“No,” he told her.
He parked behind his office. Each day he’d found half an hour to stop in here. He fed his strays in their cages and left a bowl of Alpo for the one that was his special pet, his office-dog. There was a mess in the holding area each time he came, and they were restless, shivering and whimpering and howling, because he usually was only able to walk them once a day, if that, and of the eight animals, probably only a couple had ever been housetrained to begin with.
He considered putting them down. If something happened to him, they would almost certainly starve; it wasn’t likely a Good Samaritan would come along and take care of them. The possibility of simply releasing them did not cross his mind. You didn’t let dogs run wild.
A fantasy sketched itself in Frank’s mind’s eye: coming in the next day with Nana, letting her help feed and walk them. She always liked to do that. He knew she would love his office-dog, a sleepy-eyed beagle-cocker mix with a stoic manner. She would love the way his head drooped down over his paws like a kid slumped over a desk, forced to listen to some never-ending school lecture. Elaine didn’t like dogs, but no matter what happened, that no longer made a difference. One way or another, he and Elaine were through, and if Nana wanted a dog, it could stay with Frank.
Frank walked them on triple leashes. When he finished, he wrote a note—PLEASE CHECK ON THE ANIMALS. MAKE SURE THEY HAVE FOOD AND WATER. GRAY-WHITE PITBULL MIX IN #7 IS SKITTISH APPROACH CAREFULLY. PLEASE DON’T STEAL ANYTHING, THIS IS A GOVERNMENT OFFICE.—and fastened it to the outside door with duct tape. He stroked the office-dog’s ears for a couple of minutes. “Look at you,” he said. “Just look at you.”
When he returned to his pickup and headed back to the roadblock, the bank clock read 1:11 AM. He’d start prepping everyone for the assault at four thirty. Dawn would come two hours later.
Across the prison athletic fields, on the far side of the fence, two men with bandannas over their mouths were using fire extinguishers to put out the tire fires. The extinguisher spray glowed phosphorescent through the night vision scope and the men were limned in yellow. Billy Wettermore didn’t recognize the larger man, but the smaller one he knew well. “Yonder dingleberry in the straw hat is Selectman Miller. Bert Miller,” Billy said to Willy Burke.
There was ironic personal history here. While attending Dooling High, Billy Wettermore had, as a National Honor Society student, interned in the selectman’s office. There he had been forced to silently attend to Bert Miller’s frequent thoughts on homosexuality.
“It’s a mutation,” Selectman Miller explained, and he dreamed of stopping it. “If you could wipe out all the gays in an instant, Billy, perhaps you could stop the mutation from spreading, but then again, much as we might not like to admit it, they’re human, too, aren’t they?”
A lot had happened in the intervening decade-plus. Billy was a country boy and stubborn, and when he quit college he had returned to his Appalachian home town in spite of the politics. Around here his preference for men seemed to be the first thing on everyone’s mind. This being almost two decades into the twenty-first century, that was damned annoying to Billy, not that he would ever show it, because that would be giving folks something they didn’t deserve to have.
However, the thought of putting a bullet in the dirt right in front of Bert Miller and making him drop a big old bigoted shit in his pants was extremely tempting. “I’m going to give him a jump, get him away from our tires, Willy.”
“No.” This came not from Willy Burke, but from behind him.
Norcross had materialized from the propped-open door at the rear of the prison. In the dimness, there was barely anything to his face except for the shine on the rims of his glasses.
“No?” Billy said.
“No.” Clint was rubbing the thumb of his left hand across the knuckles of his right. “Put one in his leg. Drop him.”
“Seriously?” Billy had shot game, but never a man.
Willy Burke made a kind of humming sound through his nose. “Bullet in the leg can kill a man, Doc.”
Clint nodded his head to show he understood. “We have to hold this place. Do it, Billy. Shoot him in the leg. That’ll be one less and it’ll show them we’re not playing games here.”
“All right,” Billy said.
He dropped his eye down to the scope. Selectman Miller, big as a billboard, crisscrossed by the two layers of chainlink, was fanning himself with his straw hat, the extinguisher set on the grass beside him. The crosshairs settled on Miller’s left knee. Billy was glad his target was such an asshole, but he hated to do it anyway.
He triggered.
Evie’s rules were:
1) Stay undercover and no killing until daylight!
2) Cut open the cocoons enclosing Kayleigh and Maura!
3) Enjoy life!
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Angel said. “But are you sure Maura an Kay won’t kill me while I’m enjoyin life?”
“Pretty sure,” Evie said.
“Good enough,” Angel said.
“Open her cell,” Evie said, and a line of rats emerged from the hole by the shower alcove. The first one stopped at the base of Angel’s cell door. The second climbed atop the first, the third atop the second. A tower formed, gray rat body stacked on gray rat body like hideous ice cream scoops. Evie gasped when she felt the bottom rat suffocate. “Oh, Mother,” she said. “I am so, so sorry.”
“Look at this wonderful circus shit here.” Angel was entranced. “You could make money at this, sister, you know it?”
The topmost rat was the smallest, still a pup. It squeezed into the keyhole and Evie controlled its tiny paws, searching through the mechanisms, investing it with a strength that no rat had ever possessed before. The cell door opened.
Angel fetched a couple of towels from the shower, fluffed them up, laid them on the bunk, and draped a blanket over them. She closed the cell door behind her. If anyone looked in, it would appear that she had finally lost the fight and fallen asleep.
She started up the corridor, headed for C Wing, where most of the cocooned sleepers now resided.
“Goodbye, Angel,” Evie called.
“Yeah,” Angel said. “See ya.” She hesitated with her hand on the door. “You hear screamin somewhere far off?”
Evie did. It was, she knew, Selectman Bert Miller, blatting about the bullet wound in his leg. His wailing carried inside the prison through the ventilation ducts. Angel didn’t need to concern herself with that.
“Don’t worry,” Evie said. “It’s just a man.”
“Oh,” Angel said, and left.
Jeanette had been sitting against the wall across from the cells during Angel and Evie’s conversation, listening and observing. Now she turned to Damian, years dead and buried over a hundred miles away, and yet also sitting beside her. He had a clutchhead screwdriver in his thigh and he was bleeding onto the floor, although the blood didn’t feel like anything to Jeanette, not even wet. Which was strange, because she was sitting in a pool of it.
“Did you see that?” she asked. “Those rats?”
“Yeah,” Damian said. His tone went high-pitched and squeaky, his imitation of her voice. “I see those ratsies, Jeanie baby.”
Ugh, Jeanette thought. He had been all right when he first reappeared in her life, but now he was becoming irritable.
“There’s rats just like that chew on my corpse because of how you killed me, Jeanie baby.”
“I’m sorry.” She touched her face. It felt like she was crying, but her face was dry. Jeanette scratched at her forehead, digging the nails in, trying to find some pain. She hated being crazy.