filled with drifting blue smoke. “You were telling them to shoot the kid.”

Mrs. Sigsby gave her the sort of smile reserved for those who must suffer fools. “You don’t understand. How could you? He belongs to me. He’s property.”

“Not anymore,” Tim said.

Luke knelt beside Mrs. Sigsby. There were spatters of blood on his cheeks and a shard of glass in one eyebrow. “Who did you leave in charge at the Institute? Stackhouse? Is he the one?”

She only looked at him.

“Is it Stackhouse?”

Nothing.

Drummer Denton stepped in and looked around. His pajama shirt was soaked with blood down one side, but he looked remarkably alert in spite of that. Gutaale Dobira was peering over his shoulder, eyes wide.

“Holy shit,” Drummer said. “It’s a massacree.”

“I had to shoot a man,” Gutaale said. “Mrs. Goolsby, she was shooting a woman who was trying to shoot her. It was a clear case of self-defense.”

“How many outside?” Tim asked them. “Are they all down, or are some still active?”

Annie pushed Gutaale Dobira aside and stood next to Drummer. In her serape, with a smoking gun in each hand, she looked like a character from a spaghetti western. Tim wasn’t surprised. He was beyond surprise. “I believe everyone who got out of those vans is accounted for,” she said. “A couple wounded, one with a bullet in his foot, one hurt bad. That was the one Dobira shot. The rest of the sons of bitches look like they are dead in here.” She surveyed the room. “And Christ, who’s left in the Sheriff’s Department?”

Wendy, Tim thought but did not say. I guess she’s the acting sheriff now. Or maybe Ronnie Gibson will be when she comes back from vacation. Probably Ronnie. Wendy won’t want the job.

Addie Goolsby and Richard Bilson were now standing with Gutaale, behind Annie and Drummer. Bilson surveyed the main room with dismay—bullet-riddled walls, broken glass, pools of blood on the floor, sprawled bodies—and put a hand to his mouth.

Addie was made of sterner stuff. “Doc’s on his way. Half the town’s out there in the street, most of em armed. What happened here? And who’s that?” She pointed at the skinny boy with the bandage on his ear.

Luke took no notice. He was fixated on the woman in the pant suit. “Stackhouse, sure. Has to be. I need to get in touch with him. How do I do that?”

Mrs. Sigsby only stared at him. Tim knelt beside Luke. What he saw in the pant suit woman’s eyes was pain, disbelief, and hate. He couldn’t be sure which of those predominated, but if forced to guess, he would have said hate. It was always the strongest, at least in the short term.

“Luke—”

Luke paid no attention. All of his attention was focused on the wounded woman. “I need to get in touch with him, Mrs. Sigsby. He’s holding my friends prisoner.”

“They’re not prisoners, they’re property!”

Wendy joined them. “I’m thinking you must have been absent on the day your class learned about Lincoln freeing the slaves, ma’am.”

“Come in here, shooting up our town,” Annie said. “Guess you found out, didn’t you?”

“Hush, Annie,” Wendy said.

“I need to get in touch with him, Mrs. Sigsby. I need to make a deal. Tell me how to do it.”

When she didn’t reply, Luke jammed his thumb into the bullet hole in her red pants. Mrs. Sigsby shrieked. “Don’t, oh don’t, that HURTS!”

“Zap-sticks hurt!” Luke shouted at her. Glass shards rattled across the floor, forming small creeks. Annie stared, eyes wide with fascination. “Injections hurt! Being half-drowned hurts! And having your mind ripped open?” He jammed his thumb against the bullet wound again. The door to the holding area slammed shut, making them all jump. “Having your mind destroyed ? That hurts most of all!”

“Make him stop!” Mrs. Sigsby screamed. “Make him stop hurting me!”

Wendy bent to pull Luke away. Tim shook his head and took her arm. “No.”

“It’s the conspiracy,” Annie whispered to Drummer. Her eyes were huge. “That woman works for the conspiracy. They all do! I knew it all along, I said it, and nobody believed me!”

