The Northeast Kingdom

Chapter 26

Luther Trait was in the police station when the first shots were fired. He took an AR-15 rifle from the front table and was out on the front steps before the tarp was off the M60.

Gunfire burst about the common. The first thing he noticed was that the guard dogs were loose. Their black, bodies were sharp against the whitened scene, legs working hard in the deep snow. Two remained near the cemetery, tearing at a screaming con.

The Marielitos rushed down the walkway from the funeral home, ready for a fight.

Trait advanced along the curved road, scanning the common for rebels. Two snarling German shepherds were cut down, but no rounds landed anywhere near him. The random pistol cracks and rifle bursts lacked the cadence of an exchange.

Then loud reports blasted behind him. Quintano, the head of the Mexican Mafia, fired the pickup-mounted M60. The bam-bam-bam-bam flipped a dog near the gazebo. But lacking human targets, the M60 fire stopped. The yelling and the barking died away.

Silence fell with the snow. Trait paused before the Masonic Hall, awaiting a second wave of attack, or perhaps even the first.

One of the ex-cons was running toward him, pointing back at the church with his gun. “The dogs!” he yelled.

Trait said, “The rebels! Where are they?”

“I don’t know. The dogs came at us out of the church.”

Trait saw the open church doors past the CNN van.

Trait looked for a familiar hulking figure as the cons began emerging from their hiding places.

“Where’s Spotty?” he said.

The ex-con was holding his wrist, his hand bloodied from a dog bite.

Trait started for the church. His fury increased with his speed. Spotty and his fucking dogs. Trait passed the con at the cemetery fence, his coat in rags, two gutted dogs whimpering at his feet.

Trait rushed inside the church. Two more dogs stood on the altar, turning and running at him. Trait dropped both of them in the center aisle as he advanced to the front pews.

He saw Spotty twisted on the altar steps. Trait slowed and reached for the back of the first pew before going to him. He rolled the big man over.

Spotty was dead. The dogs had been eating him.

Trait sat down on the first step. He looked out at the empty church, the rifle resting across his lap. Trait felt something leave him then.

Trait turned back to the altar in a daze. He saw the dog carcasses. He saw the bloody knife on the rug. Spotty had fought them off.

Immediately something wasn’t right. Trait resisted his hunch. He didn’t like where it was taking him.

He had never seen Spotty use a knife. Spotty’s trusted Micro Uzi was nowhere to be seen.

Then he noticed the blood on the armrests of the celebrant’s chair.

Others were coming in the doors now. It was instinct that kept Trait from telegraphing his concerns to the approaching cons.

He went behind the altar to the wide closet there. The rocket launcher lay under the choir robes, just as they had left it. If the rebels had gotten to Spotty, wouldn’t they have found the launcher?

He returned to the altar. The cons were coming to the front rows near Spotty’s body, sitting down. The Marielitos entered but remained at the far end of the center aisle. Their clannish impudence angered Trait now. Like Spotty, he had saved them from slaughter when he didn’t have to. He had delivered them from ADX Gilchrist, asking only loyalty in return.

The thing that had driven them apart, the threat of Clock and the rebels, was now the only thing holding them together.

Inkman slipped inside the front door in his hooded coat, the ruckus having drawn him out of wherever he was hiding. He came down the left side of the church, steering clear of the Marielitos.

Some were looking at Trait now. Maybe they wanted words from him. Maybe they wanted an explanation. Maybe they wanted him to rally them to battle.

Of all of them, Spotty should have been the last man standing. His sudden death took something out of the rest.

Trait’s voice was dead. “Get back to your posts.”

Hard, tired stares. Trait moved into the center aisle. The Marielitos stood between the last rows, and Trait came up against them. He met the leader’s smug, shiny eyes.

One of the others moved slightly to let him through. There were no words, nothing.

He stopped on the bottom step outside even as the cons pushed past him. Daylight was dying in the sky.

Something else wasn’t right in the common. He faced the news van they had brought back from the prison. It was parked across the street from the church doors, yet no one had come out of it during the shooting.

Trait went inside alone. He showed no reaction when he saw the coatless ex-con slumped dead on the floor. The tangle of cut wires concerned him more, but again his instinct was to do nothing — not out of respect for Spotty this time, but out of disdain for Inkman, for the Marielitos, and all the rest.

He set the inside lock before stepping back outside and closing the van door.

Inkman was waiting for him in the snow. There was concern on his face, and fear, and still a bit of the condescension in his manner that Trait had come to despise.

“Did Spotty know?” said Inkman.

Trait stared hard. Doing the weak man then and there would have been like admitting he was right. The Marielitos lurked inside the church, almost within listening range.

“Did Spotty know about the zip codes?” Inkman said.

Trait grabbed the soft fabric over Inkman’s shoulder. Inkman tried to pull away in surprise. Trait could feel him shivering through his coat.

“You stay with me now,” said Trait. Inkman tried to twist away as Trait muscled him across the common toward the police station. “I don’t want you out of my sight again.”

Chapter 27

Rebecca once dreamed there was a killer loose on west 95th Street.

She was home writing when detectives from the 24th Precinct buzzed. She answered all their questions while drawing them out as to the particulars of the crimes. As they rose to leave, one of the detectives noticed a copy of Sexual Homicides: Pattern and Motives on her bookshelf. He asked her about it. His partner scanned a few manuscript pages, then proceeded to her office. Rebecca followed, explaining to them who she was, but they would not allow her past the door. Inside her file cabinet they found newspaper clippings following their case. They pulled down books from her shelves: Bite Mark Protocol, Bloodstain Pattern Interpretation, Suspect Interview and Interrogation. There were police texts on evidence gathering, forensics, suspect profiling, sexual deviance. Detailed notes on knife wounds, ligature marks, tire impressions, and the amount of time the human body takes to decompose.

These were reference tools, she told them. She was Rebecca Loden, the author. She went through her apartment searching for a copy of Last Words but failed to find one. Even her framed dust jacket, with her photograph on the back cover — hands folded behind an elegant writing desk, radiating confidence, auburn hair shining — was missing from the wall. One detective recited her Miranda rights as the other clasped his handcuffs around her wrists.

She remembered the dream now as she stood at Mrs. Duggan’s kitchen window, watching the daylight bleed out of the Vermont sky. Her books were her alibis. Who else but a psychopath has such interests?

The snow was falling gently now, finally tapering off. Everything was ending, it seemed. Just not soon enough.

They heard the sled engine again. It varied, ranging from a growl to a distant purr. When the wind changed, she smelled smoke.

The house-burning cons were circling closer. She was anxious for dusk. The glow of the flames would give her some idea of how close they were. From the upstairs windows, she had seen black smoke in the distance through the fading snow.

Be patient, she told herself. She wanted so badly for this all to be over. All you have to do now is wait.

She turned from the window to Coe and Mia. Mia sat on a chair near the oven with her hands folded between her thighs to keep them from trembling. Coe was rocking back and forth as though trying to stay warm.

“We’ll be out of here by morning,” Rebecca said, hoping to reassure them all.

The telephone rang and Mia jumped to her feet. Rebecca tried to ignore it. Coe looked at Rebecca as though she had done something terrible.

There was no answering machine, and each ring pealed through the house like a scream.

“Don’t answer it,” said Mia, both an admonition and a plea.

But the phone kept ringing. He knew she was there.

“He’ll come if I don’t,” Rebecca decided. “I can stall him,” she said, and went to the wall phone.

She gave it one more chance to stop ringing before she lifted the receiver.

“Saw ’em go,” said Grue. “All three men. Leaving you alone.”

“Not alone.” She nearly screamed it, trying to calm down.

“They looked geared up for a fight. They were going to town, weren’t they.”

It’s over, she wanted to tell him. But that would only force him to act.

“Funny thing,” he said, his voice unreal in her ear. “I just called nine one one. Me, calling the police number. Only, it weren’t the police that answered.”

Before she could stop herself, Rebecca said, “No.”

“I told them your men were on the way. An ambush will leave you all alone here, for good.”

Rebecca slammed the phone back into its wall cradle and the others looked at her in alarm. When she realized she was covering her mouth, she removed her hands.

“He called the cons,” she said. “He told them Kells and Tom Duggan and Dr. Rosen were coming.”

“But...” said Mia.

“They’re walking into a trap,” said Coe.

Rebecca moved down the hallway to the front door, gaining speed. “I have to warn them.”

“But how?” said Coe, following. “They have a... a thirty-minute head start on you.”

She pulled on her coat as she moved into the parlor. “They were stopping to rest at the inn. Maybe I can catch them there.”

“But how?” said Mia. “With Grue waiting outside for you.”

Rebecca shouldered the laptop case containing her abortive novel.

“I’ll go with you,” said Coe.

Rebecca shot him an angry look as she moved. “No, you will not.”

He followed her back into the kitchen to the weapons bag. “But what if it’s a trap? What if he just wants you out there alone?”

Rebecca pulled a rifle out of the duffel bag and handed it to Coe. “You’re staying here with Mia. Anyone tries to get into the house before you hear helicopters, shoot them through the door.”

Mia was crying. “But you can’t catch them. How will you make up the time without a sled?”

Rebecca stopped a moment. She looked around the kitchen but she was actually visualizing the area outside the house, the woods, the street, the neighbors. “Horses,” she said. “That farmhouse across the street. There’s a stable.” She went back into the bag for guns.

“What if he’s there?” said Coe.

The only gun left was Polk’s old snub-nosed .38 revolver. She took it and stuffed it into her waistband against her back, grabbing a can of mace and an ice axe also. She stood and zipped her coat and fixed the Velcro loop of the axe to her laptop strap.

“You can’t go out there alone,” said Coe, gripping the rifle.

