“Sure,” agreed Coe.
Terry said, “But what about the rest of us?”
“Keep a lookout, and be ready to leave after sundown. We’ll scout for a new hideout along the way.”
“Wait.” Darla got to her feet, still distressed. “What if something happens? What if you don’t come back?”
Kells had his bag open and his revolver in his hand for everyone to see. He said, “We’re coming back.”
Chapter 11
Trait stood listening to the inn. An astronaut returning to Earth after years in an orbiting capsule would also move about clumsily, grabbing walls. Trait was doing this mentally. He was a man coping with his freedom. The sensations overwhelmed: the cold air, bright rooms, doorknobs that opened under his hand. For five years he had done so much wandering with only his mind that now he doubted his physical presence in each new space.
The joy of freedom would come. Little gifts of will. Music. Sunlight. Women.
The pain in his head was like the flames that buffet a spacecraft’s return to Earth. It was a neurological reaction to an abrupt change in atmosphere, and it was to be expected. These were the birth pangs of a mind expanding to its new environment.
He continued past the hanging quilts in the upstairs hallway, turning into the next bedroom and feeling a pulse of familiar energy. A burgundy sweater was folded next on the dresser. He picked it up by its shoulders, letting it fall open before him. The fabric was smooth against his fingers, cooled of body heat but still redolent of her scent. Clean and fragrant, like soap right out of the package. He looked into the mirror.
For a moment he was standing inside his foster sister’s room, waiting for her, hearing her blue jeans swishing down the hall. He had gotten into trouble with that girl, and had been killing her ever since.
A man appeared in the doorway, and Trait was back inside the inn. Errol Inkman wore the same collared shirt and loose corduroy pants he had worn at their very first meeting, that morning. His belt buckle was small and bright gold. Trait found Inkman a strange little man, nothing at all as he had imagined him. “A quarter mile outside the center of town,” Inkman said, “just a few minutes down the road from the police station. We can store weapons in each place and work out of both. Plenty of space here, and a good-sized kitchen — the perfect location.”
Trait folded the sweater and laid it back on the counter. “Perfect.”
“I checked all the rooms. Most of the luggage is gone. Looks like everyone left in a hurry.”
Trait wondered if she had been among those he released that morning. “One thing I learned in Gilchrist was that there is no such thing as coincidence.”
“The writer?” surmised Inkman. “That she requested a meeting with you the day before the breakout?” He ventured a step over the threshold. “I wonder about things like that sometimes. Connections. Like my sitting next to Deacon on that bus trip to Baltimore. Him hearing my ramblings and, once I sobered up, drawing me out about bio-terror and revenge. Was it fate? Or just a random occurrence that, in light of our success here, in retrospect seems like destiny?”
For a moment Trait was inside his Marion cell with Deacon, a wizened man of seventy years, shuffling out on parole, promising to keep the faith. Trait owed his freedom to that old hard-timer, as well as his sanity: Deacon was a legitimate criminal psychiatrist in 1960s Baltimore before coercing patients into pulling jobs for him. In their cell at Marion, he had taught Trait how to survive in the life of the mind.
Trait said, “There are omens, good and bad.”
“She was no more notable than the rest,” said Inkman. “An unremarkable bunch. But gone now.”
Trait nodded, coming out of it. “Gone.”
“Except the warden.” Inkman had stopped near the brass bed and its lilac comforter. “I just came from the police station. Jailing him is a foolish indulgence. I was very specific about there being no hostages. Putting a human face on this siege will force an assault. If the Cold War had involved a handful of Americans in a gulag in the Ural Mountains, it would not have lasted six months. Better to hold an entire nation hostage than one of its pale citizens.”
Inkman’s knowledge of the world impressed Trait, but not enough to change his mind. “No one knows,” Trait said. “To the outside world, he is dead.”
“This is a battle for public opinion. Killing or imprisoning innocent people makes us madmen. But releasing civilians and downsizing the country’s unwanted prison population — that makes us revolutionaries.”
“The warden is an indulgence,” conceded Trait. “But he is my indulgence. And he will remain.”
“It’s bad form. To hold a man without ransom, without any potential benefit — it is dangerous.”
Trait started past Inkman, leaving the room for the stairs. “If you had been with us inside Gilchrist, you would understand.”
“My point is,” said Inkman, following, continuing, “if you are going to bend any other rules of our agreement, I’d like to know first.”
Trait reached the bottom of the stairs where Spotty was eating a bowl of cereal as he stood guard at the inn doors. His hand and opposing wrist were wrapped with gauze, blood-dotted bite marks apparent on his forearm.
Trait said to him, “I warned you about those guard dogs.”
Spotty had insisted on saving the German shepherds from ADX Gilchrist before the ricin dropped.
“I can break them,” Spotty said.
“They were bred to attack cons.”
Spotty nodded awhile, swallowing. “I’m going to change my clothes.”
“It’s not the scrubs. It’s the smell or something. Something the hacks put in our food. I don’t know how they know, but they know. They know cons from guards and civilians. You get torn up bad, Spotty, there’s no doctor here. No one here to treat you. You realize that?” Now Trait could hear their barking, deep-throated in the distance. “Where are you keeping them?”
“The church. Good fence around the cemetery, room to run.”
“If they get out and hurt somebody, you’ll have to put them all down. All of them, understood?”
Spotty answered with quiet confidence. “I can break them.”
Menckley came in from outside then, hunched over and shivering, tears from his watery eyes were frozen high on his cheeks like bits of broken glass.
“What’s going on?” asked Trait.
“They’ve given up trying the pen doors,” Menckley reported. “Also the Command Center. Too stupid to know they can’t beat the lockdown that way. Panic seems to take them in waves. A few symptoms are starting. That stuff will start to wear them out.”
“How’s it playing on TV?”
“The government tried to censor our feed but the networks keep cutting to it now and then.”
“Good. Keep the live feed running.”
“How many cons do you have riding around town?”
“None. Everyone is either here in town or walking the barricades.”
Menckley’s facial expressions were limited to his thin, ointment-slick lips. Now they curled in suspicion. “I heard engines when I was out there.”
“What kind of engines?”
“Snowmobiles, had to be. On the wind from the east.”
Trait looked to Inkman. “A few stragglers, perhaps,” said Inkman. He appeared unconcerned. “Inmates who failed to return for the count, still riding around. They probably don’t even know what happened at the prison yet.”
Trait said, “Send somebody out there to sweep the area. Give it to the Marielitos. They seem anxious for something to do.”
Chapter 12
At a hard-packed road lined with bare, black trees, Coe opened up his sled and Kells throttled to keep pace, doing thirty miles per hour over the snow. Flickering through the trunks to his left was the asbestos mine, a skeleton of a tower with connecting feeder bridges atop a bald hill. Beyond it rose an outlying ring of mountains.