The ringing in Tim’s ears was starting to fade. He heard no sirens, which didn’t surprise him. He guessed the Staties might not even know there had been a shoot-out in DuPray, at least not yet. And anyone calling 911 would have reached not the South Carolina Highway Patrol but the Fairlee County sheriff—this shambles, in other words. He glanced at his watch and saw with disbelief that the world had been rightside up only five minutes ago. Six, at most.

“Mrs. Sigsby, is it?” he asked, kneeling beside Luke.

She said nothing.

“You are in a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Sigsby. I advise you to tell Luke here what he wants to know.”

“I need medical attention.”

Tim shook his head. “What you need is to do some talking. Then we’ll see about medical attention.”

“Luke was telling the truth,” Wendy said to no one in particular. “About everything.”

“Didn’t I just say that?” Annie almost crowed.

Doc Roper pushed his way into the office. “Holy Jesus on Resurrection Morn,” he said. “Who’s still alive? How badly is that woman hurt? Was it some kind of terrorist thing?”

“They’re torturing me,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “If you are a doctor, as that black bag you’re carrying would seem to suggest, you have an obligation to make them stop.”

Tim said, “The boy you treated was running away from this woman and the raiding party she brought with her, Doc. I don’t know how many are dead out there, but we lost five, including the sheriff, and it was on this woman’s orders.”

“We’ll deal with that later,” Roper said. “Right now I need to take care of her. She’s bleeding. And somebody needs to call a goddam ambulance.”

Mrs. Sigsby looked at Luke, bared her teeth in a smile that said I win, then looked back at Roper. “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you.”

“There’s a biddy with sand in her craw,” Annie said, and not without admiration. “Fella I shot in the foot, maybe not so much. I’d go see him, were I you. I think he’d sell his own grammaw into white slavery for a shot of morphine.”

Mrs. Sigsby’s eyes widened in alarm. “Leave him alone. I forbid you to talk to him.”

Tim got to his feet. “Forbid and be damned. I don’t know who you work for, lady, but I believe your days of kidnapping children are over. Luke, Wendy, come with me.”

38

House lights had come on all over town, and DuPray’s main street was full of milling people. The bodies of the dead were being covered by whatever came to hand. Someone had taken Orphan Annie’s sleeping bag out of the alley and draped it over Robin Lecks.

Dr. Evans had been completely forgotten. He could conceivably have limped his way to one of the parked mom vans and gotten away, but had made no effort to do so. Tim, Wendy, and Luke found him sitting on the curb in front of the Gem. His cheeks gleamed with tears. He had managed to work his shoe off, and was now staring at a bloody sock covering what looked like a badly deformed foot. How much of that was bone damage and how much swelling that would eventually go down, Tim neither knew nor cared.

“What is your name, sir?” Tim asked.

“Never mind my name. I want a lawyer. And I want a doctor. A woman shot me. I want her arrested.”

“His name is James Evans,” Luke said. “And he’s a doctor. Just like Josef Mengele was.”

Evans seemed to notice Luke for the first time. He pointed at the boy with a trembling finger. “This is all your fault.”

Luke lunged at Evans, but this time Tim held him back and pushed him gently but firmly to Wendy, who took him by the shoulders.

Tim squatted on his hunkers so he could look the pallid, frightened man dead in the eye. “Listen to me, Dr. Evans. Listen closely. You and your friends came high-riding into town to get this boy and killed five people. All police officers. Now, you might not know it, but South Carolina has the death penalty, and if you think they won’t use it, and double-quick, for killing a county sheriff and four deputies—”

“I had nothing to do with it!” Evans squawked. “I was here under protest! I—”

“Shut up!” Wendy said. She still had the late Tag Faraday’s Glock, and now she pointed it at the foot that was still shod. “Those officers were also my friends. If you think I’m going to read you your rights or something, you’re out your goddam mind. What I’m going to do if you don’t tell Luke what he wants is put a bullet in your other—”

“All right! All right! Yes!” Evans reached down and put protective hands over his good foot, which almost made Tim feel sorry for him. Almost. “What is it? What do you want to know?”