“How do you know that farmhouse isn’t where Grue is calling from?” said Mia. “What if the horses are dead? What if—”

“Stop!” Rebecca grasped their shoulders to get them to shut up. Speed was everything now, and if she didn’t get moving and keep moving, the others were done for. “Grue is out there. And now he knows I’m going out there.” She shook these off as mere facts. “I have to do this. Grue is only here because of me. He’s my responsibility.” She released them and moved to the door. If she paused to think anymore about it — her odds of success, the dangers she faced — she would not be able to leave. “Just hide. Please.”

She hurried out of the door into the freezing air. The snow formed a thick, luminous crust in the twilight. The woods were dark, and she stayed as far away from them as she could, moving along the driveway to the road.

He would be there soon. He would immediately pick up her trail. All her agonizing about Grue had been for nothing, all her running like standing still. And so near the end. Even in her lowest moments, Rebecca had always secretly believed she would walk away from Gilchrist. That was the arrogance of a born storyteller, a fantasist, a fabricator. Instead, she should have foreseen this happening and conserved her energy.

At least now she had a clear cause and direction. Necessity, not bravery, compelled her toward the road. It was smooth, white, silent. The axe handle flopped against her back. As she crossed to the other side, she shed a glove and took the revolver into her hand. Grue would anticipate the gun, but childishly she clung to this imagined advantage. She remained a number of paces away from the trees, tense and alert.

The faint sound of neighing horses thrilled her. She hurried along the roadside until she realized she was too far away for her presence to be disturbing them. Something else was making them cry.

She started to smell the smoke. Looking up, she noticed the glow beyond the trees, and Rebecca began to run again, leaping through the deep, crusty snow. A downed tree marked the end of the woods and the beginning of the wide clearing.

The farmhouse was on fire. Flames were taking the walls, and second-floor windows were popping, black smoke rushing out. A stable to the right of the house was not burning, though embers floating on the excited air drifted toward the haystacks like fireflies.

The blaze entranced her and for a few moments everything near — the forbidding trees, the distressed horses, the flames, and the flaring orange embers mixing with the dancing snow — took on an enchanted air. The conflagration of the farmhouse took on a poignancy she could not explain, and watching it rage, she felt at once a queer inner peace.

The horses whinnying returned her to the urgency of her task. The arsonist cons were near, as was Grue. She labored across the snow, hurrying in a straight line toward the stable to rescue the horses and take one for herself.

She did not see the ski tracks until she was nearly upon them. The bold light of the flames shadowed the grooves before the house and made them quiver. Rebecca slowed, following the tracks with her eyes to a two-passenger sled parked a safe distance away from the house.

A gruff voice called out to her over the crackling roar. Rebecca froze as the backlit form of a man emerged from behind the house, between it and the stable.

He was impossibly broad, a block form of a man, all shoulders and waist. He ran a few more steps toward her, aiming a silvery handgun.

It was not Grue. A second form then appeared behind the first, shorter and slightly hunched, wearing a dark pea coat and carrying a clublike torch.

They were the house-burning cons. Rebecca’s revolver was weightless in her hand, pointed down at the ground snow.

Burly, the ex-con, yelled something at her that was lost to the blaze. Menckley came next to him, moving more tentatively, the house flames enlivening his scarred face and making it seem even more grotesque. Burly shook his handgun and she heard his voice now, demanding to know who she was and if she was alone.

Rebecca was so dumbfounded by this sudden turn of events that she gave no consideration to answering. She was focused on only two things: The cons’ yells would bring Grue more quickly; and they would keep her from catching up with Kells and the others at the inn.

Burly came a few steps closer and ordered her to drop her gun.

Caught, she found herself wondering what Kells would do, and suddenly her choice was clear. Burly was agitated and would lose nothing by cutting her down right there.

She tossed Polk’s revolver out to the side. It made a perfect impression in the top layer of snow and promptly disappeared below.

Burly yelled at her to take off her pack. She would have done anything to quiet him. She slipped the strap off her shoulder and set it down at her feet.

Menckley was telling him to shoot her. Instead Burly ordered her away from the pack and she complied, moving back just a step or two.

Burly directed Menckley to retrieve the pack. They were close enough to Rebecca now that she could understand them.

Menckley wanted no part of it. “Just shoot!” he cried.

But Burly was ranting, “Get over there and see what she has in her goddamn pack!”

Menckley eyed the trees bordering the land, alive with flame shadow. “What about Clock?”

His fear resonated with Rebecca. It was the cons’ belief in the fictional Clock that gave him real power. In the same way his imagined omnipotence excused the cons’ failure to contain him, Grue was — to Rebecca — a mystical ghoul tracking her through the snow of her literary guilt, rather than just a man: a vicious killer, but still a living, breathing, fallible man. Her demonization of Grue in part relieved her of the responsibility of facing a mere mortal, endowing him with the force of all her fears.

The fearful side of her began to retreat. The angry side — the smarter side — was emerging.

She looked at the stable. Pockets of flame had burst to life in the dried hay bales, borne on cinders drifting in through the open front wall. The horses reared and kicked the wooden stalls.

Burly was pointing his gun at Menckley now. The two cons were yelling at each other, loud enough to be heard deep into the woods. The farmhouse was now fully engulfed, time slipping away like the smoke sailing into the night sky. Finally, with a howl of protest, Menckley doused his torch and shuffled toward her.

Burly’s gun was trained on her again as Menckley reached the pack, just a few feet away. Menckley eyed her with apprehension and distaste. His face was a waxy swirl of scar tissue glistening with sweat.

Snowflakes became water on Rebecca’s cheeks. She knew she had to make something happen here.

“It’s over,” she told him.

Menckley squinted at her, looking up from the pack. “What’s over?”

“The army is on their way. Clock found out the ricin towns. This place will be swarming with FBI agents in another hour. Don’t you two have a radio?”

Menckley straightened, looking at her with distrust. “We have a radio.”

“Check it then. Why else would I be running around freezing my ass off out here?”

Menckley eyed her a second longer, then turned back to call to Burly. “She says that we should—”

Burly yelled and twisted, dropping to the snow as the rifle report echoed off the mountains.

Menckley screamed. Burly lay still before the consumed farmhouse. Menckley whipped around and looked frantically into the trees.

The noise shocked Rebecca but she was primed for action. She lunged forward and tore the ice axe from her laptop case with one pull. From her knees she brought it around low, burying the pick blade deep in the meat of Menckley’s upper left thigh.

He howled and fell to one side. He gripped his leg just above the exposed blade and started to crawl, looking feverishly for Clock.

Rebecca, too, searched the farmland now, the horses neighing crazily behind her. She found a figure advancing from the street, nearing the light of the blaze. There was a rifle outlined in his hands. It was not Clock, and it was not Grue.

It was Coe. The flames oranged him, his eyes darting from the man he had killed to the flaming house to the scarred man trying to pull himself away. Then finally to Rebecca.

“I saw the glow from the window...” he began.

“Don’t,” Rebecca said, meaning Don’t waste time. She moved quickly to the impression her revolver had left in the snow. “Where’s Mia?”

“Back at the house.” Coe was dazed but wired. “She wanted me to go.”

Rebecca gave up her search, realizing she could have Burly’s gun instead.

“You’re going right back to her.”

“No,” Coe said. “I’m coming with you. You don’t even know the way back to town.”

She realized he was right.

Menckley had given up escape, and instead now lay cowering from Coe, pleading for his life. Coe watched him, perplexed.

The arrow silenced Menckley. A whittled wooden shaft with crow feathers and a sharp stone point entered his neck just above his clavicle, lodging there as his eyes went wide and blood spurted into the snow.

Coe spun, firing into the trees. Rebecca gave a quick, crazed glance that way — then started toward the stable at a run.

The horses were going wild as fire took the inside walls. The smoke was thick and gray as Rebecca fought her way along the stalls, throwing open doors and getting out of the way.

The farmhouse started collapsing just as she got clear, showering her with cinders. The crazed horses scattered, all except two, bucking and dancing in confusion. Two horses without saddle or bridle.

The ash cloud provided their cover. Coe helped throw her onto the jibing black colt, and after two attempts mounted the snorting palomino, the rifle slung over his shoulder.

Rebecca crouched for balance, gripping the colt’s neck and mane. The flames moved things in the trees behind them and she did not trust the shadows. She was as spooked as her horse. Only at the last second did she realize her laptop case was still lying in the snow.

When the rest of the farmhouse slumped forward, the burning timber crushed the thin box into which she had emptied the past year of her life.

And the horses broke. Rebecca held on, hands, thighs, and heels, seeing nothing but white and black. At least one arrow whizzed past her head. The horses kicked hard through the deep snow, fleeing to the street.

Chapter 28

Kells, Tom Duggan, and Dr. Rosen stood before one of the old telegraph poles across the street from the abandoned inn. They were trying to figure out how to blackout the center of town — how to bring down the live power and phone lines safely without electrocuting themselves. The wooden pole was too deep in the frozen earth to uproot. Kells was about to head to the inn garage for a ladder when he heard the horse hooves. He drew his gun, Tom Duggan and Dr. Rosen doing the same.

Rebecca’s colt reared at the sight of the men. She swung off him, her legs weak from gripping. Coe dismounted onto the packed snow behind her. The horses were as glad to have them off their backs as Rebecca and Coe were to be off them.

The men lowered their weapons. Kells was the first to meet her.

“They’re waiting for you in town,” she said, breathless but relieved. “They know you’re coming.”

“How?”

“Grue saw you leave. He called nine one one.”

“Grue?” Kells said, looking past her down the road.

“He might have taken another horse.” She turned and looked back now, as did Coe. “We ran into the arsonists.” She hurriedly told them the rest. At the end of it, Kells looked proud. “What will you do?” she asked.

The others waited for his response. Kells moved a step or two back away from them, his face unreadable. Then he spun and opened up his Micro Uzi on the crossbar of the telegraph pole.

The rounds chewed the brittle wood and the wires snapped and gave way, sparking and falling to the snow.

A quarter mile ahead of them, beyond the trees at the turn in the road, the dim aura of artificial light winked out like a snuffed candle.

