The Northeast Kingdom

Chapter 22

Spotty entered the inn dining room that morning looking like the rising of the sun had caught him off guard. He left his long coat in a heap on the floor before the corner hutch and lowered himself carefully into a chair. They had a strange way of collapsing beneath his bulk.

He still wore his prison scrub shirt, untucked over the drab fanner’s pants and huge, unlaced work boots. There were many more aspirin-sized holes of dried blood on his hands and forearms, as though carpenter nails had been plucked out of them.

Trait sat across from him. “Can you tell me what is it you see in those dogs?”

Spotty looked surly and distant, the way he always looked. “They’ll come around,” he said. “I need more time.”

Trait saw that Spotty would never admit defeat. He was a loyal man who wanted someone to be loyal to him. He trusted that loyalty would be returned in kind.

Inkman fidgeted to Trait’s right. The inn dining room was their center of strategic operations, buffet tables pushed side-to-side, covered with town maps and notes composed in Inkman’s inscrutable scrawl. Only one serving table remained against the wall, the padded cloth empty except for crumbs and coffee stains and prints from dirty cat paws.

Map ink blued Inkman’s fingertips. His hands were always moving now, and sweat dampened anything he touched. He wore a hooded coat back and forth from the inn to the center of town, to confound imagined snipers. More and more he looked like a frightened little man.

He had asked Trait that Spotty be assigned to him full time, and Trait had refused.

Trait looked at Spotty. “The fireball at the gas station got Menckley all horny. That gave me the idea to dispatch the hairless firebug with Burly to every house, shack, and cabin, working from the border in. We’re going to suffocate the rebels by torching their hiding places, drawing them here.”

“Let him come,” said Spotty.

Trait enjoyed Spotty’s confidence. “That’s what this is about. Fortifying the town.”

They schemed. Sentries were reassigned to guard against surprise attacks. Inkman said that the inn was vulnerable, and Trait agreed. They decided to abandon it and circle their wagons around the town common. Trait was determined not to suffer any further embarrassment at Clock’s hands.

Trait paid careful attention to Inkman’s counsel. Inkman exhibited a desperate enthusiasm for the security arrangements, while Spotty needed only to be told what to do. They were like two planets in divergent orbits around Trait’s sun.

Heavy footsteps interrupted. The four Marielitos rode a wave of cold air inside, moving into the dining room with their sled helmets in hand. They had searched for the rebels all night after the gas station blast. Trait had known it would be pure futility, but he left them to it. The solidarity of the convict township was waning under Clock’s pressure. They required the purifying ritual of the hunt. Victory over the insurgents would unite them again.

The Marielitos stood jackal-eyed and edgy. Trait saw Spotty stiffen and knew there might be trouble. Spotty had been Trait’s golem ever since Marion, and his fealty was perhaps the only fixed value in the ever-changing Gilchrist equation. Spotty’s back remained toward the men.

“Good news,” announced Trait. “Your search is over. We are luring Clock to us.”

The leader translated for the others. “We want the warden,” he said.

Trait’s eyes grew cool. “You’re just frustrated. You can’t get Clock and you’re angry.”

The Marielito spokesman frowned sulkily. “We know you have him in the jail. We want the hijo de puta.”

Inkman shifted in his chair. The Marielitos wore guns on their belts and their coats were swept open to display them.

Trait remained impeccably still. “You can’t have him,” he said.

“Why don’t you let them take the warden?” Inkman offered. “For their troubles.”

“We no ask,” the Marielito said. “We tell.”

Trait’s eyes never left his. “You don’t get the warden,” Trait said. “Now go back to the funeral home and wait for further instructions.”

The Marielitos remained. Fear was a challenge to these men, a taunt, something to be answered with action.

Spotty planted his feet firmly on the floor and rose out of his chair. He did not turn to face them. He did not even look their way. He just stood ready.

First one Marielito backed away. Then another. Finally the spokesman yielded and, dismissed like children, they went sullenly to the door.

Inkman sprang from his chair as soon as they were gone. Trait anticipated some comment but Inkman just donned his hood and went out into the snow alone.

Spotty followed Trait out to the front steps of the inn. As they watched Inkman trudging back into town, angry barking came out of the snow in the distance.

Trait turned to Spotty with a sudden rush of affinity. “Leave the dogs alone,” he said. “We need to concentrate on security now.”

Spotty’s shoulders tested the seams of his coat sleeves as he acquiesced with a shrug. They split up inside the police station, Trait continuing to the cells in back.

Warden James sat on his plastic slab, his shoulders sagging against the wall as he listened to what Trait had to say. “Now you come to me for advice?”

Trait stood outside the jail cell, his feet firmly planted. “I’m just telling you what has happened.”

“You are the warden now, Luther. They are the prisoners. They have the motivation. You refused to be broken, and now so do they. How quickly the satisfied forget their hunger.”

In a flash Trait was back inside his E-Unit pod in ADX Gilchrist, sitting alone in his old cell. He was happy there. “I relied too much on Inkman, who is not one of us.”

“All kingdoms are illusory, Luther. Even yours. There is no satisfaction in holding power, only taking it. I am your example. You exist now only to incite rebellion, to be overthrown or killed.”

His insubordination surprised Trait. “Today you are much more opinionated.”

