He’d told them that since word of Evie’s sleeping and waking was public knowledge, it was inevitable that someone—probably the cops—would come for her. He hadn’t attempted to pitch Tig Murphy and Rand Quigley and Billy Wettermore and Scott Hughes on the idea that Evie was some sort of fantastic being whose safety, and by extension the safety of every woman in existence, depended on Clint. He had a great deal of confidence in his ability to talk a person around to a new way of seeing things—he’d been doing exactly that for nearly two decades—but this was an idea that not even he dared attempt to sell. The tack Clint had taken with Dooling Correctional’s remaining officers was simpler: they couldn’t hand Evie over to locals. Moreover, they couldn’t play it straight with them, because as soon as they acknowledged that Evie was different, they’d only become more relentless. Whatever the deal with Evie was—whatever immunity she possessed—it needed to be sorted out by serious scientists from the federal government who knew what the hell they were doing. It didn’t matter that the town authorities probably had a comparable plan in mind: to have a doctor examine her, to question her about her background, and perform every test you could perform on a person who seemed to have a unique biology. Which sounded okay.
But, as Terry might have said. But.
She was too precious to risk, that was the but. If they handed Evie over to the wrong people and things went sideways, if someone lost their temper and killed her—perhaps out of simple frustration, perhaps because they needed a scapegoat—what good would she be then to anyone’s mothers and wives and daughters?
And forget Evie as an interview subject, Clint told his (very) thin blue line. She couldn’t or wouldn’t tell anyone anything. She seemed not to have the remotest idea of what was so special about her biology. Plus, immune or not, Eve Black was a psychopath who’d planted a pair of meth cookers.
“Someone could still, like, study her body and her DNA and such, couldn’t they?” Rand Quigley had hopefully proposed. “Even if her brains were blown out?” He added hastily: “I’m just sayin.”
“I’m sure they could, Rand,” said Clint, “but don’t you think that’s not optimal? It’s probably better if we keep her brains in. They might be useful.”
Rand had conceded as much.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of this scenario, Clint had been making regular calls to the CDC. Since the guys in Atlanta didn’t answer—repeated calls yielded nothing but a recorded announcement or the same busy signal as on the Thursday the crisis started—he was discussing matters with a branch of the CDC that happened to be located on the second floor of an empty house on Tremaine Street. Its number was Lila’s cell phone, and Jared and Mary Pak were the only scientists on the staff.
“This is Norcross again at Dooling Correctional in West Virginia,” began the play that Clint performed over and over, with minor variations, for the ears of his remaining officers.
“Your son is asleep, Mr. Norcross,” was how Mary replied at the start of their latest go-round. “May I please kill him?”
“That’s a negative,” Clint said. “Black is still sleeping and waking. She’s still extremely dangerous. We still need you to come and get her.”
Mrs. Pak and Mary’s younger sister had both fallen asleep by Saturday morning, and her out-of-town father was still attempting to make his way back from Boston. Rather than stay home alone, Mary had tucked her mother and sister into bed and gone to join Jared. To the two teenagers, Clint had been honest—mostly. He had omitted some things. He had told them that there was a woman in the prison who slept and woke, and asked them to participate in the CDC rigamarole because he said he was worried that the staff would give up and walk if it didn’t seem like he was talking to someone and that help was imminent. The parts he’d left out were about Evie: her impossible knowledge, and the deal she’d offered him.
“My pee is pure Monster Energy drink, Mr. Norcross. When I move my arms fast, there are, like, traces in the air—that I see. Does that make sense? Oh, probably not, but whatever, I think this might be my superhero origin story and Jared is in his sleeping bag missing the excitement. I am going to have to dribble spit in his ear if he doesn’t wake up soon.”
This was the part where Clint increasingly flashed a show of annoyance. “That’s all fascinating, and I certainly hope you’ll take whatever steps are necessary, but let me repeat: we need you to come and extract this woman and get to work on whatever makes her different. Capisce? Call me as soon as you have a helicopter en route.”
“Your wife is okay,” Mary said. Her euphoria had abruptly dampened. “Well, not changed. You know, the same. Resting… um… resting comfortably.”
“Thank you,” said Clint.
The entire structure of logic he’d constructed was so rickety that Clint wondered how much Billy and Rand and Tig and Scott truly believed, and how much of it was the officers craving something to dedicate themselves to amid an emergency that was as amorphous as it was nightmarish.
And there was another motivation in play, simple but strong: the territorial imperative. In the view of Clint’s small cadre of shields, the prison was their patch, and townies had no business messing in it.
These factors had allowed them, for a few days at least, to keep doing the job they were accustomed to, albeit with fewer and fewer prisoners that needed attending. They found comfort in doing the job in familiar surroundings. The five men took shifts sleeping on the couch in the officers’ break room, and cooking in the prison kitchen. It also may have helped that Billy, Rand, and Scott were young and unmarried, and that Tig, the oldest of the bunch by twenty years, was divorced without kids. They had even seemed to acclimate, after some grumbling, to Clint’s insistence that everyone’s safety depended on no more personal calls being made. And, accordingly, they had abetted him in the most distasteful measure he’d been forced to make: under the pretext of “emergency security regulations” they had used tin snips to amputate the receivers from the three payphones available for the use of the prisoners, and deprived the population, in what might well be their last days, from any opportunity to communicate with their loved ones.
This precaution had led to the breaking out of a small riot on Friday afternoon when half a dozen prisoners had made a charge for the administration wing. It had not been much of a riot; the women were exhausted and, except for one inmate wielding a sock filled with dead batteries, they had been unarmed. The four officers had quickly put the insurrection down. Clint didn’t feel good about it, but if anything, the attack had probably served to strengthen his officers’ resolve.
How long the men would stay resolved, Clint couldn’t hazard a guess. He just hoped they could be persuaded to hang on until he could either change Evie’s mind and get her to cooperate in a way that made sense, or the sun rose on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or whenever, and she was satisfied.
If what she claimed was true. If it wasn’t…
Then it didn’t matter. But until it didn’t matter, it did.
Clint felt bizarrely energized. A lot of bad shit had happened, but at least he was doing something. Unlike Lila, who had given up.
Jared had found her in Mrs. Ransom’s driveway. She had let herself fall asleep in her car. Clint told himself he didn’t blame her. How could he? He was a doctor. He understood the body’s limits. Once you went without sleep long enough, you fragmented, lost your sense of what was important and what wasn’t, lost your sense of what was even real, lost yourself. She’d broken down, that was all.
But he couldn’t break down. He had to make things right. Like he’d made things right with Lila before Aurora had taken her, by staying strong and persuading her to see reason. He had to try to resolve this crisis, bring his wife home, bring them all home. Trying was the only thing left.