Rebecca turned at the sound of the hooves. The horses were galloping back the way they came. They disappeared around the darkness of the bend, and as the gun burst echoed off the mountains, silence returned, more gravid than before.

Kells lowered his weapon. “We’re going in,” he said. “The circumstances haven’t really changed. Only they’re expecting three now — not five.”

He looked to Rebecca and Coe. “Right,” Rebecca confirmed. “Five.”

Kells nodded confidently. “We’ll let them steep in darkness a minute before starting in.”

The others remained quiet. Rebecca was quietest of all, listening for Grue’s galloping hooves. The inn loomed on the roadside like a dark sarcophagus sealed in ice. The country swing was coated with snow like the white dust of a thousand years. Rebecca spotted something small moving at the foot of the sprawling oak that formed one leg of the swing. It was Ruby, Fern’s cat, working diligently atop the frozen crust. Excited, Rebecca looked closer — only to find Ruby picking meat off a dead woodpecker’s carcass, watching Rebecca with bright, hungry eyes.

Rebecca’s bare hand went to her throat. There was violence in the air, like pollen or plague, descending on them with the snow. She retreated to Kells who held the two plastic fuel jugs from the Irving station. He handed one to Tom Duggan.

“You two take the kid,” he said. “Move to the church steeple as quickly as you can, and make a lot of noise on the way. I’ll take the writer.”

Kells’s matter-of-fact bravado excited Rebecca. She was glad to be paired with him. For some reason she wanted to be near when he struck.

“They don’t have any flak vests,” said Tom Duggan.

“We’re two short,” said Kells. “Whoever wears the vest takes the lead.”

Dr. Rosen turned to Coe. “You stay behind me, no matter what. I mean it.”

Coe nodded, his rifle hanging low. “Yes, sir.”

Kells handed Rebecca the second gasoline jug, and she was surprised to find herself anxious to get into town. “See you at the police station,” Kells told the others, with neither ceremony nor good-bye, and Rebecca walked beside him toward the dark thickness of the trees.

Chapter 29

A rich, rural blackness soaked the common, with only the ground snow retaining some light. From the police station window, Trait could barely see the outlines of the other buildings.

Inkman was starting to flip out in the darkness behind him. “I told you that call was no hoax,” he said.

The thought of a renegade convict tracking the rebels across the countryside exasperated Trait. With five such soldiers he could have put down this insurgence before it began.

He saw shadows emerge from the school, two of his cons stepping outside like children ignored too long in a game of hide-and-seek. He wanted to shoot them himself.

The silence and the blackout were too much for Inkman. “Why did we let them cut the power?”

“Because we knew we could not prevent it,” said Trait. He turned and found Inkman in the gloom. “Three men, the caller said. Do you think we can handle three men?”

“One of them is Clock.”

Inkman’s weakness chafed Trait’s warrior ethic. Trait started toward him. “We were all just hired hands,” Trait said. “Isn’t that how you saw it? Employees. Instruments of your revenge.”

Inkman took one step backward. “What are you talking—”

“Once the money started rolling in, you were going to force another coup. Only this time you were going to see to it that I was killed and you were put into power. Tear down one government, set up another in its place. That’s what you said you and Clock used to do. As soon as we got clear, you were going to run this town like it was your own little country. That was going to be your ultimate revenge on the CIA.”

“And you thought I was cracking under pressure,” said Inkman. “You thought Clock was getting to me.”

Inkman was unconvincing. “I think he will get to you,” said Trait. “Any minute now.”

Gunshots erupted at the far end of the street. Pistol fire, answered by rapid automatic bursts. Inkman’s eyes jumped and he backed away toward the radio room.

DeYoung came out past him, rushing from the radio room with his headset wire dangling. “Luther, they—”

“I know. They cut everything.”

It was a brief exchange, just long enough for Inkman to go into his boot for a gun.

He aimed it at Trait and DeYoung. Trait said nothing, staring at Inkman.

Fear raised Inkman’s voice. “Stand together, you two.”

Trait would not move. DeYoung drifted slowly to him. Trait’s eyes never left Inkman.

Inkman reached for a desk phone, listened a moment, then dropped the receiver and moved to another desk. He punched buttons to be sure. The phone lines were dead.

Trait said, “Who are you calling, Errol?”

Inkman remembered the cell phones in the battery chargers near the door. He flipped one open, working the buttons with manic confidence. “They took everything away from me,” he said. “My wife, my life, everything.” The phone was dead. He put another to his ear. “They thought they ruined me. They thought I was broken, done.” He dialed quickly with his thumb. “Now I’m taking away one of their towns.”

“What for?”

“Spite. And it will force the government to cooperate with us here. I’ll make them call off the rebels.”

Inkman had lost all sense. A beeping noise signaled a disruption in service, and he tried to dial out again, hammering the desk with the cell phone when it failed.

“They took out the wireless,” he said, troubled. “They would never have risked killing the service, unless...”

“Unless they were coming over the mountains,” said Trait.

“Spotty,” realized Inkman, looking at Trait. “What have you done? What have you done?”

“What have I done?” Trait knew then what it was like for Spotty to have lain there while his dogs tore at him. Trait had had enough. “Get out of here,” he told Inkman, barely controlling his fury.

Inkman blinked, confused. He had the gun.

Trait took a step toward him. “Clock is coming for you now, and you will meet him.”

The window glass rattled as Quintano opened up the M60 outside the doors. The racket was tremendous.

Inkman backed to the twin doors, stopping there, still covering Trait.

Trait took another step toward him.

Inkman threw open the door and was gone.

Trait turned quickly, directing DeYoung to grab a rifle from the front table. “I’ll get him,” De Young said.

“No,” said Trait. “Stay here and man the windows. This is the fallback point. We have to hold this place.”

The volume of the gun report rose again as the door opened. Trait spun angrily, expecting Inkman.

It was the leader of the Marielitos. He was alone, coatless, twin holsters strapped across his flak vest bandito-style. Two more guns were in his hands, aimed at Trait and De Young.

De Young was at the weapons table. Trait held his open hand toward De Young to keep him still.

The Marielito’s eyes were merry with savagery. He had come there to kill.

Trait yelled over the M60 noise. “Inkman just left,” he said. “Clock’s mark.”

The Marielito glanced back at the door. He wanted killing, but he wanted vengeance more.

Trait yelled, “He’s the one to shadow — if you still think you can beat Clock.”

Challenged, the Marielito straightened and backed to the doors. He smiled with gritted teeth, to let Trait know he was next, and then swung out of the door.

Trait left DeYoung to cover the windows and hurried down the dark hallway to the twinned cells at the end.

A backup bulb over the fire-alarm box cast the room dim red. Warden James was standing at the bars, listening to the gunfire outside.

“It’s happening,” the warden said.

Trait unlocked the cell door and tossed away the keys, grabbing the warden by the shoulder. He walked him roughly back along the hallway to the door by the radio room.

Outside, Trait could see Inkman’s footprints cutting diagonally across the smooth parking lot snow. He could just make out the backstop of a baseball field in the distance.

The Marielito had skirted the lot to the trees. Trait saw his shadow disappearing there.

Inkman’s run, leading Clock away from the center of town, gave Trait a fighting chance. And if the Marielito got lucky and ambushed Clock, all the better.

Trait saw someone coming toward them from the bulldozer, a dark shadow holding two guns. Trait pushed the limping warden ahead of him with one hand, drawing his gun with the other.

It was another of the Marielitos. Something had split them up. He was pointing his guns and yelling but Trait could not hear him over the roar of the M60. Trait raised his gun hand behind the warden.

When the Marielito got close enough, Trait shot him three times. The second round pierced the con’s forehead above his eye and dropped him. He never returned fire. The warden was pulling on Trait, but Trait had him firmly by the back of the neck and forced him around toward the rear of the station. They turned the corner and Trait hustled him down the narrow lane between the buildings and the trees, skirting the gun battle inside the town common.

Chapter 30

Rebecca stopped with Kells inside the trees at the edge of the blacked-out Gilchrist Common. The general store was outlined before them. She had bought a sandwich there a long time ago.

“Do you hear drums?” she whispered.

He indicated that he did. He was kneeling in the snow, looking out over the darkened center of town.

“Where are they coming from?” she asked.

Kells said, “Your head.”

The first gunshot split the night. It was answered by two more, then yells and scattered bursts. She made out three figures running toward the old schoolhouse, and recognized Tom Duggan by his long coat. She heard Coe’s rifle. They were taking fire from inside.

Louder reports close by. A convict shooting from the other side of the general store, between it and the library. Kells pressed his revolver into Rebecca’s free hand and pointed her to the rear of the store. “He’s going to run,” he said, rising and starting for the store’s front porch.

Rebecca hurried out of the trees and along the side of the store to the back. Wooden pallets were stacked by the rear door, and there was a picnic table submerged in snow.

The gunplay nearby went tat-tat-tat, crisp and particular. She could tell that Kells was firing, swapping shots with the shooter. She dropped the gasoline jug near the door.

She heard boots thumping in the snow. Someone was running toward her along the side of the store. She pressed tightly against the wooden door, arms stiff, keeping a two-handed grip on Kells’s gun.

More shots and rounds spit into the pine branches behind the store.

A dark figure turned the corner. He was holding a long weapon and he was not Kells. Rebecca saw small, bright eyes at the same time the con spotted her hiding in the shadows not six feet away.

She fired twice. The noise and recoil of Kells’s revolver shook her.

The con staggered backward with a startled grunt. But he stayed on his feet. He looked down at his chest and the rips in his parka exposing his flak vest.

He yelled and brought his long gun up again, but a spray of bullets stopped him, ripping him knee-to-head.

Rebecca’s bullets had pushed the con back into Kells’s sight line.

The con twisted hard and fell facedown in the snow. As he lay there his semiautomatic gun kept firing into the ground, a muffled pum-pum-pum-pum.

