The One Hundred Foreskins

Key West, Old Town

One night, Vera Krasinski stayed up past 3 AM telling Lindsey MC her feelings for Hunter Grant. Lindsey listened with a grin, then got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with a ketchup bottle. She then proceeded to show her friend what she assured her was the proper way to pleasure a man. This accomplished, she lifted her friend off the floor with a giggle and pushed her bodily out into the hallway, then into the living room where Hunter Grant was asleep on the sofa.

She did not do this because she cared about her friend. Lindsey MC did it because she was Lindsey MC, and because she was the only one of them who knew Hunter Grant when he was a boy, and the only who one that knew that Hunter Grant was not what he appeared to be.

Not even close.

Lindsey MC never met her father. He died while her mother was still pregnant, when the two of them had tried to sell a stolen rental car to a petty drug dealer who shot her father and shot at her mother. She didn’t know much about this event, or anything else from her mother’s youth, only that the dealer should have gone to prison for a fucking long time, but didn’t, and this fact was just another in a sea of examples of how the world was fundamentally wrong—like one of those drawings where the people walk on the stairs upside down.

Lindsey MC got her name—the last two letters of it—in the second grade when her teacher starting calling her Lindsey MC to distinguish her from Lindsey Tucker, who sat one row over. The other children took to it immediately, and Lindsey MC didn’t mind since it sounded so much nicer to her ear than Lindsey McElhaney.

The teacher who named her was Hunter Grant’s mother.

To Lindsey MC, the fact that none of the others seemed to have any recollection of Hunter Grant as a little boy, or his mother who taught at the elementary school, was just more evidence that her mother had been right—the world was a disjointed mass of nonsensical bullshit. Lindsey MC remembered. She even met his father once, when her mother tried religion at the Baptist church up in Sugarloaf.

Lindsey MC was a fourth grader when they’d joined the church. She remembered two things clearly from the Sunday School—the taller girl with the long braids who made fun of her clothes, and Hunter Grant, who tried to pray with her once and sat next to her every Sunday morning so that she could look over at his Bible.

Hunter Grant—little Hunter Grant—had no friends at the church. He was a friend of Jesus, and even at the church, that made him different. The others could say words like salvation and repentance, but Hunter Grant could not only say all of the words, he knew where all the passages were and found them before any of the others. He never answered the teacher’s questions right away. He always looked around, waiting for any of the others to say something—waited until it became uncomfortable—and then he answered.

He started sitting next to her when the girl with the braids, and the girl’s friends, laughed at her one morning before the teacher had entered the room. Hunter sat down beside Lindsey MC and stared at the other girls with those eyes—those eyes that stared out into eternity. Jesus eyes. The girls turned back around in their seats.

“I wore the same thing last week,” she told him when he asked her what was wrong. “And before that.”

“So what?” he said. “I heard Pastor say once that people in Jesus’s time only had one or two things to wear. Like ever. They didn’t have money for more.”

“I wish we had money, so I could buy another dress.”

“God is in control. It’s like with the lilies of the field. We just have to trust Him.”

“Lilies?”

“Flowers. He takes care of them, so he’ll take care of us.”

“People step on flowers.”

The next week, he was waiting when she sat down wearing the same clothes as before. He handed her a pile of crinkled up ones with both hands—thirteen dollars in all.

Lindsey MC and her mother stopped attending the church a few months later. After that, she never spoke to Hunter Grant, and looked away if she ever saw him smiling in her direction. If the others made fun of the little Jesus freak, she laughed with them. She didn’t want to pray with him, and didn’t want any more of his money. Not his. She didn’t know what strings might be attached to it, but she was sure it would just be more bullshit. As they got older and all the others seemed to forget about him, she was happy not to think of him again.

Lindsey MC first tried drugs at 13, when Cade Hargrove gave her Xanax and clumsily took her virginity. It was then that she saw the world for what it really was.

It was like two images being superimposed, one on top of the other, and suddenly the dope pulled them apart. Her mother was right: the world was fundamentally wrong. Now she could see it—not just the evidence of how things didn’t quite fit, but physically see it.

It changed everything. She could remember the way her mother’s third husband’s shouts turned shrill, like a child’s temper tantrum, his face distorted, like a reflection on the waves, when she was high. Her mother had been afraid of him, but Lindsey MC just laughed, and when he punched her in the face, her mother left him. Lots of people were different from how they looked. So many were like bad 3-D renderings of themselves, where the back-shadow was never quite in sync.

