“I said, don’t trust them, Juliet.”
“How do you know my name?”
“You’re not like them.”
“Not like who? What are you talking about? What?”
But before she could answer, Baz was there. The woman’s eyes widened and she shied away, but she was too weak to stand on her own, and collapsed in Baz’s arms. She reached out for Jule, clamping down on her wrist. “This is my fault,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“Why’s she apologizing to us for setting her on fire?” Baz asked.
“Does it matter?” Jule said. She never wanted to think about the fire, or what might have happened, again. “We’ve got to get her help.”
“There wasn’t supposed to be anyone in there,” he said.
“Well, there was. And she needs a doctor.”
The woman blinked rapidly. “Yes. I’m a doctor. Call Colonel Franklin. He’ll tell you I…” Her eyes drifted shut, and she sagged in Baz’s arms.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“She’s a doctor. So what?”
“She’s with the government. We’ve got to take her to Mouse.”
“Look at her!” Jule kicked the empty gasoline can. “Look at us.”
“Trust me,” Baz said.
She did not. But… the doctor was with the government, and the government was the one sealing off the town, trapping Jule in the last place she wanted to be. Driving her to do things that she never would have done. No wonder the woman apologized. She was responsible. And she somehow knew Jule’s name. Why would she know that? What else did she know?
There was a certain satisfaction to ringing the mayor’s doorbell at two in the morning, forcing the mayor to shake hands with a Prevette, shake hands and say thank you. She could tell it sickened him to touch her, to smile and pretend she was his equal. It pleased her more than it should have, nearly as much as the fire. There was shame in that, in the entire night. But shame was something she knew how to ignore.
The mayor called the deacon. Together, they summoned a doctor, one they could trust. The doctor tended to the stranger’s wounds – old ones, he said, wounds caused by trauma, already healing up, poorly, dislocated shoulder, concussion, fever, and exhaustion – and laid her down. On a cot. In a cell. At the local jail. They locked her up and waited eagerly for her to wake.
“A government doctor,” the deacon said to the mayor as they peered through the grating, watching her sleep. “If she knows anything, we’ll make her tell us, one way or another.”
“If she knows anything.”
“If she doesn’t, the colonel does. And will probably want her back. He wants us to give him something, he’ll give us something.”
“You want to hold her hostage?”
“I want to protect this town, whatever that takes.”
“Funny, I thought you wanted to remake it in your own – excuse me, I meant the Lord’s image.”
“Same thing, Mayor.” No word had ever conveyed less respect. “Same thing.”
Baz insisted on walking her home. The streets were unsafe these days. You never knew what could happen.
She let him.
He was the perfect gentleman, until they veered into the deserted square between the church and the town hall, its uprooted bushes and downed trees a fort of green that hid them from the empty streets.
“I promised you trouble, remember?” He pressed her up against a tree. “Ready for some real fun?”
She had burned down a building; she had nearly let a stranger die in the flames. She was the kind of person who did such things. And so she let him mash his face against hers and pull her to the ground.
It wasn’t a bad kiss.
But she gagged with his tongue in her mouth and his hands under her sweatshirt, digging at the waistband of her jeans. He stank of cheap beer and cigarettes, just like the parasite, and she tasted only bile, and pushed him away. He took the opportunity to undo his zipper and yank his pants down low on his hips, then extricated himself from his boxers. She was nearly on her feet when he grabbed her and pulled her down again. “Going somewhere?”
“Not going to happen,” she said, but he was holding on too tight.
He always looked small, surrounded by his offensive line on and off the field, but he didn’t look small now. He looked capable of doing his own tackling.
“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “It’s all good.” His hand shifted from her neck to the top of her head, pushing her down and down until her face was mashed against him, naked and fleshy and wrinkled and foul.
This was going to happen.
The realization – and the strength of his grip, the girth of his body, the smell of his sweat, slick against her face – was paralyzing. For a moment, she considered letting herself go limp, letting it happen, if it was bound to happen anyway. Let him do whatever he wanted to do. Play dead and wait for it to be over.
Instead, she took him in her mouth and bit down. Hard.
He was the one who screamed.
She scrambled to her feet and started to run, looking back only once to confirm that he was still curled in a fetal position, holding himself, gasping and cursing. “You’re dead!” he shouted after her. “Dead.” Jule had no doubt he meant it.
She ran all the way home, beaming in the moonlight, the wind crisp and sweet against her face, and when she got back to the house, she went straight through the front door and slammed it behind her, not caring who she woke.
Former police chief Richard Hayes, drunk and disgusted and a little high on something he’d confiscated from his nephew over the Fourth of July, drove his scuffed gray Ford down Route 72 at full speed, slowing for neither the signs nor the sirens nor the bullhorned warning. It was the tank parked in the center of the lane that finally forced him to stop.
