“The radio message,” Jule whispered, unable to believe it had gotten out. That anyone had heard. That the cavalry had come.
“It’s over,” Cass said, raising her hands to the sky, waving and screaming and not caring what happened next, what they would do with the girl who was killer and fugitive and victim all in one. She wouldn’t die in this town, at the hands of these people. That was more than could be expected. That was almost enough.
“It’s over,” Grace said, “and I’m sorry.” They hadn’t let her, a child, carry a gun. But they would not have left her, a child, unprotected, and so Jule had let her carry the knife. It was easy enough, when the rest of them turned their heads to the sky, to raise the blade and slip it into Cass’s chest.
She hadn’t expected she’d have to push so hard; she hadn’t expect to actually be sorry. She’d promised to wait because she knew Cass was wrong. The things she felt, the things she needed – blood, vengeance, justice – they weren’t because of the drug. Her desires were her own. She knew that to be true.
But what if she was the one who was wrong?
On the other end of that rope ladder were doctors and hospitals and the chance that she would go to sleep one person and wake up another, more forgiving, less sure. She couldn’t afford to wait and see. She’d waited long enough.
There was a lot of screaming, but none of it was Cass’s. She opened her mouth. Nothing emerged but a trickle of blood. Grace jerked the knife out of her chest and raised it over her head, preparing to strike a second time. It was harder, knowing how it was going to feel, knowing she would have to force the point past muscle and bone, and so she paused to breathe and to remember why, and that was when the bullet struck the back of her head.
The others would hesitate to hurt a child, even a child with a knife. She’d counted on that.
She hadn’t counted on the men in the helicopter, too far away to mark her as a child, too far to see anything but flames, and a victim, and her attacker, holding a knife.
They were professional marksmen; she was dead before she hit the ground.
It took Cass a little longer. She lay beside Grace, staring into her eyes, the dead eyes she saw in her nightmares, and felt no satisfaction at having outlived her killer, if only by a few seconds. A blurry face bent toward her, shouting something she was too tired to hear. Her lips moved, but it was only to gasp out a last bubble of blood. Her last words were only for herself, and for Grace, because this was between the two of them.
This is not what we deserved, she thought, but was too tired to be sure. If she could only hold on, just a little longer, long enough to make sure, once and for all, to know…
She couldn’t. She wasn’t strong enough. She couldn’t hold on to life; she couldn’t even hold on to that final plea, and in those last few seconds, the need to know slipped away. There was no more question of judgment or mercy. There was only what she had meant, and who she had loved, and what was left to her now, the grit of dirt against her cheek and the press of skin on her forehead, and Gracie, who was no longer a child, who could no longer be protected, who had to be forgiven. Cass was beyond pain; her body was no longer her own. But somehow, she managed to move her arm. Somehow, her hand reached Grace’s outstretched fingers. Somehow, as the world drained away, she held on.
They watched it happen. But they couldn’t believe it really had. Not when the knife slipped in, not when the bullet made its neat, tidy hole, not when the two bodies lay at their feet, sightless and pulseless and a testament to their failure. They couldn’t believe it, and so they had failed to stop it, and now it was done. The soldiers – real soldiers, good-guy soldiers, as Milo would have said – bundled them into the helicopter, gave them water and blankets and blood pressure cuffs, and thought they were in shock. Maybe they were in shock. Couldn’t believe they had been saved. Had saved what was left of the town. Couldn’t believe this was how it felt to save and be saved. That this was to be their happy ending.
19
THE BURIED CHILD
Of the three-quarters of town that had survived the tornado, half was consumed by the deacon’s holy fire. This included all municipal buildings on State Street and most of the businesses on Main, along with twenty blocks of housing, mostly on the better side of town. The Church of the Word still stood, as did Asylum Bridge and the stone monument to victims of the Bleeding Kansas raids of the 1850s. The fire line had held at Green Street, and so the West homestead was intact, as was the land that stretched past the ruined trailer park. Prevette country, had there been any Prevettes left to claim it.
The cemetery was untouched. Even all these months later, there were no gravestones for those who had died in the fire, or the purge, or the madness before it. Those bodies had been zipped into bags and carted off in trucks bearing military markings, which caravanned down the highway behind buses bearing the survivors.
There had been a lot of doctors, and a lot of tests. Weeks at the facility where they were held without any clear timetable but with clear locks on the doors – held until a cure could be synthesized. None of the faceless agents in charge seemed particularly disappointed that this took its time. The longer it took, the longer they had to study the effects of the R8-G; the experiment had, after all, been a success. A weapon was a weapon, whoever had built it, and how.
Jule, Daniel, and West were sequestered in a separate wing and – their blood as useless to the scientists as their states of mind to the shrinks – left pretty much to themselves. That was how they liked it. West stayed in his room, watching old football games and listening for the voices of the dead. Jule and Daniel sat together and talked about the future, and the places they would go. Jule bitched at her guards and Daniel fussed at Milo and they circled each other, warily waiting for the thing between them to break. Sometimes they held each other in the dark, wondering if they would stay in this place forever, and then Jule would kiss Daniel or Daniel would kiss Jule and they would remind each other that they had survived.
