‘We’ll make an effort to negotiate,’ he told Parker. ‘But it might be better if you and your friends stayed back here.’
‘I came to find Jerome Burnel,’ said Parker. Paige Dunstan had told him of seeing a hooded man being brought into the Cut some nights earlier, and forced into the woods, and Teona Watson’s son had confirmed a similar sighting. It was possible that Burnel might still be alive somewhere in there.
Henkel looked to Channer for an opinion. If all this went badly, Channer might be sitting in the sheriff’s chair a lot sooner than he’d expected.
‘I’d prefer to go in with five guns instead of two,’ said Channer. ‘And maybe the fewer uniforms the Cut sees, the better.’
That settled it, then, Henkel supposed.
‘I have a heart condition,’ said Henkel.
‘I know.’
‘This can’t be good for it.’
‘I guess not.’
Henkel got to his feet. He wasn’t feeling great. What he had to do next wasn’t about to make him feel any better.
‘All right, then,’ he told Parker. ‘I’m deputizing you and your friends here. You’re operating under the authority of the Plassey County sheriff from this point on, with all the power and protections of that office, but if you fire another shot without just cause, then goddamn you, I’ll kill you myself. Any questions?’ said Henkel.
Only Angel raised a hand.
‘Does the position come with a restroom key?’
They entered the Cut in two vehicles, Henkel and Parker in the sheriff’s truck, with Benedict acting as a reluctant guide, and Channer, with Angel and Louis in back, following behind in his vehicle. They encountered the first roadblock half a mile in. It was simple, but efficient. An ancient Buick with flat tires, presumably used for the scavenging of parts, lay on its collapsed roof in the middle of the road, a thick line of trees at either side.
‘We can push it out of the way,’ said Parker. ‘Use the truck to spin it, then work around it.’
Henkel took in the trees. Through them he could see a house, but it appeared quiet.
‘That’s the Tinsley place, right?’ he asked Benedict.
‘Yeah.’
Achim Tinsley had two children, a boy and a girl. The boy was about twenty, the girl a year younger. Achim was all right, as far as the Cut went, but his wife Priska was a piece of work.
Henkel activated the speaker on the truck, then instructed Benedict to call Achim’s name, and told him what to say. He placed the handset close to Benedict’s mouth, and nodded.
‘Achim! It’s Benedict. The sheriff just wants to talk to Oberon. He says we can find a peaceful way out of this.’
They heard no response for about ten seconds before a male voice answered from among the trees. It sounded young.
‘Oberon’s dead.’
‘That’s not any of the Tinsleys,’ said Benedict.
‘Then who is—’ Henkel started to ask, just before the truck was raked by bullets from the house and the trees. The windshield exploded as Henkel and Parker ducked low. They heard more shooting from behind as Channer and the others returned fire. Benedict didn’t move. One bullet had hit him in the chest, and another in the chin. He slumped sideways as Parker and Henkel opened the doors and hit the dirt, using the Buick for cover. Channer’s shotgun boomed twice, and someone cried out from the bushes to the left. The shooting stopped.
Carefully, Channer and Henkel moved into the undergrowth. Lying on a patch of bare ground with a hole in the center of his torso and a pistol by his side was a boy of no more than sixteen or seventeen. He was blinking repeatedly, trying to focus on the sky above his head. Henkel thought that Parker had been right: if they went into the Cut in force, then they risked having the blood of children on their hands, even if they were children with guns. It should never have come to this.
‘Ah, hell,’ said Channer. ‘It’s one of the Parsons boys – the youngest, Nicon.’
The Parsons had been so close to the Hobbs for generations that they were virtually the same family.
‘Parsons has one more son and—’ Henkel began to say, just as two things happened. The Parsons boy stopped blinking as the life left him; and a flap of scalp rose from Rob Channer’s skull, followed by a cloud of blood and bone, and the crack of the rifle shot that had just killed him. Channer toppled on his side, and Henkel dropped with him, Channer’s corpse absorbing the second bullet and saving Henkel’s life. This time, the fusillade that followed in reply from Parker, Angel, and Louis was aimed at one window of the Tinsley house, and when it was over all was quiet again.