Kells moved into her view, silencing the con’s gun with a kick to the man’s arm. He grabbed the con by his boot and dragged him behind the store, leaving a streak of blood-darkened snow.

Rebecca’s arms remained straight, the gun still aimed and ready. Kells moved into her sight and eased her muzzle away from his chest before reaching down to seize the con’s weapon. He kicked the man over. The con was dead.

“Get his vest,” Kells told her, taking the gas jug and opening the back door.

The sound of more gunfire got her moving. She knelt carefully next to the dead man, touching only his green parka, drawing the zipper down and pulling it open. She saw the dimples she had left in his black vest. She pulled at his coat sleeve and used her boot to roll him over, twisting the jacket off him. Then she unstrapped the vest and tugged it over his head.

She shed her own coat and strapped the vest over her sweater as Kells reemerged carrying the fuel jug and a flare. Rebecca smelled smoke on him, and light flickered orange inside the store.

Kells checked the load of the con’s weapon and then handed it to Rebecca, trading it for his revolver.

The alarm tower behind the library — a narrow granite obelisk, dark against the darker sky — was the last remnant of Gilchrist’s volunteer fire department. “Cover the common from the top,” Kells told her. “The others are working toward the church for a good angle on the police station. That’s where I’m headed. You’ve got about thirty rounds left. Use them sparingly. Don’t draw any attention to yourself and don’t get found. Just snipe. Keep them off balance.”

She felt proud of Kells’s respect, even if she had had to shoot a man to earn it. She grabbed his arm before he could leave. “What was it?” she asked him. “What was it that you saw in me that I never knew was there?”

“It was all right there in your book.”

She released him but for a moment he did not run. Light from the flames starting inside the general store showed the steam rising out of his sweater collar. She wanted him to stay. She was only just starting to understand him. She realized she wanted to know more.

“You’ll be all right,” he said, starting away.

He took off running for the brick library. Rebecca ducked inside the stone archway, rusted iron rungs leading to the top of the narrow tower. There was a short ledge below the old horn, iced but flat, a perch for her to stand on and look out over the common.

She was only a few feet higher than the one-story library. She could see spurts of gun flame here and there, and made out some movement between the old buildings across the common.

Kells was at the side corner of the library. He stepped out and fired three quick volleys, one across the common and two more straight up the street. Then he curled back, weapon up, as chunks of brick cracked off the library facing.

The loudest answering fire came from a gun in front of the police station. Despite her poor sight angle, Rebecca issued two rounds in that direction, and the con’s weapon jerked and felt good kicking at her chest. She looked back along the tree line, scanning it for a form in white moving slow against the terrain, but, of course, she saw nothing. When she looked back at the library, Kells was gone.

Chapter 31

Gunfire rattled in the night. Ant one of them might hate fired the shot that killed the convict guarding the door to the town hall. But Dr. Rosen was certain that it was his rifle and not Coe’s that felled the man firing at them from inside the school.

He stole through the foyer with Coe, under the watchful, granite eyes of Gilchrist’s town fathers. But the missile launcher supposedly stashed inside the town hall was gone.

They gave up the search and found Tom Duggan in the back hall. An old-fashioned hip door swung behind him. Behind that, the room marked Archives was alive with an angry orange glow. The gasoline jug was gone.

Tom Duggan’s brow was soaked with sweat. Dr. Rosen recalled seeing his granite bust sitting on the foyer floor, waiting to be installed with the rest. Now his flames fed thirstily on the ancient paper, the Gilchrist archives beginning to whip and roar.

“For Polk,” Tom Duggan explained.

He was the first out the side door, Coe second, and Dr. Rosen taking up the rear with ammunition clacking in his coat pockets, hopping the rail of the handicap ramp into the snow. Gunfire cracked, but it was a short, clear run to the rear of the church. Kells’s strategy appeared to be succeeding. The convicts were shooting wildly, and only the occasional bullet thudded a wall or cracked a pane of glass.

Tom Duggan led them to the gravelike dirt room and Dr. Rosen took the lead, running up the stairs to the trapdoor and firing quickly at a robe hanging in the cloak-room. But he was alone in the sacristy, and as the others surfaced he advanced to the front. The church was empty except for the corpse at the foot of the altar and the eviscerated dogs.

Back inside the sacristy, Tom Duggan and Coe lifted a bazooka-shaped weapon out of the cloakroom with the care afforded a religious relic.

“Can we do with one?” asked Dr. Rosen.

Tom Duggan said, “We’ll have to. You get up to the steeple. I’m heading out.”

Dr. Rosen grabbed Coe and pulled him over the altar into the body of the dark church. Dr. Rosen scanned the pews as they passed them. The smell was terrible but Coe gripped his rifle and soldiered on.

They ran up the stairs to the choir balcony over the entrance. Behind the organ, wooden rungs climbed to another trapdoor some twenty feet above. There were a few bullet holes in the wall.

“Stay here and stay down,” said Dr. Rosen.

Coe crouched on the floor as Dr. Rosen climbed the rungs to the ceiling, popping the clasp latch on the trapdoor and finding himself looking straight up into the church bell. Cold air washed his face as he slid the rifle into the belfry and hoisted himself up.

Kells had been right. The belfry offered an excellent vantage point, overlooking the entire common. Dr. Rosen knelt next to the copper bell and looked down over the roofs and snow. He saw the general store burning to the east. To the west, the machine gun barked from the pickup truck in front of the police station, tonguing flame. That was his target.

There was little room there next to the bell, but Dr. Rosen knelt and sighted the rifle the way Kells had told him to, steadying the weapon against his shoulder, exhaling slowly. He squeezed the trigger and the rifle jumped. He squeezed and squeezed again, the rifle cracking, Dr. Rosen going on faith that his shots were landing somewhere near the gunner.

Tom Duggan hopped the iron fence into the church cemetery, creeping through it with the missile launcher in his hands. The M60 was across the common, he could see its fiery bursts.

Three times he stopped and set himself, only to decide that he must move closer. He had no idea what the launcher in his hands could do. Kells had instructed him only to aim straight at the gun.

Just one row from the front of the fence, he knelt behind one of the larger headstones. He lifted the launcher onto his right shoulder, double-checking that he had the shooting end pointed forward.

The machine gun barked. A pang-pang-pang reverberated, the church bell was being struck.

Tom Duggan got to his feet. With the long barrel balanced on his shaking shoulder, hands shaking, he aimed and thumbed the trigger.

There was a second or so delay, and then the whooshing noise of the missile starting out of the tube. It was during that unexpected delay that he may have come up a bit on his aim.

The missile voided the barrel, filling the air with acrid smoke. It drove across the common in a perfectly straight line, as though being led along a fixed string.

But it missed the gun. It overshot the pickup truck by a few inches and instead struck the left corner of the police station.

There was a furious shudder and the cracking of mortar — and then a brief silence. Dust from the punched corner of the police station rose and blew over the pickup like a cloud. Stillness in the common, no gunfire, no yelling. The spent launcher slipped off Tom Duggan’s shoulder and fell to the ground.

The respite was short-lived. In a moment the machine gun started up again, firing out of the smoke, smacking and shattering the gravestones around Tom Duggan. He dove to the ground and covered his head as a tremendous barrage filled the cemetery with lead and splintering stone.

Kells worked his way past the bank to the craft store. He had taken one round in the lower back of his vest, a lucky shot fired from somewhere in the woods near the school. Sniping from the church steeple kept the M60 gunner distracted as Kells approached the police station. A single, high-caliber round from the M60 would have bored through Kells’s vest and dropped him cold.

Two figures hustled across the street from the funeral home, behind the pickup. Kells ducked between the pottery store and the police station, expecting a gunfire, when the missile launched from the church cemetery. It drove across the common just six feet off the ground, but missed the pickup truck, slamming the stationhouse and blowing out windows and shaking the ground. Glass landed at Kells’s feet and snow plummeted from the branches of a nearby pine.

Kells fan to the corner. The gunner had been knocked off the truck bed by the missile impact, but he was coughing now and climbing back aboard through the dust.

Kells pulled his knife. He poked holes in the half-full fuel jug as the convict spun the M60 and opened up on the cemetery. Kells stepped out into the expanding dust and hurled the jug into the bed of the pickup with a thump.

The shooting slowed. The gunner smelled the gasoline.

Kells lit the flare and tossed it end-over-end into the pickup. There was a whup of oxygen-sucking flame, then a ripping hush as the jug ignited and burst.

The gunner was splashed with flame. He screamed and spun away, tumbling out of the truck bed and thrashing around in the snow.

Kells wasted no time. He ran up the front steps and in through the shattered doors of the police station, his boots crunching broken glass. Inside the dusty darkness he found only one man, moaning, dazed, and sitting against a buckled wall, blood running out of his ears.

The weapons had fallen to the floor. Kells picked through the AR-15s, finding a MAC 10 machine pistol just as he heard movement behind him. He turned firing.

Two rounds punched him in the gut of his vest, rocking him backward as he shot up the convict from groin to face, dropping him.

Kells grunted in pain and moved to cover the con, standing over him. But the man, dying now, was not Inkman. Kells left him there, discarding his Micro Uzi for the heavier MAC 10.

He found no one in the rest of the building. Next to the radio room was a side door leading out to a parking lot, and at the foot of the stairs there lay another convict. Kells checked the body and guessed that it was one of the Marielitos. The man had been tapped in the forehead at close range.

Footprints surrounding him were fresh and clear and Kells read them quickly. Two men, the shooters, had exited the station through the same door as Kells, their footsteps closely paired as though one were holding on to the other. Then behind the dead Marielito came two more pairs, long, running strides, very likely the two men Kells had seen running from the funeral home before the missile struck. They had stopped to attend to the con, then moved on in pursuit of the first pair of tracks, following the shooters around the back of the station.

Kells was moving in that direction when he noticed a lone set of footsteps farther out in the parking lot. The holes were widely spaced, plain and straight as little black arrows, leading toward a baseball backstop in the distance.