And the island, Key West itself, was an island of wrongness. All around them, in the gulf to the west and the open ocean to the east, whirlpools of utter darkness swirled, not on the water itself—she could see this when she got high and sat on the beach, especially after nightfall—but underneath. Not even at depth from the surface, but truly underneath! It lurked below the fabric of what we could see or smell or touch, the real world of darkness behind the serene, illusionary world, with its props of buildings and bushes and trees.

Even the island had them. Lindsey MC had counted seven, or maybe ten. There was one in the pool at Mallory Square, and another next to the botanical garden. She had seen one under the pavement on Duval Street, threatening to swallow the road and all the tourists making their crawl from one bar to the next. There was one next to the school, beneath the lower salt pond.

That was why she’d been sitting on the grass, on the other side of the buildings out by the big metal conch shell, by herself, the day Hunter Grant came for her.

He wanted to buy marijuana from her, not for himself—he could barely bring himself to say the words—but for some old lady at his church who had a broken back and hurt all the time, and none of the doctors could give her anything that really worked for the pain.

Lindsey MC said she would get some, just to make him leave. The older Hunter made her nervous—something about his appearance. He had no back-shadow, and even buzzed, she could hear each one of his words as if they were spoken past all the fuzzy parts of her brain and directly into the middle, as if by some sort of intercom system she hadn’t realize existed.

She got it for him, and he got arrested a few months later.

The episode had been one of those paradoxical elements that could only be rendered plain by the dope. The Jesus freak went to jail, juvenile jail. This kicked up a dust storm of gossip. Hunter Grant had been doing something—selling health food?—that had him dealing with the sick and the nasty. He must have taken the seeds out of the dime bag and grown plants, because that was the thing that got him busted. Rumor had it that someone at the church had taken offense, when the old lady’s children had let slip why it was that grandma didn’t need prayer for her chronic pain anymore.

Something else happened next, but it was hard for Lindsey to arrange memories in a particular order. Maybe this had been when he got into the fight where he put the other kid in the hospital. He was always strong—zealot strength. Or maybe this had been when Susan Cribbage, the sluttiest girl in her whole grade, got the hots for him. Whatever. One year, he was a Jesus freak you avoided unless you wanted to hear what God was doing in his life right at that very moment; the next, he was a fallen bad boy that never smiled, and whom girls would hit on if they wanted to teach their overprotective fathers a lesson.

The sequence didn’t matter. The whole joke was that he hadn’t changed. The other kids saw him as different. Even his straight-laced parents, whom she heard wanted to kick him out of the house, thought he was different. But he was exactly the same.

She was at a party one night, buzzed out of her skull, in a bedroom with one of the boys on top of her, and Hunter threw the boy off and probably hurt him—he hurt a lot of people, once the drop-outs starting hanging around him—and he took her home and put some strong-smelling oil under her nose, and when she could see plainly, he starting preaching to her about consequences.

He still thought his God was in control.

And Lindsey MC had just sent her best friend out to him. What would he think? That God had sent one of his angels down from heaven just to get his rocks off? Or maybe that Vera was another fallen woman that he had to bring into the loving arms of his savior? Either way, Lindsey MC believed Hunter Grant was about to meet his back-shadow. His voice would distort and his eyes would darken, and she wouldn’t have to turn away anymore.

Still, it was a dick move. Vera had been a good friend to her through all the times she’d been messed up—the time she tried to dry out, the abortion, the two times she almost killed herself.

Lindsey MC felt the pangs of guilt and knew that she needed a hit of something to make those feelings go away. She rifled through both of her purses and found a little baggie with a bit of stuff left in it. She walked past the bed, where Granny snored like an old outboard motor, and stopped in the hallway. She couldn’t see anything except a little moonlight filtering through the kitchen glass and the general shape of the couch. No sound. She waited a moment, then padded into the bathroom and closed the door.

She heated up and injected what was probably the absolute last of her black tar—not a lot, but enough. The world stretched apart, unraveled, and slithered out into its true reality.

Back in the bedroom, she sat against the wall, pondering the past, the present, the future, when Hunter Grant walked in and looked down at her. She did nothing to acknowledge his presence. She saw his legs and his feet in the morning light, just as solid as they always were.

Life is a stupid bitch!

She wanted nothing to do with his face, not when it could ruin the moment.

“Ms. Krasinski?”

The snoring stopped. “Yes.”

“I’d like to talk to you when you’re awake enough for it.”

“I’m awake.”

“It’s about Vera.”