Henkel got out from behind Channer’s corpse, and crawled into the trees.
‘Please,’ said a woman’s voice from inside the house. ‘No more shooting.’
Henkel recognized the speaker as Priska Tinsley. He looked at his dead deputy, and tried to keep his voice level.
‘Priska, this is Ed Henkel. We got an awful mess out here, and I don’t want it to get any worse.’
‘Achim’s hurt,’ said Priska. ‘He was hit in the gunfire. I can’t move him.’
‘Just the two of you in there?’
‘Jason Parsons is here too, but he’s dead. The rest are up in the Square. Only Achim and me are left.’
‘Then you come out with your hands up, and we’ll see to Achim.’
The front door of the house opened, and a slim woman in her fifties emerged. Her yellow blouse and blue jeans were heavily stained with blood. Parker and the others kept her under their guns while Henkel approached, his weapon raised.
‘Lie down on the ground, Priska,’ he said.
The woman descended unsteadily to her knees, and used her hands to brace herself before lying flat in the dirt. Henkel searched her, but found nothing. Parker joined him, and together they advanced on the house. Parker risked a glance inside. A man with long white hair, who looked decades older than the woman outside, was slumped against a pockmarked wall in a widening pool of blood. His eyes were open, but whatever they were seeing wasn’t in this world. A hunting rifle lay by his side.
Parker went in first, and together he and Henkel cleared the single-story house. They found one other body, and immediately saw its resemblance to the boy who had died outside. He’d been hit twice in the upper body. He was a year or two older than his brother. He, too, had a rifle. Either he or Tinsley could have killed Channer.
‘So much for negotiation,’ said Henkel.
‘Let’s talk to the woman.’
They went back outside. Priska Tinsley was still lying on the ground, Angel and Louis beside her.
‘We need to get help for Achim,’ she was telling them, over and over.
Henkel knelt beside her, this woman whom he believed to have conspired in the killing of his deputy, and spoke as tenderly as he could with Channer’s remains in sight.
‘He’s beyond caring now, Priska,’ he said. ‘But maybe you can help us to save the others.’
90
Henkel was reluctant to advance any farther into the Cut without support. Channer’s death had tipped the balance against its inhabitants, and it was all that Henkel could do to restrain himself from wiping his hands of them and letting events take their course. But at the same time, he didn’t want his name to be associated with another Waco. The radio in his truck was busted, so he used his cell phone to contact his department.
Unfortunately, any remaining doubts about how to deal with the Cut had been dispelled by the testimony of Paige and Gayle to the state police, and the two FBI agents who had just joined them. In addition, the Holbert and Lunn families had voluntarily surrendered to the authorities, claiming sanctuary from Cassander Hobb and those who stood alongside him, and state troopers were apparently already advancing into the Cut from the north, east, and west.
Parker heard a rumble to the south as Henkel tried to take in what he was being told, and moments later the MRAP appeared, followed by a state police SUV and a cruiser, only to find their progress blocke
d by two disabled vehicles – the first a wreck on its roof, the second Henkel’s truck, with its engine pumping steam from bullet holes – and one reasonably intact sheriff’s department cruiser.
‘Well,’ said Louis, taking in the bulk of the MRAP, and thinking that a bad situation was about to get a whole lot worse, ‘at least now we can get rid of the Buick.’
Henkel decided that the MRAP, complete with SWAT team, should lead the way, on the grounds that opposition might crumble at the first sight of the combat wagon. What mattered now was reaching the Square before any of the other advancing forces, because that was most assuredly where Cassander and the hard-core would be waiting. If Henkel could get to Cassander and reason with him, he might be able to prevent further bloodshed, but already reports were coming through of troopers exchanging fire with members of the Cut – they could faintly hear some of the shots from where they stood – and there was also the problem of Cassander himself.
