“I don’t think she’s a bad guy,” he said. “And I’m an expert.”
“You know her? Cassandra?”
Milo pressed his hands to his mouth, a cartoonish tableau of someone who’d said too much.
“Milo?”
He shook his head.
She wanted to shake him.
“Do you know something, Milo? Something you’re not supposed to?”
“It’s a secret,” he said. “I promised not to tell anyone.”
“But I’m not ‘anyone.’ I’m Grace.”
“That’s true,” he admitted.
“And you trust me, don’t you?”
Milo nodded.
“We’re friends, right?”
“You’re my best friend,” he said, too solemnly for his age. “But her, too.”
“Cassandra. Who’s not a bad guy.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Best friends trust each other, Milo,” she said. Her hands were shaking. “And they really like to meet their friends’ other best friends.”
“You have to promise you won’t tell.”
“I promise.”
“No, you really have to promise. Shake on it,” he said.
They shook on it.
“You sure?” he asked. “You won’t say anything? To anyone?”
She nodded. “Best friend’s honor.”
He bent his lips toward her ear and told her a secret.
When it happened, Cass thought it was a dream, because that was how it always happened in her dreams. The door blowing open, men in uniforms yanking her to her feet, wresting her hands behind her back, and dragging her away.
But it wasn’t a dream, because in the dreams she fought back. Now she went willingly, bowing her head and offering her wrists for their handcuffs. She cooperated. At least, until the first blow landed. After that, she fought. It was of no use. Not with her hands chained. Not against three grown men with steel-tipped boots and metal batons. She screamed for Daniel, for anyone, even the Preacher with his guns. No one came. They got her on the ground and kicked her between them like a soccer ball, a rousing game of baby-killer-in-the-middle. When she hurt enough to cry uncontrollably but not enough to pass out, the shortest one said, “Save some for later,” and they did.
There was no police car. Instead, they lashed something like a leash around her neck and waist and towed her the mile back to the station. Sometimes she stumbled on her bruised and bleeding legs, and they dragged her. That hurt worst of all. People massed on the street, and watched, and laughed. That hurt less than she’d expected.
They threw her into a cell. She waited, just in case, lying down on the filthy cot with her eyes wide open, willing it to happen, but she did not wake up.
When it happened, Daniel wasn’t there, because of the dream. He was in the drugstore. Everyone dead was alive again, wide, knowing grins distending their faces, blood already starting to drip from the holes in their chests, shoulders, skulls. Bloody and oblivious, they went about their business, nodding and browsing and exchanging pleasantries about the chores that would be done that afternoon and the dinners that would be prepared and the fun that would be had, as if they wouldn’t all soon be dead.
“You bringing someone pretty to the church picnic this weekend?” Daniel heard himself saying from the wrong side of the register as Mr. Gathers plunked down an ice cream sandwich and a comic book and a handful of crumpled bills.
“Not going to the picnic,” Gathers said. “None of us are going, because we’ll be in the ground, with the maggots and the worms and the blood. You’ll be with us soon, Daniel. Should be a fine, fine day.”
Daniel nodded, and toted up the purchases, and pulled the gun out from beneath the counter, and pulled the trigger, and pulled it again and again. Daniel laughed each time a body thumped to the ground, and then Daniel turned the gun on himself. He slid his lips around the cold barrel, and ran his tongue along its metal edge, then pulled back, gently, firmly, on the trigger, and it felt so good.
He woke to find himself behind the counter of the boarded-up drugstore, his hands cut up and bloody, apparently from breaking the window and climbing through the glass. He’d gone to sleep in his own bed, nearly a mile away.
In his hands was his father’s shotgun.
9
THE ANIMALS IN THEIR CAGES
Pain, she could handle. Locked doors, she could handle. But isolation, she could not. Not anymore, not after a year inside that cell and a week out of it, a week with the sky and the stars and human contact. Cass had lost the habit of solitude, and nothing terrified her like the thought of going back to it. She couldn’t stand to lose the world again, nature and noise and words. And so, locked inside her dingy beige cell with its single cot and its malodorous toilet, she sat cross-legged on the cheap linoleum, and she listened.
They were careless about speaking near her, especially when it came to the prisoner housed in the cell next door. It didn’t take Cass long to deduce her identity. She knew that voice as well as her own. The mayor came frequently to speak to the woman, as did the deacon, and when the doctor refused to offer them any new answers about why the town had been quarantined or how they might go about escaping it, and when, as always happened, the men gave up, they argued among themselves, in voices not nearly hushed enough. They argued about torture, and it was clear both wanted it to happen. Neither was willing to do it himself.
The mayor was the more hesitant of the two, especially when the talk boiled down to fingernail pulling and waterboarding. “How long can we legally keep her if —”
“As long as you want,” the deacon said. “Declare her a prisoner of war.”
There was a pause, then a regretful “I’m not sure I have the power to do that.”
