She shouted “Freeze!” in the seconds before Garrett started firing, fumbled for the pistol on her hip, but it was too late. Garrett fired four quick shots into the cab of the truck, two more at the blurry boys fleeing toward the black camper.
“Stop!” Boone was screaming, waving his handgun in the air. “What are you doing? What are you—”
Garrett glanced at Parter. Parter gave a little nod of assent.
Garrett made a quick swivel and planted two rounds in Mr. Boone.
The county attorney gawped at Mason. Coach Parter turned the shotgun her way and Clark ducked beneath the open door of her truck a moment before the windshield exploded.
Clark finally got hold of her pistol. She didn’t bother asking herself if this was real, to ask how any of this was possible, no. She heard a few stray beads of the shotgun’s spray ting against the old truck’s door. She didn’t plan to find out what a concentrated round of buckshot would do to this old Chevy metal. She took a breath.
One-two-three go.
Clark spun out from around the door, arms locked out, knees bent, praying that she remembered enough tactical training to survive this second, and this second, and this. She brought her pistol up, trained her eyes on the sight, aimed at the big man pumping a round into his shotgun.
She fired twice.
Her first shot grazed Parter and whizzed on to strike something behind him with a loud metallic whang. The second bullet struck the coach somewhere in the arm. He threw a hand over the wound and bolted for cover.
Clark readied herself to fire again and saw Mitchell Malacek turn his attention from the orange trailer—Luke Evers, blood smeared over his stomach, was collapsing outside its door—and turn a black Glock in her direction.
Clark fired first. She didn’t hesitate. A warning shot, but good enough to spook Mitchell. The boy took three steps backward and squeezed off a round but Clark had already cleared the short distance to the jaunty green trailer on her left and heard the bullet strike the dirt where she’d just been standing.
She touched her father’s old revolver, felt it tucked tight against her waist, ready and eager.
Anything would help.
Silence fell over the Bright Lands, broken only by a chugging generator.
Clark poked her head around the green trailer to survey the scene. The circle was deserted. No men, no boys, no Bethany. With a stab in her heart, Clark saw Luke Evers lying on the concrete porch of the orange RV ten yards away, on the far side of the circle from her. So much for brotherhood, Clark thought: Mitchell Malacek had shot him in the back.
She heard a faint, high shriek beneath her feet, a sound like a nail dragged across a brick. When the ground shook a moment later the force of the quake was so strong the field lights above the circle trembled on their stalks, threw wild shadows around the trailers. That thing down there was almost here, and Clark had an ugly suspicion it would find a way to get aboveground soon enough. If she didn’t get Joel and the others out of here they might just have to introduce themselves to Bosheth himself.
Luke wasn’t moving. Nothing she could do for him now. Instead, Clark thought of what he’d done earlier, before the shooting had started. Luke’s eyes had gone twice from her face to the black camper trailer and back again. It might have been nothing, or he might have been trying to tell her what she needed to know. It was all she had.
Go.
Hustling through the darkness behind the green trailer, Clark strained to track this place’s geography. From this trailer, moving up her side of the circle should bring her first to the silver Airstream, then to Whiskey Brazos’s truck, then to a long exposed space and then the black camper.
If Joel was still alive, and if he was there in that black camper—so many if’s—then maybe Kimbra was alive and with him as well. Maybe Clark could salvage some of this situation. Maybe she wouldn’t spend a lifetime choked by the shame she already felt for involving KT, Jamal, T-Bay and Whiskey in a firefight.
Go.
As Clark reached the end of the green trailer some strange monster composed of nothing but pale flesh and black leather threw itself across the ground in front of her. She raised her gun to fire, thinking it was the twitchy thing from her nightmares, but no: it was only Mr. Boone, heaving himself along on his elbows with what little life was left in him. Boone turned to look up at her, blood pumping from his nose, a black Glock held loosely in his hand.
He said something choked and wet. His eyes strained to find her in the dim light. “Bloated. The others are bloated.”
Clark didn’t move until blood came puddling up from Boone’s mouth and the light left his eyes and then she grabbed the Glock in his hand and kept moving.
She was hoarding guns like the government was coming for them. The Glock was customized, very lightweight. An elegant tiger stripe ran along the grip, the letters HB monogrammed on the base like the vanity plates Mr. Harlan Boone always fastened to his new trucks. Clark thought of a similar gun she’d seen in Mitchell’s hand earlier and wondered if the two Glocks didn’t form a pair.
She dropped the new pistol into the empty holster on her hip and bolted the short distance to the silver Airstream. Nothing. No shouts, no gunshots. Clark pressed her back to the trailer’s cold aluminum wall and breathed.
When she looked to her right, her eyes settled on Whiskey’s truck parked a few feet away. She fought a wave of nausea at the sight inside. KT Staler’s face—or what was left of it—lay pressed against the glass of the truck’s passenger window like a specimen on a slide. Awful as that was, Clark didn’t feel herself slipping loose of her bearings until she saw T-Bay Baskin, sitting dead in the seat behind KT and wearing a great bib of blood on his shirt.
The crackle of splintering wood from up ahead cleared her mind. She kept moving.