“I need to talk to Stackhouse,” Luke said. “How do I do that?”

“Her phone,” Evans said. “She has a special phone. She called him before they attempted… you know… the extraction. I saw her put it in her coat pocket.”

“I’ll get it,” Wendy said, and turned back toward the sheriff’s station.

“Don’t just bring the phone,” Luke said. “Bring her.”

“Luke… she’s been shot.”

“We might need her,” Luke said. His eyes were stony.

“Why?”

Because it was chess now, and in chess you never lived in the move you were about to make, or even the next one. Three moves ahead, that was the rule. And three alternates to each of those, depending on what your opponent did.

She looked at Tim, who nodded. “Bring her. Cuff her if you need to. You’re the law, after all.”

“Jesus, what a thought,” she said, and left.

Now, at last, Tim heard a siren. Maybe even two of them. Still faint, though.

Luke grabbed his wrist. Tim thought the boy looked totally focused, totally aware, and also tired to death. “I can’t get caught in this. They have my friends. They’re trapped and there’s nobody to help them but me.”

“Trapped in this Institute.”

“Yes. You believe me now, don’t you.”

“It’d be hard not to after what was on the flash drive, and all this. What about that drive? Do you still have it?”

Luke patted his pocket.

“Mrs. Sigsby and the people she works with mean to do something to these friends of yours so they end up like the kids in that ward?”

“They were already doing it, but then they got out. Mostly because of Avery, and Avery was there because he helped me get out. I guess you’d call that irony. But I’m pretty sure they’re trapped again. I’m afraid Stackhouse will kill them if I can’t make a deal.”

Wendy was coming back. She had a boxy device that Tim supposed was a phone. There were three bleeding scratches across the back of the hand that held it.

“She didn’t want to give it up. And she’s surprisingly strong, even after taking a bullet.” She handed Tim the gadget and looked back over her shoulder. Orphan Annie and Drummer Denton were supporting Mrs. Sigsby across the street. Although she was pale and in pain, she was resisting them as much as she could. At least three dozen DuPray townsfolk trailed behind them, with Doc Roper leading the pack.

“Here she is, Timmy,” Orphan Annie said. She was panting for breath, and there were red marks on her cheek and temple where Mrs. Sigsby had slapped at her, but Annie looked not the slightest bit discomposed. “What do you want us to do with her? I s’pose stringing her up is pretty much out of the question, but ain’t it an attractive idea.”

Doc Roper set down his black bag, grabbed Annie by the serape, and pulled her aside so he could face Tim. “What in God’s name are you thinking of ? You can’t transport this woman anywhere! You’re apt to kill her!”

“I don’t think she’s exactly at death’s door, Doc,” Drummer said. “Hit me a lick like to break my nose.” Then he laughed. Tim didn’t believe he had ever heard the man laugh before.

Wendy ignored both Drummer and the doctor. “If we’re going to go somewhere, Tim, we better do it before the State Police get here.”

“Please.” Luke looked first to Tim, then to Doc Roper. “My friends will die if we don’t do something, I know they will. And there are others with them, the ones they call the gorks.”

“I want to go to the hospital,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “I’ve lost a lot of blood. And I want to see a lawyer.”

“Shut your cakehole or I’ll shut it for you,” Annie said. She looked at Tim. “She ain’t hurt as bad as she’s trying to make out. Bleeding’s already stopped.”

Tim didn’t answer immediately. He was thinking of the day, not so long ago, when he had swung into Sarasota’s Westfield Mall to buy a pair of shoes, nothing more than that, and a woman had run up to him because he was in uniform. A boy was waving a gun around up by the movie theater, she said, so Tim had gone to see, and had been faced with a decision that had changed his life. A decision that had, in fact, brought him here. Now he had another decision to make.