A lone man had raced away from the center of town. With deadly certainty Kells started after Errol Inkman.

Chapter 32

The towns hall was fully engulfed how, which Rebecca attributed to self-immolation: the symbolic heart of a ravaged town, flaming out.

She choked off volleys at the police station, the Masonic Hall, the woods behind the school. It was call-and-answer: a burst of gunfire from anywhere in the common except the church and she responded with a short, controlled discharge. Yet she felt disassociated from the battle, hidden behind the row of buildings, high above it all. She was still one step removed, still a writer. The gun in her hands was a pen and she was shooting ink, highlighting the action throughout the common. It was as though the entire assault were being authored by her, spilling out of her mind.

Grue was near. She could feel him somehow, and being holed up atop the tower with only one escape route made her jittery. She searched the tree line for him, in vain.

Two men appeared in the narrow lane below her. They emerged from the trees behind the bank at the rear of the library, and Rebecca rose up, unseen, aiming her machine pistol down at a sharp angle.

One man was holding a gun to the other’s head. The hostage was an older white male, wearing neither a coat nor a flak vest, limping weakly. His face was obscured, but his bald head and stooped shoulders brought a strange association to her mind. It was the Virgil to her Dante: Barton James, the butlerlike warden of ADX Gilchrist. But he was surely dead, a casualty of the initial riot. The quality of his memory made her hesitate, turning aside the barrel of her gun.

They stopped in the glow of the burning general store. The bald man’s captor was Luther Trait. Rebecca’s mind reeled as Trait threw the warden — it was the warden — against the rear of the library. He opened a back door and pushed the warden inside.

Rebecca stood staring after they were gone. The old fear returned in a rush of smothering panic, as though no time had passed since her interview with Trait. She was back again inside that disciplinary hearing room inside ADX Gilchrist, worried about the body alarm wired beneath her sweater.

She was safe in the alarm tower. He had not seen her. He did not know she was there. He was inside the building right below her, but she could continue on as she had before.

She looked out over the battlefield of the town common. She took aim at the police station again and squeezed. The machine pistol fired one shot, then clicked dry. She squeezed the trigger again and again until she realized the gun was empty.

How had the warden stayed alive? Why was he with Trait?

A great thud shook the stone tower. A cloud of dust rose from the police station and for a few moments the shooting stopped and everything was quiet. She looked way across the common and saw, dimly, the figure of a black-cloaked man standing in the cemetery, a missile launcher falling from his shoulder.

It was Tom Duggan. She knew then that he had also started the fire inside the town hall. Gilchrist was his life and he was tearing it all down. He had finally accepted its death. Now he was liberating himself in the only way he could, and Rebecca found real meaning in that.

Killing a man and writing about him are the same thing.

But Trait had not bowed to such easy treatment. She had come for him here in the hope that an encounter with the demon would somehow free him up for sacrificing in print. Then he had invited her to stay in Gilchrist and she had accepted.

Next time we meet, it will be on my terms.

Now two more men appeared below. Convicts in wool caps, holsters crisscrossing their vests, following Trait’s and the warden’s tracks out of the woods to the library door. They advanced with guns drawn — tracking Luther Trait. These two convicts were hunting him down.

Rebecca watched from above as they eased open the back door, crouched, and entered.

Their manner enraged her. Two unknown assassins were stalking her criminal. As though in expression of her sudden fury, the gun in front of the police station exploded into flames.

You came here to kill Luther Trait.

The words were Kells’s, but the voice in her head was her own.

Chapter 33

Buildings burned below as Dr. Rosen fired at anything that moved. He understood now the allure that clock towers held for the powerless, the afraid. He was a fifty-four-year-old podiatrist from Boston crouching in a church belfry, holding off a town full of killers.

A snowmobile came revving out of the woods near the school, shooting into the common through an opening in the post fence. Dr. Rosen turned and paced the dim shadow cutting across the snow, firing but missing as the rider ditched the sled and took cover behind the gazebo. He became an immediate nuisance, pecking away at the church steeple as Dr. Rosen chipped holes in the bandstand roof.

Sparking music on the bell, pang, poong, ping, and Dr. Rosen ducked and covered his head. The pickup bed was still burning and the M60 dripped flame, but another con had climbed in behind the big gun. Ricochets splintered the wood inside the cramped belfry and Dr. Rosen tried to get a shot off.

Then the bulldozer roared to life. Headlights swung brightly across the common from the funeral parlor, chewing snow past the upturned barrel of the M60, crushing the low post fence. The wide steel scoop blade reared high to shield the cab from Dr. Rosen’s aim, though he wasted two rounds on it anyway. The great machine was headed straight for the church.

The action was heavy now, the fixed gun barking, the gazebo con sniping, Dr. Rosen taking noise and splinters. His right arm jerked forward after two particularly harsh tones off the big bell. The pain was searing and he fell back, rolling until the floor disappeared beneath him.

He did not know where he was until he looked up and saw the belfry trapdoor above him. He had fallen through and landed on the choir balcony near Coe. He gripped his bloody arm. “I’m shot!” he said.

Rounds from the fixed gun ripped into the balcony wall, low over the floor. Coe flattened out near him and they covered their heads and waited.

Dr. Rosen could move his arm but the tingling pain made his right hand useless. He looked for the rifle and saw that it had fallen near, still in one piece. He reached for it with his left hand, but Coe grabbed it first.

Dr. Rosen said, “Give me that—”

The kid was already alligator crawling across the floor to the ladder rungs. Dr. Rosen rolled toward him but his injured arm held him back.

The kid scuttled up the ladder with both rifles in one hand, pausing once as rounds bit through the wall. He hoisted himself safely into the belfry.

“Coe!” yelled Dr. Rosen.

The teenager’s face appeared through the trapdoor.

“Behind the gazebo,” Dr. Rosen said.

Coe nodded once and disappeared.

The bulldozer noise grew louder. Dr. Rosen rolled over again and fished in his coat pocket for his handgun. As he was getting to his feet, the engine surged and the bulldozer rammed the front of the church.

The foundation shuddered and brought him to his knees. Wood and glass ripped out of the church entrance, headlights illuminating the altar.

A churning noise as the machine tried to turn beneath him. It wanted to bring the entire structure down.

The engine sputtered and stalled. There was swearing below, the clicking of a dead engine. A door opened and heavy footsteps crunched over fallen debris.

The convict was out of the bulldozer, moving on foot. Dr. Rosen knelt on the floor above him with the gun in his hand.

Tom Duggan snagged his black overcoat as he fell over the cemetery fence. The hem caught and the lining ripped and he had to twist free, leaving the coat hanging from an iron spike.

He crept through the snow to the left, along the road past the Masonic Hall toward his black-shuttered funeral home. The bulldozer had started up there. The headlights came on bright and it rolled past the pickup, crushing the fence post, roaring across the common toward the church.

The barrel of the big gun still dripped fire. The prisoner who had stumbled out of the ruined police station burned his hands as he opened it up on the church belfry. Yet the M60 continued to rock furiously as Tom Duggan stole along the snowy hedge fronting his home. The con was yelling between each burst of fire, ripping into the steeple, and Tom Duggan could see bright sparks flying off the bell.

The bulldozer rammed the church, opening up the mouth of the entrance. Its headlights illuminated the stained-glass windows like a jack-o’-lantern.

Rounds resumed from the belfry, picking at the snow around the pickup and punching holes in the bumper. But the con would not stop. He kept yelling and firing the hot M60.

Tom Duggan pulled the revolver from his belt. He crossed his front walk, going the wide way around the pickup, approaching the gun from behind.

Diesel smoke and drywall dust, the sound of debris breaking off the wall.

Dr. Rosen was listening to the convict below as a sudden volley of automatic fire ripped through the floor planks.

Spit holes pitted the wood all around him, dropping him to his side. He was not hit, but he landed hard on his bad arm and the groan upon impact was automatic and forceful.

He was given away. He froze where he was there on the choir floor, but the damage was done.

Near his head was the bloodstain from his first fall. One of the rounds had splintered the stain, dead center. That was what gave him the desperate idea.

He rolled forward so that his injured arm lay across the hole. The splinters were jagged and biting and Dr. Rosen’s groan authentic. Fresh blood ran down through the floor.

Coe sat with his eyes closed and his back to the wood stanchion as rounds rang off the big bell. He held the rifle ready and rushed a count of five before opening his eyes and turning and firing twice in the direction of the police station.

Answering fire was loud and quick, rounds sparking off the copper bell, but Coe had already spun back into a tight crouch.

He was no match for the M60 gunner making frenzied music off the bell. He had a much better chance at getting the gazebo sniper below. That angle was safer and more favorable. Coe poked the rifle sight over the edge and fired down at the dark rotunda roof.

A distant rumbling began to make itself felt under his feet. First he thought it was the bulldozer rolling through the church. Then he saw lights moving over the jagged horizon of the Green Mountains.

Helicopters were crossing into town. The army was moving in.

Another discordant volley off the bell, Coe curled up tight. The gazebo had gone quiet and he wondered if he had hit someone. He peered over the edge of the belfry platform.

He could just make out the convict beyond the cover of the roof. The man was crouched and there was something balanced on his shoulder, long-barreled, pointed at Coe.

Coe saw the smoke as the Stinger left its launcher. There was no time for any other reaction. He jerked backward and the rifle slipped from his hands.

Dr. Rosen’s heart raced as the intruder climbed the stairs to the choir balcony. He lay still but his hands and feet were trembling and he was certain that with one look the convict would know that he was not dead. What he concentrated on was patience and the young life of the boy upstairs.

A rumbling in the distance, growing, obscuring the creaking of the con’s boots on the old stairs. Dr. Rosen had to rely on his instincts. The gun was heavy in his offhand.

His muscles were tense with the urge to spring, but he waited, waited, until he could wait no more.