“A man with nothing to lose will get that way. If you don’t like what you’re hearing, confide in someone else. Go to Inkman if you still think you can trust him. I’ve been thinking about what you said, about criminals being the purest of men, the best of their breed, feared and reviled for their strength. You believe in survival of the fittest. You think you will prevail here because you are a warrior. But fittest does not mean strongest. It means most adaptive. It means most suitable for survival. Strength has played less of a hand in human evolution than luck. Dinosaurs were strong until a meteorite kicked up a cloud of dust that blanked the earth, and they could not adapt to the changed conditions. These rebels are your meteorite, the snow outside is your cloud of dust. You are a killer and a sadist, Luther, motivated by forces you do not understand. You are madadaptive. Clock and the others, they are motivated purely by self-preservation now, they have nothing to lose.”

Trait hated to concede anything, but the question was an important one. “Clock said Inkman would betray me.”

“Inkman betrayed his country for his ego. Now Gilchrist is his country.” The warden lowered his head, and the look he showed Trait was one of fatherly disappointment. “Why do you think it would be any different this time around?”

Chapter 23

The physical challenge of their expeditions no longer made any impression upon Rebecca. Only the daylight made this one different. They paired off and took turns pulling Polk’s toboggan. Her mind kept returning to the gas station in a perverse attempt to reconstruct the series of events leading to the convict’s death, forming only the fractured narrative of an interrupted dream.

The house Tom Duggan led them to was modest and crowded by trees. From the front door, just a sliver of street showed beyond a twist in the driveway, and only from the upstairs bedroom window could you see the nearest neighbor, a farmhouse and stable set well across the road. To Kells, the house was neatly hidden. To Rebecca, it was a remote, wooded cul-de-sac tempting to Grue.

Inside, snow fell in the living room. Ghostly flakes haunted her retina and no amount of blinking would clear them. Through a hall window she saw Tom Duggan’s dark figure standing alone in the side yard. The real snow falling outside was soothing to her vision, so she pulled her coat back on and went out.

Down the front steps and around a stack of snow-covered firewood, into a side yard bound by dark, leafless trees. Tom Duggan stood hat in hand over a smooth, broad, gravelike hump of snow. His eyes were down-turned and he stood rigid as though expecting a sudden gust of wind. Dull white stubble aged his angular face. She stood near and waited for him to speak.

He said, “This was my mother’s house.”

She had sensed this from his familiar manner as he entered the house and moved through the rooms.

“She wandered out here,” he said. “I found her curled up.”

Rebecca remembered her first impression of Tom Duggan, at the ceremony on the town common: a proud, reasonable man who had humbly saved his hometown from extinction.

“There was nothing you could have done,” she said, aiming for empathy but hitting only emptiness.

He replaced his hunting cap. He said, “It’s just not right.”

“I’m really sorry.”

He sunk his hands deep into his overcoat pockets. “Kells wants me to take him into town.”

“Just you?”

He nodded. “I want to go. I want to see it.”

She found Kells inside, boiling water in a black pan. The kitchen had been updated recently, with clean buttercup-yellow countertops, natural wood cabinets, and new appliances except for the thin, whirring avocado-colored refrigerator.

He emptied a packet of Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup into an “Irish Blessing” mug. His whiskers were coming in dark with gray hints, giving his chin more of a spadelike jut.

Rebecca said, “You’re going into town?”

“With the undertaker. To get a look at the setup.”

“How long?”

“Don’t worry about Grue. The guns will keep him away. You can handle yourself here. You’ve proved that.”

“I proved nothing. The gas station counter killed that man, not me. All it proved was that you can force me into situations I don’t want to be in.”

Kells looked at her probingly. “Why did you come here?” he asked.

“What do you mean? To this house?”

“To Gilchrist. To the prison. You came for something.”

“You know why. To interview Luther Trait.”

“And he represents what to you? Besides publicity and book sales.”

“I was doing research on a character.”

“No.” He shook his head. “What about fear?”

“You mean, was I afraid? Of course.”

“Trait was especially cruel to women. Maybe that’s why you came. You told him on the phone that you wouldn’t be his ‘prize’.”

She still resented him for that phone call. “Well, he was right about one thing. That I would align myself with a killer.”

“He meant that you would let a man do the killing for you. You know that the only way you can avoid being the prize is to participate, to do your own fighting.”

She didn’t like that. “I don’t know what he meant,” she protested.

“Look here, at Gilchrist. The government was oppressing the prisoners who finally reached their breaking point and revolted. Now they are in charge of the town — but here we come, fighting back. That’s the price of power. The history of the human race was built on insurrection. Now look at you. In a world run by men, you’ve won real independence — money, a position of some influence. You’ve beat the system. The problem now is that as you move into power, getting a taste of it, you find it’s a lot easier to tear down the establishment than to build one up. Trait is learning that now. So there’s trepidation. There’s a stall, a pullback. Before you cut the emperor’s throat, you think: Do I really want to do this? Do I want the responsibility this will bring? That moment of hesitation is when most people fail. You’ve got to move past that fear. You’ve got to kill that fear, however it manifests itself.”

She shook her head as though to clear it. “Are you talking about Gilchrist now, or a gender war?”

“You came here to meet Trait so that you could go back and tell the world, I looked the beast in the eye. I faced the Minotaur and here is what I learned. Trait is a butcher and a sadist, with a special brutality toward women, and you came here to take away his power to scare you. You want to capture him in your book and trap him there for good. For you, killing a man and writing about him are the same thing. You came here to kill Luther Trait.”

She must have been even wearier than she realized. His words almost made sense. Her thoughts were like doll furniture and he was reaching inside her head and rearranging it to his liking. His persuasion was both seductive and alarming. “Why are you doing this to me?” she said.

