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.