Andi had been standing on the marble base of the pillar on the left side of the huge oak door of the courthouse when the commotion started. Shouting. Screams. People running in and out. A crowd had quickly gathered—from where?—on the courthouse steps.
There was a babble of talk all around Andi, people curious or upset.
“…said it was a prisoner got loose and shot…”
“Two of the officers is down. I heard it on the scanner when they called the ambulance.”
“…standing right here on the steps and I didn’t hear no gunshots.”
“It’s some kid. Must be Mary Ellen Willis’s boy because she’s the one in there doing all the screaming.”
Andi could hear her, a woman’s voice wailing, “Rusty! Rusty!”
Then the crowd parted to allow EMTs through with a stretcher. And in no time they were wheeling the stretcher back out with a man on it. His face was deathly pale. The crowd recognized him, a hum of sympathy buzzed around.
“Charley Parker’s oldest…”
“Somebody’d ought to tell his wife—she’s playing the organ right now at First Baptist.”
The crowd was watching the EMTs load the man into the ambulance and nobody noticed the four deputies come out the front door, each holding the limb of a little boy with wet brown hair hanging in his eyes, thrashing about, writhing, struggling to get free.
A bat-like creature clung to the boy’s shoulders, its scaled wings draped over his back. The creature had the head of some kind of bug—a beetle—with gigantic eyes and a drooling mouth with pinchers on either side that snapped together in front of its face and antennae that twitched restlessly. The creature’s head snapped from side to side, watchful and alert. It spotted Andi immediately and put up a huge, clawed hand to shield its lidless eyes, like it was looking into the sun.
The boy who was its host suddenly froze, stopped trying to wrench away.
“Who are you?” the creature demanded, its voice the sound of metal scraping against metal, a grating sound that set Andi’s teeth on edge.
Andi shrank back in revulsion, all the air knocked out of her, and squeezed her eyes tight shut. But she opened them again whether she wanted to or not. She had to look; she always had to look. The rage and loathing that pulsed off the creature in a wave struck her a blow in the chest and she staggered, almost stepping off the edge of the marble base of the column.
“You will die,” the creature threatened, but the menace in its voice seemed somehow almost…shaky…“We will come for you in the night and—”
“No, you won’t. You won’t come anywhere near her.”
The voice was soft, such a contrast to the rasping rumble of the creature, it seemed musical.
Andi turned to find Princess Buttercup standing next to her on the marble base of the column. Not Princess Buttercup exactly. It was a young woman with long blond hair that hung down her back in a single braid. She was dressed in a pair of jeans with a hole above the right knee and a chambray shirt sprinkled with tiny yellow flowers. She’d rolled the long sleeves up to her elbows, had well-worn New Balance running shoes on her feet and carried a rain jacket. No flowing white gown, but the face was Princess Buttercup’s. Andi would recognize that face anywhere.
The creature cowered backward, shielding its eyes as if they were scorched by a thousand suns.
“You can’t hurt me here,” the creature cried. Maybe it was trying to sound cocky and confident, but Andi could see it didn’t feel confident at all. It felt scared. At the sight of that horrible creature cowering back, a thrill of elation ran through Andi’s whole body and she stood up tall and didn’t shrink away from the sight of it like before.
When the boy had gone limp, the woman behind him had cried out, “Rusty! Rusty, are you all right?” Then she rushed around in front of the officers, looking up pleadingly into their faces.
“Please…he’s…when he’s asleep, he’s not…”
The two officers holding his ankles set them down. She reached out and tenderly gathered into her arms the child the other two officers held between them. He hung as limp as a rag doll. The officers looked at each other; then one picked the limp boy up into his arms out of the other officers’ grips and they continued down the steps with him. It was a brief tableau. The crowd missed it altogether, but Andi watched from the top of the column base, following the progress of the officers, the boy and his mother, and the creature as they got into a squad car parked out front.
The creature never stopped squinting in Andi’s direction, trying to look, but unable to tolerate the brightness that sparkled in the dark, ashy air.
As the officers were loading the child into the backseat beside his mother, the creature cried out in defiance at Andi.
“We’ll kill you all, you know,” it shouted with its ragged, rusty voice. “Starting with your daddy.”
Andi gasped and couldn’t drag her eyes away as the boy was loaded into the car and the officers drove with him slowly away. Then she turned to Princess Buttercup. But Princess Buttercup was gone. The ambulance edged through the spot where the barricades on the street had been moved to let it pass; then it tore out fast with lights flashing and the siren screaming. Another ambulance pulled into the space left by the first and EMTs from it rushed into the courthouse.
A few minutes later, Uncle Jack emerged through the crowd around the courthouse doors, moving people out of the way of the stretcher pushed by the two EMTs right behind him.
The man on the stretcher was Major Crocker.
Andi jumped down and shoved her way through the crowd to his side.
“Major Crocker!”
He tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off. “Wanna play rock, paper, scissors?” he asked, but his voice was breathy, the way you talked when you were trying not to cry because you just stubbed your toe or got a brain freeze.
When the EMTs began to load the stretcher into the ambulance, Uncle Jack told her, “We’ll follow the ambulance to the hospital.”
Andi looked around one last time. But she didn’t see Princess Buttercup. She didn’t see Daddy either.
Theresa tried to act like didn’t nothing hurt, that she was fine, but she wasn’t foolin’ nobody. Truth was everything hurt, and whatever part didn’t hurt was sympathizin’ with the parts that did hurt by hurtin’ right along with ’em.