“Bandage her up, Doc. I think Wendy and Luke and I are going to take these two for a little ride and see if we can straighten this thing out.”

“Give her something for pain, too,” Wendy said.

Tim shook his head. “Give it to me. I’ll decide when she gets it.”

Doc Roper was looking at Tim—and Wendy, her too—as if he had never seen them in his life. “This is wrong.”

“No, Doc.” It was Annie, and she spoke with surprising gentleness. She took Roper by the shoulder and pointed him past the covered bodies in the street and at the sheriff’s station, with its smashed windows and doors. “That’s wrong.”

The doctor stood where he was for a moment, looking at the bodies and the shot-up station. Then he came to a decision. “Let’s see what the damage is. If she’s still bleeding heavily, or if her femur’s shattered, I won’t let you take her.”

You will, though, Tim thought. Because there’s no way you can stop us.

Roper knelt, opened his bag, and took out a pair of surgical scissors.

“No,” Mrs. Sigsby said, pulling back from Drummer. He grabbed her again immediately, but Tim was interested to see that before he did, she was able to put her weight on her wounded leg. Roper saw it, too. He was getting on, but he still didn’t miss much. “You’re not going to do field surgery on me in this street!”

“The only thing I’m going to do surgery on is the leg of your pants,” Roper said. “Unless you keep struggling that is. Do that, and I can’t guarantee what will happen.”

“No! I forbid you to—”

Annie seized her by the neck. “Woman, I don’t want to hear no more of what you forbid. Hold still, or your leg’s the last thing you’ll be worrying about.”

“Get your hands off me!”

“Only if you’ll be still. Otherwise I’m apt to wring your scrawny neck.”

“Better do it,” Addie Goolsby advised. “She can be crazy when she gets one of her spells.”

Mrs. Sigsby stopped struggling, perhaps as much from exhaustion as the threat of strangulation. Roper scissored neatly around her slacks two inches above the wound. The pantleg collapsed around her ankle, exposing white skin, a tracery of varicose veins, and something that looked more like a knife-slash than a bullet hole.

“Well, sugar,” Roper said, sounding relieved. “This isn’t bad. Worse than a graze, but not much. You got lucky, ma’am. It’s already clotting.”

“I am badly hurt!” Mrs. Sigsby cried.

“You will be, if you don’t shut up,” Drummer said.

The doctor swabbed the wound with disinfectant, wrapped a bandage around it, and secured it with butterfly clips. By the time he finished, it seemed that all of DuPray—those who lived in town, at least—were spectating. Tim, meanwhile, looked at the woman’s phone. A button on the side lit up the screen and a message reading POWER LEVEL 75%.

He powered it down again and handed it to Luke. “You keep this for now.”

As Luke put it into the pocket containing the flash drive, a hand tugged his pants. It was Evans. “You need to be careful, young Luke. If you don’t want to have to hold yourself responsible, that is.”

“Responsible for what?” Wendy asked.

“For the end of the world, miss. For the end of the world.”

“Shut up, you fool,” Mrs. Sigsby said.

Tim considered her for a moment. Then he turned to the doc. “I don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with here, but I know it’s something extraordinary. We need some time with these two. When the state cops show up, tell them we’ll be back in an hour. Two, at most. Then we’ll try to get on with something at least approximating normal police procedure.”

This was a promise he doubted he would be able to keep. He thought his time in DuPray, South Carolina, was almost certainly over, and he was sorry for that.

He thought he could have lived here. Perhaps with Wendy.

39

Gladys Hickson stood in front of Stackhouse at parade rest, her feet apart and her hands behind her back. The fake smile that every child in the Institute came to know (and hate) was nowhere in evidence.

“You understand the current situation, Gladys?”

“Yes, sir. The Back Half residents are in the access tunnel.”

“Correct. They can’t get out, but as of now, we can’t get in. I understand that they have tried to… shall we say fiddle with some of the staff, using their psychic abilities?”

“Yes, sir. It doesn’t work.”

