The Northeast Kingdom

Chapter 6

Rebecca awoke late the next horning to thick snowflakes drifting like downy feathers outside her room’s calico curtains. She showered until the hot water ran out, dressed, and arrived downstairs just as Mia and Robert were leaving. Bundled in mittens and mufflers, Mia gave Robert a playful punch in the back as they pushed through the doors.

Bert-and-Rita were the only ones left in the dining room. Rita was done up in a violet snowsuit, and Bert was sporting a ridiculous pair of gaiters wound to his knees. She disparaged them because she envied them. Here was a good, working marriage, two healthy people growing old together. Rebecca said “Good morning,” then fixed herself a to-go cup of coffee at the serving table, leaving them swapping sections from the local newspaper.

She took a drive around the town. The falling snow kept everything fresh and white without yet impeding movement, so that the Mountaineer rolled along confidently. Snow was the great equalizer, nature’s cream base. Even the most beautiful town in the world profited from a little touching up. It whitened out the rough edges, filled in the cracks where things were wanting, and brought to life the colors that survived its steady march — the sorrel of a tree trunk, the stark black dome of a short silo, the bright brick of a heated chimney.

Outside the town center, life was more rugged and lonely. Collapsing barns. A solitary tree wilting in a field of snow. A makeshift house constructed around a mobile home. A tractor driven by a watchcapped man of flannel and wool. Horses rooting through snowfall for food, near squatting cows, lazily watching her drive past.

She made a circuit of Gilchrist and was back at the common by noon. The Gilchrist General Store, first stop on the right as you come from the inn, was a wood-planked floor of three narrow aisles, a mix of old and new, glass bottles of Moxie and plastic half-liters of Sprite. The post office was there, a scale and a stamp machine and a government seal behind the register. In back was a selection of fishing and hunting gear, and next to the deli counter was a bulletin board of Polaroid pictures of camouflaged men, photos taken at all times of the year, hunters holding up a string of fish or kneeling in the back of an open pickup twisting the head of a dead deer toward the camera. The old man behind the meat case wore a stained smock, drying his hands on a brown paper towel.

She ordered a sandwich and stepped outside. A crowd was gathering on the snowy common, townspeople milling around the gazebo. The historic white buildings spaced around the blanketed common looked like a movie set, The Nineteenth Century New England Village backlot. Dates were printed above the doors, as though a flatlander might question their authenticity: Gilchrist Town Hall, 1854; Gilchrist Masonic Hall, 1841. Rebecca’s cynical eye sought out the anachronisms, things that would have to be framed out of the camera’s view. The snowmobiles lining the curb. The North Face jackets. A placard in the window above the general store advertising Tai Kwan Do.

Yet something about Gilchrist touched her, triggering a sense memory which, despite its authenticity, warmed her heart. It was the simple innocence of a small-town past shared by most Americans, despite their true pasts — memories assigned in seventh grade, with the first three chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This was Rockwell’s America. Rebecca wandered over to the common with her wrapped sandwich.

The bell rang in the church steeple, calling the gathering to attention. It was a ceremony of some sort, the dedication of a bust about to be unveiled. The honoree named Tom Duggan, stood on the bandstand wearing a hangman’s coat. Rebecca remained on the edge of the crowd, biting into her sandwich discreetly and listening to a top-hatted man speaking without a microphone. He was the town historian, joined onstage by the uniformed chiefs of the police and fire departments and the selectmen and other elected officials, reciting from index cards something about the history of the penitentiary and Tom Duggan’s role in bringing it to Gilchrist. But Rebecca was more interested in the conversations around her.

One old salt in a dingy pea coat decried the turnout. “Saturday afternoon, for chrissakes.”

“Town’s changing,” sang his buddy, with the cadence of an oft-spoken refrain.

“Seen all them outer-state license plates these past coupla days?”

“How’s that?”

“Strangers riding around. At night.”

They all resembled each other in some vague way: hearty, red-cheeked, dour. Lots of beards. Kept the chin warm. Rebecca turned her attention to a middle-aged woman talking to a hard-faced neighbor.

“You heard about Lemsie?”

“Drinking again?”

“Tractor stolen last night, right out of his barn. Chief Roy don’t have no clue.”

“Like Dickie Veal’s snowplow two nights ago.” The man sheeshed. “Crime follows money, don’t it.”

“Like shit follows dessert.”

The snow was coming down harder, thick flakes rushing to the earth, the groundfall thickening and muffling sound. The bust was unveiled to applause and a few whistles — it was granite and chip-cheeked, just like Mr. Tom Duggan — and then the man of the hour began to speak, slowly and shyly. “Louder, Tom!” came the cries, and he smiled with embarrassment and opened his mouth to start over.

Instead of speech, there was a series of short horn blasts, as from an old civil-defense alarm. All heads turned toward the source, a narrow stone tower just visible behind the roof of the library.The sequence repeated, and the common hung in stunned silence for a few moments before people started to talk.

“Fire alarm.”

“That’s not the fire alarm. This one’s different.”

“Police emergency?”

“Not police either.”

“Got to be the prison.”

This last rumor spread quickly through the crowd. Rebecca saw Tom Duggan on the gazebo, one hand still resting on the crown of his granite head, which appeared stately and confident while the man himself looked bewildered.

The police and fire chief hustled down the slippery bandstand steps and strode quickly across the common. This excited no one at first, the people just milled about, confused and drifting into tighter groups as the siren blasts continued. At one point Tom Duggan tried resuming his speech, but gave up, his voice lost in the din. Then people began to disperse. They walked off in different directions with faraway eyes. Their expressions unsettled Rebecca. It was like they had all suddenly remembered last night’s shared-nightmare. She returned to her Mountaineer and eased it through the thinning crowd back to the inn.

Fern was with Kells in the parlor. She wore a loose sweat suit, he a parka and wet boots. He was standing in a small puddle of melting snow.

On the television, a local news anchor had cut in with a bulletin regarding a disturbance at the prison at Gilchrist.

“Oh, my,” said Fern, her small hand going to her mouth.

“What have they said?” asked Rebecca, but Kells shushed her.

The anchor said that a small group of inmates had reportedly seized control of the prison Command Center.

“The Command Center,” said Rebecca.

Kells turned. “What’s that?”

“The brain of the prison. They control everything from there.”

Kells returned to the television for more news, but they were cutting back to a talk show.

Noises at the front door, others returning. Fern looked up with a start. “I better get some tea on,” she said, making for the kitchen.

Rebecca was excited. She followed Fern as far as the sitting room, as though expecting a messenger, but it was only Dark returning, shaking snow off an orchid mohair scarf. “What is that god-awful noise?”

Rebecca led her back into the parlor. Only a few chunks of melting snow remained where Kells had stood before the TV. There was a chill in the room because the outside door had been left ajar. Rebecca reached the porch door just in time to see a white Jeep Cherokee pulling out of the driveway.

He had shushed her rudely at the television, and she was wondering about him now. Remembering her sleuthing the previous night, she followed the enclosed porch around to the bookshelves before returning inside. She saw that Last Words was back on display.

The alarm went silent an hour later, by which time all of the guests except Hodgkins and Kells had returned to the inn. They all stayed close to the television in the parlor and pressed Rebecca for details about the prison. She described the security regimen and praised the professionalism of the Gilchrist guards, belittling the chances of a few disgruntled inmates against crash gates, electric fences, and underground sensors.

