He pronounced terrible as turrible.
Judge Silver’s Land Rover was nearing the outer limits of Dooling’s neighbor, Maylock. Rhinegold’s house in Coughlin was on the other side, a drive of another twenty minutes or so.
“The National Guard has been called out in all the cities where those Brigades have been at work, and they have orders to shoot to kill if those superstitious fools won’t cease and desist. I say amen to that. The CDC has repeated that there is no truth whatsoever to—”
The windshield was fogging up. Judge Silver leaned to his right, never taking his eyes from the road, and flipped on the defroster. The fan whooshed. On its wind, clouds of small brown moths spewed from the vents, filling the cabin and circling the judge’s head. They lit in his hair and battered his cheeks. Worst of all, they spun before his eyes, and something one of his old aunts had told him long ago, when he was just an impressionable boy, recurred to him with the brilliance of a proven fact, like up is up and down is down.
“Don’t ever rub your eyes after touching a moth, Oscar,” she had said. “The dust from their wings will get in there and you’ll go blind.”
“Get away!” Judge Silver yelled. He took his hands off the wheel and beat at his face. Moths continued to pour from the vents—hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. The Land Rover’s cabin became a swirling brown mist. “Get away, get away, get aw—”
A huge weight settled on the left side of his chest. Pain hammered down his left arm like electricity. He opened his mouth to cry out and moths flew in, crawling on his tongue and tickling the lining of his cheeks. With his last struggling breath he pulled them down his throat, where they clogged his windpipe. The Land Rover veered left; an approaching truck veered right just in time to avoid it, ending up in the ditch, canted but not quite toppling. There was no ditch to avoid on the other side of the road—just the guardrails separating the Dorr’s Hollow Bridge from the open air and the stream beneath. Silver’s vehicle snapped the guardrails and pitched over. The Land Rover went end-for-end into the water below. Judge Silver, by then already dead, was ejected through the windshield and into Dorr’s Hollow Stream, a tributary of Ball Creek. One of his loafers came off and floated downstream, shipping water and then sinking.
The moths exited the overturned vehicle, now bubbling its way down into the water, and flew back toward Dooling in a flock.
“I hated to do that,” Eve said—speaking not to her guests, Clint felt, but to herself. She wiped a single tear from the corner of her left eye. “The more time I spend here, the more human I become. I had forgotten that.”
“What are you talking about, Evie?” Clint asked. “What did you hate to do?”
“Judge Silver was trying to bring in outside help,” she said. “It might not have made any difference, but I couldn’t take the chance.”
“Did you kill him?” Angel asked, sounding interested. “Use your special powers an all?”
“I had to. From this point forward, what happens in Dooling has to stay in Dooling.”
“But…” Michaela rubbed a hand down her face. “What’s happening in Dooling is happening everywhere. It’s going to happen to me.”
“Not for awhile,” Evie said. “And you won’t need any more stimulants, either.” She extended a loose fist through the prison bars, extended a finger, and beckoned. “Come to me.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Rand said, as Garth overlapped him, saying, “Don’t be stupid, Mickey.” He grabbed her forearm.
“What do you think, Clint?” Evie asked, smiling.
Knowing he was giving in—not just to this, but to everything—Clint said, “Let her go.”
Garth released his grip. As if hypnotized, Michaela took two steps forward. Evie put her face against the bars, her eyes on Michaela’s. Her lips parted.
“Lesbo stuff!” Angel crowed. “Turn on the cameras, freaks, the muff-divin comes next!”
Michaela took no notice. She pressed her mouth to Evie’s. They kissed with the hard bars of the soft cell between them, and Clint heard a sigh as Eve Black breathed into Michaela’s mouth and lungs. At the same time he felt the hairs stand up on his arms and neck. His vision blurred with tears. Somewhere Jeanette was screaming, and Angel was cackling.
At last Evie broke the kiss and stepped back. “Sweet mouth,” she said. “Sweet girl. How do you feel now?”
“I’m awake,” Michaela said. Her eyes were round, her recently kissed lips trembling. “I’m really awake!”
There was no question that she was. The purple pouches beneath her eyes had disappeared, but that was the least of it; her skin had tightened on her bones and her formerly pallid cheeks had taken on a rosy glow. She turned to Garth, who was staring at her with slack-jawed amazement.
“I’m really, really awake!”
“Holy shit,” Garth said. “I think you are.”
Clint darted his spread fingers at Michaela’s face. She snapped her head away. “Your reflexes are back,” he said. “You couldn’t have done that five minutes ago.”
“How long can I stay this way?” Michaela clasped her shoulders, hugging herself. “It’s wonderful!”
“A few days,” Evie repeated. “After that, the weariness will return, and with interest. You’ll fall asleep no matter how much you struggle against it, and grow a cocoon like all the rest. Unless, that is…”
“Unless you get what you want,” Clint said.
“What I want is immaterial now,” Evie said. “I thought you understood that. It’s what the men of this town do with me that matters. And what the women on the other side of the Tree decide.”
“What—” Garth began, but then Jeanette hit him like a left tackle intent on sacking the quarterback, driving him into the bars. She shouldered him aside and grasped the bars, staring at Evie. “Do me! Evie, do me! I don’t want to fight it no more, I don’t want to see the bud man anymore, so do me!”
Evie took her hands and looked at her sadly. “I can’t, Jeanette. You should stop fighting it and go to sleep like all the others. They could use someone as brave and strong as you are over there. They call it Our Place. It can be your place, too.”
“Please,” Jeanette whispered, but Evie let go of her hands. Jeanette staggered away, squashing spilled peas underfoot and crying soundlessly.
“I don’t know,” Angel said thoughtfully. “Maybe I won’t kill you, Evie. I’m thinking maybe… I just don’t know. You’re spiritual. Plus, even crazier than me. Which is goin some.”
Evie addressed Clint and the others again: “Armed men will be coming. They want me because they think I may have caused Aurora, and if I caused it, I can put a stop to it. That’s not exactly true—it’s more complicated than that—just because I turned something on by myself doesn’t mean I can turn it off by myself—but do you think angry, frightened men would believe that?”
“Not in a million years,” Garth Flickinger said. Standing behind him, Billy Wettermore grunted agreement.
Evie said, “They’ll kill anyone who gets in their way, and when I’m not able to awaken their sleeping beauties with a wave of my Fairy Godmother magic wand, they’ll kill me. Then they’ll set fire to the prison and every woman in it, just for spite.”