When he finished and left, Lindsey MC was smiling on the outside, but not like on the inside. On the inside she, bawled in laughter. If ever anything had proved that the sober world made no sense of any kind, it was Hunter Grant, standing at the foot of Granny’s bed, in a house full of armed teenagers and looted foodstuffs, on an island where the sick sometimes tried to kill you, surrounded by soldiers whose only job was to keep you from escaping, talking to an 85-year-old about courtship. His solid outline could kiss her ass.

When he left, Lindsey MC needed to go be sick. She staggered into the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. Then Vera was there with her, looking at her with her best-friend’s concern, holding her around the shoulders when she tried to stand.

“Guess what?” Lindsey MC wiped her mouth, smiled wickedly at her friend, and said, “You’re getting married.”

By 1922, Sister Mary Louis Gabriel had lived through three hurricanes while housed in the convent on Key West. The last of these officially took 778 lives, although since “officially” had a rather more humble meaning in 1919, the total may have been as high as 1,500. To keep it from ever happening again, Sister Mary built a grotto of mortared rocks with an engraving that read:

As long as the grotto stands, Key West will never again experience the full brunt of a hurricane.

In the 95 years since she built the grotto, not one single life had been lost on the island from hurricane.

At the grotto, Hunter Grant and Carter Lacewood found Reverend Barclay.

When Hunter said that morning that he had somewhere to go... alone... Lacewood put on his shoes. They’d done this before. For Hunter, ‘alone’ didn’t quite mean alone. It just meant that it would not be on official Wharf Rat business. None of them ever went outside of the house alone anymore. Unless Hunter specified a team, Lacewood needed to get dressed.

Hunter expected him to do this, but it didn’t bother Lacewood. In fact, he’d come to consider this a solemn duty. If anyone of them would ever tell their story, it would have to be him. None of the others could ever have written a story. Most had never even read a book from cover to cover. That left Lacewood to keep tabs. Each day, he got the details from the twins on their previous night’s runs. If it was his turn to guard the house while the others went out, he took notes when they came back. And, as the heart and soul of all things Wharf Rat, it only made sense that Lacewood went out with Hunter to make sure nothing was ever missed.

These things just were—like the grotto, engraved in stone.

This morning, Hunter had asked Lacewood, “Do you know where the Catholic church is?”

Know? Lacewood had been there. He’d attended mass with his mother, a devout Catholic. After she died, and his father moved the two of them to Key West, he still went from time to time, until his father remarried the first of his non-Catholic wives.

When Lacewood asked what they needed at the church, Hunter said simply, “I got to find someone Catholic to do a wedding.”

Lacewood laughed as they walked out the back door, stepping over the tripwires Face had set next to the fence. “Who’s getting hitched?”

“Me and Vera. Maybe. I just got to see if he’s willing to do it. Granny says it has to be a Catholic wedding.”

Lacewood could only stare. Hunter Grant didn’t talk like anyone else he’d ever met. The things he said were not for Lacewood to question, or even to understand. It was like Lacewood had just started a game, and Hunter was giving the mission parameters.

Hunter and Vera are getting married. Maybe.

That statement would shape other details, like computer code shaping a simulation. It didn’t have to make sense to the player.

Lacewood liked the Basilica of Saint Mary Star of the Sea better than the church they’d attended up in Miami. It had the island feel. It contained wood pews and stained glass, and a big statue of Jesus on the cross—just like a thousand other churches—but in nice weather, they opened the louvered doors on both sides and let the Caribbean breeze blow through.

Today, the side doors were closed. Hunter and Lacewood entered through the front and found forty-odd people sitting in the pews turning to look at them. No one they could see wore robes or clerical collars—just ragged leftovers of Key West there to ask God to get them the hell off the island. So Lacewood and Hunter went down the center aisle and, in whispers, asked if anyone knew where the Father was.

An older woman with stringy hair and a mouth that opened and closed like a fish, even though she was not saying anything, pointed toward the grotto.

The grass had overgrown a brick pathway shaped like a string of rosary beads. To the left of the grotto, a small iron fence separated the place of prayer from a little cemetery. The single gnarled tree, with mats of moss hanging off of its limbs, shaded both grotto and tombstones. Three kneelers, made of the same rough stone as the grotto, were occupied at that moment by the penitent. One of them sobbed as she lifted her hands. More of them lay face down on the grass. The grotto itself was the size of an average shotgun shack, with two statues of the Virgin Mary—one set into the stones up high, like an attic vent on a house; the other set back inside a smooth, square cave, with iron gates that stood open. In both, halos of light bulbs hung suspended above their heads. The one in the cave rested at the back of a metal candle rack covered in lit candles.