He opened his eyes and brought the gun up and saw the convict on the top step, standing in a drab green parka and wet denim jeans, looking up at the open trapdoor. As Coe came diving headfirst out of the belfry, Dr. Rosen emptied his gun into the convict’s legs and chest and the convict fell back. Coe crashed to the floor next to Dr. Rosen as a windy, whistling noise filled the air, splitting slate and wood, ripping apart the church steeple overhead.

Tom Duggan yelled at the con to stop, but the man’s ears were bleeding and the noise of the gun obliterated all human voice. So Tom Duggan shot him once from behind. The bullet struck the convict in the shoulder, and DeYoung stiffened and turned fast. He brought the steaming gun around with him.

He never stopped firing. Rounds ripped into the ground, stitching the snow toward Tom Duggan. He lunged forward to the grill of the pickup and the hot rounds thumped behind him, the M60 barrel unable to get below the front cab. Tom Duggan was readying his revolver as fire from the belfry plunked the body of the pickup, driving him back. He ducked to the other headlight and came up shooting.

His gunshots struck DeYoung in both arms and square in the throat, driving him back from the machine gun, knocking him out of the pickup.

The gun tipped skyward of its own accord — silent now, though Tom Duggan’s ears screamed as though it were still firing. He saw lights moving across the dark night sky and knew they were helicopters in the distance.

He climbed up into the scorched bed of the pickup. He got behind the M60, but was too late in turning to the gazebo. The Stinger lit out and pierced the belfry, smashing the steeple and lopping off the high white cross before going off corkscrewing into the night.

Tom Duggan opened up the gun. He shuddered as round after round discharged, first felling the missile-firing con, then all but obliterating the old gazebo. He turned the spray on the blazing town hall, wasting bullets into the hungry fire, then wheeled hard and ripped into each building along Post Road, from the library all the way to the wounded police station behind him. He stopped then, looking over his shoulder at his beloved funeral parlor, his home. The lawn was all torn up, bullet holes in the clapboard siding, the front door hanging open. Tom Duggan turned the gun, gripping it hard as he tore into the white walls, popping the lead-glass windows and shredding the generations-old sign.

Chapter 34

The M60 noise grew distant, and Inkman’s pace slowed as his breathing suffered, the freezing air choking his lungs. He tumbled over the short right-field fence and picked himself up and slogged through the knee-high snow toward the farm. The openness of the land pulled at him. The nearest hiding place was a silo at the top of the rise, but from there it looked terribly far away.

Over his shoulder, Inkman’s own footprints pursued him like a shadowy version of himself. This phantom trail failed to symbolize guilt for Inkman, standing instead as just another example of his ongoing bad luck. Misfortune had dogged him for years, always conspiring to keep him from achieving his goals.

Way beyond the tall, bare trees, the sky over the center of town glowed ruddy, and Inkman was glad.

A dark figure crossed the pitcher’s mound of the baseball field. The form was moving across the snow with quick deliberateness — and Inkman turned and ran as fast as his desperation would take him.

He expected a bullet in the back at every step. There was a tree farm before the silo, neat rows of fat spruces shaking wildly in his vision. They were neither many nor tall, but they were his only potential cover.

The flak vest weighed heavy on his shoulders as the snow sucked at his feet. Every time he looked back, Clock was gaining.

He would not make it to the trees. Clock was closing too fast. Inkman could see the breath swirling around his pursuer’s shadowed face.

So Inkman took to favoring his right leg, giving up before the trees. It was a Christmas tree farm, bushy spruces in rows of ascending height — and Inkman stopped just yards away, doubled over as Clock came up fast behind him.

“Wait,” Inkman said. “Please wait.”

He kept his right leg stiff, gripping his knee, sliding his hand down to his shin.

The muzzle of the MAC 10 poked into his cheek, stopping him. Inkman froze as Clock reached down and pulled Inkman’s pant leg over his right ankle, finding the holster inside his boot.

Relieved of his gun, Inkman dropped to one knee, hands over his head, suppliant. He looked up at the face of the black man from the inn, changed only by a few days’ growth of beard and angrily glowing eyes.

Clock hurled Inkman’s handgun into the trees. “Get up,” he said.

Inkman stood, snow sticking to his pant knees. Even in the grip of fear, Inkman was confident he could scheme his way out of anything. Just keep Clock talking.

He spoke slowly as his shortness of breath required. “Fitting,” he said. “That I staged a revolution here... and you overthrew it.”

Clock said nothing, but neither did he shoot him.

“Too fitting,” concluded Inkman. “How did you know I was here? Or have you been following me ever since...”

Rotors beat in the distance, helicopters approaching in the night sky.

Inkman went on, “Why wouldn’t you have stopped me before? You wouldn’t have allowed this to happen... unless you wanted the country to go through mis? A public-policy lesson? A vaccination shot against future biowarfare?”

“Your problem is, you’re not as smart as you think you are,” said Clock. “You should have taken your lumps and crawled away.”

Confusion fueled Inkman’s pitiful defiance. “I want back what you took from me.”

“You’ll take what’s coming to you,” said Clock. “What’s been coming to you for a long time.”

Three gunshots cracked at close range. Inkman yelled and jerked backward, but it was Clock who had been struck: two shots off his vest, one in his left arm.

As Clock twisted, Inkman wasted not a moment turning and running into the trees. He drew no fire. After scooting across a few rows, he stopped to get his bearings, kneeling low and trembling. He was trying to figure out in which direction his handgun had been thrown.

Kells rushed into a row of six-footers for cover. Inkman had scrambled off to the left and the third gunman was somewhere along the right. Inkman had seemed as surprised by the gunshots as Kells was. There was pain in his left arm but he was more concerned that spilled blood would mark his tracks in the snow.

He crouched still a few more moments, listening for footsteps, branch snaps, breathing.

The snow in the narrow lanes was soft and unbroken. He realized he had to get moving and cross the shooter’s tracks before the shooter crossed his.

Kells hurried along, gun out, eyes and ears alert. He ducked through gaps between tree rows, moving fast but sure.

Crunching snow in the direction of the smaller trees. Boot steps, moving fast. Through the branches he saw a body fleeing the farm, plodding up the short rise toward a barn.

It was Inkman, running away. The sight invigorated Kells. No longer on the defensive, he moved confidently from lane to lane.

He found the opposing tracks in a low row. He knew Inkman’s tread and this pattern was different. He set off after them at top speed, weaving in and out of rows. He knew that the gunman must have crossed his telltale tracks by now.

A form moved to Kells’s right, two rows over. He slowed and waited, pushing into the next lane, crouching at the end of the row.

Boots rushed along the adjacent lane, coming toward Kells, then right past him. Kells rose fast and burst into the shooter’s lane in a flurry of snow.

The convict spun and fired high. Kells was on his knees and let the gunfire sweep the lane above his head once before firing up at the man’s legs and arms. The convict flailed and twin guns jumped out of his hands and he fell backward, settling deep into the snow.

Kells got to his feet. It was another of the Marielitos, the man’s mouth curled in pain as his wet eyes stared up. “El Reloj,” he said.

The Marielito watched the snow falling out of the sky and whispered to himself in Spanish. Kells dropped the MAC 10 and pulled the revolvers from the holsters crisscrossing the man’s vest.

The barn was a short walk up a low rise. Cows lowed plaintively as the helicopters beat overhead, searchlights focused on the center of town.

Kells crossed the white tableau with a gun in each hand.

It was a cow barn, long and dirt-floored, doors open at both ends. Inkman had released the jerseys in an attempt to slow Kells, but the cows just moaned past him, looking for food.

Inkman was staggering toward the opposite end of the barn. The air was thick with bovine sweat and dung as Kells advanced over the dirt. He raised both arms, the good one higher than the bad one, aiming at Inkman’s back and calling his name.

Inkman stopped, swaying in the doorway. Below him stretched acres of wide-open, snow-coated meadows. He turned and faced Kells, exhausted, showing him an open hand.

“Wait,” Inkman said.

The revolvers fired, and then there was only one man standing in the barn.

Chapter 35

A carousel of romances creaked as Trait brushed past it to the library window, looking at the town hall in flames across the common. The M60 rattled proudly against the cracking of the smaller arms, but it should never have come to this. Defending their own turf was failure in itself.

The new library reeked of old paper. It was dark but for the flames from the general store casting flickering light through the side windows, shadows shifting and creeping in the stacks. The warden leaned heavily against the front counter. Near him, a library calendar sleeved in a clear plastic standee highlighted a Saturday evening reading by bestselling author Rebecca Loden.

“What are we doing here?” asked the warden. “You’re trapped.”

Bullets cracked the front window, fluttering a white shade as Trait paced, gun in hand, head screaming. “Shut up,” he said. He was trying to think.

If Clock had taken the Inkman bait, then all they had to contend with here were a few civilians. The launchers would scare off the first wave of army helicopters. Maybe he could retreat to the prison with a few remaining men. Maybe there was some ricin left over—

The floor shuddered and books dropped off the shelves. Trait realized a missile had struck one of the buildings. He sensed it was not a blow for his side.

“You are no longer the leader of this revolution,” said Warden James. “You are its victim.”

Trait turned on him, eyes flashing. He crossed the library to the front desk and brought the butt of his gun across the warden’s face.

The warden dropped to the floor. He lay still a moment before rolling onto his back.

“One more word,” said Trait, brandishing the gun above him.

The warden’s face, shaded by old and new contusions, remained defiant. “You just keep trading one locked closet for another.”

Trait thought of his E-Unit cell. All the dreams he had dreamed there. All the journeys he had taken.

The front door opened onto Post Road and the common, and Trait was a few moments too slow in turning.

The man who entered wore all white: a bleached coat, pants, boots, gloves, and hood. He was crouched low, a small bow and arrow poised in his hands, the bowstring pulled taut to his nose. The nocked arrow was aimed at Trait’s face. Trait’s gun was aimed at the stranger’s heart.

“Drop it!” yelled Trait.