Dr. Rosen entered carrying Polk’s sopping red bandage to the trash. If he noticed them talking, he didn’t care. “Forget the soup,” he said, washing his hands in the sink. “He’s asleep now.”

“Later?” said Kells.

“Maybe.”

Kells turned off the boiling water. “How long?”

Dr. Rosen was washing his hands forcefully under the steaming water. “He’s losing too much blood,” he said, then stopped and turned off the faucet and shook his head. He returned to the sitting room.

Kells added water and stirred, pulling a small plastic bag from his pocket and crumbling some brown herbs into the broth.

Rebecca looked again. Kells was stirring small buds of marijuana into the soup.

“From Coe’s pack,” he said. “If he wakes up again, give this to him.”

The scent of the pot rose with the steam as Rebecca watched the buds spin in the middle of the mug. Instead of flakes falling before her eyes, it snowed behind them now, the drifts piling up inside her head.

Kells and Tom Duggan left and Rebecca stood at the front door, looking past the driveway to the sliver of street. The snow fell in silence and nothing moved. She shut the door on the white yard and locked it behind her.

Chapter 24

Tom Duggan led Kells along the abandoned train route in to town. The railway was canopied with trees, narrow and straight. With their three-day beards and sullied clothes they looked like tramps who didn’t know the trains had stopped running.

There was no high ground from which to spy or mount an ambush on Gilchrist Common. The only way to view it was to go there. Post Road ran straight through it, starting with the general store and library, and ending at Duggan’s Funeral Home and the police station. The loop around the common itself was optional. The land sagged behind the buildings along the bend, the school, town hall, and church. That was where Tom Duggan figured to make their approach.

It was mid-morning by the time they reached the inn, a quarter mile outside the center. From behind a snow-frosted evergreen, they watched men in parkas unloading storage from Fern’s garage onto waiting sleds. One con carried an armful of rifles.

“They’re pulling back,” said Kells. “Moving everything into the center of town.”

A man with a rifle on his hip stood under the oak near Fern’s country swing. He turned his back to the road and Kells and Tom Duggan withdrew deeper into the trees.

They skirted the western perimeter where the land dipped to the farms below. Stout Scotch pines provided cover near the top of the rise, Kells staying close to the backs of the buildings, watching for convicts.

The barking frightened Tom Duggan. He was worried about being scented and betrayed. It grew more spirited as they approached. “What do we do?” he asked.

“Where are they?”

The dogs sounded like they were on the other side of the church, to the left. “There were never dogs here before.”

“They’d be on us now. Must be tied up.” Kells looked at the backs of the buildings. Tom Duggan had never viewed Gilchrist Common from this perspective. “We need to get inside one of these buildings.”

Tom Duggan looked down the lane and settled on the building he knew best.

“There’s a dirt room in back of the church. They buried the dead there before the town was incorporated, stored munitions there during the Revolutionary War. It’s where I keep my digging tools now. The old door doesn’t lock. Stairs lead right up into the sacristy.”

Kells nodded and followed him along the crest of the rise, past the back of the town hall, moving toward the dogs. The barking turned to howling, though its intensity began to wane. Tom Duggan could finally see them, dark German shepherds racing around the cemetery left of the church. About ten of them were penned there, strong, black beasts snapping at the air behind the spiked iron fence, baring their teeth and trampling the graveyard snow.

The narrow lane behind the buildings was clear on both sides. The square wooden door was now twenty steps away.

Tom Duggan ran for it. The old knob turned and the hinge squeaked as usual and the familiar scent of machine oil and earthy musk wafted out of the dark cellar.

Kells was at his side. The dogs were whimpering now, crying and no longer howling. They stood on the fence, dancing on their hind legs and pawing at the spikes. No more ferocity, just dogs whining to be let out.

They entered the cellar. Tom Duggan tugged the noisy door shut and they stood in earthen darkness. “Guard dogs,” said Kells.

“What are they doing here?”

“I don’t know. But they seemed to like us.”

No movement above. Light outlined the ceiling trapdoor and Tom Duggan led Kells past his workbench to the stairs. Their boots croaked guiltily on the wood planks.

Tom Duggan lingered in the downcast light as Kells eased open the trapdoor and moved to the front of the church. When no other noise followed Kells’s boot treads, he surfaced.

There was a long vestment closet in the sacristy and an old bowl sink and stacks of printed announcements. Tom Duggan ventured out past the backdrop wall and onto the modest altar overlooking the empty pews. Kells was halfway down the center aisle. Muddy paw prints stained the red carpet and the church reeked of wet dog. It was like the yellow snow on the graves outside. The desecration gnawed at Tom Duggan.

Special collections from the prison-enriched congregation paid for the new stained-glass windows, four to each side wall and two tall lancets on either side of the double front doors. The colored glass impeded the view of the town center — Tom Duggan hadn’t considered this — but the hinge windows opened at the bottom for ventilation, and even better, the front windows featured clear pieces of glass mixed in with the stained ones. He joined Kells near the doors.

The flakes were coming down wetter and smaller outside, a slow, white rain over Gilchrist Common. For just an instant Tom Duggan saw the town center as it had always been — the row of storefronts from the police station to the general store, the high flagpole, the snow-washed gazebo — everything normal and fixed. Then two slow-moving men in heavy coats approached with rifles in their hands, shuffling along the sidewalk.

