the sheriff’s station, raising puffs of pinkish-red dust, blowing the windows and the glass door panels inward. They were on the sidewalk; the rest of Gold team was standing spread out behind them in the street. The only exception was Dr. Evans, standing off to one side, his hands over his ears.
“Yeah!” Winona Briggs shouted. She was dancing from foot to foot, as if she needed to go to the bathroom. “Kill their asses!”
“Go!” Mrs. Sigsby shouted. “All of you go now! Take the boy or kill him! Take him or—”
Then, from behind them: “You’re not going anywhere, ma’am. I swear by the Savior a bunch of you goan be dead if you try. You two fellas up front, put down those grease guns this minute.”
Louis Grant and Tom Jones turned, but did not put down the HKs.
“Do it fast,” Annie said, “or you’re dead. This isn’t playin, boys. You’re in the south now.”
They looked at each other, then put the autos carefully down on the pavement.
Mrs. Sigsby saw two unlikely ambushers standing beneath the Gem’s sagging marquee: a fat bald man in a pajama top and a wild-haired woman in what looked like a Mexican serape. The man had a rifle. The woman in the serape had an automatic in one hand and a revolver in the other.
“Now the rest of you folks do the same,” Drummer Denton said. “You’re covered.”
Mrs. Sigsby looked at the two yokels standing in front of the abandoned theater, and her thought was both simple and weary: Would this never end?
A gunshot from inside the sheriff’s station, a brief pause, then another. When the yokels glanced that way, Grant and Jones bent to pick up their weapons.
“Don’t you do it!” the woman in the serape shouted.
Robin Lecks, who not so long ago had shot Luke’s father through a pillow, took that small window of opportunity to draw her Sig Micro. The other members of Gold team dropped, to give Grant and Jones a clear field of fire. This was how they had been taught to react. Mrs. Sigsby stood where she was, as if her anger at this unexpected problem would protect her.
34
As the confrontation in South Carolina began, Kalisha and her friends were sitting in slumped postures of disconsolation near the access door to Front Half. The door they couldn’t open because Iris was right: the lock was dead.
Nicky: Maybe we can still do something. Get the staff in Front Half the way we got the red caretakers.
Avery was shaking his head. He looked less like a little boy and more like a weary old man. I tried. Reached out to Gladys, because I hate her. Her and her fake smile. She said she wasn’t listening and pushed me away.
Kalisha looked at the Ward A kids, who were once more wandering off, as if there were anywhere to go. A girl was doing cartwheels; a boy wearing filthy board shorts and a torn tee-shirt was knocking his head lightly against the wall; Pete Littlejohn was still getting his ya-ya’s out. But they would come if called, and there was plenty of power there. She took Avery’s hand. “All of us together—”
“No,” Avery said. We might be able to make them feel a little weird, dizzy and sick to their stomachs . . . “. . . but that’s all.”
Kalisha: But why? Why? If we could kill that bomb-making guy way over in Afghanistan—
Avery: Because the bomb-making guy didn’t know. The preacher, that Westin guy, he doesn’t know. When they know . . .
George: They can keep us out.
Avery nodded.
“Then what can we do?” Helen asked. “Anything?”
Avery shook his head. I don’t know.
“There’s one thing,” Kalisha said. “We’re stuck here, but we know someone who isn’t. But we’ll need everybody.” She tilted her head toward the wandering exiles from Ward A. “Let’s call them.”
Avery sighed and held out his hands. Kalisha, Nicky, George, Helen, and Katie linked up. After a moment, Iris did, too. Once again, the others drifted to them. They made the capsule shape, and the hum rose. In Front Half, caretakers and techs and janitors felt it and feared it, but it wasn’t directed at them. Fourteen hundred miles away, Tim had just put a bullet between Michelle Robertson’s breasts; Grant and Jones were just raising their automatic rifles to rake the front of the sheriff’s station; Billy Wicklow was standing on Denny Williams’s hand with Sheriff