“Get out of your car, sir,” came the order, and a man of the law himself, he followed it.
“I’m the chief,” he said, which was at least in the neighborhood of truth. “How about you let me through. We won’t have to tell anyone.” The handful of protesters had gotten bored and gone home for the night. They were alone.
“I’m going to have one of my men drive you back to your home, sir,” a man in uniform said. “And I’m going to ask that you stay there.”
“At least let me use the damn radio to call my daughter,” he said. “She’s up at school, probably doesn’t know whether I’m dead or alive.”
“The frequencies have all been jammed by storm damage,” the man said. “You know that.”
“Bullshit,” he said. There was movement in the shadows. But that stuff he’d taken always made him a bit paranoid, so he dismissed it. “I’m getting out of here.”
He turned back to his car, but a soldier stood before the door, hand on his sidearm, challenge implied.
“I’m the law,” he said again. “This is my town. You have no standing here.”
“Let us take you home, sir.”
“Let me through,” he said, and made a run for it, darting around the soldiers, giving the roadblock a wide berth, hooting with gleeful triumph as he made it clear to open road, nothing ahead of him but blacktop and horizon. He was shouting his daughter’s name when the bullet entered the back of his head.
“Did I say fire?” the lead man shouted at the shooter.
“Thought better safe than sorry,” he mumbled.
“You thought. Jesus. Do me a favor, don’t do any more of that.”
He cursed as his men cleaned up the mess. There would be paperwork now, and a headache he didn’t need. But the idiot had been right. Better safe than sorry. And though he’d been told alive was better than dead, he knew the men in white coats were always pleased to get their hands on another body.
The former chief had few friends in town, thanks to the way he’d bungled things the year before. It was a long time before anyone noticed he was gone. And by the time they did, there wasn’t anyone left who cared.
8
THE
DYING OF THE LIGHT
The reigning Miss Oleander, Laura Tanner, had, when choosing a life working with children, made one very important miscalculation. She had gone into elementary school teaching with her eyes wide open about the deficiencies of her young charges – the runny noses and “accidents,” the dirty hands and discipline problems, the hyperactivity and unchecked aggression, the short attention spans and shorter fuses. She hadn’t underestimated her tolerance for bureaucracy and tedium, or overestimated her willingness to wipe the snot and puke and tears from other people’s children, to comfort them when they fell, to teach them to say please and thank you and ABC, to love them as much as school policy allowed. She’d anticipated all of it, except for one thing.
She’d forgotten to factor in the parents.
And oh, how she hated the parents.
She hated the ones who interfered; she hated even more the ones who couldn’t be bothered. She hated the helicopter parents, slathering their kids with kisses and complexes. She hated the ones who let their kids get bullied and the ones who counseled their kids to fight back. She hated the ones who worked three jobs and left their kids sulking in the school parking lot till sundown; she hated the ones who had no jobs, whose kids brought in Oxy bottles and meth pipes for show-and-tell. She hated the ones who couldn’t help it, and hated that she couldn’t stop herself from doing so.
Lately, she’d lost the will to try.
In the church basement, Laura surveyed her kingdom: Jasper was playing a clumsy game of balance beam on one of the tables. Emily S. was playing chicken with a light socket. Emily K. had smeared chocolate pudding all over her face and was well on her way to Picassoing up the nearest wall. Henry and Max were pretending they were pro wrestlers, and at the knockdown stage of a knockdown, drag-out fight. Grace was reading comic books in a corner with the spooky preacher’s son, and the high school cheerleader had her hands full, literally, with three mini blondes who were loudly demanding a French braid. Forty-three helpless little ones whose parents apparently had better things to do. Every day, Laura kept them safe; every night, their parents ferried them away to homes where Laura wasn’t welcome, where Laura’s protection wasn’t desired.
Nights were hard for Laura, since the storm. When she closed her eyes in hopeless pursuit of sleep, she saw Henry’s mother branding him with a hot iron or Emily K.’s father dragging her down to the basement, darkness in his heart. She saw herself, avenging and protecting her charges, smashing the iron in Henry’s mother’s face and laughing as the hot metal seared her flesh. Hanging Emily’s father from his butcher’s meat hook and carving him up from sternum to groin. The visions were as real as memories. She could almost feel the comforting weight of the carving knife in her hand, the delight of flaying flesh, laying bare pink muscle and pearly bone.
Some nights, she lay awake till dawn, stewing over these parents who thought they could do whatever they wanted, as if biology guaranteed ownership. As if creating something gave you the right to destroy it.
Not tonight, she decided.
Not ever again.
Her last boyfriend had given her a gun for her birthday. He’d also, before going back to his ex, given her a key to his house. Where he had an entire cabinet of guns, some for hunting, some for personal protection, some for fun – enough that it might be a while before he noticed that she’d slipped into his basement last night and claimed a rifle and a semiautomatic for herself. Just in case.