Kells ducked and moved to the left of the church and Tom Duggan followed. They looked out from the honey-tinted glass of Jesus’ feet.

The cons had paused at the front of the cemetery fence. The dogs turned ferocious again, racing around the small stone markers, jaws snapping hungrily. The men barked back at them and continued on in the direction of the Masonic Hall.

Kells pried open the bottom of the window. The barking had tailed off again as the dogs returned their attention to the church, whining and jumping over one another at the rear fence.

Kells made a grunt of interest and they walked back to the front windows. A sled from the inn skied along Post Road, moving right to left, past the library and the bank and stopping to unload at the police station. The brick station was the center of activity. Three figures lurked on its cleared front steps, guarding the entrance, too far away for Tom Duggan to make out faces or weapons. At the curb in front was a beaten pickup with a large machine gun mounted on its bed.

Duggan’s Funeral Home was across the corner from the station. A bulldozer was working on his front lawn, plugging up the street with mounds of snow, frozen sod and all.

The loop road was recently plowed, and a large van was parked directly across the street from the church. Bold red letters on its sliding door spelled CAW.

“They must have cut the prison broadcast,” said Kells. “They’re hunkering down here in the center. They brought the TV van back for safekeeping.” Kells stood back from the window. “I’m going to take it out.”

“You’re not going out there,” said Tom Duggan.

But Kells had a way of announcing things that precluded debate. “I can eliminate their broadcast capability.”

“What if someone’s inside?”

Kells was unsnapping his parka. He had the taser on his belt. He moved it to his coat pocket.

“What about me?” asked Tom Duggan.

Kells pulled his ski mask on, then rolled it up to look like a wool cap. “Just wait here and tell me when I’m clear to go.”

Tom Duggan looked outside again. There was plenty of activity in the center but none near the church. The van would block him from sight. The only worry was another two-man patrol.

“Clear,” said Tom Duggan.

A gust of snow and the door closed and Tom Duggan was alone.

He watched Kells cross the road to the van, head down, shoulders hunched, walking slow. From behind, he easily passed for a prisoner.

He knocked on the van door, two sharp raps. Tom Duggan heard a garbled exchange of words. Kells stood waiting for what seemed like a long time, then the door slid open. Kells nodded up to the form inside — a black man, wearing earmuffs and a long, loose coat — then jabbed him with the taser and jumped inside.

Tom Duggan saw the con’s legs twitching. Kells turned and glanced back once at the church before shutting the door.

He watched until he was confident Kells had raised no alarms, then Tom Duggan turned back to the empty church, moving from the vestibule to the rear pews. He had held out hope that some sense of decency or even superstition would have kept the marauders away from his shop, but as the dogs in the cemetery proved, nothing in Gilchrist was sacred anymore, not faith or death or personal property. They were tearing up his land, they were running through his house.

He needed to see this. He needed to know that there was no going back.

Raucous barking intruded upon his thoughts. He realized he should have been watching the windows. The front door opened behind him, too soon for it to be Kells. Even before Tom Duggan turned, he knew he was in trouble.

The prisoner, hulking and broad-faced, pale with brown hair matted flat on his hatless head, stood holding an automatic weapon on Tom Duggan. He stepped forward smiling like a retarded boy at the entrance to a zoo.

Rebecca had her laptop open on a tray table in the parlor. On the screen was a page from her long-gestating sequel to Last Words. She read the prose again. It was flat and meaningless. Writing had become a safe haven for her, a place she escaped to in order to avoid life’s conflicts, rather than confront them. She had been hiding inside her work just as she had spent the past year hiding in Vermont.

She selected the entire text of her manuscript, beginning to end, blackening the display. The delete button was smooth under her fingertip. She scooped a tiny thread of dust off it, coming within a few pressure-pounds of executing the self-destruct command. She wanted to know what it would feel like. She tested the tension of the key spring, the machine gently whirring beneath her finger. But caution prevailed in the end. She closed her notebook before doing any permanent damage.

She went to the kitchen. The pantry jars held only cookie crumbs and cracker salt, the refrigerator an open liter of ginger ale. She was hungry finally, her stomach so empty it hurt. She took in the kitchen and tried to picture Tom Duggan’s mother puttering around there. There were safety rails in the shower stall upstairs and handlebars around the raised toilet, triggering memories of Rebecca’s own grandmother near the end, and the house in Manchester with the sun porch and the dishwasher that connected to the sink by a hose. She remembered her grandmother’s sweet tooth, and Rebecca pursued this instinct into the dining room, to the buffet table there, but found only table linens and tarnished silverware. She climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, undaunted, zeroing in on the night table at the sunken side of the mattress. The drawer handle was still slick with cream.

Jackpot. An open bag of Brach’s candies and a package of Nestlé Crunch bars.

Rebecca hurried downstairs to share this bounty with the others. They were in the living room, Dr. Rosen watching the TV and Mia sitting with Polk. The old man lay on a brocaded sofa, his potbelly barely rising beneath an unfinished brown-and-orange afghan with crocheting needles still hooked in the corner. His skin was papery and his lips were downturned at the corners, parted as though in whisper. He looked like a thing ravaged by the elements. She thought of a downed tree in the woods, the bark husk rotting away, the wood core brittled and infested.

His eyes opened. He brows knit when he saw her.

Rebecca dropped the candy in the kitchen. She heated up the soup in a microwave oven and took Mia’s place, sitting in the cushioned rocking chair at Polk’s head.