“Father Barclay?”

A bookish, middle-aged man wearing glasses and protectively holding an old woman’s shoulders, turned from inside the cave. Though both sat in shadows, Lacewood could still see the white of the Father’s collar.

“Father, we need to ask you something,” Lacewood ventured.

“We hope to have more food this evening.” His voice sounded as though he’d been crying.

“We don’t need food. We need someone catholic who can officiate a wedding.”

Now the Father stared.

The old woman next to him turned, still crying, holding a cloth to her swollen face.

“What happened?” asked Hunter. Up until then, he’d been holding Defiance, wrapped in a large rain jacket like an umbrella, under his left arm. Now, still wrapped, he held it in his hand, ready to be swung.

Lacewood was still trying to understand the question—How did he know something had happened?—when the woman answered.

“They took them, three of the sisters, from the convent.”

Hunter’s voice became a growl. “Mother... fucker.”

Lacewood had never heard him utter profanity before.

“They kidnapped them,” said the priest, his voice lilting on every third word as he struggled to maintain control. “We tried to talk to them... begged them... to give them back. They won’t. They... threw rocks. They beat us—”

“Who?” said Hunter Grant, losing patience.

“Those... people in the naval base. The ones... with the megaphone.”

“I’ll need their names.”

Both the priest and the older woman straightened. “They won’t give them back,” cried the woman.

“I don’t care what they’ll give. I’m not going there to ask.”

“Don’t be silly. There are hundreds of them,” Father Barclay insisted.

“So it can’t be done”

Neither answered.

“So if it can be done, and we do it, will you do the wedding?”

“Listen, young man,” said Father Barclay. “You’re going to make it worse.”

“Worse than being raped?”

“If you get yourselves killed—”

“Miss, we’re the Wharf Rats. We killed the giant zombie at the Southern Cross. We just need the girls’ names.

“You think that’s what we want? More killing and—”

“Just give us the names.”

“If they catch the girls trying to escape—”

“The names!”

“Bethany, Kristen, and Coral!” shouted a young woman praying at one of the stone kneelers.

Hunter was already turning to leave. “We’ll be back by this time tomorrow.”

“Don’t—”

“Three girls!” Hunter stopped and shouted over his shoulder to the priest. “One wedding. That’s the deal.” Then they walked quickly. “It can be short,” Hunter shouted as they left. “There won’t be many people there.”

Glen ‘Face’ Waldron’s father was not a bad man. At least, Glen didn’t think so. He just had a run of bad luck and figured that nothing really mattered anymore, that was all—a that lasted about twelve years.

It started when their mother went crazy. He never knew what had set her off. Carl always told him that it wasn’t their fault, and that they should never blame themselves, but Glen didn’t know what to think of this. It sounded as though she was normal before becoming the mother of two wild boys.

When Glen was six and Carl nine, she walked out into the water from Dog Beach, swam out about a hundred yards, and tried to drown herself. Before rescuers could hoist her up onto a boat and get her breathing again, she’d managed to keep herself facedown long enough to give herself permanent brain damage. She came out of the coma different, affected, and would never live without around-the-clock care again.

Her insurance wouldn’t cover it, though, so their dad sold the house and declared bankruptcy. After that, things just went downhill. His heavy drinking didn’t help. He wrecked their only car and got arrested... twice. His boss at the auto shop was an old friend, so he never lost his job, but his wages never covered everything—like when Carl broke his leg trick-jumping his skateboard, or when Glen got pneumonia, which his dad said was because he “didn’t take care of his God-damned cold like he should have.” Debt collectors left a constant string of messages.

In spite of what everyone thought—because he once bashed in the side of Glen’s face with the pipe wrench—he rarely got mad at his sons. Mostly, he just lived in a state of perpetual sadness. Then, one day, it was if he could not feel anything anymore—like a drug he’d grown tolerant to. Nothing mattered.

He told his sons, again and again, “Nothing matters. Nothing is important. Don’t be fooled.”

Carl finished high school and did one year at the college on Stock Island while working at the body shop. He didn’t go back the next year. He got a job at a boat shop and spent most of his free time getting high. Carl wasn’t around much—most nights, he crashed on the floor at a friend’s place—not that it mattered.