It was Cass’s blood that saved the day, after all, just as the GMT doctors had theorized. Cass’s blood, from Cass’s corpse, drained and analyzed and synthesized and injected into the people who had tried to burn her alive. A simple needle stick, painless as a flu shot, and they were cured. And still the doors were locked, and the people of Oleander waited as the government and the media wags argued their fate. The shortwave radio message, beamed to the four corners of the earth, had ensured that whatever the military’s natural inclinations toward secrecy, this dirty laundry would be aired in public. No one from Oleander believed they would ever have been allowed to leave the “secure location” were it not for this built-in insurance policy.
Even so, there were those who suggested eradicating the lot of them, and blaming it on aftereffects of the R8-G, defying the public to challenge the story.
They’d lost the argument, but it had been close.
It was a useful time, politically, for the military to play the role of good guy, for the Justice Department to throw a corporate board in prison, for the president to make a stirring speech, for heroes to be valorized and medals handed around. So after the passage of months and the certification of nontoxicity, the people of Oleander were released.
Released, as opposed to sent home.
Home was gone.
The population of Oleander was not what it once was. The Preacher had been picked off by a sniper within minutes of taking a position on the pawnshop roof, and fell two stories to his heavenly reward. Scott Prevette bled out on the floor of his borrowed house, wasting his last breaths raging at the corpses of the brothers he’d murdered and the women he’d left to die. Thanks to Laura Tanner, most of the town’s children survived, but more than two hundred of their parents and neighbors died, on that last of the dark days, some at the hands of the mercenaries, some at the hands of one another. At least that number chose not to return to their decimated town and face the neighbors who knew what they’d done. They took their government hush mon
ey and ran away.
But hundreds went back: Because they wanted to, or because there was nowhere else they could think to go. Because at least in Oleander they would not be alone in their shame and their memories. Because this was their home and these were their neighbors, and the devil you knew was no devil at all. In a strange new place, they would have to live a lie, but here, they would know, even if it was never spoken aloud, that they were not the only ones.
It had been decided that the crimes of Oleander couldn’t be prosecuted in a court of law, and so they were set free. But that didn’t change what they’d done.
Laura Tanner expected a hero’s welcome, but no one could look at her: not the parents, who remembered her succeeding where she had failed, and not the children, who still had nightmares of the wild days and the witch that had enchanted them into the woods. She got a job at D’Angelo’s, which needed waitresses, and when a family with children sat down in her section, she passed their table to someone else.
Coach Hart survived the battle, but lost a leg and most of his team. He settled back into the house he shared with his wife, and married life continued apace. He no longer worried about his wife cheating on him, and if she missed her dead lover, she had the large rust-colored stain on the porch to remember him by. Every night, the coach kissed his wife good night and told her he loved her. Every night, she considered killing him in his sleep.
The high school would never reopen. Instead, a new one was hastily built in the next town over. Any remaining Oleander students would be bused in and do their best to ignore the stares. Clair Grafton and Morgan Deets would be homeschooled. The former best friends no longer spoke; they didn’t miss each other. Nor did they regret what they’d done. Clair still liked to imagine it sometimes, before she fell asleep, the sounds he’d made when they fell upon him. In the secret, secure government facility, she’d gone to services in the chapel every Sunday, and every Sunday she prayed to God with gratitude for the opportunity he’d afforded her. The nightmares that had plagued her for years were gone. Morgan abandoned the church and hooked up with Chuck Platch. They both wore a lot of black and read depressing poetry together, which came as a surprise to everyone who’d assumed Chuck couldn’t read.
Kaitly Connor, always an also-ran, had finally reaped a benefit from being the odd girl out. Hayley and Emily had run one way, she’d run the other, and now no one remained to challenge Kaitly’s reign. She had survivor’s cachet, the whiff of danger, the romantically sorrowful aura of a girl who grieved her best friends, and it was of no concern that the girls at school gave her strange looks and whispered as she passed. She would mold them into shape, flatter and ignore them until they’d been trained to perform for her favor. She had learned from the best.
Ellie King’s father died defending the menagerie of strays he’d packed into his lonely apartment – twelve cats, three dogs, and seven pigeons by the end, none of them enough to fill the hole his family had left behind. Ellie’s mother, who seemed not to remember lighting the match that had sent her daughter to her Maker, was institutionalized. She would live the rest of her days in a featureless white padded room. All visitors reported that she seemed quite happy.
Cassandra Porter’s parents were surprised to discover their daughter had been imprisoned so close to town, and even more surprised she thought they’d abandoned her. Under the guise of an anonymous benefactor, GMT had shuffled them out of town, paying the utilities on their old house and the rent on their new one. They had written weekly devoted letters to their daughter and received regular replies from someone purporting to be Cassandra, claiming to be well taken care of and occasionally happy. Now they were told that their daughter died a hero, and hoped that this time it was the truth. The Tucks, too, were told their daughter died a hero, and didn’t question the claim. It didn’t help.