She blew on the first spoonful and touched it to his cracked bottom lip. He swallowed and she fed him a second spoonful and a third. His throat worked sluggishly.

“This is service,” he said hoarsely.

She smiled and shook her head to keep him quiet. A drop escaped to his bristly chin. His eyes lingered on Rebecca’s face, exploring it like a feeding infant.

After a few minutes of patient swallowing his eyes began to drift. She kept feeding him. The soup had cooled enough for her to lift the mug to his lips, and he gazed at the ceiling as he sipped. His interest lagged and she pulled the afghan back up to his neck, then lay her hand over his forehead where fresh beads of sweat glistened. It was like touching a warm ball of cracked leather. She felt the transfer of heat from his fevered head to her palm.

“Oh, boy,” he whispered.

She took the mug and the spoon back into the kitchen. Coe was there. He was supposed to be watching the windows. He could smell the soup’s secret ingredient. Rebecca offered him the rest, but he declined with a sorrowful shake of his head. He wanted a clear mind for whatever was coming. So did she. That surprised her.

She brought out the candy and they sat and ate. The television reported that the prison feed had been terminated at the source. They kept replaying the moment of interruption: cons sprawled out dead or dying in the corridors, languid with dementia, choking on their own blood — suddenly effaced by.static.

Polk had a fit of sleepy mumbling behind them, clutching at his afghan. Coe looked particularly distressed. Rebecca tried to get him talking. She asked him what his plans were after high school.

“Going to Austin, Texas,” he said. “A friend of mine moved down there with his dad two years ago. I went last summer for a visit. He lives on a ranch. Do you ride?”

“Horses?” she said. “Not since I was a girl.”

“I’ve been practicing. His dad’s company does web pages, and he said he could get me work to pay for college. Only, my parents have problems with it being so far away. These are two people who met in South America in the Peace Corps.”

“You should go,” interjected Dr. Rosen.

Coe was surprised by this unlikely source of support. “I’m working on them,” he said.

“My son, when he was about your age, went out to school in California, and it was the best thing for him. You need to do these things young. You never know what time will bring.”

Rebecca was interested. “How do you mean?”

Dr. Rosen had the rocking chair, but he was still. “My son was lost six years ago. An avalanche on his honeymoon. One last run before dark.”

Mia said, “How awful.”

“They say that, if the force of the falling snow doesn’t kill you, it’s a gradual suffocation. The snow freezes and you re-breathe your own carbon dioxide. I just wonder what he thought of at the end. He was completely immobilized, and it was dark. I wonder if he thought of me at all. How did he see me? Waving to him on the first day of school? Cheering him on at some game? Sitting around the kitchen table? But probably it was all just panic, senseless, formless.” He smiled wistfully. “Rhonda and I, we just drifted apart. The tide separated us and we could have fought it, but neither one did. Because who has the strength? We stayed together for Jacob, for his memory. Darla — she was young. She was open to things. Full of life, yet with her own troubles. She needed encouragement and guidance. I know these are just excuses.”

The telephone interrupted him. They others jumped a little at the ring. Polk gasped.

Rebecca stood and went to the kitchen. It scared her at first, but Kells was the only one who knew they were there. He must have brought a cell phone with him.

She picked up the cordless receiver. It smelled faintly of old lady. “Hello?”

“You made me use the phone. I don’t like to use the phone.”

The drawl was slight but distinct. A chill came over Rebecca, a creeping dread, the room becoming smaller.

“I saw you writing,” said Jasper Grue. “In your computer.”

Rebecca shrank into a crouch. She tried not to make any noise. She could hear him breathing in her ear. She looked at the kitchen windows. He was on a phone somewhere, he was—

Crouching, Rebecca made her way down the front hallway to the dining room. Opaque yellow curtains draped the windows like desert veils. She turned and saw the parlor tray table from there.

Rebecca crept to the windows. The curtains were parted in the middle, and outside she saw boot prints in the snow. They came out of the woods and right up to the snow-mounded shrubs. There, a small patch of snow was yellowed.

The address on the mailbox. He looked her up in the phonebook. But where was he calling from?

Was he in the house?

She pulled back from the window, striking the table and rattling the crystal punch bowl centerpiece.

“Where’d your men go?” he said.

He had been near when they left. Had he killed them?

She went ducking back into the kitchen to the weapons bag. She was pawing through it.

Mia and Dr. Rosen stood in the doorway, frightened, and Rebecca motioned for them to duck down.

“Did they go to town?” he said.

Rebecca pulled a gun from the duffel bag and forced the words. “I’ve got a gun. We all do.”

“All of you? The girl and the boy too? And the sick old man in the toboggan? You think guns’ll keep me away?”

Rebecca sat against the wall near the door, out of sight from all the windows. She gripped the phone hard and did not know what to do.

His slow drawl was just as she had imagined it. “Here’s Bert’s final testament. ‘Don’t do this, dear God, I have money, please.’ He was crying. I wrote that just after I cut him. The wife was trying to scream through her gag, but when I pulled it off her she went quiet, like she weren’t there anymore. ‘Gloria,’ she said. Just once, just like that. ‘Gloria.’ Must be a daughter. ’Course, you’re a great artist. Your last words count. I expect much more from you.”

Rebecca pushed the on/off button and the receiver clattered across the kitchen floor.

Spotty stood for awhile near the bulldozer working outside the funeral home. He was watching the snow fall in front of his face.

