And the engine started. By God, it started.
Nick blinked sweat out of his eyes as he jammed the shift lever into first and let out the clutch. The truck shuddered and Nick remembered the parking brake—he slammed at it with his hand and the truck leaped forward. Nick juggled accelerator and clutch as he slowed the truck to match it to his family’s pace on foot. He crouched down over the wheel, trying to make a smaller target, and he tried to keep other vehicles between himself and the catfish pond, keep more metal between himself and any bullets. He ran out of parking lot and cover at the same time. He put in the clutch and let the truck coast to a stop.
“Everyone in!” he said. “Fast now, fast! Heads down!”
Manon and Arlette came scrambling in, Manon on top in an attempt to shelter her daughter with her body. Jason came next, jamming himself in with difficulty next to the others, his task made more difficult by the hard red body of the Astroscan telescope he’d slung over his shoulder. He had brought the scope with him that morning, Nick remembered, to have Frankland store it. And he’d kept ahold of it through everything.
“Maggie!” Olson’s voice, crying over the battlefield. “Maggie you get out here, you bring Liza and Dickie!”
Nick let out the clutch before his three passengers had quite wedged themselves in, and Jason gave a yell and clutched at the dashboard as the truck leaped forward and threatened to spill him into the bar ditch. The truck swayed as it ran up the shoulder of the road, and Nick flung the wheel over and punched the accelerator to the floor.
His back tensed. Waiting for the bullet.
Nick shifted into second, then into third. Tools and planks in the truck bed boomed as the truck thundered over broken asphalt and a filled-in crevasse. The last of the camp, the unmarried men’s compound, fell behind.
Gears clashed as Nick shifted into fourth. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a demon smile. The sniper wasn’t gunning for them. They were free.
Frankland tried to take a step and stumbled over Hilkiah’s inert body. Another shot boomed. There was the weird whine of a bullet sheathing itself in flesh, but all he could see was trampling feet. He clutched the microphone in his fist. He knew that if he gave up the microphone, he gave up all hope of saving the situation.
“Stop the shooting!” Frankland cried. “Stop!” Shots chattered out into the air, people firing wildly. The panicked crowd screamed as it scattered over the fields. Choir members sprawled over the ground as the risers on which they were standing were tipped by panicked singers.
Frankland scurried on hands and knees after the crowd, trying to get the solid bulk of his steel-framed church between himself and the sniper.
Some people ran past him, dragging Dr. Calhoun over the bloody grass. Calhoun had been shot, Frankland thought dimly. And a voice in him said, Oh, iniquity!
Another cry, barely audible over the panic, came from the man lying behind the banks of Brother Johnson’s catfish ponds. ” Send me my family!”
Olson, Frankland thought. It was Olson out there. Somehow he had not quite realized this till now.
“You’ll get your family!” Frankland shouted into the mike. “Just stop the shooting!” One of the Armalites ripped off a dozen rounds. “Stop that firing!” Frankland commanded, and the gunshots ceased.
He scurried around the corner of the church. There were thirty people lying there—Frankland saw Sheryl with a pistol in her hand, and Calhoun lying pale, and old Sheriff Gorton standing there with a mild, puzzled look on his face, as if he were trying to work out the daily crossword in the paper.
“Maggie!” Olson called. “Maggie, you come out here!” Frankland looked out at the terrified crowd stampeding away from the site of the shooting, and he wondered if there was any way he could find Maggie Olson and her children anywhere in that panicked mass.
“Maggie!” Olson’s voice again. “Maggie you get out here, you bring Liza and Dickie!” Olson squeezed off two shots that rang on the steel sides of the church. Frankland looked over his head and saw two bullet holes.
The church wasn’t cover at all. That high-powered rifle of Olson’s could punch right through it.
“You’ll get your family!” Frankland shouted, “just stop the shooting!” He had been the target, Frankland thought. If he hadn’t turned his head when he did, to whisper into Hilkiah’s ear, it would have been his own head that exploded under the force of the bullet. And if he hadn’t tripped, he would probably have been gutshot instead of Calhoun.
The Lord had preserved him, he realized. And that meant that the Lord wasn’t done with him yet, that the Lord still featured him in his plans.
Frankland and Olson shouted back and forth for long moments while the crowd dispersed over the camp and beyond. Eventually Maggie Olson and her two children were located and sent forward to her husband. Maggie wept as she dragged herself with slow steps across the asphalt highway toward her husband, and her youngest was hysterical, screaming against his mother’s shoulder as she carried him toward the catfish pond where her husband had fortified himself.
“Now you just leave us alone!” Olson shouted after his family joined him. “You leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone! If you send anyone after us, I’ll shoot him dead.”
Frankland saw no point in replying. He looked at Calhoun lying gasping and pale. Hilkiah’s corpse was barely visible around the corner of the church. The flies were already busy about his brains. They hath taken my right arm, Frankland thought, but I shall smite them sore with my left. He had better things to do than wonder if the phrase that just popped into his head was actually from the Bible or not.
There was a rushing sound in Frankland’s ears, like a thousand angels in flight. He picked his way through the prone figures toward Dr. Calhoun, who lay surrounded by the crouched forms of Sheryl, the Reverend Garb, and several others. Calhoun was pale, and his skin was moist. Frankland crouched by him, saw Calhoun’s midsection soaked in red. Someone’s shirt was folded and pressed over the wound to stem the bleeding, but Frankland knew that bleeding was not the greatest danger facing a gutshot man. Calhoun would die within a few days, and he would die of peritonitis because there wasn’t a doctor in Rails Bluff capable of saving him. Frankland took Calhoun’s hand. “How you doing, Lucius?” he asked. Calhoun licked his lips. “Praying,” he said. Dust blew from his ginger mustache as he spoke.
“Well,” Frankland said, and touched his colleague’s shoulder, “we’ll get the man that did this.” Calhoun nodded. “Olson,” he said.
“Yes. Smite him. We’ll smite him.” The sound in Frankland’s ears resolved itself into a band of angels singing a chorus of vengeance.
Calhoun nodded again. His bloody fingers tightened on Frankland’s.
“I’ll talk to you soon,” Frankland said, “and we’ll pray together, if you like. But right now I got a posse to put together.”
Calhoun nodded. “Heaven-o,” he said.
Frankland rose to his feet. His skull filled with the sound of angels crying for vengeance. An unprovoked attack, Frankland thought. He just fired from ambush, without warning, and blew Brother Hilkiah’s head right off. Frankland couldn’t let Olson get away with that. Olson and his family had to leave the safety of that catfish pond embankment sooner or later. And when they did, Frankland and his people would follow. Olson would find he wasn’t the only person with a high-powered hunting rifle.