Rosemary Wooden returned to her house, which had not burned, and continued her life of solitude. Eventually the town would come to life again, and inevitably, they would come, the boys who thought her a harmless old lady, ripe for the tormenting. She kept the pearl-handled revolver in her lap while she worked on her knitting, enjoying its weight on her thigh. She probably shouldn’t have shot that large, nasty boy, she thought sometimes.
But it had felt so good.
Many people stayed indoors, at least at first, and those who ventured out rarely met their neighbors’ eyes. But there were strangers here, too, construction crews and charitable volunteers and curiosity seekers, and a trickle of fortune hunters who saw, in the wreckage of the old town, more than a few opportunities for a new one. A third Oleander, built on the ruins of the second, as that had been founded on the ruins of the first.
It was considered taboo to speak of what had happened, but the old men who gathered every day for coffee at the rebuilt Elmo’s Luncheonette weren’t bound by convention. All the surviving members of this coffee klatch had returned to Oleander, and all were unfazed by what had transpired. They’d been around for a long time, and they’d seen stranger; they had seen worse. So they told themselves. They argued, over cold cups of coffee served to them by a stranger – because Elmo was dead and his two waitresses were never coming back – about what the drug had done to the people of the town. Whether it had driven them to do crazy things they would never, under other circumstances, have had it in them to do, or whether it had simply peeled away people’s fancy exteriors to reveal their ugly truth. Henry Wallace was in the latter camp, arguing that when he’d taken that hammer to his son-in-law’s head, it was nothing more than what he’d wanted to do for years. “A goddamned dream come true,” he said, smashing the flat of his palm against the counter and grinning at the memory. But Paul Corey disagreed.
“If that drug did what you say it did, then how come I still got this headache that I’ve had for forty years? How come Mary’s still sitting in the living room waiting for me to get home so she can yell at me some more?” Mary was his wife, and forty years was the duration of their happy union. Paul gulped down the rest of his coffee, spitting the last mouthful back into his cup. “No, I’d say if that drug did what you say it did, and made people do what they really wanted to do? Mary’d be chopped up in pieces in the backyard.” At this point in the argument that he ventured nearly every day, he liked to karate-chop the counter with the side of his hand, even harder than Henry had whacked it, once, twice, three times, each time barking, “Chop! Chop! Chop!”
The other men laughed, and then they all went back to their coffee and discussed the weather or the football season or the hideously ugly brick face some idiot had designed for the new town hall. Because maybe it was true that Paul Corey wanted to hack up his wife, and maybe it wasn’t. That was the thing about Oleander now, the thing that made it tolerable again: You weren’t forced to know the truth one way or another. A person could choose for himself who he pretended to be, and you could choose for yourself whether to believe him.
Jeremiah sat cross-legged in the cemetery with Jason beside him. Before them was stretched a picnic blanket and a feast: homemade bread, farm-fresh cheese, jam preserves rescued from the West family cellar. After an unusually tenacious winter, spring was finally starting to bloom. A breeze stirred the willows, but it was nearly warm even where they sat, in the shadow of the trees, and the shadow of Nick’s grave.
The Wests had chosen to return, because they were Wests, and Oleander was in their blood, as their blood was in its soil. But they would not lay claim to the house. That was for Jeremiah. They stayed in the new motel at the center of town, and could not look at their son, the hero, even when he finally persuaded them to come to the house for dinner. Jason cooked while Jeremiah sat on the couch across from his parents, waiting for one of them to meet his eye. He told himself they were embarrassed by what they’d done. His bruises had long since healed. But the doctor said he might always have the limp.
At least they had accepted the invitation: it was a beginning. They had – after a long pause and a pointedly loud throat cleari
ng by their hero son – shaken Jason’s hand. His father had shaken Jeremiah’s hand, too, and his mother gave him a stiff, tentative hug. They’d managed to endure through two courses and dessert.
His mother brought a pie.
Once Jeremiah had been given his freedom, he could have gone anywhere. But Oleander was the only place he’d ever wanted to be. He and Jason had returned to the house together, and stayed together. In Oleander now, it was better not to be alone. Too many ghosts.
They talked of Nick, often.
Often, they didn’t talk.
“He hated it here,” Jason said now. He didn’t have to say who. Jeremiah wondered, sometimes, whether it was natural, the thing growing between them. Whether it was healthy, this strange three-sided bond between two living people and a grave. Over the months, they’d discovered the occasional thing in common, but nothing that came close to matching that primary, fundamental thing, the loss. That after everything that had happened and all the people who had died, they could still feel this loss above everything, they both marveled. They both felt a small measure of shame, and this was another thing they could talk about only with each other, another thing that bound them together.