Something had been bothering him, and now he knew what it was. The church looked a lot like the town hall except that there was no cross on top of the white spire. The TV van was parked outside of it now. Next to the church was the graveyard where Spotty kept his dogs.

They were quiet. No stray barks or howls.

Spotty walked across the common. He went in a straight line, stepping over the low white post fence with almost no change in his stride, snow swirling in his wake. Passing the bandstand, he saw the dogs congregating at the rear of the graveyard. He heard a little whimpering.

One of the dogs heard him as he passed the TV van. She barked once, jumping to her feet leading the charge at him across the cemetery. They planted their front paws in the beaten snow there and raged at him, full-throatedly, though Spotty noticed a couple of them backing off. Two or three of them whined and trotted back to the church wall with a grace Spotty himself lacked.

He bore their hatred without understanding it. Something in the church had their attention. Something there pleased them. Spotty felt more jealousy than either confusion or anger. With one stride he mounted the steps to the double doors.

The man standing inside wore a long, black coat and a hunting cap with ear flaps. Spotty got the drop on him and the man turned but did not otherwise move. Spotty saw the fear right away. He knew there was no one else inside the church.

“Hands,” Spotty-said.

The man’s hands went up very slowly. They were gloved. This was one of the rebels who blew up the gas station.

“Coat off,” Spotty said.

Carefully, like a man removing wet clothes, the rebel pulled off his coat and laid it over one of the pews. He wore a gun belt.

“Gun out,” Spotty said.

The gaunt man took his gun out and set it on the bench next to him.

“Turn around,” Spotty said.

The rebel was obedient. He stood with his arms above his head as though the church were flooded and water was rising.

The front doors opened and Spotty wheeled. He saw the earmuffs and black skin and long coat of the TV van ex-con. Spotty nodded to him, easing up on his gun, a quick glance back at the rebel.

“Got one,” Spotty said. Disappointment became pride. “My dogs led me to him.”

Spotty was pleased with himself. He knew that saving the guard dogs was a good idea. He wished he had a radio to call Luther.

The ex-con closed the doors on the snow. “Get his gun,” Spotty said, turning back to cover the rebel.

He never felt the crack on the side of his head. He never heard it, he never saw it coming. He knew only he was on the floor now and the church was roaring. It tilted like a dream room and he clutched at the floor, rolling, sliding off.

When he opened his eyes again, the church righted itself. He was sitting up, clawing at the armrests of a high-backed wooden chair. He was tied to it by ropes around his neck, waist, arms, and legs. The ropes were tasseled at the ends, though it took several moments of confused staring to discern this.

He was coughing and spitting and his vision was blurred. Spotty had tasted mace before.

They had him at the foot of the church altar. The black ex-con from the TV van was there, standing before the big table like a priest.

But he was not the black ex-con from the TV van. This revelation sank in slowly. There was a hunting knife in the man’s hand.

“What his...?”

Spotty hissed a spray of blood, finding several of his teeth broken. He tested the ropes, but his neck was lashed to his wrists in such a way that the throat cord tightened with each squirm. Mace tears rolled down his face. The big chair was made of heavy wood. It would not crack under his great weight.

Kells said, “You know what this is.”

Spotty understood only that there was more hurting to come.

Kells showed him a missile launcher. “We found this in the cloakroom.”

Spotty said nothing. Spotty was confident he could stall them a long time.

Kells said, “Do you have one of these stored in every building?”

Spotty said nothing. The man finally just nodded and set the launcher back down on the table. Spotty wondered for a moment if he had somehow let on something. He was disoriented.

Kells said, “I want to know about the security arrangements here.”

Spotty shook his head as best he could.

Another voice then, the rebel in the hunting cap, lurking on the periphery of Spotty’s vision. “And the names of the two ricin towns.”

Spotty blinked. He played like he was unaware what they were talking about.

Kells stepped off the altar to stand in front of him. He was playing with the knife in a casual, threatening way.

“You don’t have to die. You should know that. This isn’t the end unless you want it to be.”

Pride surged in his veins and Spotty showed him his best face. The sweat squeezing out of his forehead was pure anticipation. He was eager to prove himself. He welcomed this test of will.

“We have little time,” Kells said, checking the door, “so here is how we will proceed. I am going to ask you a question. If you fail to answer it quickly and truthfully, then you will choose where I cut you. You have five senses and therefore five choices: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, or hands. You select the sense you can best do without and then we start it all over. I ask the same question again, and you get another chance to avoid becoming a vegetable.”

Spotty’s throat swallowed beneath the rigid rope.

Kells said, “Most people choose the nose first. Smell is the most undervalued sense. Rarely has anyone progressed beyond sight.”

Spotty tried to shake his head and was choked for the effort. He was tearing up again, not from fear but from the mace and the rope tension and his clumsiness in getting caught. He thrust his chin upward as best he could, straining against the cord, as though to say, Ready.

Kells studied him, waggling the knife in his hand. After a long moment, he backed off.

“Good soldier,” Kells said. “I believe you will maintain your loyalty to Trait right to the end. Pride is all you have. I won’t break your loyalty with pain.”

He moved back onto the altar. Spotty watched him disappear behind the backdrop. They had to kill him. Stalling was Spotty’s only chance, until a patrol noticed the dogs’ silence and investigated.

He heard steps, numerous and confused, growing louder in the rear of the church. He smelled the German shepherd before he saw it. Kells came around from the sacristy holding one of the guard dogs by the collar.

She was nosing his leg and trying to jump up on him. Spotty’s eyes burned at her playfulness.