At dinnertime, Fern’s forced enthusiasm belied her anxiety while the guests chattered excitedly, the way people get when they find themselves near news. Twice Darla quieted everyone, claiming to hear helicopters overhead. Kells did not return for dinner, and neither did Hodgkins.

The mood after dinner was much different that night.

They migrated back to the television, with Terry commandeering the remote and switching between channels at the most inappropriate times. The snow was coming down more heavily with each hour, hampering the press coverage, but in a way the lack of video only made the story more alluring. The twenty-four-hour-news networks kept replaying the same choppy footage over and over again, that of badly wounded guards arriving at an area hospital in an ambulance fitted with a snowplow blade. Otherwise, the reports focused primarily on the all-star roster of criminal personalities involved.

“Craziness,” Terry declared. “I’m out of here first thing in the morning.”

Rebecca said, “I think it’s kind of exciting.”

The network newscasts came on at six-thirty, leading with the riot. Due to the guard casualties, the warden and his administrative personnel had reportedly been forced to evacuate the prison. They were awaiting more support, which, like everything in Gilchrist, was slow in coming. Snow had closed the nearest airport in Coventry.

Terry cut to the Weather Channel, which showed a forecast of more of the same: heavy snowfall, strong winds. Despite the traveler’s advisory, cars rolled past on Post Road, and all talk at the inn turned to leaving. Plans were made to rise at dawn and dig out.

Gilchrist Police Chief Roy Darrow came on the tube after seven and read a statement outside the front doors of the police station. He was asking the people of Gilchrist not to panic: “No inmates have escaped, and this uprising has been contained within the prison perimeter. No one on the outside is at risk.” But Rebecca knew that by giving voice to people’s fears, he was simply unleashing them. She expected the number of cars out on Post Road to double.

A scream came from across the room as Mia jumped out of her seat, spilling a mug of warm cider on the floor. “Scratching — at the window!”

It was Ruby. The cat had gotten herself locked outside on the porch. Coe opened the French doors and she trotted back in, slinking guiltily along the fireplace to the dining room. Mia, however, was not relieved.

“I want to leave,” she said, turning to Robert.

“Right now?” he stammered. “In this snow? In the dark?”

Coe interrupted then, asking that the television be turned down. Terry grumbled but muted the newscast. Coe went and stood at attention on the porch, just steps outside the open doors.

Rebecca listened too. Water moved through the house pipes from the dishwasher running in the kitchen. Blower heat breathed into the parlor. A wreath scraped mouselike against a window. But in the distance, the sound of firecrackers echoed off the mountains.

“Shooting,” Coe said, amazed at what was occurring in his hometown. “From the prison.”

Mia gripped Robert’s arm. “Right now,” she said.

Robert said nothing. He looked to Fern for advice.

“You’re my guests,” she said, disappointed but firm. “You come and go as you please.”

Mia searched for support, moving across the room to Rebecca. “What are you going to do, Miss Loden?”

Rebecca’s visit to the prison made her the closest thing they had to an authority on the matter. The others looked to her as well.

The existential jury again. She had always thought that she would make a good leader, a moral being, the mantle she assumed every time she sat down at her writing desk to work. She knew she could set their fears at ease.

“From what little I know about prison riots,” she said, “ninety-nine percent of the time, the inmates just give up. They can’t go anywhere, and eventually they settle for concessions like better food or longer exercise privileges. I think the snow has everyone on edge. No one could break out of that prison. This will all blow over before too long.”

Her answer greatly disappointed Mia, but the rest seemed satisfied and the television volume was turned up again.

Rebecca, bolstered by the trust they had shown in her, decided to lead by example. She reminded Fern about the book reading, less than thirty minutes away. “Do you think anyone will show up?”

Fern was shocked that she had forgotten. “I think so. These are hardy people. Most of them will shrug it off and continue on their way, I’m sure of it.”

Rebecca checked the time. “Shall we go?”

Darla spoke up. “Could I come? I’ve never been to one.”

The others were politely uninterested, so the three of them bundled up and headed up the road on foot. The wind whipped snow as they followed a set of tire tracks, headlights from outbound cars passed them slowly. Only one vehicle came up behind them, the cavalry, a CNN satellite truck. It was primetime in Gilchrist, Vermont.

The common was still but for the line of cars. The police station was lit up at the end, a cruiser was parked out in front, blue spinners lit, and the streetlights illuminated a cone of falling snow. The library was small and new, tightly bricked with a granite block above the red front door reading, Free To All.

Inside, pastel-colored fliers heralded the reading on a bulletin board, with Rebecca’s author photo pushpinned beneath the words This Saturday Night! But the lights were off inside the main room, the chairs unassembled. They waited a few more minutes, but it was obvious no one would appear. It was Rebecca who tried to console Fern, rather than the other way around. Rebecca had published two books before breaking out with Last Words; she had faced empty library rooms before.

The three of them went out onto the front steps of the library, watching the station wagons and four-wheel drives roll past. The slow-motion panic fascinated Rebecca, being such a purely human detail, the collective guilt of a community that had enriched itself on the rest of the country’s crime-busting. This was the fear of a town founded on a fault line as the earth began to rumble.

Fern was devastated. For her, the exodus portended a more personal disappointment.

“Things will never be the same here,” she said. “Gilchrist isn’t a town anymore. We’re just a prison now.”

They pulled their scarves up over their faces and trudged back around the quarter-mile road bend to the inn. Mia and Robert were out in the driveway, trying to clear off their yellow Volkswagen. Fern, ever practical, pledged her help, but first went inside to put on some coffee. Rebecca needed only to change gloves, and passed Bert-and-Rita at the entryway, suiting up to help the younger couple get away.

Rebecca found Terry alone with the parlor television. He was a whiz with the remote control, as though staying on top of the media coverage somehow involved him in the crisis itself.

“They set part of the prison dispensary on fire,” he told her. “That’s smart. Burning your own house. And CNN finally got somebody on the scene.”

“The truck passed us.”

“Some bozo kid, it’s awful.” Terry chuckled. “His big break and he’s blowing it.”

“Did Kells come back? Hodgkins?”

Terry shook his head. “Nope.”

The heavy snow came halfway to Rebecca’s knees, thick stuff, coming down hard and sticking fast. It fell as quickly as Mia could clear it off the car windows. Fern was running her snowblower, shooting a plume of white onto the front lawn, but the machine kept choking and quitting. Robert sat behind the wheel, gunning the engine while Coe, wearing his fool’s cap, helped Bert rock the car back and forth.

A snowmobile, sleek and black with yellow detail, cut slowly across the neighboring field, stopping in Fern’s driveway. The engine idled and the driver removed his dark-visored helmet. It was a seventy-year-old man in a nylon racing suit. Fern left her snowblower to exchange a few words, then the old man replaced his helmet and turned back in the direction of Gilchrist Common.

Fern returned to them even more disappointed than before.

“Dickie Veal, he runs the public works. The outlying roads are all jammed up. Cars stuck in the smaller lanes near the edge of town. And there’s some ice, people sliding off the shoulder. Everything would be clear, my driveway too, if Dickie’s main plow hadn’t gone missing two nights ago.”

Robert looked at Mia, trying to make her understand that they were fighting a losing battle.