Glen was good at math and better with tools than either his brother or his father. Not that this mattered either, but he enjoyed going into the little garage where his dad had the two work benches, and figure out what was wrong with whatever he was working on, even if this did sometimes piss off the old man.

When the disease hit and the Army closed off the island, Carl came back full time. He helped Glen board up the house and stock the fridge, and even though it seemed like he was being a good big brother, now that Dad had made it off on a friend’s boat, Carl made sure that Glen knew it wasn’t any big deal. None of it made any difference.

He’d told Lacewood and Hunter Grant that when they came to check on him. Glen knew right away that they were looking for some kind of safety in numbers, but who cared? Not him. If they wanted to stay over, they could. Sure, he would come back and play some games, since Lacewood’s place had power, but that was all. He might even stay the night, if Carl didn’t mind, but it wouldn’t mean anything.

Then it happened.

He and Lacewood had paused a game of Counterstrike so Lacewood could use the john, and Glen walked around the house just to stretch his legs, and saw the sofa in the living room that Hunter had turned into a living space. He had his bat, a few changes of clothes, a Gideon Bible for some reason, and a stack of papers.

Glen Waldron had peered down at the papers, and knew what they meant as soon as he saw them. Right then, Hunter Grant came in the back door from where he’d been scouting around the house.

Glen sputtered out a laugh and pointed at the papers. “This is... these are registration papers.”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d you get ‘em?”

“Boca.”

Glen smiled. He was more than just a little afraid of Hunter Grant, but the absurdity of that statement compelled him to press the issue. “You were out? You were outside of the barricade?”

“A few times.”

“And you came back?”

“Yeah.”

Glen chuckled and shook his head, incredulous. “Why?”

“I figured I was needed more in here than out there.”

Glen scoffed at this. He looked all around his rich guildmate’s living room. “Nobody on this island is worth that.”

“They are now.”

For a long moment, he kept smiling. Then the gears locked into place.

They are now.

Glen Waldron almost reeled as the words struck him like a physical blow. For whole minutes, he did nothing but stand behind the sofa while his mind took the words—they are now—and worked through the implications.

Hunter had left the room.

Lacewood was ready to play and called for him.

“Just a minute,” he had called back.

They are now. They are now. They are now.

Could importance work like fuel? Like energy? Was it something that could be placed inside an empty system and allowed to move the other parts? No, he thought, it can’t be. The fuel makes the machine work. It gives it the power to accomplish a task. The kind of reverse engineering that Hunter Grant had clearly meant was all in his head. What could it possibly change?

But his mind would not let it go.

This is it! This is it!

He could hear himself thinking.

This is why the machine of your dad’s life does not work. Look at the paintings. Look at the sculptures next to the fireplace. What do they do? They don’t work like a machine. Why are they worth any more than a child’s finger-painting? You know why? Because someone is willing to pay more. The buyer sets the value.

If no one on planet Earth was willing to save these people, then they weren’t worth saving. If no one would help them, then his dad was right. But Hunter Grant was here, with a stack of registration forms for people outside the cordon. That could only mean that he’d been sneaking people through.

But he could have been doing it for money, part of his mind resisted. And what good is money now?

No, he knew it. He went back to the TV room and sat down next to Lacewood, and started to play, and he knew it. Anything in this world is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. It could all be important. It could all be made to mean something. It remained worthless only if no one would pay the price.

He set down the controller. “I got to go get some things.”

Now, tonight, for him, for Face, the whole idea of infusing meaning would be put to its greatest test. Because when Lacewood and Hunter came back and had told everyone what needed to happen, and Hunter asked them all for ideas on how to do it, Glen told them. It was obvious. They had everything already.

The only hitch in the plan was that it meant Glen ‘Face’ Waldron was about to kill a substantial number of his fellow human beings.

Face felt numb, and yet simultaneously sickened. His stomach roiled with the knowledge of what he was about to do, but there was no pain; the feeling dissipated as it left his abdomen. By the time the nerves reached his hands, no sensation remained, as if his arms and legs belonged to someone else.

Getting into the compound had been simple. They didn’t even have guards. In fact, they had no structure at all.

Billy and Shawn had scouted it out that afternoon, not the first time they’d been on the old naval base. Two weeks before, they’d explored the grounds. The next night, they’d gone back. No longer a base, not even a fortress, Protest City was more like... just that, a city. The protesters themselves came from all over the country, some from the Midwest, some from the Northeast. They met one from Oregon. Most had been staying in hotels, but some of the protesters were locals. When the quarantine started, these all went back to their homes, and they housed as many of the others as they could. In the first few days, they’d still paraded up and down the streets shouting slogans and demands. Now, the streets were no longer safe. When the looting started, a few of the business owners fought back. One set his own restaurant on fire with several of the protestors inside.