The dog scented Spotty and stiffened. It lurched toward him, testing Kells’s grip on her collar, a snarl strangled in her throat. She crouched on the crimson-red rug, growling menacingly at Spotty.

“You said these were your dogs,” Kells said.

He patted her dark, silky coat, touching her in a way Spotty never could. The dog’s eyes never left Spotty’s, even as she dipped her head toward Kells, begging his hand.

Kells smiled. “Good girl,” he said. “Trusting sort. They know cons from civilians.”

Spotty swallowed his distress. The dog was so eager for affection, so immediately loyal.

As Kells held the collar with his left hand, the hunting knife reappeared in his right.

“I want you to tell me about the security arrangements here in town.”

Spotty foolishly tested the rope again and paid the price. It scored the broad base of his neck, choking him as the dog’s collar choked her.

Tom Duggan spoke. “Not on the altar,” he said.

But Kells ignored him, stroking the dog’s belly with the knife hand now. The dog lay contentedly and vulnerably on her side, still glaring at Spotty. Kells’s stroke worked its way up to her throat.

Kells said, “Start with the police station.”

Spotty tried to lift his feet. He tried to will himself out of the strangling chair.

The dog wriggled under Kells’s hand, nuzzling the rug. Spotty saw the rebel’s eyes darken as sometimes Luther’s would.

Kells’s hands moved quickly. The knife went swish-swish and up he stood.

The dog let out a half-yelp and rolled onto its legs, standing and stepping forward before slumping, blood gushing from her throat. She pushed forward on hind paws, crawling, then gave up, rolling off the altar step and bleeding out at Spotty’s feet.

Spotty was choking. He could not breathe. The throbbing in his head reminded him of beatings from parents whose love he was refused.

Blood ran down the altar steps. Kells’s voice came to him as though on a crazy breeze. “Nine more. Only you can spare them.”

The stink of the opened dog. Spotty choked out two words, a gasp. “You Clock?”

Kells looked down at him from the altar. He nodded once.

Spotty felt a flicker of relief. If he was going to be broken, at least he was going to be broken by the best.

Tom Duggan moved toward the altar, crawling with anxiety and repulsion. Kells had gone too far, and they had been there too long. Three dog carcasses lay around the altar. The hulking prisoner was slumped in the pastor’s chair, head down, wheezing.

“We need to go,” Tom Duggan said. “Someone’s going to come.”

There was blood on Kells’s hands and a few flecks on his coat sleeves but none on his boots. He said, “We can’t leave him here.”

In his distress, Tom Duggan thought Kells was proposing that they take the con back with them. “What do you mean?”

“We can’t let him tell the cons what we know.”

He understood then. “But if they find him dead, won’t they know we did it? Won’t they assume we know everything anyway?”

Kells’s expression blanked as though he were looking at something terrible but inevitable. “You wait here,” he said.

He pulled out his taser and hit the con with a paralyzing charge. He sliced the ropes with his knife and the prisoner fell hard, flopping to the floor near one of the dogs. He twitched there, immobilized.

Kells replaced the pastor’s chair on the altar and dropped his knife on the rug. He returned the rope and the launcher to the sacristy cloakroom, then started down the old planks underneath the trapdoor.

Tom Duggan regarded the prisoner, oafish and shivering like some great beast stranded outside its natural habitat. “You should never have escaped,” Tom Duggan said.

The man’s eyes were more sad than fierce. He heard the paws running up behind the altar and his vision rolled to the backdrop.

The rest of the guard dogs came trotting into the sacristy before scenting Tom Duggan, bounding out to him, their cold bodies dancing around his legs.

He remained very still.

First one let out a low, feral growl and then the rest turned. Their coats grew prickly, teeth flashing white. The prisoner’s eyes were tragic as the dogs broke for him: a many-mouthed beast, roaring.

Chapter 25

The mania-fright of impending rape and murder was not a wild, electric feeling. It was more like bugs and fungus of immense weight, creeping over Rebecca’s skin to her mouth and nose, slowly suffocating her.

Kells and Tom Duggan returned an hour too late for Polk. Tom Duggan lifted his mother’s unfinished afghan off Polk’s face. His manner was studied and formal, and he replaced the shroud with great care.

Polk’s body was bundled in flowery bedsheets and carried out to the side yard and laid next to Tom Duggan’s mother. With shovels and gloved hands they buried him in the preserving snow. Tom Duggan said a few words at the end. He was a true revolutionary. He was willing to tear down his world rather than see it compromised.

The rest stood with head bowed, except for Rebecca, who never took her eyes off the woods.

Inside, they shed coats and gloves in the hallway and regrouped in the parlor.

“We know the other two towns,” announced Tom Duggan, Kells standing behind him. “We got the information from one of the prisoners.”

Rebecca reached for the easy chair and sat in it. She was reluctant at first to give in to elation. Any dashed hope would crush her now.

Dr. Rosen stammered. “How do you know it’s true?”

“The zip codes of the two towns correspond to Luther Trait’s ten-digit inmate number. That’s how he selected them. The first five digits are the zip code of the first town, the second five are the second.”

This was typical of Trait, a backward stab at the technocracy that had imprisoned him.

Rebecca said, “Then it’s over?”

“That part of it,” said Tom Duggan.

Dr. Rosen blinked as though waking from sleep. Coe’s graveside tears were gone. Mia’s hand gripped her sweater over her belly.

It was over. Just like that Grue and Trait and everything.