“But it’s uncomfortable.”

“Yes, sir, a bit. There’s a kind of… humming. It’s distracting. It’s not here in admin, at least not yet, but everybody in Front Half feels it.”

Which made sense, Stackhouse thought. Front Half was closer to the tunnel. Right on top of it, you could say.

“It seems to be getting stronger, sir.”

Maybe that was just her imagination. Stackhouse could hope so, and he could hope Donkey Kong was right when he insisted that Dixon and his friends couldn’t influence prepared minds, not even if the gorks were adding their undeniable force to the equation, but as his grandfather used to say, hope don’t win horse races.

Perhaps made uneasy by his silence, she went on. “But we know what they’re up to, sir, and it’s no problem. We got em by the short and curlies.”

“That’s well put, Gladys. Now as to why I asked you here. I understand that you attended the University of Massachusetts in the days of your youth.”

“That’s correct, sir, but only for three semesters. It wasn’t for me, so I left and joined the Marines.”

Stackhouse nodded. No need to embarrass her by pointing out what was in her file: after doing well in her first year, Gladys had run into fairly serious trouble during her second. In a student hangout near the campus, she had knocked a rival for her boyfriend’s affections unconscious with a beer stein and been asked to leave not just the joint but the college. The incident had not been her first outburst of bad temper. No wonder she’d picked the Marines.

“I understand you were a chem major.”

“No, sir, not exactly. I hadn’t declared a major before I… before I decided to leave.”

“But that was your intention.”

“Um, yes, sir, at that time.”

“Gladys, suppose we needed—to use an unjustly vilified phrase—a final solution concerning those residents in the access tunnel. Not saying it will happen, not saying that at all, but supposing it did.”

“Are you asking if they could be poisoned somehow, sir?”

“Let’s say I am.”

Now Gladys did smile, and this one was perfectly genuine. Perhaps even relieved. If the residents were gone, that annoying hum would cease. “Easiest thing in the world, sir, assuming the access tunnel is hooked up to the HVAC system, and I’m sure it is.”

“HVAC?”

“Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, sir. What you’d want is bleach and toilet bowl cleaner. Housekeeping will have plenty of both. Mix em up and you get chlorine gas. Put a few buckets of the stuff under the HVAC intake duct that feeds the tunnel, cover it with a tarp to get a good suck going on, and there you are.” She paused, thinking. “Of course, you might want to clear out the staff in Back Half before you did it. There might be only one intake for that part of the compound. Not sure. I could look at the heating plans, if you—”

“That won’t be necessary,” Stackhouse said. “But perhaps you and Fred Clark from janitorial could get the… uh… proper ingredients ready. Just as a contingency, you understand.”

“Yes, sir, absolutely.” Gladys looked raring to go. “Can I ask where Mrs. Sigsby is? Her office is empty, and Rosalind said to ask you, if I wanted to know.”

“Mrs. Sigsby’s business is none of yours, Gladys.” And since she seemed to be determined to remain in military mode, he added: “Dismissed.”

She left to find Fred the janitor and start gathering the ingredients that would put an end to both the children and the hum that had settled over Front Half.

Stackhouse sat back in his chair, wondering if such a radical action would become necessary. He thought it might. And was it really so radical, considering what they had been doing here for the last seven decades or so? Death was inevitable in their business, after all, and sometimes a bad situation required a fresh start.

That fresh start depended on Mrs. Sigsby. Her expedition to South Carolina had been rather harebrained, but such plans were often the ones that worked. He remembered something Mike Tyson had said: once the punching starts, strategy goes out the window. His own exit strategy was ready in any case. Had been for years. Money put aside, false passports (three of them) put aside, travel plans in place, destination waiting. Yet he would hold here as long as he could, partly out of loyalty to Julia, mostly because he believed in the work they were doing. Keeping the world safe for democracy was secondary. Keeping it safe full stop was primary.

