MISSILE STRIKE IMMINENT 11 page

“What’s Sloppy Sam supposed to do for the booze?”

Big Jim explained. Junior listened impassively … except for his bloodshot eyes, which danced. He had only one more question: Would it work?

Big Jim nodded. “It will. I’m feeling it. ”

Junior took another chomp on his beefstick and another swallow of his soda. “So’m I, Dad,” he said. “So’m I.”

When Junior was gone, Big Jim went into his study with his robe billowing grandly around him. He took his cell phone from the center drawer of his desk, where he kept it as much as possible. He thought they were Godless things that did nothing but encourage a lot of loose and useless talk—how many man-hours had been lost to useless gabble on these things? And what kind of nasty rays did they shoot into your head while you were gabbling?

Still, they could come in handy. He reckoned that Sam Verdreaux would do as Junior told him, but he also knew it would be foolish not to take out insurance.

He selected a number in the cell phone’s “hidden” directory, which could be accessed only via numeric code. The phone rang half a dozen times before it was picked up. “What?” the sire of the multitudinous Killian brood barked.

Big Jim winced and held the phone away from his ear for a second. When he put it back, he heard low clucking sounds in the background. “Are you in the chickenhouse, Rog?”

“Uh … yessir, Big Jim, I sure am. Chickens got to be fed, come hell or high water.” A 180-degree turn from irritation to respect. And Roger Killian ought to be respectful; Big Jim had made him a gosh-darn millionaire. If he was wasting what could have been a good life with no financial worries by still getting up at dawn to feed a bunch of chickens, that was God’s will. Roger was too dumb to stop. It was his heaven-sent nature, and would no doubt serve Big Jim well today.

And the town, he thought. It’s the town I’m doing this for. The good of the town.

“Roger, I’ve got a job for you and your three oldest sons.”

“Only got two t’home,” Roger said. In his thick Yankee accent, home came out hum. “Ricky and Randall are here, but Roland was in Oxford buying feed when the Christing Dome came down.” He paused and considered what he had just said. In the background, the chickens clucked. “Sorry about the profanity.”

“I’m sure God forgives you,” Big Jim said. “You and your two oldest, then. Can you get them to town by —” Big Jim calculated. It didn’t take long. When you were feeling it, few decisions did. “Say, nine o’clock, nine fifteen at the latest?”

“I’ll have to rouse em, but sure,” Roger said. “What are we doin? Bringin in some of the extra propa—”

“No,” Big Jim said, “and you hush about that, God love you. Just listen.”

Big Jim talked.

Roger Killian, God love him, listened.

In the background roughly eight hundred chickens clucked as they stuffed themselves with steroid-laced feed.

“What? What? Why? ” Jack Cale was sitting at his desk in the cramped little Food City manager’s office. The desk was littered with inventory lists he and Ernie Calvert had finally completed at one in the morning, their hopes of finishing earlier dashed by the meteor shower. Now he swept them up—handwritten on long yellow legal-pad sheets —and shook them at Peter Randolph, who stood in the office doorway. The new Chief had dolled up in full uniform for this visit. “Look at these, Pete, before you do something foolish.”

“Sorry, Jack. Market’s closed. It’ll reopen on Thursday, as a food depot. Share and share alike. We’ll keep all the records, Food City Corp won’t lose a cent, I promise you—”

“That’s not the point, ” Jack nearly groaned. He was a baby-faced thirtysomething with a thatch of wiry red hair he was currently torturing with the hand not holding out the yellow sheets … which Peter Randolph showed no signs of taking.

“Here! Here! What in the name of jumped-up Jack Sprat Jesus are you talking about, Peter Randolph?”

Ernie Calvert came barreling up from the basement storage area. He was broad-bellied and red-faced, his gray hair mowed into the crewcut he’d worn all his life. He was wearing a green Food City duster.

“He wants to close the market!” Jack said.

“Why in God’s name would you want to do that, when there’s still plenty of food?” Ernie asked angrily. “Why would you want to go scaring people like that? They’ll be plenty scared in time, if this goes on. Whose dumb idea was this?”

