If Jared Norcross needed mothering, Michaela was the wrong person. The world had been out of tilt since Thursday, but as long as she’d been around Garth Flickinger, Michaela had been able to treat it almost like a lark, a bender. She would not have expected to miss him so much. His stoner good cheer was the only thing that made sense once the world went wacky.
She said, “I’m afraid, too. You’d be crazy not to be afraid.”
“I just…” He trailed off.
He didn’t understand it, what the others around the prison had said about the woman, that she had powers, and that this Michaela, the warden’s reporter daughter, had supposedly received a magic kiss from the special prisoner that had given her new energy. He didn’t understand what had come over his father. All he understood was that people had started to die.
As Michaela had guessed, Jared missed his mother, but he wasn’t angling for a substitute. There was no replacing Lila.
“We’re the good guys, right?” Jared asked.
“I don’t know,” Michaela admitted. “But I’m positive we’re not the bad guys.”
“That’s something,” Jared said.
“Come on, let’s play cards.”
Jared swiped a hand across his eyes. “What the hell, okay. I’m a champ at War.” He came over to the café table in the middle of the break room.
“Do you want a Coke or something?”
He nodded, but neither of them had change for the machine. They went to the warden’s office, emptied out Janice Coates’s huge knit handbag, and crouched on the floor, sifting for silver through the receipts and notes and ChapSticks and cigarettes. Jared asked Michaela what she was smiling about.
“My mom’s handbag,” said Michaela. “She’s a prison warden, but she’s got, like, this hippie monstrosity for a bag.”
“Oh.” Jared chuckled. “But what’s a warden’s handbag supposed to look like, do you think?”
“Something held together with chains or handcuffs.”
“Kinky!”
“Don’t be a child, Jared.”
There was more than enough change for two Cokes. Before they went back to the break room, Michaela kissed the cocoon that held her mother.
War usually lasted forever, but Michaela beat Jared in the first game in less than ten minutes.
“Damn. War is hell,” he said.
They played again, and again, and again, not talking much, just flipping cards in the dark. Michaela kept winning.
Terry dozed in a camp chair a few yards behind the roadblock. He was dreaming about his wife. She had opened a diner. They were serving empty plates. “But Rita, this isn’t anything,” he said, and handed his plate back to her. Rita handed it right back. This went on for what seemed like years. Back and forth with the empty plate. Terry grew increasingly frustrated. Rita, never speaking, grinned at him like she had a secret. Outside the windows of the diner, the seasons were shuffling past like photographs through one of those old View-Masters—winter, spring, summer, fall, winter, spring—
He opened his eyes and Bert Miller was standing over him.
Terry’s first waking thought was not of the dream, but of earlier that night, at the fence, Clint Norcross calling him out about the booze, humiliating him in front of the other two. The irritation of the dream mixed with shame, and Terry fully comprehended that he was not the man for the sheriff’s job. Let Frank Geary have it if he wanted it so bad. And let Clint Norcross have Frank Geary if he wanted to deal with a sober man.
Camp lights were set up everywhere. Men stood in groups, rifles hung from straps over their shoulders, laughing and smoking, eating food from crinkly plastic MRE packages. God only knew where they’d come from. A few guys knelt on the pavement, shooting dice. Jack Albertson was using a power drill on one of the bulldozers, rigging an iron plate over the window.
Selectman Bert Miller wanted to know if there was a fire extinguisher. “Coach Wittstock’s got asthma and the smoke from those assholes’ tire fires is drifting over here.”
“Sure,” Terry said, and pointed to a nearby cruiser. “In the trunk.”
“Thanks, Sheriff.” The selectman went to fetch the extinguisher. There was a cheer from the dicing men as somebody made a hard point.
Terry lurched up from the camp chair and oriented himself toward the parked cruisers. As he walked, he unbuckled his gunbelt and let it fall into the grass. Fuck this shit, he thought. Just fuck it.
In his pocket were the keys to Unit Four.
From his seat on the driver’s side of the animal control pickup, Frank observed the acting sheriff’s silent resignation.
You did that, Frank, Elaine said from beside him. Aren’t you proud?
“He did it to himself,” Frank said. “I didn’t tie him down and put a funnel in his mouth. I pity him, because he wasn’t man enough for the job, but I also envy him, because he gets to quit.”
But not you, Elaine said.
“No,” he agreed. “I’m in it to the end. Because of Nana.”
You’re obsessed with her, Frank. Nana-Nana-Nana. You refused to hear anything Norcross said, because she’s all you can think of. Can you not wait at least a little longer?
“No.” Because the men were here, and they were primed and ready to go.
What if that woman is leading you by the nose?
A fat moth sat on the pickup’s wiper blades. He flicked the wand for the blades to clear it off. Then he started the engine and drove away, but unlike Terry, he intended to return.
First, he stopped at the house on Smith to check on Elaine and Nana in the basement. They were as he had left them, hidden away behind a shelving unit and tucked beneath sheets. He told Nana’s body that he loved her. He told Elaine’s body that he was sorry that they could never seem to agree. He meant it, too, although the fact that she continued to scold him, even in her unnatural sleep, was extremely irritating.
He relocked the basement door. In the driveway, by the headlights of his pickup, he noticed a pool had collected in the large pothole that he had planned to fix soon. Sediments of green and brown and white and blue sifted around in the water. It was the remains of Nana’s chalked drawing of the tree, washed away by the rain.
When Frank reached downtown Dooling, the bank clock read 12:04 AM. Tuesday had arrived.
As he passed the Zoney’s convenience store, Frank noticed that someone had smashed out the plate glass windows.
The Municipal Building was still smoking. It surprised him that Norcross would allow his cohorts to blow up his wife’s place of work. But men were different now, it seemed—even doctors like Norcross. More like they used to be, maybe.
In the park across the street, a man was, for no apparent reason, using a cutter to work on the verdigris-stained trousers of the statue of the top-hatted first mayor. Sparks fountained up, doubling in the tinted slot of the man’s welding helmet. Farther along, another man, a la Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, was hanging off a lamp post, but he had his cock in his hand and he was pissing on the pavement and bellowing some fucked-up sea chanty: “The captain’s in his cabin, lads, drinking ale and brandy! Sailors in the whorehouse, where all the tarts are handy! Way, haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe!”
The order that had existed, and which Frank and Terry had tried to shore up over the last few chaotic days, was collapsing. It was, he supposed, a savage kind of mourning. It might end, or it might be building to a worldwide cataclysm. Who knew?
This is where you should be, Frank, Elaine said.