But the intruder froze and held his crouch as the door opened wide on the fire-brightened snow and the gunplay behind him. The flames of the general store painted a white man with blunt features under a sloppy beard. He slowly rose to full height, lowering the bow to his chest, revealing his face while keeping the arrow point aimed dead at Trait’s eyes.

“I said drop it,” said Trait.

“Naw,” said the archer. “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be wearing an arrow shaft in your neck.”

The archer smiled a pale grin. Trait kept his aim and his distance.

“Jasper Grue,” said the warden, amazement filling his voice from where he lay on the floor.

Trait said, from behind his gun, “You the cowboy who’s been tracking the rebels?”

“Not all them,” said Grue. “Just one. You the Negro who set everyone free?”

Grue, Trait remembered. A race-hater. Militia leader. Backwoods survivalist. He had to be handled carefully.

Trait said, “What brings you here now?”

“I ain’t come to say thank you.”

Trait showed Grue his free hand as he circled away from the counter, keeping a respectful distance. Grue turned with him. “The FBI is coming with the U.S. Army. We’ve got to run. Maybe you know something about the terrain here. Maybe together you and I could...”

Grue shook his head slowly. The sound of the gunfire through the open door did not impel him at all.

“Why not?” said Trait.

“Because the second you drop your aim, I’m going to put you down.”

Trait breathed deeply through his fury. “I turned you loose. You owe me.”

“You made a distraction. I got out on my own.”

“Then what did you come here for?”

“The writer. I want to know where she’s at.”

Trait smirked cruelly. “She tried to write about you too?”

“I got a little book of my own,” Grue said. “She’s getting her own chapter.”

Shadows produced by the fire next door had been shifting the entire time.

Now all at once, whole silhouettes emerged from the dark stacks. Two men, wielding handguns.

Grue was the first to react, getting off an arrow at the most visible shooter. He dropped fast and rolled behind a table of current periodicals.

Trait swung and fired three times, and simultaneously there were flashes of light from the gunmen. Trait ducked back behind a row and looked for Grue, seeing only the warden lying on the floor, playing dead. He heard yelling in Spanish and understood that the other two Marielitos had come to collect for their murdered comrade.

The searing in his ribs was acute and he had trouble keeping his gun arm up. The bullet had gone in below his heart but had not come out. He slumped against the bookshelf, switching gun hands and then came out blasting.

One Marielito was down already. The second was half-turned by an arrow in his shoulder and Trait finished him off with two shots to the head. The third trigger pull clicked empty as the Marielito fell dead.

Trait dropped his empty gun and stood hunched, his hand pressed hard against his side. Grue emerged from behind the front desk, eyeing Trait, his empty hands, and the bloody wound. In one fluid motion Grue plucked an arrow from his pouch and strung it taut.

Trait turned toward him. Smoke hung in the air. The room smelled of cordite and sweat and the musk of decaying paper.

Grue moved in front of the desk, holding his aim. “Where is she?” asked Grue.

Trait frowned, grunting. “I don’t know.”

The warden was looking up from the floor now. “He doesn’t,” he insisted.

Grue’s eyes lingered on the warden in dim recognition. He looked back to Trait and let the arrow fly.

The point pierced Trait beneath his right breast, knocking him backward into the end of a row of shelves. Trait stood there looking down at the black-feathered arrow sticking out of his chest. He looked at Grue.

Grue set his bow down calmly on the table of current periodicals and advanced.

With a defiant growl, Trait summoned the strength to remain on his feet. There was a blur of disgust and impassivity on the race-hater’s face. This was the will of the fatherless cons, turning on him now.

He managed an impudent smile as the first blow came. Grue roundhoused him flush in the face, shattering his nose and cheek and driving him back against the metal row end, jerking the arrow for extra despair. Grue’s knee came up next, then his fists again, Trait accepting his judgment boldly, tasting in his mouth not blood but the bitterness of defeat.

He was going unconscious. Just as he was slipping into the black undertow of the room, Grue released him and backed away.

The voice calling to him was high and crazed. “Stop it! Get away from him!”

Trait twisted on the floor at the bottom of the row. He felt little pain now, drifting on a nimbus of brain-released opiates.

Someone was standing in the firelight near the Marielitos, aiming a gun. The room listed as Trait tried to focus on the face.

He saw auburn hair blazing in the flame light, and the revelation came in waves.

Rebecca stood near the front of the stacks — motionless, almost floating, the Marielito’s revolver still warm in her hand. Grue moved with incredible agility, releasing Trait upon her order, but then darting behind the warden who had been almost at his feet. Now Grue’s white-gloved hand gripped the warden by the throat. His other hand clutched the handle of a large hunting knife, held vertically, the gleaming silver point touching the crown of Warden James’s bald head. Grue’s arm was ready-bent to drive the wide blade down into the warden’s skull.

The two Marielitos lay dead at her feet. Trait was bloodied and crumpled, barely moving.

“Put that thing down,” drawled Grue. Beating up on Trait had exhilarated him, his dark, beady eyes bore a bright sheen.

The warden looked forlorn, his eyes downcast — scared but too weak to express it.

“No,” Rebecca told him. “You put down the knife.”

“I will,” said Grue. “Right down through his skull.”

She shook her head, still yelling. “You won’t kill him. You’ve got nothing if you kill him.”

Grue’s glove tightened around the warden’s throat. The knife blade twisted as with a grin Grue slowly rotated his wrist back and forth. A single drip of blood appeared on Warden James’s head, rolling down over his temple and streaming to his chin.

“We’ll stand here like this then,” said Grue. “See who moves first.”

Grue continued to twirl the knife point, holding the warden close.

As the revolver shook in her two-handed grip, she said, “I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

She was overheating inside her sweater and flak vest. She smelled him now, the sickening funk of his unwashed body. Outside, gunfire raged as the big gun continued to fire.

Grue just grinned and kept twisting the knife. Her senses plagued her as she stood by helplessly, watching him bore into the warden’s head.

Trait’s groaning, until then ignored, stopped as a hand came free from beneath his chest. Rebecca saw something in his fingers, perhaps a weapon, but did not have time to react.

Trait thumbed the switch on the stun-belt trigger. The warden rocked violently, thrashing with an immediacy and force that shook him free of Grue’s grip, dropping him hard to the floor.

Grue was left wide open and Rebecca did not hesitate. She squeezed once and Grue shuddered and stepped back.

He looked down at his chest as blood oozed out of the small hole, seeping into the white fabric. He looked again at Rebecca, arms hanging at his sides, a child’s expression of hurt on his face.

She fired four more times, emptying the revolver into his chest and neck and driving him back onto the table of periodicals. He lay still a moment, bent backward over the tabletop, then sagged and fell to one side, pulling some of the magazines with him to the floor.

Trait released the switch that freed the warden, leaving him quaking involuntarily before the front counter.

Rebecca carried the empty gun to Grue. He lay on his side, throat gurgling as his lifeblood coughed out of his neck and mouth. He was sagging like a balloon losing air, looking bewildered and small.

She knelt beside him and set the gun down near his wide, staring eyes.

“I don’t want your last words,” she said.

But he could no longer see her or the flame-lit book stacks of the Gilchrist Public Library. Death panic had tricked his mind out to a place in his past. His mother had run a slaughterhouse, and it occurred to Rebecca that he might have returned there to die.

Rebecca used the table to get to her feet, momentarily leaning on it for support.

When she turned around, Luther Trait was standing before the row of bookshelves behind her.

Rebecca reeled back wildly, stumbling into a smaller table set near the far stacks.

Trait was a broken man. His face was ripped apart and swelling and his jaw hung open. He could not summon a full breath. The black feathers of the arrow in his right breast were wet with blood. His head drooped to the side such that he watched her out of his one good eye, the yellow-brown pupil piercing.

He spit out blood in order to speak. “You look different,” he slurred.

“I am different.”

She stood her ground, gripping the table as books tumbled off display stands. One struck her boot and its familiar jacket design distracted her. The prim, satisfied woman behind the writing desk in the author photograph was someone she barely knew. Rebecca was standing against a table of Last Words display copies, arranged for her ill-fated reading.

Trait took one short step toward her, then another, holding his balance. This brought a determined, if lopsided, grin.

“Don’t come any closer,” she warned him.

“You saved me,” he said.

“They’re coming now. Stay where you are.”

But he came forward two more steps. She felt oddly relaxed — out of control and in control at the same time. Suddenly she was glad she had stayed in Gilchrist, if only to defy him.

“Here I am,” she said. “Here’s your prize.”

The rumbling grew tremendous overhead, the rotor hum of the helicopters sweeping near the center of town. Warden James crawled to a sitting position against the front desk, looking up now, hearing them, as did Trait.

Trait pushed ahead. He was dying and yet somehow he kept moving toward her.

“Don’t do this,” Rebecca said.

He was close now, only a few steps away.

Something in his broken face told her he was stronger than he seemed.

“I’m not afraid,” Rebecca said. Her hand went into her pants pocket, closing around the mace. “I won’t be anyone’s victim.”

The warden called to Trait in a worn, tremulous voice, “Luther! Don’t!”

Trait paused, a spark of aggression in his one good eye — then he lunged for Rebecca, one arm raised, groping for her neck.

Rebecca pulled her hand out of her pocket. She maced him as he came.

Trait hit her sputtering, grabbing at her face as they went down, overturning the display table.

He was on top of her, blindly, pulling at her hair, trying to work his other fist free. The mace mist irritated her eyes, and as they rolled Rebecca felt around the floor until her hand gripped something with a familiar heft. As Trait was raising his hand to strike her, Rebecca let out a yell from a long-forgotten self-defense class and brought the Last Words hardcover across his temple.

Trait sagged, dazed. Rebecca shoved him off her and rolled over, gagged by mace, but he would not give her up. He gripped her vest, pawing at her face and hair, and she could not get free of him. Above him now, with both hands she brought the book spine down forcefully against the back of his head. She struck him with it again and again, hammering his head into the floor until the binding cracked and the creased cover boards and bloody endpapers collapsed in her hands, the freed pages fluttering around the room like snow.

