The woman who owned the purse, Melanie understood in a terrible flash.
No, please, no…
The man's arm descended leisurely. Through the undulating wheat she saw the dull glint of metal in his hand.
Stoat's head bent slightly; he'd heard a sudden noise. He winced. Bear's face broke into a smile. Mrs. Harstrawn's hands rose to her ears, covering them. Horrified. Mrs. Harstrawn could hear perfectly.
Melanie stared into the wheat, crying. She saw: The shadowy figure crouching lower, over the woman. The elegant movement of the tall wheat, swaying in the intemperate July wind. The motion of the man's arm rising and falling slowly, once, twice. His face studying the body lying in front of him.
Mrs. Harstrawn fixed Stoat with a stoic gaze. "… us go and… won't bother you. We won't…"
Melanie was comforted to see the woman's defiance, her anger. The sturdy set of her jaw.
Stoat and Bear ignored her. They herded Susan, Mrs. Harstrawn, and Melanie toward the bus.
Inside, the younger girls huddled in the back. Bear pushed Mrs. Harstrawn and Susan inside and gestured toward his belt, where his gun bulged. Melanie was the last person inside before Stoat, who shoved her into the back. She tripped and fell on top of the sobbing twins. She hugged them hard then gathered Emily and Shannon into her arms.
The Outside… Caught in the terrible Outside.
Melanie glanced at Stoat and saw him say, "Deaf as… all of them." Bear squeezed his fat torso into the driver's seat and started the bus. He looked in the rearview mirror and frowned then spun around.
In the distance, at the end of the ribbon of asphalt, was a dot of flashing lights. Bear pressed the pad on the steering wheel and Melanie felt the vibrations of the horn in her chest.
Bear said, "Man, what the fuck's… think we…" Then he turned his head and the words were lost.
Stoat shouted toward the wheat. He nodded when, apparently, the man answered. A moment later the gray Chevy sped out of the field. Badly damaged but still drivable, it rolled onto the shoulder, paused. Melanie tried to glance into the front seat for a glimpse of the man behind the wheat but there was too much glare. It appeared there was no driver at all.
Then the car accelerated fast, fishtailing onto the asphalt. The bus followed, easing forward into the faint clouds of blue tire smoke. Bear slapped the steering wheel, turned for a moment and barked some words to Melanie – angry words, vicious words. But she had no idea what they might be.
The brilliant flashing lights grew closer, red and blue and white. Like the Fourth of July fireworks over the park in Hebron two weeks ago, when she'd watched the streamers of color crisscross the sky, felt the explosions of the white-hot bangs against her skin.
She looked back at the police car and knew what would happen. There'd be a hundred squad cars all converging up ahead. They'd pull the bus over and these men would get out. They'd put their hands up and be led off. The students and teachers would go down to a station-house somewhere and make statements. She'd miss the Theater of the Deaf performance in Topeka this time – even if they still had time to make it – but there was no way she'd get up on stage and recite poetry after all of this.
And the other reason for her trip?
Maybe it was a sign that she shouldn't go, shouldn't have made those plans. It was an omen.
All she wanted to do now was go home. Back to her rented house, where she could lock the door and have a cup of tea. Okay, a hit of blackberry brandy. Fax her brother in the hospital in St. Louis, tell him and her parents the story. Melanie fell into a nervous habit, twining her blond hair around her bent middle finger, the other digits extended. This hand shape was the symbol for "shine."
Then there was a sudden jolt. Bear had turned off the asphalt and was following the gray car down a dirt road. Stoat was frowning. He asked Bear something Melanie didn't see. The big man didn't answer but just spit out the window. Another turn and another, into hillier country. Getting close to the river.
They passed under an electric wire covered with a hundred birds. Big ones. Crows.
She looked at the car ahead of them. She still couldn't see him clearly – the driver, the man from the wheat field. At first Melanie thought he had long hair, then a moment later he seemed bald or crew-cut, then appeared to be wearing a hat.
With a skidding turn the gray car spun to the right and bounded down a narrow weed-filled driveway. Melanie guessed that he'd seen the dozens of police cars up ahead – the cars racing toward them to save them. She squinted and looked. No, nothing ahead of them. The bus turned and followed the Chevy. Bear was muttering, Stoat was looking back at the police car.
Then Melanie turned and saw where they were headed.
No! she thought.
Oh, please no.
For she knew her hope about the men surrendering to the trooper who was fast approaching was just a fantasy. She understood where they were going.
The worst place in the world.
The gray car suddenly broke into a large, weed-filled field. At the end of the field, on the river, squatted a red-brick industrial building, long abandoned. Dark and solid as a medieval fort. The acreage in front of the plant still held a few of the fences and posts from the animal pens that had subdivided the area long ago but mostly the field had been reclaimed by the Kansas prairie of mid-high grass, sedge, bluestem, and buffalo grass.
The Chevy raced right for the front of the building, the bus following. Both skidded to a stop just to the left of the door. Melanie peered at the ruddy brick.
When she was eighteen, and a student herself at the Laurent Clerc School, a boy had brought her here, supposedly for a picnic but of course to do what boys of eighteen will do – and what Melanie too wanted, she believed at the time. But once they'd snuck inside, carting a blanket with them, she'd looked at the gloomy rooms and panicked. She'd fled and had never seen the perplexed boy, or the building, again. But she remembered it. An abandoned slaughterhouse, a place of death. A place that was hard and sharp and dangerous.
And dark. How Melanie hated the dark. (Twenty-five years old and she had five night-lights in a six-room house.)
Stoat flung open the bus door, dragged Susan and Mrs. Harstrawn out after him.
The police car – a single trooper inside – paused at the entrance to the field. He leapt out, pistol in his hand, but he stopped short when Bear grabbed Shannon and put a gun to her head. The eight-year-old surprised him by spinning around, kicking his knee hard. He flinched in pain then shook her until she stopped squirming. Bear looked across the field at the trooper, who made a show of putting his gun back into his holster and returning to his car.
Bear and Stoat pushed the girls toward the slaughterhouse door. Bear slammed a rock into the chain that bound the door closed and snapped the rusted links. Stoat grabbed several large bags from the trunk of the gray car, where the driver continued to sit, staring up at the building. The glare still prevented Melanie from seeing clearly but he seemed relaxed, gazing with curiosity at the turrets and black windows. Bear yanked open the front door and he and Stoat pushed the girls inside. The place stank of cave more than building. Dirt and shit and mold and some sweet-sickly decay, rancid animal fat. The interior was a maze of walkways and pens and ramps and rusted machinery. Pits surrounded by railings and parts of old machines. There were rows and rows of rusted meat hooks overhead. And it was just as dark as Melanie remembered.
Bear herded the students and their teachers into a semicircular, tiled room, windowless and damp. The walls and cement floors were stained dark brown. A worn wooden ramp led to the left side of the room. An overhead conveyor holding meat hooks led away from the right side. In the center was a drain for the blood.