“Selectmen voted,” Randolph said. “Any problems you have with the plan, take them up at the special town meeting on Thursday night. If this isn’t over by then, of course.”

“What plan?” Ernie shouted. “Are you telling me Andrea Grinnell was in favor of this? She knows better!”

“I understand she’s got the flu,” Randolph said. “Flat on her back. So Andy decided. Big Jim seconded the decision.” No one had told him to put it this way; no one had to. Randolph knew how Big Jim liked to do business.

“Rationing might make sense at some point,” Jack said, “but why now?” He shook the sheets again, his cheeks almost as red as his hair. “Why, when we’ve still got so much ?”

“That’s the best time to start conserving,” Randolph said.

“That’s rich, coming from a man with a powerboat on Sebago Lake and a Winnebago Vectra in his dooryard,” Jack said.

“Don’t forget Big Jim’s Hummer,” Ernie put in.

“Enough,” Randolph said. “The Selectmen decided—”

“Well, two of them did,” Jack said.

“You mean one of them did,” Ernie said. “And we know which one.”

“—and I carried the message, so there’s an end to it. Put a sign in the window. MARKET CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.”

“Pete. Look. Be reasonable.” Ernie no longer seemed angry; now he seemed almost to be pleading. “That’ll scare the dickens out of people. If you’re set on this, how about I put CLOSED FOR INVENTORY, WILL REOPEN SOON? Maybe add SORRY FOR THE TEMPORARY INCONVENIENCE. Put TEMPORARY in red, or something.”

Peter Randolph shook his head slowly and weightily. “Can’t let you, Ern. Couldn’t let you even if you were still an official employee, like him.” He nodded to Jack Cale, who had put down the inventory sheets so he could torture his hair with both hands. “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. That’s what the Selectmen told me, and I carry out their orders. Besides, lies always come back to bite you on the ass.”

“Yeah, well, Duke Perkins would have told them to take this particular order and wipe their asses with it,” Ernie said. “You ought to be ashamed, Pete, carrying that fat shit’s water. He says jump, you ask how high.”

“You want to shut up right now, if you know what’s good for you,” Randolph said, pointing at him. The finger shook a little. “If you don’t want to spend the rest of the day in jail on a disrespect charge, you just want to close your mouth and follow orders. This is a crisis situation—”

Ernie looked at him unbelievingly. “ ‘Disrespect charge?’ No such animal!”

“There is now. If you don’t believe it, go on and try me.”

Later on—much too late to do any good—Julia Shumway would piece together most of how the Food City riot started, although she never got a chance to print it. Even if she had, she would have done so as a pure news story: the five Ws and the H. If asked to write about the emotional heart of the event, she would have been lost. How to explain that people she’d known all her life—people she respected, people she loved—had turned into a mob? She told herself I could’ve gotten a better handle on it if I’d been there from the very beginning and seen how it started, but that was pure rationalization, a refusal to face the orderless, reasonless beast that can arise when frightened people are provoked. She had seen such beasts on the TV news, usually in foreign countries. She never expected to see one in her own town.

And there was no need for it. This was what she kept coming back to. The town had been cut off for only seventy hours, and it was stuffed with provisions of almost every kind; only propane gas was in mysteriously short supply.

Later she would say, It was the moment when this town finally realized what was happening. There was probably truth in the idea, but it didn’t satisfy her. All she could say with complete certainty (and she said it only to herself) was that she watched her town lose its mind, and afterward she would never be the same person.

The first two people to see the sign are Gina Buffalino and her friend Harriet Bigelow. Both girls are dressed in white nurse’s uniforms (this was Ginny Tomlinson’s idea; she felt the whites inspired more confidence among the patients than candy-striper pinafores), and they look most seriously cute. They also look tired, in spite of their youthful resiliency. It has been a hard two days, and another is ahead of them, after a night of short sleep. They have come for candy bars—they will get enough for everyone but poor diabetic Jimmy Sirois, that’s the plan—and they are talking about the meteor shower. The conversation stops when they see the sign on the door.

