“Not by poking me or prodding me or taking my blood. Those things wouldn’t work, even if I were to allow them.”
“What will?”
Evie spread her arms wide. Her eyes flickered, the pupils expanding to black diamonds, the irises roiling from pale green to brilliant amber, turning to cat’s eyes. “Kill me,” she said. “Kill me and they’ll awake. Every woman on earth. I swear this is true.”
Like a man in a dream, Frank raised his rifle.
Clint stepped in front of Evie.
“No, Dad, no!” Jared screamed.
Clint took no notice. “She’s lying, Geary. She wants you to kill her. Not all of her—I think part of her has changed her mind—but it’s what she came here to do. What she was sent here to do.”
“Next you’ll be saying she wants to be hung on a cross,” Pete Ordway said. “Stand aside, Doc.”
Clint didn’t. “It’s a test. If we pass it, there’s a chance. If we don’t, if you do what she expects you to do, the door closes. This will be a world of men until all the men are gone.”
He thought of the fights he’d had growing up, battling not for milkshakes, not really, but just for a little sun and space—a little room to fucking breathe. To grow. He thought of Shannon, his old friend, who had depended on him to pull her out of that purgatory as much as he had depended on her. He had done so to the best of his ability, and she had remembered. Why else would she have given her daughter his last name? But he still owed a debt. To Shannon, for being a friend. To Lila, for being a friend and his wife and his son’s mother. And those who were with him, here in front of Evie’s cell? They also had women to whom they owed debts—yes, even Angel. It was time to pay off.
The fight he’d wanted was over. Clint was punched out and he hadn’t won a thing.
Not yet.
He held his hands out to either side, palms up, and beckoned. Evie’s last defenders came and stood in a line in front of her cell, even Willy, who appeared on the verge of passing out. Jared stood next to Clint, and Clint put a hand on his son’s neck. Then, very slowly, he picked up the M4. He handed it to Michaela, whose mother slept in a cocoon not far from where they now stood.
“Listen to me, Frank. Evie’s told us that if you don’t kill her, if you just let her go, there’s a chance the women can come back.”
“He’s lying,” Evie said, but now that he couldn’t see her, Frank heard something in her voice that gave him pause. It sounded like anguish.
“Enough bullshit,” Pete Ordway said, and spat on the floor. “We lost a lot of good men getting this far. Let’s just take her. We can decide what comes next later.”
Clint lifted Willy’s rifle. He did so reluctantly, but he did it.
Michaela turned to Evie. “Whoever sent you here thinks this is how men solve all their problems. Isn’t that right?”
Evie made no reply. Michaela had an idea that the remarkable creature in the soft cell was being torn in ways she had never expected when she appeared in the woods above that rusted trailer.
She turned back to the armed men, now halfway down the corridor. Their guns were pointed. At this range, their bullets would shred the little group in front of the strange woman.
Michaela raised her weapon. “It doesn’t have to go this way. Show her it doesn’t have to.”
“Which means doing what?” Frank asked.
“It means letting her go back to where she came from,” Clint said.
“Not on your life,” said Drew T. Barry, and that was when Willy Burke’s knees buckled and he went down, no longer breathing.
Frank handed his rifle to Ordway. “He needs CPR. I took the course last summer—”
Clint pointed his rifle at Frank’s chest. “No.”
Frank stared at him. “Man, are you crazy?”
“Step back,” Michaela said, pointing her own gun at Frank. She didn’t know what Clint was doing, but she had an idea he was playing the last card in his hand. In our hand, she thought.
“Let’s shoot em all,” Carson Struthers said. He sounded near hysterics. “That devil-woman, too.”
“Stand down,” Frank said. And, to Clint: “You’re just going to let him die? What would that prove?”
“Evie can save him,” Clint said. “Can’t you, Evie?”
The woman in the cell said nothing. Her head was lowered, her hair obscuring her face.
“Geary—if she saves him, will you let her go?”
“That old cocksucker’s fakin!” Carson Struthers shouted. “It’s all a set-up they planned!”
Frank began, “Can I just check if—?”
“Okay, yes,” Clint said. “But be quick. Brain damage starts after three minutes, and I don’t know if even a supernatural being could reverse that.”
Frank hurried to Willy, dropped to one knee, and put his fingers to the old man’s throat. He looked up at Clint. “His clock’s stopped. I should start CPR.”
“A minute ago, you were ready to kill him,” Reed Barrows grumbled.
Officer Treat, who thought he had witnessed some shit in Afghanistan, groaned. “I don’t understand any of this. Just tell me what it’s going to take to get my kid back and I’ll do it.” To whom, exactly, this statement was directed, was unclear.
“No CPR.” Clint turned to Evie, who stood with her head down. Which, he thought, was good, because she couldn’t help seeing the man on the floor.
“This is Willy Burke,” said Clint. “His country told him to serve, and he served. These days he goes out with the volunteer fire department to fight brushfires in the spring. They do it without pay. He helps at every bean supper the Ladies’ Aid puts on for indigent families the state is too chintzy to support. He coaches Pop Warner football in the fall.”
“He was a good coach, too,” Jared said. His voice was thick with tears.
Clint continued. “He took care of his sister for ten years when she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He fed her, he brought her back when she took it into her head to wander, he changed her shitty diapers. He came out here to defend you because he wanted to do the right thing by you and by his conscience. He never hurt a woman in his life. Now he’s dying. Maybe you’ll let him. After all, he’s just another man, right?”
Someone was coughing on the smoke drifting down Broadway. For a moment there was no other sound, then Evie Black shrieked. Lights burst in their overhead cages. Cell doors that had been locked slammed open and then banged shut in a sound that was like iron hands applauding. Several of the men in Frank’s group screamed, one of them in a pitch so high that he sounded like a little girl of six or seven.
Ordway turned and ran. His footfalls echoed through the cinderblock halls.
“Pick him up,” Evie said. Her cell door had opened with the others. If, that was, it had ever been locked in the first place. Clint had no doubt that she could have left whenever she wished at any time during the last week. The rats had only been part of her theater.
Clint and Jared Norcross lifted Willy’s limp form. He was heavy, but Evie took him as if he were no more than a bag of goosefeathers.
“You played on my heart,” she said to Clint. “That was a cruel thing to do, Dr. Norcross.” Her face was solemn, but he thought that he saw a glint of amusement in her eyes. Maybe even merriment. She encircled Willy’s considerable waistline with her left arm and placed her right hand on the matted, sweat-soaked hair at the back of the old man’s head. Then she pressed her mouth to his.
Willy shuddered all over. His arms lifted to encircle Evie’s back. For a moment the old man and the young woman remained in a deep embrace. Then she let him go and stood back. “How do you feel, Willy?”