She choked off volleys at the police station, the Masonic Hall, the woods behind the school. It was call-and-answer: a burst of gunfire from anywhere in the common except the church and she responded with a short, controlled discharge. Yet she felt disassociated from the battle, hidden behind the row of buildings, high above it all. She was still one step removed, still a writer. The gun in her hands was a pen and she was shooting ink, highlighting the action throughout the common. It was as though the entire assault were being authored by her, spilling out of her mind.
Grue was near. She could feel him somehow, and being holed up atop the tower with only one escape route made her jittery. She searched the tree line for him, in vain.
Two men appeared in the narrow lane below her. They emerged from the trees behind the bank at the rear of the library, and Rebecca rose up, unseen, aiming her machine pistol down at a sharp angle.
One man was holding a gun to the other’s head. The hostage was an older white male, wearing neither a coat nor a flak vest, limping weakly. His face was obscured, but his bald head and stooped shoulders brought a strange association to her mind. It was the Virgil to her Dante: Barton James, the butlerlike warden of ADX Gilchrist. But he was surely dead, a casualty of the initial riot. The quality of his memory made her hesitate, turning aside the barrel of her gun.
They stopped in the glow of the burning general store. The bald man’s captor was Luther Trait. Rebecca’s mind reeled as Trait threw the warden — it was the warden — against the rear of the library. He opened a back door and pushed the warden inside.
Rebecca stood staring after they were gone. The old fear returned in a rush of smothering panic, as though no time had passed since her interview with Trait. She was back again inside that disciplinary hearing room inside ADX Gilchrist, worried about the body alarm wired beneath her sweater.
She was safe in the alarm tower. He had not seen her. He did not know she was there. He was inside the building right below her, but she could continue on as she had before.
She looked out over the battlefield of the town common. She took aim at the police station again and squeezed. The machine pistol fired one shot, then clicked dry. She squeezed the trigger again and again until she realized the gun was empty.
How had the warden stayed alive? Why was he with Trait?
A great thud shook the stone tower. A cloud of dust rose from the police station and for a few moments the shooting stopped and everything was quiet. She looked way across the common and saw, dimly, the figure of a black-cloaked man standing in the cemetery, a missile launcher falling from his shoulder.
It was Tom Duggan. She knew then that he had also started the fire inside the town hall. Gilchrist was his life and he was tearing it all down. He had finally accepted its death. Now he was liberating himself in the only way he could, and Rebecca found real meaning in that.
Killing a man and writing about him are the same thing.
But Trait had not bowed to such easy treatment. She had come for him here in the hope that an encounter with the demon would somehow free him up for sacrificing in print. Then he had invited her to stay in Gilchrist and she had accepted.
Next time we meet, it will be on my terms.
Now two more men appeared below. Convicts in wool caps, holsters crisscrossing their vests, following Trait’s and the warden’s tracks out of the woods to the library door. They advanced with guns drawn — tracking Luther Trait. These two convicts were hunting him down.
Rebecca watched from above as they eased open the back door, crouched, and entered.
Their manner enraged her. Two unknown assassins were stalking her criminal. As though in expression of her sudden fury, the gun in front of the police station exploded into flames.
You came here to kill Luther Trait.
The words were Kells’s, but the voice in her head was her own.
Chapter 33
Buildings burned below as Dr. Rosen fired at anything that moved. He understood now the allure that clock towers held for the powerless, the afraid. He was a fifty-four-year-old podiatrist from Boston crouching in a church belfry, holding off a town full of killers.
A snowmobile came revving out of the woods near the school, shooting into the common through an opening in the post fence. Dr. Rosen turned and paced the dim shadow cutting across the snow, firing but missing as the rider ditched the sled and took cover behind the gazebo. He became an immediate nuisance, pecking away at the church steeple as Dr. Rosen chipped holes in the bandstand roof.
Sparking music on the bell, pang, poong, ping, and Dr. Rosen ducked and covered his head. The pickup bed was still burning and the M60 dripped flame, but another con had climbed in behind the big gun. Ricochets splintered the wood inside the cramped belfry and Dr. Rosen tried to get a shot off.
Then the bulldozer roared to life. Headlights swung brightly across the common from the funeral parlor, chewing snow past the upturned barrel of the M60, crushing the low post fence. The wide steel scoop blade reared high to shield the cab from Dr. Rosen’s aim, though he wasted two rounds on it anyway. The great machine was headed straight for the church.
The action was heavy now, the fixed gun barking, the gazebo con sniping, Dr. Rosen taking noise and splinters. His right arm jerked forward after two particularly harsh tones off the big bell. The pain was searing and he fell back, rolling until the floor disappeared beneath him.
He did not know where he was until he looked up and saw the belfry trapdoor above him. He had fallen through and landed on the choir balcony near Coe. He gripped his bloody arm. “I’m shot!” he said.
Rounds from the fixed gun ripped into the balcony wall, low over the floor. Coe flattened out near him and they covered their heads and waited.
Dr. Rosen could move his arm but the tingling pain made his right hand useless. He looked for the rifle and saw that it had fallen near, still in one piece. He reached for it with his left hand, but Coe grabbed it first.
Dr. Rosen said, “Give me that—”
The kid was already alligator crawling across the floor to the ladder rungs. Dr. Rosen rolled toward him but his injured arm held him back.
The kid scuttled up the ladder with both rifles in one hand, pausing once as rounds bit through the wall. He hoisted himself safely into the belfry.
“Coe!” yelled Dr. Rosen.
The teenager’s face appeared through the trapdoor.
“Behind the gazebo,” Dr. Rosen said.
Coe nodded once and disappeared.
The bulldozer noise grew louder. Dr. Rosen rolled over again and fished in his coat pocket for his handgun. As he was getting to his feet, the engine surged and the bulldozer rammed the front of the church.
The foundation shuddered and brought him to his knees. Wood and glass ripped out of the church entrance, headlights illuminating the altar.
A churning noise as the machine tried to turn beneath him. It wanted to bring the entire structure down.
The engine sputtered and stalled. There was swearing below, the clicking of a dead engine. A door opened and heavy footsteps crunched over fallen debris.
The convict was out of the bulldozer, moving on foot. Dr. Rosen knelt on the floor above him with the gun in his hand.
Tom Duggan snagged his black overcoat as he fell over the cemetery fence. The hem caught and the lining ripped and he had to twist free, leaving the coat hanging from an iron spike.
He crept through the snow to the left, along the road past the Masonic Hall toward his black-shuttered funeral home. The bulldozer had started up there. The headlights came on bright and it rolled past the pickup, crushing the fence post, roaring across the common toward the church.