“The market can’t be closed,” Gina says unbelievingly. “It’s Tuesday morning.” She puts her face to the glass with her hands cupped to the sides to cut the glare of the bright morning sun.

While she’s so occupied, Anson Wheeler drives up with Rose Twitchell riding shotgun. They have left Barbie back at Sweet-briar, finishing up the breakfast service. Rose is out of the little panel truck with her namesake painted on the side even before Anson has turned off the engine. She has a long list of staples, and wants to get as much as she can, as soon as she can. Then she sees CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE posted on the door.

“What the hell? I saw Jack Cale just last night, and he never said a word about this.”

She’s speaking to Anson, who’s chugging along in her wake, but it’s Gina Buffalino who answers. “It’s still full of stuff, too. All the shelves are stocked.”

Other people are pulling in. The market is due to open in five minutes, and Rose isn’t the only one who planned to get an early start on her marketing; folks from all over town woke up to find the Dome still in place and decided to stock up on supplies. Asked later to explain this sudden rush of custom, Rose would say: “The same thing happens every winter when the Weather Bureau upgrades a storm warning to a blizzard warning. Sanders and Rennie couldn’t have picked a worse day to pull this bullshit.”

Among the early arrivals are Units Two and Four of the Chester’s Mill PD. Close behind them comes Frank DeLesseps in his Nova (he’s ripped off the ASS, GAS, OR GRASS sticker, feeling it hardly becomes an officer of the law). Carter and Georgia are in Two; Mel Searles and Freddy Denton in Four. They have been parked down the street by LeClerc’s Maison des Fleurs, by order of Chief Randolph. “No need to get there too soon,” he has instructed them. “Wait until there are a dozen or so cars in the parking lot. Hey, maybe they’ll just read the sign and go home.”

This doesn’t happen, of course, just as Big Jim Rennie knew it wouldn’t. And the appearance of the officers—especially such young and callow ones, for the most part—acts as an incitement rather than a calmative. Rose is the first to begin haranguing them. She picks on Freddy, showing him her long list of supplies, then pointing through the window, where most of the stuff she wants is ranked neatly on the shelves.

Freddy is polite to begin with, aware that people (not quite a crowd, not yet) are watching, but it’s hard to keep his temper with this mouthy little pipsqueak in his face. Doesn’t she realize he’s only following orders?

“Who do you think is feeding this town, Fred?” Rose asks. Anson puts a hand on her shoulder. Rose shakes it off. She knows Freddy is seeing rage instead of the deep distress she feels, but she can’t help it. “Do you think a Sysco truck full of supplies is just going to parachute down from the sky?”

“Ma’am—”

“Oh, can it! Since when am I a ma’am to you? You’ve been eating blueberry pancakes and that nasty limp bacon you like at my place four and five days a week for twenty years, and calling me Rosie while you did it. But you won’t be eating pancakes tomorrow unless I get some flour and some shortening and some syrup and …” She breaks off. “Finally! Sense! Thank You, God!”

Jack Cale is opening one of the double doors. Mel and Frank have taken up station in front of it, and he has just room to squeeze between them. The prospective shoppers—there are nearly two dozen now, even though the market’s official opening time of nine AM is still a minute away—surge forward, only to stop when Jack selects a key from the bunch on his belt, and locks up again. There’s a collective groan.

“Why the hell’d you do that?” Bill Wicker calls out indignantly. “My wife sent me down for aigs!”

“Take it up with the Selectmen and Chief Randolph,” Jack responds. His hair is raring every whichway. He throws Frank DeLesseps a black look and fires an even blacker one at Mel Searles, who is trying unsuccessfully to suppress a grin, perhaps even his famous nyuck-nyuck-nyuck. “I know I will. But for now, I’ve had enough of this shit. I’m done.” He strides off through the crowd with his head down and his cheeks burning even brighter than his hair. Lissa Jamieson, just arriving on her bicycle (everything on her list will fit into the milk box perched on the rear fender; her wants are small-going-on-minuscule), has to swerve to avoid him.