Priska Tinsley confirmed the truth of what the younger Parsons boy had told them: Oberon was dead, killed by Cassander’s son Lucius, but almost certainly on the orders of his father. Priska couldn’t say if Cassander had also ordered Henkel’s murder, but it now seemed highly likely. In addition, word had also spread through the Cut via burner phones and shortwave radios that Cassander’s sons were dead. Being reasonable, Henkel guessed, was unlikely to be foremost in Cassander’s mind.
Troopers pushed the crippled Plassey County sheriff’s vehicle off the road, Henkel being understandably reluctant to incur further damage by letting the MRAP take care of his truck, a decision for which he was doubly thankful after he saw what it did to the Buick, which the MRAP crushed as much as moved. Priska Tinsley was put in the back of the state police car, just in case she might be able to talk sense into any Cut skirmishers, but they encountered only one further roadblock along the way, this one constructed from logs and sandbags, and after some cursory shots at the MRAP, and a warning to lay down their arms, the defenders surrendered. Two of them were teenagers, the other a girl in her twenties, and all seemed grateful to be under arrest. They hadn’t been in a hurry to die. None of them could offer any clue as to what might be waiting in the Square, beyond giving a rough estimate of the size of the force holed up there: no more than twenty men and women, all told, with the elderly and very young kept back in the prison hut for safety. Using the map he had given Parker, Henkel indicated the position of the building in which the old and the children were gathered, and gave two troopers orders to get to it and keep those inside calm. This would also ensure that it was less likely to be fired upon accidentally by any members of law enforcement entering the Cut from other directions. Although there was a state police lieutenant with the SWAT team from the MRAP, he was smart enough to defer to Henkel. Like the sheriff, he wasn’t anxious to have the blood of women and children on his hands.
They were within sight of the Square when the first shots came, both from the buildings before them and from hidden positions to the right and left of the road. Parker saw a trooper go down, hit in the leg, and then they were all in it: blood, smoke, noise.
Dying.
Later it would come back to Parker as fragments, pieces of a vast diorama that had somehow shattered and then scattered itself through his memory: the MRAP opening to disgorge the SWAT team, and the ragged shooting of the Cut being answered with heavy, disciplined fire; glass shattering, and someone shouting for help; a middle-aged man in camouflage gear rising from the undergrowth with a shotgun at his shoulder only to be almost torn in half by a stream of automatic fire from close to the MRAP; the turret gunner opening fire on one of the houses in the Square with a .50-caliber sniper rifle, its suppository-shaped bullets ripping through the walls and anyone inside unfortunate enough to get in their way; the MRAP crawling forward, and then the ground collapsing to its right, for the road had been built with deliberate weaknesses at its edges precisely to thwart an advance by heavy vehicles. The MRAP tumbled to its side, ejecting the sniper from the turret, his momentum sending him smashing into a tree before he fell at its base and did not move.
By then, Parker was close to the Square, Angel and Louis at his heels, troopers shooting at the houses until Henkel’s voice sounded over the loudspeakers, calling for everyone to cease fire. The last thing he wanted was to engage in a house-to-house clearance of the Square. So far, he had two injured troopers, and Channer was dead. The Cut’s casualties were higher, but only one of the defenders on the outskirts of the Square had been added to the list of the dead. Three more were wounded, and some of the rest were already laying down their weapons and raising their hands. Like a street fight, the conflict in the Cut seemed set to burn briefly, but there was not enough determination, or desperation, among its inhabitants for a sustained conflict. Most of these people were not killers. They probably didn’t even consider themselves criminals.
Parker, flanked by Angel and Louis, continued around the east of the Square, keeping to the trees, not drawing fire. Priska Tinsley had shared one crucial detail with them before the assault began: the blockhouse was where Cassander would be. It was their shrine, the heart of the Cut, although she claimed never to have been inside it, and when Parker mentioned the Dead King she looked away and went silent. Whatever lay at the heart of the Cut’s existence, whatever the Dead King might be, it was in that sanctuary.