No reason to go yet, he told himself. The apple cart is tipping, but it hasn’t turned over. Best to hang. See who’s still standing once the punching is over.

He waited for the box phone to give out its strident brrt-brrt. When Julia filled him in on the outcome down there, he would decide what to do next. If the phone didn’t ring at all, that would also be an answer.

40

There was a sad little abandoned beauty shop at the junction of US 17 and SR 92. Tim pulled in and walked around to the van’s passenger side, where Mrs. Sigsby was sitting. He opened her door, then pulled the slider back. Luke and Wendy were on either side of Dr. Evans, who was staring morosely down at his misshapen foot. Wendy was holding Tag Faraday’s Glock. Luke had Mrs. Sigsby’s box phone.

“Luke, with me. Wendy, sit where you are, please.”

Luke got out. Tim asked for the phone. Luke handed it over. Tim powered it up, then leaned in the passenger door. “How does this baby work?”

She said nothing, simply looked straight ahead at the boarded-up building with its faded sign reading Hairport 2000. Crickets chirruped, and from the direction of DuPray they could hear the sirens. Closer now, but still not in town, Tim judged. They would be soon.

He sighed. “Don’t make this hard, ma’am. Luke says there’s a chance we can make a deal, and he’s smart.”

“Too smart for his own good,” she said, then pressed her lips together. Still looking through the windshield, arms crossed over her scant bosom.

“Given the position you’re in, I’d have to say he’s too smart for yours, as well. When I say don’t make this hard, I mean don’t make me hurt you. For someone who’s been hurting children—”

“Hurting them and killing them,” Luke put in. “Killing other people, as well.”

“For someone who’s been doing that, you seem remarkably averse to pain yourself. So stop the silent treatment and tell me how this works.”

“It’s voice activated,” Luke said. “Isn’t it?”

She looked at him, surprised. “You’re TK, not TP. And not that strong in TK, at that.”

“Things have changed,” Luke said. “Thanks to the Stasi Lights. Activate the phone, Mrs. Sigsby.”

“Make a deal?” she said, and barked a laugh. “What deal could possibly do me any good? I’m dead no matter what. I failed.”

Tim leaned in the sliding door. “Wendy, hand me the gun.”

She did so without argument.

Tim put the muzzle of Deputy Faraday’s service automatic to the pantleg that was still there, just below the knee. “This is a Glock, ma’am. If I pull the trigger, you will never walk again.”

“The shock and blood loss will kill her!” Dr. Evans squawked.

“Five dead back there, and she’s responsible,” Tim said. “Do you think I really care? I’ve had it with you, Mrs. Sigsby. This is your last chance. You might lose consciousness at once, but I’m betting your lights will stay on for awhile. Before they go out, the pain you feel will make that bullet-groove in your other leg feel like a kiss goodnight.”

She said nothing.

Wendy said, “Don’t do it, Tim. You can’t, not in cold blood.”

“I can.” Tim wasn’t sure this was the truth. What he did know for sure was that he didn’t want to find out. “Help me, Mrs. Sigsby. Help yourself.”

Nothing. And time was short. Annie wouldn’t tell the State Police which way they went; neither would Drummer or Addie Goolsby. Doc Roper might. Norbert Hollister, who had kept prudently out of sight during the Main Street shoot-out, was an even more likely candidate.

“Okay. You’re a murderous bitch, but I’m still sorry I have to do this. No three-count.”

Luke put his hands over his ears to stifle the sound of the gunshot, and that was what convinced her. “Don’t.” She held out her hand. “Give me the phone.”

“I think not.”

“Then hold it up to my mouth.”

Tim did so. Mrs. Sigsby muttered something, and the phone spoke. “Activation rejected. You have two more tries.”

“You can do better,” Tim said.

Mrs. Sigsby cleared her throat and this time spoke in a tone that was almost normal. “Sigsby One. Kansas City Chiefs.”

The screen that appeared looked exactly like the one on Tim’s iPhone. He pushed the phone icon, then RECENTS. There, at the very top of the list, was STACKHOUSE.