“Hey,” said Coe. “Hey, listen.” His many-tasseled hat was in his hands now, his head cocked toward the northern mountains. The absence of the snowblower brought out the snow-silence. “Check it out.”

Rebecca heard a few car horns in the distance, faint and pitiable like quarreling children.

“No more gunshots,” he said.

Back indoors, Terry sat in a club chair pulled into the center of the parlor, hands clasped before the TV as though watching a close basketball game. He muted the volume when the porch doors opened, and confirmed the absence of gunfire. “It’s over,” he said.

On screen, they were repeating footage of the distant prison fire. Fern said, “Did they say anything on the news?”

“Amateur night,” Terry said, shaking his head disparagingly. “The CNN feed went to static almost as soon as they got it up. Nobody has anyone at the scene now.”

Fern looked to her lamps. “Maybe we’re going to lose power.”

Rebecca said, “Wait a minute. Every remote feed was lost?”

“Power surge,” dismissed Terry. “All those camera trucks out there in the middle of nowhere without enough juice. Or, maybe the FBI went in there with guns blazing, like Waco. Took out the cameras first in order to stage a surprise attack.”

As the others began to relax, it was now Rebecca’s turn to look concerned. Terry turned the sound back up as she shed her parka, keeping her reservations to herself while standing in the parlor with the rest, waiting for the television to tell them what to do.

Chapter 7

Repressive security conditions inside ADX Gilchrist precluded the warning signs that traditionally anticipate prison disturbances, such as increases in disciplinary hearings, hints to well-liked guards that they should take vacation time or sick leave, or a high volume of outgoing personal items. There were no well-liked guards at ADX Gilchrist; there was no mail.

Despite the acute embarrassment of a full-blown riot raging in a so-called “unriotable” penitentiary — and the fact that correctional officers were rarely murdered during an uprising — Warden Barton James and his people relied on the usual reactive models. A prison riot has a reliable life cycle, from the inmates’ violent euphoria of the first hours to the rejection of their initial, unreasonable demands — freedom, full pardons — to infighting among racial lines and the bloom of “preexisting intergroup tensions,” and finally, to renegotiation and eventual collapse. The outcome of the riot was never in question; the only variable was its eventual cost, of human life, of damage to the physical plant, and of the loss of public faith in their federal prison system. Although in theory any prison riot can be ended at any moment by force, tactical assaults are prohibitively costly by all three criteria and ordered only as a strategy of last resort. The Bureau of Prisons’s response was to allow the riot to run its course.

And that is exactly what the watchmen of ADX Gilchrist were doing: waiting, hoping to minimize cost. They never anticipated being evicted from their facility, and now they found themselves holed up on the access road well back from the front gate, inside two campers commandeered from a nearby construction site. ADX Gilchrist’s onsite tactical unit, the Special Operations Response Team, was drinking cold coffee in the second camper. Off-duty guards manned the prison grounds outside the perimeter fence, and the government barricade — the twin campers, parked lengthwise across the road — was secured by local police and fire department officers. Communication with Bureau of Prisons headquarters at the Department of Justice was by cellular telephone only.

The only convenient sanitary facility was a single, wretched Porta-John from the same construction site. More popular was the snow-filled woods, which was fine for the men but not for FBI Special Agent Chloe Gimms now sharing on-scene command with a shaken Warden James. A thin woman with electric gray hair, she had survived forty-two years without peeing in the woods and was not about to break that streak now. She paced inside the small camper, ignoring the urge, tapping her thighs with red-mittened hands.

Warden James listened to the sporadic gunfire and the prison alarms. He sat in a small chair with his fists pressed to his eyebrows, wondering if he was supposed to be able to feel his pulse in his forehead. Chloe Gimms asked him about cutting power.

“No,” he said. “The crash gates would all come down. We’d be trapping guards inside with the inmates, with no way to get them out.”

“So even if we retook the Command Center, we couldn’t wall off the units. Personnel would still be trapped inside.”

Warden James looked up. “Correct.”

“That’s it, then. Nothing else we can do until more support arrives.”

The warden stood and looked out one of the small camper windows. The outline of the facility was visible through the snow at the end of the long lane of trees lining Prison Road, black smoke from the dispensary fire rising behind. He tried reaching out to his charges, tried to understand them. “They’ll have a lot of anxiety. After years in isolation, of being spoon-fed—”

“It’s a free-for-all,” said Chloe Gimms. “Old scores are being settled. A kill-off.”

“No,” said Warden James, shaking his head. “They’ll be looking for someone to take my place. A guiding force. A leader.”

“That’s the nice thing about psychopaths. They’re too crazy to group up. Nobody could hold these cons together.”

The warden turned. “Luther Trait could. For a while anyway. The riot started in his unit.”

“Trait? You think this is him?”

“It couldn’t be anyone else.” He stepped away from the window, distressed. Correctional officers were rarely murdered during an uprising. Something wasn’t right. “Where is your partner?”

“Police station in town. We needed a landline to talk to Washington — regulations.” She crossed her arms, tucking in her mittened hands and looking out the window the warden vacated. Local police walked the barricade between the campers and the TV trucks. “Those cops better keep the media away,” she said.

Forty yards away, producer Justin Keane sat inside the CNN satellite van on the phone with his boss back in Atlanta, coordinating their live-report schedule and establishing a protocol in case of breaking news. They were still the only cable channel on the scene, benefactors of fortuitous timing, having detoured on their way back from covering the birth of the Gallimard Sextuplets in L’Assomption St. Jérôme, Canada, just as the snow was really starting to hit. Their reporter had flown back separately, so Justin’s cameraman, Buzzy — the suit jacket fit him best — was doing what he could with the on-air remotes.

Justin hung up and scribbled his notes, then sat back to stretch his arms in the confined quarters of the satellite van. “May this all end so very, very soon.”

“Amen,” said Buzzy, wearing the jacket over sagging blue jeans. As he drained their last can of Mountain Dew, the overhead lights inside the truck flickered.

Justin checked the console. The image on his monitor snapped and went black.

“No, no,” Justin said, rising. “No way. Not now.”

He slid open the door, and two big guys in flannel and watch caps stood outside, looking up at him.

Locals. “Hiya,” said Justin, surprised.

The first guy pulled a large silver handgun from his waistband. “Back inside.”

Justin retreated obediently as, behind him, Buzzy’s empty soda can clinked and danced along the floor.

The armed man and his partner climbed inside.

Gilchrist police chief Rot Darrow lifted off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. FBI agent Coté was talking on Chief Roy’s phone and rooting around in Chief Roy’s desk for a pen. But Chief Roy held his patience. The truth was that he was glad to have big law there, he was relieved to be in the presence of a higher power. This thing was more than his men could handle.

It was hysteria. What else to call it? The flight of the townspeople, which he first took for a lack of confidence in him personally, he saw now as something essentially helpful. Had they all stayed, every stray noise and they would be calling the new 911 system saying that an escaped serial killer was outside their door.

“Dad!”

It was Roy, Jr., waving him to the front. The floor of the station house was coarse with boot grit and Chief Roy winced at all the snow people were tracking in. This was like coming home early from a trip and finding your kids hosting a beer party.

Tom Duggan dogged Chief Roy to the glass doors, a shadow in undertaker’s clothes, haunting him.

“Just go home, Tom. Or throw on a uniform and help me out. One or the other. I’m up to my ears—”

“My mother, Roy.”

