His next destination was the break room. Jared and Michaela were at a table with a deck of cards and cups of coffee.
“Make yourselves scarce. It’s starting.”
Michaela toasted him with her cup. “Sorry, Doc. I’m legal to vote and everything. I think I’ll stick around. Who knows, there might be a Pulitzer in my future.”
Jared’s color was chalky. He looked from Michaela to his father.
“Fine,” Clint said. “Far be it for me to abridge the freedom of the press. Jared, hide, and don’t tell me where.”
He jogged on before his son could respond. His breath was short by the time he reached the rear door that opened near the shed and the fields. The reason that, until the morning of Aurora, he’d never before suggested to Lila that they should go running was because he hadn’t wanted her to have to limit her pace for him; it would have been embarrassing. What was the root here, vanity or laziness? Clint promised himself to give the question real consideration when he had a free second and, if he should be so lucky as to live through the morning, and ever get to speak to his wife again, possibly to repeat his proposal that they take up jogging together.
“Three bulldozers on the road,” Clint announced as he emerged outside.
“We know,” Willy Burke said. He walked over to Clint from his spot behind the shed. There was a weird contrast between his bulletproof vest and his festive red suspenders, now lolling in loops at his hips. “Tig radioed. Billy’s going to hold tight here, watch the north fence. I’m gonna sidle on up along this wall to the corner and see if I can get a few clean shots. You’re welcome to join me, but you’ll need one of these.” He handed Clint a gas mask and put on his own.
At the ninety-degree turn from the road to the gate, Frank pounded the metal plate over the door, a signal to Albertson to hang a right. Jack did so—slowly and carefully. The men slipped back further, keeping the mass of metal in front of them at all times as it swung around. Frank was wearing a vest, and he had a Glock in his right hand. He could see licks of smoke spilling down the road. This was expected: he’d heard the pops of the gas grenades being fired. They couldn’t have too many. There had been a lot more masks than grenades in the armaments room of the sheriff’s station.
The first bulldozer completed its adjustment and the four men climbed on the back, pressed together shoulder to shoulder.
In the bulldozer cockpit Jack Albertson was safe behind the steel blade, which was raised to the upper position, therefore blocking the window. He gave it plenty of gas as it headed for the gate.
Frank used his walkie, although not everyone in his attack force had them; all of this had been done on the fly. “Get ready, everyone. This is going to happen.” And please, he thought, with as little bloodshed as possible. He was already two men down, and the attack hadn’t even started.
“What do you think?” Clint asked Willy.
On the other side of the double fences, the first bulldozer, blade high, was crunching forward. For a half-second there’d been a glimpse of movement slipping around to the back of the machine.
Willy didn’t respond. The old moonshiner was revisiting an unnamed square meter of hell in Southeast Asia in ’68. Everything had been still, swamp water up to his Adam’s apple, a layer of smoke closing out the sky, him sandwiched in the middle; everything had been so still, and a bird, red and blue and yellow and massive, eagle-sized, had floated up beside him, dead, its eye clouded. The creature was so vivid and so incongruous in the strange light. Its glorious feathers had grazed Willy’s shoulder, and the faint current had drawn it away, and it had vanished back into the smoke.
(Once, he had told his sister about that. “Never saw a bird like that before. Not the whole time I was there. Never saw one since, either, of course. I wonder sometimes if it was the last of its kind.” The Alzheimer’s had taken most of what made her herself by then, but there had been a small piece left, and she had said, “Maybe it was just—hurt, Willy,” and Willy had said to her, “I sure love you, you know.” His sister had blushed.)
The dozer blade hit the middle of the fence with a rattling crash. The links bowed inward before the whole section tore free of the ground and flopped back against the second layer of fence across the median. Ghosts of teargas broke across the front of the bulldozer as it ground forward, bashing against the second fence with the tangled fragment of the first. The inner fence buckled and collapsed, the bulldozer jouncing over the debris. It continued across the smoke-filled parking lot, a length of fencing stuck shrieking under its nose.
The second and third bulldozers followed the first through the gap.
A brown shoe, visible behind the rear left corner of the first bulldozer, appeared in Willy’s sight. He fired. A man shouted and fell out from behind the bulldozer, one pinwheeling arm casting off a shotgun. It was a banty-legged little guy wearing a gas mask and a vest. (Willy wouldn’t have known it was Pudge Marone, saloonkeeper of the Squeaky Wheel, even if Pudge’s face had been visible. Willy hadn’t drunk in bars, not for years.) While the man’s torso was covered, his legs and arms were not, and that was just fine because Willy did not want to kill anyone if he could help it. He shot again, not quite where he wanted, but close enough, and the .223-caliber bullet, expressed by an M4 assault rifle that had been the property of the Dooling Sheriff’s Department until the previous day, blew off Pudge Marone’s thumb.
An arm reached out from behind the bulldozer to assist the prone man, an understandable and perhaps commendable attempt, though definitely unwise. The arm in question belonged to retired Deputy Nate McGee, who, having lost over a hundred dollars playing dice on the tarmac of Route 31 the previous evening, had soothed himself with a pair of false thoughts: one, that if he’d known for certain that Mrs. McGee might some day reawaken, he wouldn’t have bet at all; and two, that at least he had used up his bad luck for the week. Not so. Willy shot a third time, catching the elbow of the reaching arm. There was another shout and McGee tumbled from behind the bulldozer. Willy squeezed off four more quick shots, testing the steel plate that had been mounted over the bulldozer’s grill, and heard them zing off uselessly.
Frank leaned out from the cover of the first bulldozer with a pistol and fired a series of rapid shots at Willy. In 1968 Willy might have been able to judge by the angle of Geary’s arm that his aim would be way off, and thus stayed in position and taken him out, but 1968 was fifty years ago, and getting shot at was something you lost your coziness with pretty swiftly. Willy and Clint scooted to cover.
As Jack Albertson’s bulldozer rolled through the tangles of teargas and black smoke, straight on for the RV and the front doors, the debris under its nose grinding, the second bulldozer, driven by Coach Wittstock, barreled through the hole in the fence.
Like Albertson before him and Carson Struthers behind him, Coach Wittstock’s blade was raised for protection. He could hear the shots, could hear the shouts, but he couldn’t see Nate McGee clutching his elbow on the ground in front of him, and when the bulldozer rolled over the disabled man, Coach Wittstock assumed it was just one of the burned tires that the machine’s crawlers were climbing.
He whooped. He was breaking through just like he taught his linebackers to do, reckless and relentless!
From his vantage at the window in the visitors’ room, Rand waited to fire on the first bulldozer until it was halfway between the gatehouse and the front doors. His shots struck plating here and there, ricocheting off without effect.
Pete Ordway, the Wittstock boys, and Dan “Treater” Treat, under cover of the second bulldozer, found themselves confronted with the crushed corpse of Nate McGee. The dead man’s gas mask was full of blood and his torso had burst out around the straps of his vest. Gore sprayed up from the crawler treads; shreds of skin flapped like streamers. Rupe Wittstock screamed and leaped away from the mess, clearing himself of the viscera, but putting himself in Rand’s line of fire.