“You would if you declared martial law.”
“Can I do that?”
“I’d like to see anyone stop you.”
This was how she learned that Oleander’s era of democracy had drawn to a close.
This was how she learned of the town’s rampant “disorderly conduct,” law and order giving way to anarchy: people walking off their jobs, crimes committed in broad daylight, an armed pied piper herding packs of feral children into the woods, their parents not much seeming to care. This, too, was how she learned of the Prevettes’ efforts to hasten chaos along, making bomb threats against various government-related organizations, setting small pipe bombs, even, allegedly, blowing up the offices of the local paper. The deacon suggested that they’d blow themselves up before they did any major damage, and the mayor laughed, and the subject was closed.
“Hey!” she called out, finally, as the mayor and the deacon retreated from yet another session with the doctor. This time, there had been very little conversation, at least that she could hear. But there had been some screams. That was what decided her. “I want a lawyer.”
They were supposed to be the magic words. But the deacon only laughed. “The hubris of the sinner astounds.”
“We’re doing things differently now,” the mayor said. “It’s time for this town to take justice into its own hands.” The words had a stale quality to them, as if he’d rehearsed them one too many times. “It will be good for all of us.”
“Even you,” the deacon added. “You’ve never had a true chance to pay for your crimes. Everyone deserves the chance to meet their Maker with a clear conscience.”
That was when Cass understood they weren’t sending her away again. At least, not to a courthouse or a federal prison or another mental institution. She was too scared to cry.
That night, the doctor’s voice floated through the dark. “They’re going to kill you,” she said. “Any day now.”
This was Oleander, where she’d lived all her life. Deacon Barnes had taught her fourth-grade Sunday school class and given her a poster of a tiger cub in reward for winning a biblically themed spelling bee. Mayor Mouse had, before he was mayor, sold her family each of its cars. He always offered her a lollip
op (even after she got too old for such things) while she waited for them to finish bickering over car-radio options and sign the paperwork. She had known both men since she was a toddler. But they were different now; Oleander was different. Even she could see that. So, unbelievable as it should have been, she believed it. They were going to kill her.
“I wouldn’t sound so excited about it,” Cass said. “You’re probably next. Or first.”
“I could have died in the accident. Or out there in the storm.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” And she was, more than she sounded. Not least because she’d ended up here anyway.
“I need to get out of here,” the doctor said. “Out of this whole town.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I want you to help me.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Cass laughed sourly. “Hold on a sec, let me just grab the key and I’ll let us both out.”
“I know you’ve got no reason to trust me, Cassandra. You don’t have to. But if I get the chance to get out of here, I’m taking you with me. I hope you’ll do the same for me. These people are not our friends.”
“‘These people’? You mean the ones who just want to know what the hell is going on? The ones you won’t tell anything to? Those people?”
“There are some things it doesn’t help to know.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you had any idea…”
“What?”
“What it’s like not to know.”
“What if you did know?” the doctor asked. “What if I could tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“What happened that night. Why you did what you did.”
Cass sat up. “You know?”
There was no response.
Cass had to force herself to take several long, slow breaths. The doctor was infuriatingly silent.
“So tell me,” Cass said. Still, no answer. She lost it. “Tell me!”
“Not here. It’s not safe. But if we can get ourselves out, you’ll get your answers. Hopefully, that will serve as an incentive.”
Cass considered screaming for the cops and, when they arrived, volunteering to do their dirty work herself. She wouldn’t mind some fingernail pulling at the moment, and forget waterboarding. She would happily plunge the doctor’s head into the toilet bowl and hold it there for good.
“I was lying before. I’m glad I left you out there on the road.”
“I am, too,” the doctor said. “Because now I know you’re capable of it, and I know better than to let it happen again. And it won’t, will it?”
Cass didn’t answer, but they both knew the answer was no. Because more than revenge, she wanted the truth.
She was allowed visitors, which only offered her the opportunity to think about all the people who didn’t show. Her parents, of course: long gone. Her old friends: nonexistent. West: he’d already gone beyond what she could have expected of him, her fake boyfriend who didn’t even trust her enough to confide his most obvious secret.
Ellie King showed up, more than once. Because of who she was, or what she purported to be, she was allowed into the cell with Cass, and, with a surreptitious brush at the dirty sheet, she sat on the cot beside her and asked if Cass had taken God into her heart. It was the kind of thing Cass would have laughed off easily – before. She’d embraced atheism at age twelve, not out of any serious conviction but simply for the aesthetics of it. Like reading glasses and her beat-up copy of The Great Gatsby, atheism seemed an appropriate accessory for the kind of person she aspired to be. Now she took the question seriously. Had she taken God into her heart? The answer was no. “What would it get me if I did?” she asked.
“It’s not about what it gets you,” Ellie said. “It’s about giving. Giving yourself up to something greater.”