“I know what I said. But I can’t do anything for her right now.”

“You said you’d send a car.”

“I don’t have a man or a car to spare. Hell, these aren’t even my men anymore.”

“She’s all alone.”

“She will be all right, and so will you. So will the rest of us. Just get her on the phone.”

“You know she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t like the phone.”

Roy, Jr., was holding the door, and the three of them moved out onto the stoop. The line of cars had diminished at that late hour, as word had gotten out that the roads were jammed. The town center was quiet and blue, five streetlights brightening the snowy common like an empty stage set for a pageant.

“Tom.” Chief Roy put his hand on Tom Duggan’s narrow shoulder, a strange gesture for him. “You’re feeling guilty about this whole thing. My advice is: don’t. Go on home. Don’t try to drive out there yourself, we got enough problems on the road already and nobody to take care of them. Once things start to look better, maybe I can free up a man to check on her. And if, God forbid, things don’t get better, I imagine the National Guard will be sweeping through here to check on her for you. All right?”

Tom Duggan nodded once in resignation, turning and moving in his somber way down the brick steps to the snow, toward Duggan’s Funeral Home on the corner across the street.

Roy, Jr., came in front of the chief and adjusted his father’s clip-on police necktie. “What the hell are you doing?” said Chief Roy.

“CNN, Dad. They want to interview you. Might want the both of us.”

A crew of three men waited on the sidewalk below, big guys, the bigger one holding a camera. “Can we do this inside?” said the chief.

“Want to get the snow and the brick in,” one of them said.

The chief nodded as he fussed his way down four slippery steps. They had to think visually, he understood. Image is everything. “Good ’nough,” he said. “But let’s make it quick.”

One of them regarded Roy, Jr. “This your son, Chief?”

“It’s in the blood.” Chief Roy nodded as he spoke his usual refrain. “My father and grandfather before me.”

The reporter drew a revolver and cocked it at Roy, Jr.’s temple.

The click sounded dull in the snow. Chief Roy looked on wordlessly, feeling a hand at his waist. Someone relieved him of his side arm.

“Dad?” Roy, Jr., said, shying away from the short barrel of the gun.

Chief Roy could not grasp what was happening. He saw his son’s face and staring eyes, but nothing made sense yet.

Beyond, he saw Tom Duggan walking away through the snow, his black-clad figure fading into the night.

They knocked Roy, Jr., to his knees, then laid him facedown in the snow. Another one of them stepped up to the chief and put a nine-millimeter handgun to his stomach.

“You walk right back inside and don’t say nothing. Walk straight through to the side door and open it to us.”

Nothing was real. “I’ve got a civil emergency here...” said Chief Roy, but as soon as he heard his own words the spell was broken. He focused his attention on the snowy boot in his son’s back. Roy, Jr., was lying still and limp in the snow as though he were already dead. A gun muzzle was pressed to the back of the head Chief Roy once cupped in his hand. “Jesus Christ,” the chief said, his mind clearing. “I’ll do anything.”

“Do what I told you, and fast.”

Roy Darrow turned and started up the four steps to the double glass doors, disoriented, gripping the handrail, unable to hear anything. He entered his station and passed through it slowly. He could not summon any speed. One of his men tried to hand him a telephone receiver but he passed him by, part of his mind remembering how irritated he had been when Ann insisted on driving down to her sister’s in Cabot, “just to wait this thing out.” Now he didn’t care about his pride or the town or anything except his family and his son.

FBI Agent Coté was talking to him from the door of his office. “Got to clear some room here, Chief, this place is going to fill up with agents. Chief? Hey, Chief.”

Roy Darrow turned left at the radio room, unlocking the doors to the side parking lot, admitting the three men and a fourth. They followed him inside and then rushed past him, moving quickly throughout the station.

Special Agent Lon Coté returned to the desk inside the police chief’s office, rubbing his eyes and taking up the telephone again, still on hold. He was setting in motion the necessary mechanisms to use Title 18 violations — malicious destruction of federal property, hostage-taking — to upgrade the FBI’s official response from “advisory” to “operational,” thereby allowing them to take total command of the prison riot from the Bureau of Prisons.

A CNN cameraman walked past the office door and Coté shook his head at the lax security of the Gilchrist PD. All that would end... as soon as he could get somebody to pick up the damn phone. He looked out the room’s only window, to the flakes dancing under the streetlamps around the town common. Then he became aware of voices rising in the outer rooms.

He set down the phone and was halfway to the door when the cameraman reappeared. In the man’s free hand was a short-barreled Smith & Wesson.

Lon Coté felt the weight of the shoulder holster suddenly beneath his tan wool suit jacket. In his fourteen-year career he had never faced a loaded gun.

“Lay it on the floor,” said the cameraman.

Coté saw another man behind him rounding up police. Except for the paramilitary Micro Uzi machine pistol in his hands, everything about these guys said ex-cons.

Coté set his piece down flat on the carpet and stood with his hands open and out at his sides. “My name is Lon Coté, special agent with the FBI,” he said, plainly and without drama, surprised at the pride he felt in these words. “Now, what is this all about?”

Warden James stood outside the trailer, watching the black smoke rising out of the compound as wet snow-flakes melted on his venous cheeks. “Fortresses,” he said.

Chloe Gimms was behind him. “How’s that, Bart?”

The warden looked straight up at the flakes falling to him and for a dizzying moment experienced the sensation of flight. “This was the end of the line. The worst of the worst. Now what? How do we punish this? Where does it go from here?”

Chloe frowned. “Just hang in there, Bart.”

This was his last command. Thinking this bolstered Barton James. With the end in sight, anything is tolerable. Mrs. James had remained behind in Denver, too tired to follow him to one more prison town. Now he spent all his vacations traveling home. That was how upside-down things had been. She had wanted more time with him, now she was going to get it.

A roar behind him, machinery coming to life, almost like one of the campers starting up. But it was louder than that, Warden James felt the roar from the ground. Movement to his left. He turned, expecting police officers.

Three local men were walking toward them from the trees.

“The hell is this?” said Chloe Gimms, angered by the breach of security.

Headlights swirled behind the campers. Engine gears downshifted, and Chloe heard popping and felt thumps in the ground near her feet, then noises like rocks striking the camper hull and windows. With a crash and a wail of steel, the camper next to her was rammed from behind. She jumped out of the way as it was shoved over onto its side in a crashing whump of snow.

Now she saw the attacking bulldozer rearing back and raising its curved steel blade. The headlights swung around and with a snort of exhaust the bulldozer rolled at the second camper.

The Special Operations Response Team leader came rushing out of the camper door. He saw the first camper on its side and reached for his weapon — then jerked and took a small step backward as though shoved. Chloe never heard the gunshot. The SORT leader held his hands at his chest as though cradling a baby bird. The bird was bleeding.

The bulldozer rammed the second camper, its raised blade chewing and crumpling the roof, rocking the vehicle but failing to overturn it on the first try. The bulldozer rolled back, grinding snow, lowering its blade as a bull does its horns, then rushing forward again.

Yelling and movement came from inside the jostled second camper as members of the SORT team fled out the only door, stunned.

With the second blow the camper tipped over like the first, crushing the SORT team leader.