Chapter 36

Warden James was received by the arriving government and law-enforcement agencies as a hero on par with the resurrected Christ. A hush came over the heavily armed men as Rebecca walked him out of the library, and they took him from her shoulder like a child pulled from a well.

Stunned FBI agents eagerly questioned him while they waited for the medical helicopter. Foremost on their minds was the whereabouts of Luther Trait. When the battered warden pointed at the brick library, a handful of agents started toward it with guns drawn.

“He’s dead,” Warden James said, stopping them.

“Dead?” said one. “Who did it?” The supervisory agent scanned the destroyed town common. “Who did all this?”

The warden looked at Rebecca, standing outside the ring of men.

“They did,” he said. “Trait’s men. A power struggle. They brought down the town.”

He kept looking at Rebecca as they peppered him with questions, until finally he glanced away.

“Perhaps one of you could do me a favor,” Warden James said. “My wife thinks she is a widow. The sooner I get to a working telephone, the sooner I can correct that.”

The helicopter touched down near the gazebo and he was strapped inside, and Rebecca felt better once he had risen out of Gilchrist and puttered away.

They were all detained as suspected prisoners until positively identified. Rebecca, as the only woman, was the first to be cleared. They told her she was in shock and Rebecca allowed them that assumption because it precluded her answering questions about the blood on her sweater sleeves. Her opinion, and that of the rest, was that they owed the FBI nothing.

She felt wired and out of sorts, sick one minute, sleepy the next. Her throat was still raw from the mace, her muscles tired and tight. The snow had stopped but for a few straggling flakes, the sky brightening with morning as she took in the war-torn town. The smoldering husk of the town hall, the smashed front of the church, the rocket-punched police station. Nothing was fixed anymore. Molecules were being continually rearranged and transformed. It seemed to her now that the snow had not been falling that week so much as she had been rising through it.

The sounds of gunfire in the distance. The barricade cons still putting up a fight.

Mia was returned to the center of town by sled, wrapped in a thick blanket. “You’re okay,” she said, starting to cry when she saw them. “You’re all okay.”

Rebecca thought of Mia as an orphan entrusted into their care, a child they had to protect and carry home. In turn, Mia had carried a part of each of them, something innocent and untouched, from the beginning.

Dr. Rosen, still giddy from the gunshot and the battle, insisted on dressing his own arm wound. When the FBI informed him his wife was waiting at the hospital in Beckett, Dr. Rosen thanked them with tears in his eyes.

Coe’s parents would also be at the hospital, and he joined Mia and Dr. Rosen on the second medical helicopter. Rebecca was relieved not to have to meet Coe’s parents. For some reason she felt responsible for Coe, and that she had failed him. She wished she had been able to shelter him more.

The FBI wanted Rebecca to go with them, but Rebecca was waiting for Kells. “Make sure Mr. Kells comes to see me,” Coe called to her, on his way to the waiting helicopter.

She did not know where Kells was. She assumed he was somewhere being debriefed.

Tom Duggan remained behind, standing with her outside his funeral home. His black overcoat was gone, residual adrenaline keeping him warm in his wrinkled funeral suit. He said he wasn’t sure where Kells was either.

“What did you tell them?” Rebecca asked Tom Duggan, now that they were alone.

“Nothing, same as the rest,” he said. “What can they do?” He shrugged. Then he resumed looking her over. “I am worried about you.”

She didn’t know how much he knew. “Me?” she said, turning and looking at the sign, Duggan’s Funeral Home, riddled with bullet holes.

Tom Duggan nodded, contrite but not quite ashamed.

“So what now?” she asked.

“For me or for the town?”

Rebecca shrugged.

“First order of business is burying the dead,” he said. “I’ll take some of these men to the country club to get the others. I’ll go to my mother’s house alone.”

“And the town?”

He looked out at all the activity in the common. “Like a forest after a great fire. Either it comes back or it doesn’t. If it does come back, usually it comes back stronger. But if it doesn’t, then you have to move on, you don’t have a choice. Animals know it, I don’t know why people don’t. It pains me to say it, but the old fool was right. We’ve had a good fire here, long overdue. I’ll miss my mother terribly, but I’m free now, and there are other forests.” He nodded, still partly convincing himself. “What about you? Are you going to write about this?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I truly don’t.”

“Well,” he decided, “I’d buy a copy.”

She hugged him then, and in feeling some of his stiffness dissolving in her arms, she began to feel better herself. When they separated he was smiling, and with a modest wave he started away.

A voice called to her, loud, startling, familiar. “Bee!”

Jeb climbed out of an arriving army jeep and hurried toward her through the snow. He was wearing a soft orange ski parka, tan corduroys, and new snow boots, trailing a cashmere scarf.

He gripped her in a tight hug. Now it was Rebecca’s stiffness that needed dissolving.

“A miracle,” he exulted. “I don’t want to say I gave up hope, but—”

“Where did you come from?”

“Stowe — I’ve been waiting day and night for some word from you. Soon as the news broke, I had an agent friend of a friend get me in here. Look... at you.” His enthusiasm suffered as he took her in: She was scraped up, bruised, and exhausted. Perhaps he could tell that she had not merely survived the assault on Gilchrist, she had participated in it. And perhaps just as intuitively he put it straight out of his mind. “Let’s get you away from here. We’ll check you out, get you cleaned up. There is so much heat right now, so much buzz on this revolution thing, you would not—”

“Jeb.”

“Okay, I know, I know. But we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot.” He gripped her shoulders. “I know this is a monster cliche, so forgive me in advance... but you truly don’t realize how much you miss someone until you think they’re gone. I mean, really, really gone.”

She reached for his hands, gently pulling them from her shoulders, holding them.

Jeb smiled. He nodded and calmed down.

She leaned forward and planted a kiss on his smooth, scented cheek, then withdrew before he could reciprocate.

“You’re fired,” Rebecca said.

Jeb’s smile lingered as the words took a few moments to register.

“I’m moving on,” she said. “The Last Words sequel isn’t working out. My heart isn’t in it.”

“Fired?” he said. “We have a legal agreement.”

“Sue me. Nothing’s guaranteed in life, nothing’s fixed. You’re the one who taught me that.”

Four men passed behind Jeb, two of them wearing black windbreakers with the acronym DTRA in bold white letters on the back. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

“I have to go now, Jeb,” she told him. And she left him standing there.

“Excuse me!” she called, hurrying after the men, following them around an army jeep.

While the pair in windbreakers were fairly young, the older two could have passed for nuclear physicists. All looked haggard, like men who had just dodged a bullet. The ricin had indeed fallen on the target towns — Trait’s Brotherhood had dropped the poison when news of the town invasion broke — but too late, just after the evacuations. Rebecca was glad the country had gotten a little taste of doomsday.

“Excuse me,” she said again, getting their attention that time. “Can you tell me where Alex Kells is?”

One of the younger ones glanced at the older pair. “We wouldn’t know.”

“I’ve been looking for him.”

The agent turned to continue on with the rest. “We have no idea where he is,” he said.

Rebecca was standing there, perplexed, until after a few steps one of the older men stopped and turned back. “You’re a friend of his?” he asked.

Strange to hear it put that way. “Yes.”

“We don’t know where Alex Kells is,” he explained, in apology for his associate’s short manner. “After the stunt he pulled in the New York City Transit System, he was placed on administrative leave. We’ve neither heard from nor seen him since.”

Rebecca smiled at first, as though she were being put on. Then a thick fog began to settle in her head.

“But how did you know about the ricin towns?” Rebecca asked him. “The zip codes?”

“We were contacted by the CIA.” He looked at her strangely. “You’d have to ask them.”

They continued on busily, leaving Rebecca alone on the edge of the common.

If Kells hadn’t been working for Doomsday, then who had he been working for? And if he was not being debriefed...

A female FBI agent hurried past in a heavy blue parka, reacting to a report on her radio. “Body in a tree farm, just outside the center of town.”

The agent turned at the police station and headed out across a baseball field scored with boot tracks. Rebecca followed her into the open pasture beyond and over a hump of snow marking a property line. There was a Christmas tree farm in the distance, and a group of men in windbreakers standing near the end of a tall row.

Rebecca was accustomed to moving through the snow now, and even in her exhaustion she overtook the agent before the farm. A male agent there tried to get in her way, but Rebecca sidestepped him. In their eyes, she was a victim. Victims needed to emote.

It was another of the Marielitos, lying on his back in the snow, empty holsters crisscrossed over his flak vest, eyes frozen open.

“Inkman,” she said. “Where is he?”

The agents looked at her strangely. But their unquestioning silence told her they knew something. She repeated the question, and one of the earphone-wearing agents glanced to the top of the nearby rise.

Rebecca walked to the barn. Her weariness was complete, her fatigued mind swimming as she trudged up the last snowy hill.

The doors were open at both ends. The cow stalls were empty and only a handful of men stood about. She smelled manure and cordite.

The body lay in the dirt at the far end of the barn, just inside the snow line. “Mr. Hodgkins” bore a slurred expression in death, his head tipped to one side, eyes glancing away as though forever in search of a better angle. She pitied Inkman then. She realized he never had a chance.

A single pair of footprints, deep and widely spaced, led out from the barn over meadows toward the tree line and the mountains in the distance.

Three men stood together outside the door. They were in their fifties, dressed conservatively in parkas and suit pants, engaged in close conversation. Rebecca absorbed their scrutiny without reflecting anything back at them.

“Clock,” she said.

Two of them looked over, as though uncertain she was speaking to them. One said, “Excuse me?”

But it was in their eyes. A shimmer of recognition, like a pupil contracting from a flash of unexpected light.

Looking out at the footprints leading away from town, Rebecca felt the first stirrings of a novel taking form in her mind.