“I don’t think something greater would want me.”
That was where they left it, the first day. The second day, Ellie quoted Bible verses, and Cass listened, waiting for something she could believe in. Ellie promised that if she gave herself to God, He would cleanse her soul. Sometimes, at night, she lay awake, searching herself for the conviction that there was a “something greater” up there beyond the ceiling. She experimented with talking to him, asking for favors small and large, praising him for killing the cockroach in the corner before she had to do it herself, and, finally, apologizing for what she’d done.
That was the end of the experiment. “I’m sorry,” she said, and realized that it didn’t matter whether there was some great omniscient entity weighing her words and choosing whether to forgive. What right did he even have to do so? He was the one who’d stood by and let her do it. They were all God’s children, Ellie said, but what kind of a father let one kid kill another without intervening? And if it happened while he was looking away, what right had he to forgive the surviving child, or himself?
That was what she told Ellie, the third time that Oleander’s saint appeared.
“It won’t change anything,” she said. “God forgiving me won’t bring him back.”
“God’s not the one who has to forgive you,” Ellie said.
Cass swallowed back a sob. “No one would forgive me. Not for that.”
“Owen Tuck is dead,” Ellie said. Even now, the words hurt. “You can’t change that. But you’re still here. You can fix you.”
It sounded a little too self-helpy for Cass’s taste, not to mention impossible, given the present circumstances.
“It’s not about changing the past,” Ellie said. “It’s about making the present bearable. And the future. Because otherwise you look forward and…”
“There’s nothing out there.”
Ellie nodded.
“God is the light,” she said. “That’s how you see through the dark. Past it. How you keep going.”
“And that’s how it worked for you?” Cass asked. “What would someone like you know about the dark?”
Ellie stood up. “I should go.”
“Why are you here, Ellie?” Cass asked. “We’re not friends – we barely even know each other. What do you care?”
“Because I know what happened to you that night,” Ellie said.
“What happened to me?”
“The devil claimed you,” Ellie said, and Cass supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, but so far the girl had seemed so sane. “Possession is real,” Ellie said. “I know. I’ve seen. Good people can do terrible things if they let the devil into their heart.”
“You mean metaphorically.”
Ellie shook her head. “The devil is real. I didn’t want to believe it before, not until I saw it. And now I understand why…” She shook the rest of the thought away. “I understand a lot. He can make you do things you never imagined you would do. He made you do what you did. That’s why I’m here.”
“To banish the devil? Like an exorcism?”
“To tell you it was him,” she said. “Not you.”
“You really believe that?” Cass asked.
Ellie nodded. “Can you?”
Demonic possession: she supposed it was as good an answer as any and, conveniently, one that let her off the hook. After making such an effort to believe in an all-powerful entity who lived above, wouldn’t it be churlish not to acknowledge the possibility of one that lived below?
“I’d like to,” she said. “But no.”
“The devil’s not like God,” Ellie said. “He doesn’t want you to believe in evil. That makes it easier for him.”
“I’ll add it to my list of sins,” Cass said. “Maybe you should go.”
“I hope you know you’re not alone,” Ellie said before she left.
“I know, I know, God is always with me. Et cetera.”
“No, I mean, what happened to you that night, the devil getting inside. You’re not the only one.”
Daniel came, too, of course. He’d sworn to anyone who asked that she had camped out in his shed without permission. The lie grew flimsier with every hour he spent o
utside her cell, blinking those puppy-dog eyes and fumbling for ways to help. “This is where I deserve to be,” she reminded him more than once, at which he would make noises about due process and double jeopardy and the proper authorities. She was forced to agree that, yes, if someone opened the door, she’d be more than happy to walk through it, need for penance or not. It wasn’t going to happen.
On the fourth day – after the doctor had put down her cards – he showed up wild-eyed and blotched with red, and pressed his face through the bars of her cell, whispering, “We have to get you out of here.” But he wouldn’t say why it had suddenly become so urgent, and when she pressed him, he started telling some inane story about a game they’d created when they were kids, an elaborate combination of tag, basketball, and TV wrestling. He was full of details like this, stories she only half remembered, reminiscences about kids who’d moved away and substitute teachers she’d long since forgotten, inside jokes she no longer understood, complaints about the food served in their elementary school cafeteria and the oafish pitcher on their third-grade softball team, conversations they’d apparently had during recess, swaying on the lower- playground swings, their legs pumping in sync, their heads tilted back, their feet kicking the clouds. He had nothing to say on the subject of his mother dying, or the way they’d all drifted apart after that, a pack of kids veering off in one direction, Daniel plodding off alone in the other. She wondered if she was supposed to feel guilty for ditching him along with the others – she couldn’t even remember why she’d done it, any more than she could remember them being friends in the first place, but she assumed it was because he’d been sad and his father had gotten weird and she’d been a kid, ill equipped to deal.