He handed the phone to Luke. “You call. I want him to hear your voice. Then give it to me.”

“Because you’re the adult and he’ll listen to you.”

“I hope you’re right.”

41

Almost an hour after Julia’s last contact—much too long—Stackhouse’s box phone lit up and began to buzz. He grabbed it. “Have you got him, Julia?”

The voice that replied was so astounding that Stackhouse almost dropped the phone. “No,” Luke Ellis said, “you’ve got it backward.” Stackhouse could hear undeniable satisfaction in the little shit’s voice. “We’ve got her.”

“What… what…” At first he could think of nothing else to say. He didn’t like that we. What steadied him was the thought of the three passports locked in his office safe, and the carefully thought-out exit strategy that went with them.

“Not following that?” Luke asked. “Maybe you need a dunk in the immersion tank. It does wonders for your mental abilities. I’m living proof. I bet Avery is, too.”

Stackhouse felt a strong urge to end the call right there, to simply gather up his passports and get out of here, quickly and quietly. What stopped him was the fact that the kid was calling at all. That meant he had something to say. Maybe something to offer.

“Luke, where is Mrs. Sigsby?”

“Right here,” Luke said. “She unlocked her phone for us. Wasn’t that great of her?”

Us. Another bad pronoun. A dangerous pronoun.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” Stackhouse said. “If there’s any chance we can put this right, it’s important that we do so. The stakes are higher than you know.”

“Maybe we can,” Luke said. “That would be good.”

“Terrific! If you could just put Mrs. Sigsby on for a minute or two, so I know she’s all right—”

“Why don’t you talk to my friend instead? His name is Tim.”

Stackhouse waited, sweat trickling down his cheeks. He was looking at his computer monitor. The kids in the tunnel who had started the revolt—Dixon and his friends—looked like they were asleep. The gorks weren’t. They were walking around aimlessly, gabbling away and sometimes running into each other like bumper cars in an amusement park. One had a crayon or something, and was writing on the wall. Stackhouse was surprised. He wouldn’t have thought any of them still capable of writing. Maybe it was just scribbling. The goddam camera wasn’t good enough to make it out. Fucking substandard equipment.

“Mr. Stackhouse?”

“Yes. Who am I speaking to?”

“Tim. That’s all you need right now.”

“I want to speak to Mrs. Sigsby.”

“Say something, but make it quick,” said the man calling himself Tim.

“I’m here, Trevor,” Julia said. “And I’m sorry. It just didn’t work out.”

“How—”

“Never mind how, Mr. Stackhouse,” said the man calling himself Tim, “and never mind the queen bitch here. We need to make a deal, and we need to do it fast. Can you shut up and listen?”

“Yes.” Stackhouse drew a notepad in front of him. Drops of sweat fell on it. He mopped his forehead with his sleeve, turned to a fresh page, and picked up a pen. “Go ahead.”

“Luke brought a flash drive out of this Institute place where you were holding him. A woman named Maureen Alvorson made it. She tells a fantastic story, one that would be hard to believe, except she also took video of what you call either Ward A or Gorky Park. With me so far?”

“Yes.”

“Luke says that you are holding a number of his friends hostage along with a number of children from Ward A.”

Until this moment, Stackhouse hadn’t thought of them as hostages, but he supposed that from Ellis’s point of view…

“Let’s say that’s the case, Tim.”

“Yes, let’s say that. Now here comes the important part. As of now, only two people know Luke’s story and what’s on that flash drive. I’m one. My friend Wendy is the other, and she’s with me and Luke. There were others who saw it, all cops, but thanks to the queen bitch here and the force she brought with her, they’re all dead. Most of hers are dead, too.”

“That’s impossible!” Stackhouse shouted. The idea that a bunch of small-town cops could have taken out Opal and Ruby Red combined was ludicrous.