Gunshots cracked all around Chloe Gimms. SORT team members were still climbing out of the windows of the overturned second camper, only to be set upon by the men dressed as locals. Those already outside drew their weapons and looked for cover, but bullets smacked their chests and legs and knocked them around. They tried to return fire but they were shooting at ghosts. Snipers in the trees. The ground snow was turning red.

Chloe was lying on her side, not knowing how she got there. She turned to Warden James but he was being dragged away by two armed men. She was rolled over then by a man wearing a CNN ballcap, a gun jabbed into her face. He held a bloody SORT radio.

“Call in the guards from around the prison. Get them out here in two minutes.”

“What is this—”

He fired two shots into the snow behind her head and she barely heard her own scream. “Do it!” he yelled, in a faraway voice.

She called them in. She didn’t know if she was yelling or whispering into the radio. The man took her side arm from her and dragged her over to the rest.

Time blurred. Prison guards arriving from the perimeter were taken captive, made to sit in the snow like children, the local cops and reporters too. Guns, radios, and other equipment were all confiscated.

With the outside secured, some of the armed men headed for the prison entrance and the front gate, which opened magisterially. Gunfire was exchanged briefly, but then lights came on around the main entrance. Police cars, driven by more of these men, sped to the front gate with blue lights spinning.

Inmates exiting the penitentiary were picked up and chauffeured away. The rest of the guards were marched out of the prison, hands on their heads. A pickup truck pulled near the front entrance and a man standing in the bed raised a long, dark tube to his shoulder.

The missile obliterated the road sign heralding the entrance to ADX Gilchrist and federal property.

A cheer went up. Oddly, the prison structure itself, the gates and the watchtowers, were left intact.

Chloe Gimms saw it all then. The inmates were going to turn the tables on their captors and lock them up like prisoners of war. Chloe Gimms’s mind flashed on every story of human degradation she had overheard in her six years working federal pens. She was one of the few women there and she was going to be passed around like their last cigarette.

But that was not what happened. A truck used for transporting livestock was brought around and all the captives were loaded onto it like day laborers, including the wounded and the dead. Armed prisoners in con scrubs surrounded the truck and Chloe Gimms pushed toward the center, trying to disappear with the rest. The back of the truck was shut up and they began rolling away from the prison, past the fallen campers and abandoned TV trucks, turning the corner and following a bulldozer out along the access road. Chloe’s mind reeled. She looked around for familiar faces, but they were packed so tightly she could not move. Where were they being taken? The phrase “mass grave” popped into her head, and Chloe Gimms’s bladder emptied, warming the insides of her thighs. Hers was one of the last to go.

Special agent Lon Coté rode with the rest of the Gilchrist police force aboard a second truck, pulling in between the guard truck and the lead bulldozer. Ex-cons had led a surprise attack on the prison from the outside, and the liberated prisoners rode in pickups on either side of the two trucks now, howling and hoisting rifles in their hands.

The country road was dark but for the white snow. In the distance Coté could see machines working, large vehicles: backhoes, tractors, a fork-bladed snowplow. The organization mystified him. This was a coordinated effort, not a riot of opportunity.

The trucks slowed near the machines, rolling past cruisers and armed prisoners, AR-15s leaning casually on shoulders. No one on Coté’s truck uttered a sound. A huge combine lit up, slowly threshing its way off the road to allow them past. Suddenly Coté understood, and he was amazed.

The voices of the cons below grew angry. An argument, back and forth, in Spanish and English. The Spanish accent was Cuban. Gilchrist housed seven Mariel Cubans, the worst of the six thousand or so degenerates, criminals, and lunatics dispatched to the United States in Castro’s “Freedom Flotilla” of 1980.

Coté chanced a look over the side of the truck. The arguing Marielito was wearing Chief Darrow’s hat and brandishing his AR-15 in the direction of the cops on the trucks. One of the ex-cons was telling the Marielito to do as he was told, that he was not following the plan.

Then a yell from behind. Coté turned in time to see a young man in uniform slipping over the side of the truck, dropping wildly to the ground and taking off. It was the police chief’s son, his arms pumping, boot treads kicking up bits of snow like sparks as he ran full-out for the trees.

Two shrill whistles from one of the ex-cons on the ground and a shot rang out.

The chief’s son stumbled to his knees. A second shot stopped him from crawling.

People on both trucks screamed.

Armed cons and ex-cons jumped from their cars and rushed the trucks. A pickup with an M60 machine gun mounted on its bed pulled around from the shadows, high-beam headlights on, patrolling the road with a small man crouched behind the butt stock, hands at the ready. Coté began saying “The Lord’s Prayer” in his head.

The Marielito was still going on, his debate with the white ex-con ratcheted up a few notches now. The hostages’ fate was being decided. Cons and ex-cons waited on all sides with wild looks of freedom and desire in their eyes, their rifles trained on the trucks, waiting to be told what to do.

Blue police lights came on. There was a cruiser set just off the road. Four men in con scrubs stood outside it, mostly in shadow.

One man stood in front of the rest. That man slowly shook his head.

The Marielito in the police hat gave in. He shrugged grandly and lowered his rifle, swearing in Spanish.

Rifles went down all around the trucks. The man with the mounted machine gun took his hand off the trigger and tipped the barrel toward the sky.

The trucks lurched and started forward again, past the rumbling combine and a sign marking Gilchrist’s town limits. Coté’s eyes remained fixed on the man who, with a simple command gesture to the renegade Marielito, had pardoned their lives. He was certain that blue-tinged silhouette was Luther Trait.

The combine rolled back into place behind them and the other machines crowded in, the snowplows starting to work, pushing snow from the fields onto the road. The prisoners were barricading the routes into Gilchrist. They were expelling every law-enforcement representative and closing off the town. It was a revolution.

Chapter 8

The center of town was taken without resistance and Luther Trait entered the Gilchrist police station with little fanfare, like a conquering general inspecting the abandoned enemy headquarters. The sensation was so like one of his mental journeys that he had to remind himself that he was in fact physically in the room. Coffee cups had been left behind and coats were slung over chair backs and the telephones still rang. Trait touched one of the desks, feeling it under his fingers, still uncertain. He put his hand on a ringing phone and the receiver was still warm. He answered it.

The voice said, “This is Salvatore Richardsen of the FBI. Get me Agent Coté.”

Trait said, “He is not here right now to take your call.”

“Who is this?” demanded the caller. “What the hell is going on there?”

Trait hung up and turned to his crew. They were stamping snow off their shoes and exploring the station, except Spotty who stood by his side. Spotty had been Trait’s white shadow at Marion, the Brotherhood of Rebellion pledge a full head taller than anyone else in the room, and loyal in the extreme. He would march at any order. ADX Gilchrist had failed to break him mentally because there was so little there to break. The rest were ex-cons dressed as locals, Brotherhood of Rebellion click-ups from the outside.

Dove Menckley entered the station shivering. Slender and shifty, a compulsive arsonist with burned hands and skin grafts obscuring the Hispanic features of his face, Menckley took in the room with furtive glances out of weepy, bloodshot eyes. Stacks of paperwork, partition drywall, roster notices: Menckley’s world was full of kindling.

“Crazy out there,” he said, rubbing his scarred fingers together thirstily. “No fires, anyway.”

Trait said, “There better not be.”

Menckley nodded, chastened. “They’re rounding up the residents and bringing them to the prison.”

“Good. How do the people look?”