Of all the zombie stories Billy and Shawn had heard, theirs were by far the most vivid. Not, “I heard there was one walking down Laird Street yesterday.” More like, “Susan and I were rummaging through the loft for clothes when we heard a noise downstairs.”

They took over the Annex simply because it was big and empty. No one shot at them behind the gates and the iron fence. They didn’t have any doctors. If someone got sick and looked like they might be infected, they could take them to the hospital, or just drop them in front of the one of the churches.

They fed themselves in the first few days, in the mess hall, and from the restaurants and nearby houses. That was all gone. Some of them went up to the officials for supplies, but they kept getting into fights. They never could get organized. They had no system for doling out their meager supplies, and no official guards to keep the others from raiding the storerooms.

They tried designating leaders but it didn’t work. They wouldn’t submit to any authority, least of all their own. Only one thing held them together—the common belief that the world owed them something, and they would not be quiet until it had paid every last penny. Every day, someone raged against the unfairness of it all in the front courtyard. Every night, they stood out on the beach and out on the pier, holding signs while someone screamed into the megaphone in the Navy’s general direction.

That was the first thing Billy and Shawn said when they came back the second time.

Billy made the ‘metal horns’ with his fingers and shouted out, “We totally did it.”

“I did it, bedwetter,” said Shawn, and told them how the megaphone was being passed from one to the next like a kind of open mic night, and how somebody had passed it to him, and then he’d started screaming about the useless fucking Army and the useless fucking politicians, and how they were all in it together. Then he’d started in on things like how teachers had it out for their students, like that useless asshole Mr. Randolph, and how useless boy bands were ruining music just to see if everyone would keep shouting in approval.

“They did.”

“They totally did.”

Face wanted to sympathize with them, but kidnapping nuns did take a certain something away from the left-for-dead-on-a-strange-island sob story.

The way Billy and Shawn told it, only a few of them had actually been in on it. They had no problem finding out where the nuns were being kept, and even went inside the office building and had a girl point out the room where they were all tied up.

There were eight of them total, not just the three nuns.

Two days before, a couple of the local churches managed to organize a food run to the Annex. The nuns were a part of the group in three trucks, about fifteen people in all. They tried to distribute the food, but some of the protestors got out of hand. They started fighting with each other, and then somewhere in all the chaos, several of them grabbed some of the girls. The others tried to fight, but were beaten and eventually ran away. More came back later and tried again to get their people released. They too were attacked.

The twins had gotten the story from a group inside one of the barracks. The kidnappers said they were holding their prisoners as leverage, but everyone they took was young and female, except for one man who’d taken a horrific beating when he refused to leave the others. Not only this, but one of the girls at the barracks meeting—the same one who eventually took the twins to the room—had heard that at least one of the girls was raped last night, and none of them had been fed in two days.

No, getting in would not be a problem, but getting them all back out would require just a little more planning and execution. Only Face had an idea that would mean none of them getting hurt. Hunter liked that part of it. It also meant that everyone at the Annex was about to learn a painful lesson, and Hunter seemed to like that part of it too.

This time, Hunter ordered Vera and Thyroid to stay behind, since they wouldn’t need any dogs.

Thyroid pleaded, “If you have to carry that injured guy, you might need me.”

“I know,” Hunter had said, “but, Chris, I want you to watch Vera for me.”

At that, Thyroid’s eyes had gone wide, and he’d simply nodded.

The rest of them hit Fort Street in front of the Truman Annex, and then split into two groups. The twins walked through the front gate, while Face, Lacewood, Lindsey MC, and Hunter ran to the north with the rope they would need to scale down the other side of the iron fence, where a braced dumpster allowed them to climb up from the sidewalk.

When the last of them cleared the fence, they left the cover of the line of royal palms that ran behind the fence, and jogged toward the main building that the twins had pointed out. The grounds were filthy with looted items already discarded. The grass had been reshaped into dirt walking-trails surrounded by everything from furniture to dishes, from piles of wet clothes to shards of broken glass.

A group had circled around a fire in the front courtyard. A few of these looked at Face and the others running by—one even tugged on another’s arm to draw his attention—but none followed. Most of the protesters were down at the Mole Pier. Some held banners. One shouted into a megaphone, calling for the world to unite against the blockade and the military-industrial complex that kept it in place.