“Boss lady was a little too eager, my friend, and they were blindsided in the bargain. But let’s stay on point, shall we? I have the flash drive. I also have your Mrs. Sigsby, and a Dr. James Evans. Both of them are wounded, but if they get out of this, they’ll mend. You have the children. Can we trade?”

Stackhouse was dumbfounded.

“Stackhouse? I need an answer.”

“It would depend on whether or not we can keep this facility secret,” Stackhouse said. “Without that assurance, no deal makes any sense.”

A pause, then Tim was back. “Luke says we might be able to work that out. For now, where am I going, Stackhouse? How did your pirate crew get here from Maine so fast?”

Stackhouse told him where the Challenger was waiting outside of Alcolu—he really had no choice. “Mrs. Sigsby can give you exact directions once you reach the town of Beaufort. Now I need to talk to Ellis again.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“As a matter of fact, it’s vital.”

There was a brief pause, then the boy was on the secure line. “What do you want?”

“I assume you have been in touch with your friends,” Stackhouse said. “Perhaps one friend in particular, Mr. Dixon. No need to confirm or deny, I understand that time is short. In case you don’t know exactly where they are—”

“They’re in the tunnel between Back Half and Front Half.”

That was unsettling. Nevertheless, Stackhouse pressed on.

“That’s right. If we can reach an agreement, they may get out and see the sun again. If we can’t, I will fill that tunnel with chlorine gas, and they will die slowly and unpleasantly. I won’t see it happen; I’ll be gone two minutes after I give the order. I’m telling you this because I feel quite certain that your new friend Tim would like to leave you out of whatever deal we make. That cannot happen. Do you understand?”

There was a pause, then Luke said: “Yes. I understand. I’ll come with him.”

“Good. At least for now. Are we done?”

“Not quite. Will Mrs. Sigsby’s phone work from the airplane?”

Faintly, Stackhouse heard Mrs. Sigsby say that it would.

“Stay close to your phone, Mr. Stackhouse,” Luke said. “We’ll need to talk again. And you need to stop thinking about running. If you do, I’ll know. We have a policewoman with us, and if I tell her to contact Homeland Security, she will. Your picture will be at every airport in the country, and all the fake ID in the world won’t do you any good. You’ll be like a rabbit in an open field. Do you understand me?”

For the second time, Stackhouse was too dumbfounded to speak.

“Do you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Good. We’ll be in touch to fine-tune the details.”

With that, the boy was gone. Stackhouse set the phone down carefully on his desk. He noted that his hand was trembling slightly. Part of that was fright, but it was mostly fury. We’ll be in touch, the boy had said, as though he were some hotshot Silicon Valley CEO and Stackhouse a paper-pushing underling who had to do his bidding.

We’ll see about that, he thought. We’ll just see.

42

Luke handed the box phone to Tim as if glad to be rid of it.

“How do you know he has fake ID?” Wendy asked. “Did you read it in his mind?”

“No,” Luke said. “But I bet he has plenty—passports, driver’s licenses, birth certificates. I bet a lot of them do. Maybe not the caretakers and techs and cafeteria staff, but the ones on top. They’re like Eichmann or Walter Rauff, the guy who came up with the idea of building mobile gas chambers.” Luke looked at Mrs. Sigsby. “Rauff would have fit right in with your people, wouldn’t he?”

“Trevor may have false documents,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “I do not.”

And although Luke couldn’t get into her mind—she had closed it off to him—he thought she was telling the truth. There was a word for people like her, and the word was zealot. Eichmann, Mengele, and Rauff had run, like the opportunistic cowards they were; their zealot fuehrer had stayed and committed suicide. Luke felt quite sure that if given the opportunity, this woman would do the same. As long as it was relatively painless.

He climbed back into the van, being careful to avoid Evans’s wounded foot. “Mr. Stackhouse thinks I’m coming to him, but that’s not right.”

“No?” Tim asked.

“No. I’m coming for him.”

The Stasi Lights flared in front of Luke’s eyes in the growing gloom, and the van’s sliding door rolled shut on its own.