“Bad,” Menckley said, smiling until he realized he probably shouldn’t. “Pretty bad.”

“Cons staying inside town?”

“I think so. They’re enjoying it too much to run off yet. A few will try their luck on the outside, but I think most are excited about assembling back at the pen tomorrow morning. They want to know what your plan is.”

“We have the snow on our side, but not time. Get back to the pen. Some of them might be thinking about tearing it down. Discourage them. We need it for the next phase.”

Menckley looked surprised. “How am I supposed to discourage them?”

“Just do it. See that they stay happy and occupied until tomorrow morning.”

Trait left him and started down the hallway. He had been inside a few police stations in his time, he knew the general layout. He paused at the doorway to the radio room. Every line on the Enhanced 911 switchboard was flashing. An ex-con named DeYoung was working the console, and Trait motioned to him to put a call on speaker.

“Gilchrist Police,” said DeYoung. “What’s your emergency?”

“Oh, thank God, I’ve been calling.” An elderly woman, whispering. “There’re men snooping around my backyard.”

Enhanced 911 displayed the name and street address of the caller. DeYoung said, “Is this forty-three Abenaki Way?”

“Yes.” Relief, her voice growing louder. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Those are plainclothes police officers, ma’am. We’re checking residents door to door. You can let them right in.”

“Oh — thank heavens.”

Trait moved on. He wore the police chief’s key ring on his belt — having changed out of his hack clothes and back into regular prison issue — and found the lockup around the corner to the right. There were only two cells: Gilchrist was a safe community, once you factored out 312 reluctant residents. Trait found the key that fit the lock, and the steel-barred door swung open.

Warden Barton James sat turned toward the wall on one end of the thick plastic bench inside. He was hunched over, head hanging, hands tucked protectively between his legs. His bald skull was florid with yellow and purple bruises and blood from his face soaked the front of his white cotton shirt. He was beltless and shoeless and still.

Luther Trait entered and stood before him. Trait stooped for a good look at his face. The warden’s right eye was a swollen, raspberry egg. Within the bruised orbit of his left, a pale green iris drifted toward Trait, a dilated pupil attempting to focus.

Trait sat down next to the warden. He relaxed and took in the clean, wide cell. Then, for a moment, he was sitting in his foster father’s study, in an oversized, smoothly polished wooden college chair. Trait waited and the image cleared.

“There are things I want you to know,” Trait said, “because no one else will truly appreciate what I have achieved here. I can tell you now, the break started with your guards. Brotherhood of Rebellion parolees got the home addresses of the E-Unit hacks and maintenance personnel. You all live in a neat little hack neighborhood, so it was easy to do surveillance on the hacks and their hack wives and little hack children enjoying their freedom. My men concentrated on dietary habits — specifically, breakfast foods. Getting into the houses was no big deal, and the sedatives were carefully measured with body size in mind, timed to release well into the hacks’ work shifts. Yesterday was shakedown and sterilization in E-Unit. It was smooth, the hacks going down without any biological surges triggering their body alarms. We used the sight lines along the corridor to duck the cameras and swap clothes with the sleeping hacks. Then we played guard, signaling the cameras to open the rest of the pod doors. This same trick worked for the grate openings at the end of the hall, and the range upstairs, your hacks opening doors for us all the way to the Command Center. The battle there was bloody but quick, and then we owned the entire complex by remote control. Pod doors were opened in every security unit and the animals set free.”

Warden James did not move, facing away from Trait, crumpled in pain. His only response was a tuneful wheeze.

“You’re wondering how a man in solitary confinement in the highest security prison in the world could coordinate such an ambitious plan. I got a little help from my friends. The only times I was allowed out of the prison was to provide testimony for one of the members of my ‘disruptive group.’ A few minutes of face time, that was all I needed. You can thank my lawyers for that. I left most of the details to a trusted associate who has been lying low here in town a few days now, your average good citizen, preparing for my release. Other devoted Brotherhood parolees have been drifting steadily into town, getting the lay of the land and jacking tractors and heavy machinery to barricade the main roads and blitz you at the staging area. We took you from behind. You can see, I considered everything.”

Trait was only now starting to appreciate the victory himself.

“You understand now why I had to see the writer? Her requesting a visit one day before the riot, after eighteen months of planning? I was worried the riot was off, but it wasn’t. Tonight I have unleashed the wrath of ADX Gilchrist on its little host town. One night of rampage won’t make up for years of torture, but it is a start. I’m putting their pent-up hostility to good use. The cons are rounding up every citizen in town and bringing them back to the prison. Tomorrow morning I will outline for them my great design.”

The warden’s voice was hushed and pained. “You’ll never control them all.”

Trait was pleased with the warden’s impaired speech. “No more than you could. The difference between you and me is, I don’t intend to try. Tonight I have their enthusiasm and that is enough.”

The satisfaction of the past few hours drained as Trait looked ahead to the strength required to see this thing through to the end. He turned the warden toward him, eliciting a pitiful groan.

“I am not going to kill you, Warden. On the contrary, I am going to do everything within my power to keep you alive. You are my prisoner now. I am going to study you as you studied me.”

Barton James’s slanted jaw garbled his words. “The army will come in here and blow you all to hell.”

Trait smiled. “I give your government two hours before it realizes what has happened here, and another six to eight to mass troops outside the town. By then I will have addressed the country, and that should put things into proper perspective. You think we got lucky breaking out of Gilchrist? I’m working on a fifty-year plan. This is only the beginning.”

It was midnight and Callie Coldwell was sitting in the dark with a loaded .38 in her lap. She never slept well when Ted was gone, but when Channel Seven’s prison remote went to static, she really got scared. She couldn’t see any lights on in the windows down Duggan Way, the main road of the cookie-cutter village of correctional officers known as Gilchrist Falls. She wondered how many other wives had already left.

Ted’s last words to her on the phone that morning were Just sit tight. And she had done that, making an afternoon of it with Becky and C. C. after their early release from school, building a family of snowmen in the front yard and baking sugar cookies to welcome them to the neighborhood. Later, they went tramping over to Dinah’s to go sledding with her two girls. From the hill out back they watched the minivans pulling away, she and Dinah dishing cruelly on the younger wives. Callie was home in plenty of time for Ted’s next call, due six hours ago now. Maybe mixing two highballs after the girls went to bed wasn’t such a good idea. She was getting really paranoid now that something had gone wrong.

That was why Ted’s old gun lay across her thighs. So when the blue-lighted police cruiser turned onto her street, she said aloud, “Thank you, God,” going to the window, leaving the gun behind. Just knowing that the Gilchrist cops were out there — even though Ted called them Mayberry RFD — put her mind at ease. All it took was that one little sign of authority.

Then the cruiser stopped outside her house. All gratitude melted away, and she felt her worst fears were about to be confirmed: Something terrible had happened to Ted at the prison. She stood behind the window sheers, hiding from bad news, praying the cruiser would shine a light in their yard and roll along.

It turned into her driveway, headlights brightening the family room.

Callie rushed into the attached garage, hitting the button and hurrying to the rising door. It opened on bright, flashing headlights and blowing snow.

Two officers were out of the car, closing their doors, coming forward. Callie hugged herself inside her sweater, one hand shading her eyes. “Yes?”

“Yes,” they said, advancing through the flashing lights.

Callie was already backing away in confusion. Neither man wore a police uniform.