She clapped her hands over her head, twice, and the children fell silent. “Who wants to go on a little field trip?” she said, and when the kids cheered, she knew she was doing the right thing. They wanted to be rescued. They wanted her to save them. She would lead them out of this basement and into a world of her own making; she would keep them safe and raise them right.
And if anyone tried to stop her, she would make them sorry.
“Not for you, baby sis.” That’s what Scott always said, although he also said it was the best high he’d ever known, it was like snorting the solar system, it was like God and the devil playing a set with the Rolling Stones and you were the guitar, it was like life itself. But to Annie, he said only, “I’m doing you a favor.”
Now Annie Prevette was going to do one for herself. Or, rather, her dear, depraved husband would do it for her. Unlike Scott, he wasn’t in a position to refuse her much of anything. When you got caught pawing through your stepdaughter’s underwear drawer, you tended to lose the upper hand.
She’d put on a good show at first, yelling and screaming about calling the cops, throwing him out, setting her brothers on him. It was that last that broke him. He dispensed with the bullshit excuses and begged for mercy, blaming it on Jule, as if she were some stealth Lolita in sweatshirts and combat boots.
“Just get me enough to last awhile,” Annie had said. “At least a quarter pound.”
“But that’s everything I’ve got,” he said. “More.”
“Figure it out. Or I go to Scott.” She whipped his cheek with the pair of black panties she’d caught him nuzzling. “He’s very fond of his niece.”
That night, Billy had dumped a ziplock bag of Nazi Cold on her mattress. It was swag crank, cheap and dirty, but it would do.
“So we have an agreement,” he said.
“Jule’s a grown woman. She can do what she wants.”
And so can you, that was the real agreement. Jule was an adult, practically, Annie Prevette told herself. She never shut up about that. More to the point, there was so much meth, and Scott had been right about that, at least. It was good, and she wanted it, and surely Jule, whose arrival had ruined both her figure and her life, owed her that much. She took the deal.
She hadn’t come up for air since.
“I saw it on TV,” Morgan said. “It’ll be great.”
“What show?” Clair asked. It was strange to be on the empty football field. She’d only ever been here at game time, cheering the team and occasionally handing out literature for the church. No one in Oleander doubted that God loved football – though after the Bulldogs finished out their third losing season in a row, there was some question as to whom he rooted for.
“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “It was a bunch of football players. And they did it to this loser. It was awesome.”
“Yeah, but in real life…” Clair wasn’t allowed to watch TV, which her mother thought was a tool of the devil. She did manage to catch the occasional glimpse on the library computer when the librarian took her afternoon nap. But cooking competitions and reality shows about wealthy divorcées hadn’t offered her much insight into the mind of the average American teen, football-player variety. Not that she wanted insight into anything that disgusting.
“I asked Chuck Platch, and he said they totally do stuff like this all the time,” Morgan said.
Clair scowled. “What were you doing talking to him?”
Morgan colored. There was a long pause while she searched for an acceptable answer. She seized upon the obvious one. “He had questions about the Lord.”
There was skepticism in Clair’s mm-hmm, but she didn’t press it. There was no need. Everyone knew what Morgan did when she wasn’t at church. It was one of the things they ever so politely didn’t discuss, as neither of them acknowledged their raging jealousy that Ellie King, that stuck-up little deacon’s pet, had practically ascended to sainthood. If this went as planned, Clair decided, maybe Ellie would be next.
And then maybe Morgan herself, Clair thought. Ten years was a long time to be best friends with someone you couldn’t stand. Eventually something had to give.
“Think of it as striking a blow for feminism,” Morgan said. “On TV, it may be a jock thing, but in real life, who’s to say a couple of girls can’t strike a blow for righteousness and show the devil where to shove it?”
The freshman on the ground between them whimpered something, but the duct tape over her mouth made it impossible to understand. Clair toed her in the stomach to shut her up. She was thinking. r />
“Okay,” she said finally. “But only because we’re doing it for Him.”
“Of course,” Morgan said. And it was true. The freshman had snuck out of church to smoke three Sundays in a row. She wore odd hippie dresses and chewed gum like a cow and had once, though she claimed it was an accident, knocked over Clair’s tray in the cafeteria, spilling orange juice and tomato sauce all over her most slimming pair of jeans. She had also, rumor had it, given Chuck Platch a parking-lot blow job after the Memorial Day picnic.
As they stripped off her clothes and tied her to the flagpole in front of the school, the reasons no longer seemed to matter. It felt good to strip her bare; it felt good to squeeze her shoulders and wrists and thighs, to yank and stretch her into position, pressing hard enough to leave thumbprint-shaped bruises in her flesh; it felt good to watch her cry, and even better to rip off the duct tape in one swift, cruel tear and listen to her scream.