They cleared the Square and moved north into the woods, until the blockhouse was revealed to them, and they paused to take it in. It resembled a construct from a child’s fairy tale, a castle for an ogre; squat and dark, with branches thrusting themselves through its walls, and a thinning crown towering above its roof, so that the whole resembled a head, torso, and arms, as though the blockhouse might in an instant uproot itself and disappear into the forest. The material of the structure and the wood of the tree had weathered together over the years, making it difficult to say precisely where one ended and the other began.
A door stood open at the foot of the blockhouse, but before they could get any nearer to it a shotgun blast tore the branches and leaves from the evergreen above Louis’s head, and a second later a burst of fire raked the ground beside Angel.
‘I have one of them,’ said Louis.
He drew a bead on a figure in brown moving through the trees to the west of the blockhouse, and fired three times. The man fell. Louis waited to be sure that he was down before he began to move toward him, keeping low. The shotgun fired again, but the blast was wild, the action of someone who could no longer lift his weapon from the ground. Louis circled, and came in behind him, but by then the man was already dead.
Angel and Parker concentrated their fire on the second shooter. He was staying under cover, using the undergrowth to change position without being seen before opening fire again. With his target neutralized, Louis continued on behind the blockhouse, while Angel kept shooting to the right and left of the gunman’s last position, keeping him down so that Parker could make a run for the building.
The rattle of sustained fire came from beyond the Square, followed by an explosion that might have been a grenade. Parker heard a woman screaming, and men shouting. Henkel’s amplified tones once again urged calm, and ordered the defenders of the Square once again to lay down their weapons and come out, assuring them that they would not be hurt. Parker saw Angel dart behind a tree, advancing cautiously as he and Louis closed in on the remaining gunman.
‘Cassander Hobb?’ Parker called. ‘It’s over.’
He stayed away from the door, although he wasn’t sure how much protection the old wood of the blockhouse would provide if someone inside decided to shoot. Then again, it had survived for this long, and the logs at his back felt as cold and hard as stone. Was Hobb even in there?
There was no reply. Parker risked pushing the door further ajar, and waited for the gunfire to come, but all remained dark and silent.
He stepped inside, and found himself in the court of the Dead King.
91
The interior o
f the blockhouse was lit only by the spears of morning sunlight that pierced its windows. The walls were hung with old standards and flags, some of them little more than rags, with only the barest trace of color remaining on them. Parker picked out a royal standard that might have been Spanish, judging by the preponderance of reds and golds; a colonial flag with the British colors in one corner alongside a series of faded stripes; and the distinctive red-and-white guidon of the 9th Cavalry Regiment, the black fighters nicknamed ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ by the natives. Alongside them were nineteenth-century U.S. flags, one with as few as twenty stars on it, and a number of Confederate Stars and Bars, mostly tattered and stained. Despite the strangeness of the blockhouse’s appearance, and its obvious antiquity, the air inside was peculiarly dry, which might have explained how the delicate banners had not entirely rotted away. They were less decorations than trophies of war, relics of those who had crossed the Cut during its history and not lived long enough to regret the encounter.
Parker smelled gasoline. He touched the walls, and his fingers came away damp. They must have been preparing to burn the blockhouse when the assault on the Cut began. Why it had not been accomplished he could not say. Perhaps they had been holding off in the hope that the spiritual home of the Cut might yet be saved.
The floor was made of wood and stone, and strewn with fresh straw, but Parker barely glanced at it, his attention drawn instead to two phantasmagorical sights. The first was the great tree that seemed to have birthed the dwelling, its trunk rising like a supporting column from the ground, its branches the beams upon which the roof appeared to rest. It was an awesome natural entity, which accentuated the contrast with the unnatural thing that sat at its base.