The Rats waited at the back of the Annex’s large office building, in full view of anyone on the beach or the pier who might turn around.

Then Billy and Shawn ran up.

“They see you?” Hunter asked.

Billy answered. “We couldn’t find any of the same people from earlier, but we asked for, like, the girl who showed us where the prisoners were—”

“So unless they’re just really stupid,” Shawn cut in, “they should figure it out.”

A back door near the south end stood open. Just inside, three of them, two blacks, one white, sat at a table in a downstairs break room eating something out of a cardboard box, while a pair of decorative candles that looked like they belonged on someone’s dining table lit the room. These three also just watched while six teenagers, all armed, all with their faces covered by gray bandanas, one carrying a small trash bag, another carrying a pair of bolt cutters, walked by.

“What the fuck?” Hunter whispered.

None of the three had even stood up.

The twins showed them the stairwell and turned on their flashlights. They took the stairs three at a time while the others followed. The prisoners were on the second floor, and the twins had cleared the entryway by the time the others arrived. They walked down one hall and then another, the twins peering around each corner.

Shawn waved them all into an empty hallway and pointed. “That door.”‘

They found the hostages on the floor, with their hands tied behind their backs, in what had been a conference room with tables and a projection screen.

The man lay by himself, in a corner. He didn’t move.

Face watched for a moment as the women recoiled from the flashlights. He adjusted the painter’s goggles on top of his head. When he turned, Hunter was explaining to them all that Father Barclay had sent them, and he could hear them beginning to go to work on the ropes.

Face stepped out into the hallway by himself, walked to the end of the hall, pulled a can of paint remover out of his back pack, and sprayed a thick layer of the slippery fluid back and forth over the floor. Then he went to the other side of the hall and did the same. Still no response from the protesters. He went back to the door where the others were freeing the prisoners, and stood a lonely vigil, waiting for the inevitable. He didn’t mind. He wanted to be alone for this.

Behind him, he heard crying that he assumed were tears of joy. The other Rats were rescuers. They were heroes.

Only he would leave the Annex a murderer.

But minutes later, after they’d freed all the prisoners and Hunter had given the ready signal, no one had run up the stairs, and no one had hit the floor slicks. He looked at Hunter Grant, their leader, who just shrugged.

“I think there’s a hole in your plan,” said Lindsey MC.

“What the hell?” Face went to the next room, walked past a sort of receptionist desk opposite multiple sets of tables, and looked out a window. The bulk of them still gathered at the pier. Face wondered if the Rats could simply walk out with their freed prisoners.

He could see a group of animated protesters talking on the beach, and one of them, maybe one of those who’d been eating below, pointed at their building. If they left now, they might get away before a response arrived.

And they might not.

Face pulled the coil of rope off his belt, and tied one end to a nearby table. Then he opened the window and dropped the other end to the ground.

Now several protesters were pointing.

Face took deliberate steps back out into the hall. “They’re coming,” he called out. “Finally,” he said to himself.

Then he put in a pair of foam ear plugs, lowered the goggles, and pulled the first device from his pack. He was still staring down at it when he heard their steps.

A group of them arrived all at once at the T-junction to Face’s right, hit the slick, and crashed to the floor in a heap. Another followed and did the same.

Face shined his flashlight at the cursing. The light shined off of the eyes of one with dreadlocks in a ponytail, who’d managed to get to his knees. Maybe a half dozen sprawled there, none older than twenty-five. Face’s breath caught in his throat.

Then he threw the bomb. Roughly the size of a heavyweight flashlight, it clattered end over end down the hallway, the little Christmas light on top flickering innocently. Face turned to dive into the room, where the prisoners all huddled under a makeshift shelter of tables.

But the Rats were not. They were standing with their fingers in their ears.

At this moment, his body moved in what felt like slow motion, and Face understood that he’d not adequately explained this part of the plan. He just assumed they knew. Sterno and hair bleach cold-welded into a steel pipe the width of his arm... they should have grasped the magnitude, but these were gamers. Face suddenly realized that, even though he’d told them to get everyone under cover, and even though he’d insisted that he make the bombs alone inside the Krasinski house, while Hunter and Thyroid stood guard outside, they didn’t quite get it. With the nine-volt battery duct-taped to the pipe, and the Christmas bulb at the top, the bombs looked very much like the pipe bombs in any standard first-person shooter, like the black powder bombs in a zombie shooter. They must have expected that sort of explosion.

