“My point exactly,” said Looks Away. “Does that sound like your father?”
She glared at each of them in turn. “Then maybe he’s sick or something. People rave when they have fevers and—”
Looks Away pointed at the corpse that had attacked them. “A fever? Really? Until now I’ve rather admired you for your practicality and clarity of vision, but you are genuinely at risk of becoming another ordinary hysterical fool.”
“Whoa, ease up, pardner,” murmured Grey.
Jenny balled her fist and looked ready to swing a roundhouse punch at the Sioux, but then she abruptly turned and walked a dozen paces away. Her body was ramrod stiff. She stopped and stared into the darkness at the edge of town.
Looks Away glanced helplessly at Grey. In a hushed voice he said, “I’m merely trying to make her see reason.”
Grey shook his head. “Reason left town a long time ago, brother. She just watched her father lead an army of corpses in an attack on everyone she knows. You want to maybe give her a minute?”
The Sioux opened his mouth, thought better of it, and turned away. He tapped Brother Joe on the shoulder. “Come along. There are people who could probably use our help.”
They hurried off to tend to the wounded, the shocked, and the grieving.
Hitching up his borrowed pants and all of his courage, Grey walked over to where Jenny stood. The carnage around her was horrific. There was one final rumble of thunder, far away over the ocean. Above them, though, the moonlight was scattering the last of the storm clouds. It spilled a pure white light down on everything.
It seemed odd to Grey. He’d always hated the night and the cold eye of the moon. Now it was the purest thing in his world.
For a long, long time he said nothing. He did not touch her, did not speak her name.
She stood like a statue, frozen by the impossibility of what was happening, and Grey understood that. The world was wrong. Everything was so damn wrong.
He knew that he should find Picky and get the hell out of Paradise Falls. Out of the Maze. Out of California.
Maybe go East. See if Philadelphia was still normal, still sane.
Or perhaps take a ship. He’d heard about something called the Légion étrangère. The French Foreign Legion. They were supposed to be a group of misfits and outcasts, and nothing seemed better suited to him than that.
He almost smiled at the thought. Putting ten thousand miles between him and this godforsaken little town. Putting an ocean between him and this whole broken country.
It was a nice thought.
The moonlight painted everything with a veneer of purity. The mud, the bloodstained buildings, the mangled dead.
The light traced a silver line along the profile of Jenny Pearl.
A pearl in pearlescent light.
A poet could make something out of that.
Very softly, Grey said the only thing that he could say that might matter to her.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
It broke her.
She bent and put her face in her dirty hands and wept. It was a horrible sound. So deep. Torn from some private place.
Jenny turned and leaned against him, and then she wrapped her arms around Grey and clung to him. He hesitated for only a heartbeat, then he took her in his arms and held her as the storm and the madness of this night went away.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
They walked through the town together. Silent, his arm around her shoulders, her hand clutching the torn front of her dress.
The town was coming alive, but death circled like a carrion bird. People were in the street and there were torches and gas lamps lit. Three bodies lay on the back of a wagon. A young man named Huck who worked in the livery stable and an older couple — the Delgados — whose family had lived in Paradise Falls for nearly a century. More than thirty were hurt, including a twelve-year-old boy with a bad bite on his upper arm.
Looks Away and Brother Joe were tending to the wounded. It did not surprise Grey that the Sioux was skilled in medicine. The man seemed to have a remarkable depth of knowledge, especially in scientific fields. He diagnosed injuries, cleaned and dressed wounds, and mixed compounds that he said would prevent infection or ease pain. Brother Joe, on the other hand, seemed to be more shamanistic in his approach, using herbs and prayers. In both cases, though, the people seemed to respond to the treatments. It was, Grey knew, as much from the appearance of authority and knowledge as it was from what the men did.
They found the little red-haired girl sitting near Brother Joe. Grey learned that her parents had been badly injured but were expected to recover, and that the girl — whose name was Felicity — was herself unharmed. The blood on her face had not been hers.
Saying that she was uninjured and knowing it to be true, though, were different things. When Grey looked into the girl’s eyes he saw that shadows had taken up residence and they would be hard to exorcise.
He carried his own shadows around, so it was something Grey knew all too well.
Thinking that made him glance toward the unlighted far end of town. It was a reflex; something he did when he felt like ghostly eyes were watching him.
There was no one there, though. No one — nothing — that he could see.
“What is it?” asked Jenny.
“Huh?” he said, jolted back to the moment.
“You look like you saw a ghost?”
He turned to her. She was trying to force a smile, but it was a ghastly attempt. It broke apart and fell away, and then she, too, was staring toward the darkness.
“Is it them? Are they back…?”
“No,” he said gently, making himself turn his back on the night. “It’s nothing. They’re gone. They won’t be coming back.”
“How do you know?”
“That damn contraption of Doctor Saint. The gas gun thing. Whatever it is. I think they’ve had enough,” he said, and nearly added “I hope.”
Jenny nodded.
“What I don’t understand,” she said after a few steps, “is who they were. That was Jed Perkins and his men. I mean, that’s who some of them were. What happened to them?”
“I’ll be damned if I know.”
They walked together to the well at the other end of town. There were four teenagers busy drawing bucket after bucket of water up from the shadows. The town’s school marm — a hatchet-faced old buzzard named Mrs. O’Malley — stood guard with a woodsman’s axe clenched in her hands. She had a fierce glare in her eyes and her dress was splashed with black blood.
While they were still out of earshot, Grey murmured, “There’ll be a story behind that.”
“Sure,” agreed Jenny, “but I know her. She was my teacher, too. She keeps things to herself. Farthest thing on God’s earth from a gossip. If there’s a story there, and I have no doubt there is, she won’t be the one to tell it.”
Grey nodded. “That’s how it often plays out.”
Jenny leaned her hip against a hitching post outside of the feed store. “What do you mean?”
He took a moment before answering, but he could see that she wanted to talk. Probably to distract herself from what she needed to talk about but wasn’t yet ready to face. So he lowered himself onto the edge of the feed store porch.
“History books and newspapers talk about battles as if they’re one big event. This side and that side. They talk about the land that’s being fought over, the generals or officers, maybe a hero, and they count the dead, but that’s not what makes a battle. Not really.” He leaned his forearms on his knees and watched the teens bring up the water. “Battles are people. Battles are small things. They’re big, sure, but up close it’s man against man. When it starts, okay, it’s lines of men firing rifles, but then you get into it, then it’s one guy shooting at another. Specifically at another, you understand?”