A half-mile closer to the center of town, Fred Burnglass awoke to the sound of voices in his yard. He crawled out of bed in threadbare long Johns and felt around for his eyeglasses, only mildly aware of a rare, halfhearted erection. He pulled his specs behind his ears and squinted out his bedroom window. There were shadows prowling around the lumber mill. Those tractor thieves he had been hearing about.

He padded downstairs, barefoot in the dark. He froze near the bottom as a shadow passed his window. They were up on his front porch now. They were near the door.

Fred Burnglass was seventy-one years old. He lived alone, never having married for the simple reason that he had never gotten around to it. He owned six working radios, including the first one his grandfather ever brought home, but no television set — again, simply because he had never gotten around to buying one. He owned a telephone, hanging below his medicine shelf on the kitchen wall in the back of the house. Except for two years in the Army Signal Corps when he was stationed in New Jersey, Fred had never traveled any farther outside Gilchrist than Hardwick, fifteen minutes to the south, and then only for tractor parts. Everyone in the Northeast Kingdom knew to come to Fred Burnglass for good quality-milled wood at a fair price.

He heard more voices, whispering and near. He crept down the rest of the way to his hand axe on the straw mat next to his rubber boots. A flashlight shone through one of his side windows, splitting the darkness. As Fred’s hand closed around the smoothly worn handle of the axe, he heard a single pane of glass pop out, busted.

The crack and tinkle in the rear of his house echoed in Fred’s head. He was seeing shadows everywhere as he fought his way to the kitchen. He reached the cold linoleum of the dark room, fearful of broken glass. Voices outside, quiet and plain, but he was too rattled to make sense of them. He stopped beside the back door and felt the cold air spilling through the broken pane. The tractor thieves were right on the other side of the wall.

One hand came through the busted window, tattooed knuckles and fingernails pointed like saw teeth. It reached for the inside knob as Fred stood mutely, unable to raise his axe blade at a human hand, the trusted tool growing heavy in his grip. He spun it so that the flat edge was facing down, and with both hands steadying his aim he hammered at it once, crushing the tattooed knuckles against the door frame. Fred ran back to the front of the house, away from the howling and the angry voices.

Someone was trying his front doorknob. The door wasn’t locked, but it tended to stick in winter. Fred watched the twisting knob and the entire door seemed to be moving. He stood before it, long Johns sagging off his behind, axe halfheartedly raised.

“Get away,” he said, not sounding like his voice at all, the words ran together as though choked.

There was a rattle outside and he could see his ten-foot ladder now up against the house, legs were running up past the window to the second floor. An engine started up outside — his Ford. Then something hard kicked at his back door, and kicked again. Fred spun to each noise like a man taking arrows from all directions. He backed to the railing at the bottom of the stairs. Footsteps crunched glass on the kitchen linoleum and a chair fell over. Fred backed along the side of the staircase to the angled closet door. He fumbled with the latch and backed inside.

Raincoats, his father’s bagged suits, his old army jacket, all brushing against him like ghosts. He backed in deep and spun the axe again in his trembling hand, blade facing down now, Fred crazy with fear. He raised the axe over his head, and he lashed out at the first thing that appeared when he saw the door open a crack. There was a shriek of pain and an arm pulled back as the door was thrown wide open. Fred came out of the coats yelling and swinging at the shadows, but they immediately wrested the axe away from him. There were two men, each with their own hand tools. They were upon him.

Tom Duggan’s Ship had run aground. The long, black Fleetwood hit a frozen patch of road and the steering wheel turned uselessly in his hands as the funeral limousine slid off the shoulder and beached on a bed of densely packed snow. In frustration he threw it into reverse and gunned the engine and did everything he wasn’t supposed to do, and the car sank and stuck there.

He threw open the door and hobbled through the deep snowfall to the road. From the downstairs window of his funeral parlor in the town common, he had watched the armed men load the Gilchrist police onto a truck. He left immediately after they did, his usual evening commute turned nightmarish by roaming prisoners and snow. But he was alone on this dark road, and less than a mile from his mother’s house.

Tom Duggan ran through the trees. Branches tore at his undertaker’s coat, grabbing after him like fingers. Snow and time obscured the landmarks he had known since a boy, but he pressed on, falling through the woods as much as running through them.

He emerged into a clearing and found himself right around the corner from her driveway. The house was dark when he reached it, the lamp timers switched off around ten. The side door was locked. Tom Duggan’s mother never locked the door. His house key was hanging on the ring in the Fleetwood’s ignition. He rang the doorbell impatiently, then without waiting he pulled his hand into his coat sleeve and punched through the windowpane nearest the knob.

He fumbled the door open without cutting himself and rushed through the kitchen and then upstairs to her bedroom. It was still made from the morning. The bathroom was also empty. He heard voices downstairs and ran to the dim parlor but her chair was empty. It was the radio playing, and he switched it off and called her name. He checked the floors in every room in case she had fallen. Then he saw that the front hallway door was open.

They never used the front door. The storm door was closed, but the threshold was sprinkled with snow.

He ran out onto the front walk. There were footsteps in the snow, one set, a short stride, already fading with the wind. He followed them around to the side of the house.

Tom Duggan found his mother lying in a drift a few steps behind the old woodpile. He rushed to her, stumbling, finding her curled up on her side, her hands pressed to her chest, her eyes closed. He rolled her over and let out a wail. Her mouth was shut in a grimace, her neck muscles clenched, her jaw set. He groped for a pulse even as he knew that she was gone.

He stepped back. The rest of the snow was undisturbed except for his own footsteps. What had possessed her to open the front door and wander outside with only a housecoat on? Was it the news on the radio? Was she disoriented and trying to walk for help? He knew only that his mother had died afraid and alone.

He knelt, weeping, and got her up into his arms. His impulse was to carry her back inside the house, but with the prisoners loose and the snowstorm, it could be days before he could get her to the funeral home. He would not allow her to decay inside the warm house. Tom Duggan cursed the prison then, cursed the uprising, standing with his dead mother in his arms. Slowly and regrettably he lowered her back into her cradle of snow. He would see to a proper and respectful end as he had always promised. With bare, shivering hands he heaped snow over her body, snow that would preserve her until his return.

Wind howled through the trees, breaking the spell of his anguish. Only after he stood again did he realize it was not the wind howling. It was the rowdy cries of escaped prisoners, borne on the wind.

The predators Tom Duggan had lured to Gilchrist were on the road. He started toward the house in search of a weapon. For the first time in his life, he considered objects in terms of killing potential, of which his mother’s house held very few. Knives, yes, but nothing to fend off more than one convict at a time. They would not get him, he determined. He would survive this if only to see to his mother’s final details.

Tom Duggan eyed the woods behind his mother’s house. He entered them, slowly at first, still weighed down by despair. But by measures his pace increased. Murderous thoughts raged inside his head like the hungry voices of the prisoners as he headed north, tearing through the trees, not quite blindly, heading in the general direction of the old asbestos mine.

Kells entered the parlor just before the report came through. He was holding his parka and gloves, his brown face flushed from the cold. All eyes turned to him.

“Where were you?” said Terry.

“Car ran off the road,” he said, unwinding a snow-dusted scarf from around his neck. His thick, khaki pants were wet to his thighs. “Bad out there. Had to walk back.”

“Where’s Mr. Hodgkins?” asked Fern.

Kells said, “What do you mean?”