Wrong. So wrong.

“Get down!” he screamed to the others, and had just enough time to tackle Lindsey MC and cover her body with his.

The entire building erupted into a world of noise and pain. Pressurized air washed over Face like a crashing wave. He felt tiny pinpricks, flecks of speeding drywall, through his pants and jacket. Something, maybe a door, crashed from side to side down the hallway, then slid loudly on the floor.

He stood up coughing into his gray bandana. The flashlight illuminated nothing but dust. He wiped at his goggles until he could make out the others on the floor, all stunned, but all alive. He felt his way out into the hallway, then to the next room, and back to the now shattered windows. He couldn’t hear them because his ears throbbed—his entire body throbbed—but he could see them.

The protesters ran in all directions, scattering away from the explosion.

Perfect. Almost.

He shuffled back out into the hall, and when he neared the T-junction, he had to watch his footsteps. He walked around a fluorescent light fixture and its wires, which now sagged almost to the floor. He passed something covered in dust that he first mistook for a wooden board. It was a severed arm, blackened. The stream of light moved over debris and torn-out corners of walls, and then a black hole on the far wall, which Face realized was an entire section of bricks that had burst out into the courtyard.

Cautiously, he tested each step with the toe of a work boot. Halfway to the far wall, his toe touched a section of floor that gave like a crust of sun-scorched dirt. It took a moment to see where the floor ended through the haze of dust.

He took out another bomb.

Then he stopped with his finger on the switch. The gravity of what he was doing threatened to overwhelm him. Two versions of tonight’s events flared in his mind, like a binary circuit with both paths competing for the power flow.

On the one hand, he’d just ended several human lives—students and workers, sons and daughters. They had hope and promise and a future. Now their remains lay scattered about, indistinguishable from the rest of the devastation.

I did that.

He killed them, and he was about to drop a second bomb that might kill more—a second bomb in a military installation, which, two months ago, would have made him a terrorist at the top of every watch list in the western world.

Of course, the other side was that the military had left this instillation to people who’d just kidnapped and raped a group of women who were only trying to feed them and keep them alive. This was no longer America, it was the Kill Zone, and everyone had to pick a side. These protesters had chosen to become monsters. The Wharf Rats had chosen to protect everyone else from monsters like these.

Hunter Grant had been right; they had all made their choices—the Rats, the kidnappers—and now they had to face the consequences.

For Face Waldron, the choice was made.

One explosion could mean any number of things. Someone might take cover and wait, and then attack if they thought they could take the bombers by surprise. A second explosion would mean only one thing—they were being bombed, and it could happen again and again, and they needed to run and to keep running. Tonight, the protesters were going to run for their lives. By morning, they would be scattered all over the island.

Did any of it matter? It does now!

He flipped the switch, leaned forward, and dropped the bomb down the hole in the floor.

And he ran.

When it was over, they walked down the north stairwell. Shawn Robb was working his jaw and probably had a ruptured eardrum, but none of the others were injured. The prisoners—except for the injured man, whom Billy and Hunter carried between them—walked while hugging themselves tightly. Their expressions made clear that they feared their liberators as they had feared their captors.

Before leaving, Face turned and looked back. He had to fight back a wave of nausea. Part of the entire south exterior of the building had collapsed, exposing three open floors of brick and lathe and rebar. He could hear the approach of helicopters.

They didn’t wait for the next day. They took the nuns back to the Convent of Mary Immaculate, and the sisters there took in their crying companions. A crowd of others, having heard the explosions, but not knowing what had just happened, just watched.

Face stayed away from the reunion. He saw one of the girls looking back, clearly wanting to tell of the carnage he had just wreaked, but not yet able to find the words.

Hunter Grant came up next to him, and they stood together on the grass in front of the living quarters, which looked very much like an elegant old apartment complex. Hunter put his arm around Face’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Hunter. I should have explained better. I know it was probably overkill, but I made those things to get us through a wall if we got trapped somehow, and it’s hard to know how much pressure it will take to get through a wall. There’s lots of variables.”

“Get through a wall.” Hunter chuckled. “You are the man.” He nodded to himself. “You are the freaking man!”

Face looked over to the others: Lindsey MC and Billy also nodded, and Lacewood laughed.

“We’re going to draw a picture of you, man,” said Billy. “Face sitting behind a drum set, drumming with a pair of bombs. Right, Shawn. Shawn?”

For answer, Shawn took a hand away from his left ear, threw up the metal horns into the night sky, and howled.