Dr. Paul Richardson had said she had been bitten more than two dozen times—miraculous given how many rats they was. Most was only little punctures where they teeth sunk in, but five of the bites required a stitch or two to close wounds where the sharp teeth tore her flesh. Only two of the stitched and bandaged bites—the one on the side of her neck and the one on her right hand—were in places you could see. But all the rest had been thoroughly disinfected. They’d pumped her full of all kind of IV antibiotics, give her bottles of the pills to take home with her and said she was to go to Dr. Richardson’s office in Lancaster if she had any problems.
“I want to see you immediately if any of your wounds start to ooze or get red and puffy or if you start to run a fever,” Dr. Richardson had said. “It is almost impossible to totally disinfect the bite of the filthiest animal on the planet.”
While Becca went to fetch the car, Theresa waited in a wheelchair at the main entrance to the hospital. She’d told them nurses she didn’t need no wheelchair and they’d told her she wasn’t leaving ’less she got in one! As she watched other folks pass by who ’peared to be in a lot worse shape than she was, Theresa struggled to have a good attitude about what’d happened. Truth was she hadn’t been shot or nothing like that. Didn’t break her arm or get hit by a bus. Everybody was making a fuss about somethin’ wasn’t all that bad. She had a bunch of little bitty holes in her—only a few even needed Band-Aids—that was all.
And she could believe that as long as she thought of the pains as little holes and not as where rats had sunk their sharp teeth into her.
She always stopped herself any time she started talkin’ to Bishop, in her head or out loud even, because he’d gone on home and she needed to be talkin’ to the one who had been waitin’ for him when he got there. It still didn’t feel like her prayers made it as far as the attic, but she’d read once not to judge the effectiveness of a prayer by how you felt while you was prayin’ it, so she went on ahead even if it didn’t feel like God was listenin’.
Okay, Lord, I ain’t Jonah and I ain’t gonna run away—and by the way, do you think it was fair to sic that little girl on me with all her sweetness and wide-eyed innocence?
But I’m stickin’ and I’m sorry for unloadin’ on you like I done. I was just being honest and you could see it all in my heart anyway so I might as well a’said it out my mouth.
Lord, it’s getting darker and darker. That monster’s got Daniel now and the rest of us is floatin’ around, not knowing what to do.
Bottom line is, you got to do something. You, not us. We’re doing all we know to do, but it ain’t enough. You gone have to step in or we ain’t never even gonna find that efreet, let alone send it back where it come from.
And you done give Andi that vision about explosions rippin’ people apart. But how we supposed to stop it from happenin’ if we don’t even know what it is? In fact, how could we stop it even if we did know what it is—only the handful of us, nobody special, garden-variety folks like we is. How we supposed to stand up to the Prince of Darkness hisself?
You got to give us what we need. You got to make a way, ’cause we stuck here. Ain’t nothing else we can do on our own.
Later that afternoon, she had dozed off in Bishop’s big old chair as the afternoon shadows lengthened across the lawn when there come a knock at the door. It was Jeff Kendrick, but a very different Jeff Kendrick from the hotshot lawyer who’d sat in that conference room in the police station that time, telling her all confident like that he was gone win her case and get her off and she wasn’t gonna have to go to prison.
What’d happened to him with them roaches—it’d changed him. Course wasn’t none of them the folks they was before, and wouldn’t none of them ever be again.
Still, it looked like the man had aged ten years, had bags under his eyes big enough to pack for two weeks in Hawaii. Jeff’s face was dark, too, with…what? She wasn’t sure. But she was sure that he was all strung out. Like them wires in the back of that grand piano she seen once in Macy’s at Christmastime. The little short ones was pulled the tightest and they was the ones made the high notes. The Jeff Kendrick she’d known before could have played you a song on that piano, but the one standing before her right now wasn’t capable of nothin’ but high notes.
“I stopped by to check on you…and to tell you I’m having dinner with Chapman Whitworth this evening,” Jeff said. No preamble, said it flat out without even taking time to sit down.
“You’ll want to back up a little, sugar, ’cause I’m still loopy from all them drugs they gave me. I thought you said you’s going to see Chapman Whitworth.”
“His ‘you’ll have to go through me’ video was a fraud.”
“Can you prove that?”
“No, but I can convince him I can. All I had to do was mention it and suddenly he had time to see me today.”
“Been my experience trying to bluff the devil don’t usually end well. Daniel and Jack and Senator LaHayne had in mind to do the same thing—bluff him—and the senator got hisself dead over it.”
“I’m not going to demand he withdraw from the presidential race or anything like that,” Jeff said. “I’m going to tell him that we know what he did and he knows where Daniel Burke is—‘let’s trade.’”
Theresa was so incredulous she could hardly find her voice. “Jeff, listen to yourself, son. Do you really think he’s gone say, ‘why, sure, Jeff, I’d be glad to trade what I got for what you got’? You know better than that.”
This was all wrong. Wasn’t a thing about any of it that felt genuine. Theresa’s instincts about people had alarm bells, and right now, every one of them bells was clanging ding, ding, ding.
Why on earth would Jeff Kendrick…?
“You ain’t doin’ this to rescue Daniel Burke!” She hadn’t thought the words before she said them, but she knew they was true soon’s they come out of her mouth. “You just made that part up so you’d look noble.” His surprised face told her she’d guessed right. “You want revenge!”
That was what she’d seen darkening his face—unspent rage.
“And you think you can waltz in there—”
“You said demons don’t know what we’re thinking—right?”
“They can’t get inside your head, if that’s what you’re askin’. But most times they don’t need to ’cause one of ’em was probably right there when—”
Jeff went right on like he hadn’t heard a word she said. Most likely he hadn’t. “Then Chapman Whitworth is in for a big surprise.” He paused. “Goodbye, Theresa.”
There was an awful finality to his words; then he turned and walked out the door.