“He isn’t with you?”

Terry upped the volume then, as the CNN anchor interrupted a taped piece. “We are going to the telephone now, where one of our news producers, Justin Keane, has breaking information on the Vermont prison break. Justin, where are you?”

There was no graphic available. The shot lingered on the anchorman’s tanned face.

“Yes, Martin, there’s been an extraordinary turn of events here... I am calling from a pay phone in Beckett, Vermont, a few miles north of Gilchrist. Approximately three hours ago there was an attack upon the Gilchrist Penitentiary. A surprise attack, armed gunmen, believed to be parolees of a sympathetic national prison gang, opened fire on federal officials stationed outside the siege. The battle was brief, terribly one-sided, culminating in all law-enforcement and news-media personnel being loaded onto trucks and escorted out of town through a barricade of farm equipment. Martin, the prisoners of the Gilchrist penitentiary are free. And they have seized control of the town.”

Everyone in the parlor was standing. Sentences unfinished, then shushing each other as the report resumed.

“... equipment, radios, weapons. Also our satellite broadcast truck. My cameraman and I were taken at gunpoint.”

The anchor’s face reflected the nation’s confused dismay. “You’re saying you had a gun pointed—”

“I personally witnessed the shooting death of one Gilchrist police officer. None of us believed they were simply going to release us... The only thing I can compare this to, Martin, is a military coup.”

Fern was staring at the television, both hands covering her mouth. Terry looked dumbfounded.

The rest were like Rebecca: moving about, but not knowing which way to turn.

The anchorman said, “Justin — we know from earlier reports that many people have already left the town. What is being done for those who remain in Gilchrist tonight?”

“Martin... I can’t imagine what they might be going through.”

Kells switched off the television. It was as though all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

“We leave now,” he said. “Everybody upstairs. Pack essentials only, the warmest clothes you have.”

“Pack...?” Terry said, incredulous.

“One bag. The police station is just up the road. They will be here any minute.”

Terry said, “How can we drive—”

“We can’t. They own the roads. We go on foot.”

Mia cried, “Where?”

“Out of here. Right now, we just go.”

Dr. Rosen said, “Shouldn’t we wait here, for help?”

Terry was at the telephone next to the deacon’s bench. He picked up the receiver, poised to dial. The numbers wouldn’t come.

“You dial nine-one-one,” Kells said, “you bring them right to us.”

Terry dropped the receiver. “Cell phone,” he said, and rushed out of the room.

Bert-and-Rita were the next to leave, starting past Kells and moving quickly up the stairs. Rebecca lingered near the doorway. Fleeing seemed so rash. Staying seemed so wrong.

The existential jury. Rebecca hurried out of the parlor and climbed the stairs behind Fern.

Inside her room, she got her cargo bag open on the bed and went around grabbing things, still not convinced. It was as though she were acting out a scene of people fleeing danger. Socks. Boots. Gloves and hat. Toothbrush, underwear. Moving automatically.

Kells’s room was directly above Rebecca’s, and she heard his heavy boots moving from bathroom to dresser to bed. It was beginning to sink in. She had no choice. All of a sudden they were running for their lives.

Her jewelry kit, a fleece pullover, her handbag, her cell phone. She nearly left without her laptop, and forgetting her manuscript heightened her panic more than anything. She slipped the laptop with battery charger into its carrying case and slung the leather bag over her shoulder, taking up her cargo bag without zipping it, stopping at the door to look around the room. She was terrified to leave. She looked at the things she was leaving and wondered if she would ever return.

Kells’s deep voice upstairs got her moving. She set her bag down in the hall and ran up, ruffling the hanging quilts as she brushed past.

Fern was in the middle of her bedroom holding Ruby while Kells zipped up a bulging paisley carpetbag. “She’ll be fine,” he was saying. “They’re not after cats.”

“But she’s never been alone, she doesn’t—”

“She’s fine,” Kells said, reaching over and plucking the black cat from her arms.

Ruby squirted out of his hands, wriggling under the low bed. Kells clapped shut the wooden handles of Fern’s carpetbag and moved to the door, leaving her looking at the empty bed. He went back and gripped Fern’s arm and brought her along.

Rebecca followed them downstairs. The others stood in coats and hats at the reception desk. Each person carried one bag, except for Bert-and-Rita, who wore their matching backpacks, and Terry, who carried two. Bert-and-Rita’s cross-country skis and poles stood against the reception desk. Robert held Mia, who was staring out from his dark coat. Terry was frantically punching buttons on his phone.

Fern went to Coe. “It’s okay,” he said, but a frightened boy had replaced the easygoing teenager in the fool’s cap.

Kells pulled down an old hunting rifle from its mount over the front door. “This work?” he asked, checking the action. Flakes of rust twinkled to the floor.

“I... I think so,” Fern said.

“Last time it was fired?”

“Ten years ago?”

Kells hung on to it anyway. “Cartridges?”

Fern looked spacey. “Maybe the side drawer.”

He pawed around inside the reception desk, pocketing a few rounds.

“Where are we going?” asked Mia, her voice tremulous, tear-choked.

Kells came around to the front of the desk. “They don’t know the town. They must be going by maps or street-to-street. We need someplace...” He found a brochure next to the burning candle — Welcome to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom! — and unfolded it. “Someplace not marked on a map. Someplace remote, where we can rest awhile, think.”

He showed the map to Fern with Coe looking over their shoulders. “The golf course?” Coe said.

“Where? This empty area here?”

“There’s a clubhouse there. Brand-new, they opened it this summer.”

Fern said, “That’s four or five miles away.”

Kells folded the brochure and stuffed it into his coat pocket, ready to leave.

Terry, getting no satisfaction from his phone, collapsed it against the breast of his overcoat. “Five miles? In this weather?”

Kells nodded. “You’re going to get your shoes wet.”

Dr. Rosen said, “If we wait here, I’m sure help will come. If we leave, how will they find us?”

Darla’s blond hair was tucked under a head wrap, ski-lift passes dangling from her parka. “They let the guards go free.”

Kells looked at her. He seemed to be constantly in motion, even when standing still. “How many of those guards do you think were women?”

Darla blanched. Rebecca did too. Now all she wanted to do was run.

“Look!” said Coe.

He was pointing to the storm door. Blue lights spun through the snow and the trees. A cruiser was rolling along Post Road, but it was not the police.

Kells threw his bag strap over his shoulder and took up Fern’s bulky carpetbag and the rusted rifle. “Out the back. We go now.”

They rushed to the kitchen. Fern was the last to leave, blowing out the spiced candle on the reception desk and looking around one last time for Ruby. Rebecca called to her from the swinging doors.

They stole out into the backyard like criminals themselves, eleven fugitives blundering into the snow-muffled night. Some drifts reached Rebecca’s knees, pulling on her legs like a soft floor in a dream, her bag cutting into her shoulder. But with fear at her back she slogged ahead. At the tree line she glanced back once at the inn, faded into the snow except for a faint yellow light in an upstairs window. Bert-and-Rita glided past her on their long skis, arms pumping. Terry followed, struggling in his long coat, eventually dumping one of his Louis Vuitton garment bags. Kells was the last, breathing hard, toting his and Fern’s possessions. Their foot trail lay glaringly in the white expanse, but the wind and snowfall followed them late into the night. By morning all trace of their journey was obscured.