“What other part is there?” asked Rebecca, looking at Kells. “We just wait to be rescued now. You’ll call your agency, and they’ll end this.”

Tom Duggan deferred to Kells, backlit by the window overlooking the snow graves. “They’ll have to evacuate both towns before moving into Gilchrist. That will take time. We have a window of maybe ten hours.”

Tom Duggan said, “We also learned their security setup. We were inside the center of town. We know where their manpower and firepower are concentrated.”

“Of the forty or so cons left,” said Kells, “at least half of them are out manning the barricades. A few others are out riding around burning down houses. That leaves less than twenty inside the center of town itself.”

Rebecca was dizzy with relief. “Then it’ll be easy for the army to come in and take them out.”

Tom Duggan’s face was serious and still. His were eyes of purposefulness, not victory. “They’re vulnerable,” he said.

Kells said, “We’re going back in. We’re going to hit the center of town at nightfall.”

Bewilderment, then anger clouding out joy. Kells, she could understand. But not Tom Duggan.

Kells said, “This has never been about the other towns.”

“Yes, it has,” said Rebecca. “Yes, it has.”

“This has been about this town, about us, and about them.”

“That’s crazy,” said Rebecca. “You ended it. You just ended it.”

Kells shook his head sternly. “Polk,” he said. “Fern. Mrs. Duggan.”

Rebecca was growing frantic. “No!” she said. “Shooting your way into town isn’t going to do anything for Polk or your mother. It is over!”

Tom Duggan was nodding, standing near his mother’s crystal lamp. “It might not mean anything to you,” he said, “but I was there. I saw them crawling all over the common like it was their own. If they were in your house, and you were tied up and forced to watch diem tear down everything you worked to build, all the time thinking, ‘If only I could get free...’ We just got free. I don’t want the government to finish this. They were going to give us up. I want to end this myself. Maybe I’ve got more at stake than the rest of you.”

“You don’t,” said Kells.

“Those prisoners need to know what it’s like. To lose everything. To be humbled.”

Dr. Rosen was standing before the mantel. There was a mirror there, and he was looking at himself in it. He turned toward Tom Duggan and Kells. Rebecca almost reached after him.

“I want to go with you,” Dr. Rosen said.

Rebecca got to her feet. “This is crazy!” She felt betrayed. “It’s over! Don’t you understand? You don’t have to fight! No one has to fight!”

Dr. Rosen went to stand with the others. He looked pained, like a tired drunk lacking the sense to sleep it off. “They can’t go alone,” he said, then turned to Kells. “I’ll go so long as the boy doesn’t have to.”

Coe looked shocked. His youthful fascination with the takeover had long since faded. He looked older now, and younger at the same time. He looked relieved.

“The kid stays here,” said Kells. “Mia, too.”

No one looked at Rebecca. Her face was flushed. She was all alone. She was desperate, searching for excuses.

“What if they can’t clear out the towns in time?” she said. “What if Trait calls in the ricin too early?”

Kells said, “I can have them kill the telephone service from the outside.”

“But there are cell phones. Pagers.”

“They can move satellites if they need to.”

“The television,” she said weakly, knowing the feed had been cut.

“That’s been taken care of.”

It was Kells’s censure that she felt most piercingly. “It’s over,” she said, pleading with him. “Why can’t you just let it be over?”

No one moved until Kells started away. “I have a phone call to make.”

Tom Duggan and Dr. Rosen went out after him, and Mia came to her side. “Why didn’t you tell them?” she said. “Why didn’t you say Grue called?”

Rebecca just shook her head. She couldn’t even speak anymore. There were two Rebeccas, one who was angry, one who was scared. Right now the one who was scared was in full control. All she had to do was hide for a few more hours and she would be safe.

She was all alone in the parlor when Kells approached her, as she feared he would. He wore a flak jacket over his sweater now, a Micro Uzi hanging from his shoulder.

“Dr. Rosen said Grue called.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It won’t matter in a few more hours.”

“What makes you think you’d be any safer here?”

She was beyond reason and she knew it. “A few more hours,” she repeated.

“We need you.”

She shook her head. She was trying not to cry.

“Instead of taking control, you’re giving up all control. If we end this thing, then it’s ours. We claim it. We give it meaning.”

“There is no meaning. There’s no meaning to any of this.”

“You’re still the writer here, aren’t you? Still hanging back and observing, believing you can never be touched. Trying to outrun this vague fear that’s chasing you. Spinning your fragile little fictions, these morality tales parroting empty truths. People standing up and fighting simply because that’s the right thing to do. Only, as we see here, that’s not exactly how it works. You lack the conviction of your characters.”

She would not be shamed into action. “That sort of thing may work with Tom Duggan and Dr. Rosen—”

“You think I’m running some sort of game? Have you spent so much time making up cardboard heroes that you don’t recognize plainspoken valor? I show people the path, either they walk it or they don’t. You want to tag along and just make notes. You’re like a thief, stealing lives for your books, then casting yourself as the hero. How did I become your villain here and not Trait?”

She was indignant, burning. “I am never going to write about this.”

“Sure you will. You’re a thief, that’s what you do. But when you betray the rest of us in print, don’t make this into anything more or less than it was. Others will want to forget, they’ll want to deny what really happened here. People like yourself. They want to go on believing their freedom is actually free.”

She sensed as much disappointment as anger from him, which wounded her more. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Is that what you want me to say?”

“I was just a guy doing a job,” he said, starting away. “Write that.”