Carter, Georgia, and Freddy are ranged in front of the large plate-glass window, where Jack would have set out wheelbarrows and fertilizer on an ordinary day. Carter’s fingers are Band-Aided, and a thicker bandage bulks under his shirt. Freddy has his hand on his gun-butt as Rose Twitchell continues to chew on him, and Carter wishes he could backhand her one. His fingers are okay, but his shoulder aches a bitch. The small cluster of would-be shoppers has become a large cluster, and more cars are turning into the parking lot.

Before Officer Thibodeau can really study the crowd, however, Alden Dinsmore gets into his personal space. Alden looks haggard, and seems to have lost twenty pounds since the death of his son. He’s wearing a black mourning band on his left arm and seems dazed.

“Need to go in, son. My wife sent me to stock up on the canned.” Alden doesn’t say the canned what. Probably the canned everything. Or maybe he just got thinking about the empty bed upstairs, the one that will never be filled again, and the Foo Fighters poster that will never be looked at again, and the model airplane on the desk that will never be finished, and clean forgot.

“Sorry, Mr. Dimmesdale,” Carter says. “You can’t do that.”

“It’s Dinsmore,” Alden says in a dazed voice. He starts toward the doors. They are locked, no way he can get in, but Carter still gives the farmer a good hearty shove backward. For the first time, Carter has some sympathy for the teachers who used to send him to detention back in high school; it is irritating not to be minded.

Also it’s hot and his shoulder aches in spite of the two Percocet his mother gave him. Seventy-five at nine AM is rare in October, and the faded blue color of the sky says it will be hotter by noon, hotter still by three PM.

Alden stumbles backward into Gina Buffalino, and they both would fall if not for Petra Searles—no lightweight she—steadying them. Alden doesn’t look angry, only puzzled. “M’wife sent me for the canned,” he explains to Petra.

A mutter comes from the gathering people. It’s not an angry sound—not quite yet. They came for groceries and the groceries are there but the door is locked. Now a man has been shoved by a high-school dropout who was a car mechanic last week.

Gina is looking at Carter, Mel, and Frank DeLesseps with widening eyes. She points. “Those are the guys that raped her!” she tells her friend Harriet without lowering her voice. “Those are the guys that raped Sammy Bushey!”

The smile disappears from Mel’s face; the urge to nyuck-nyuck has left him. “Shut up,” he says.

At the back of the crowd, Ricky and Randall Killian have arrived in a Chevrolet Canyon pickemup. Sam Verdreaux is not far behind, walking, of course; Sam lost his license to drive for good in ’07.

Gina takes a step backward, staring at Mel with wide eyes. Beside her, Alden Dinsmore hulks like a farmer-robot with a dead battery. “You guys are supposed to be police? Hel-lo ?”

“That rape stuff was nothing but a whore lie,” Frank says. “And you better quit yelling about it before you get arrested for disturbing the peace.”

“Fuckin right,” Georgia says. She has moved a little closer to Carter. He ignores her. He is surveying the crowd. And that’s what it is now. If fifty people make a crowd, then this is one. More coming, too. Carter wishes he had his gun. He doesn’t like the hostility he’s seeing.

Velma Winter, who runs Brownie’s (or did, before it closed), arrives with Tommy and Willow Anderson. Velma is a big, burly woman who combs her hair like Bobby Darin and looks like she could be the warrior queen of Dyke Nation, but she has buried two husbands and the story you can hear at the bullshit table in Sweet-briar is that she fucked them both to death and is looking for number three at Dipper’s on Wednesdays; that’s Country Karaoke Night, and draws an older crowd. Now she plants herself in front of Carter, hands on her meaty hips.

“Closed, huh?” she says in a businesslike voice. “Let’s see your paperwork.”

Carter is confused, and being confused makes him angry. “Back off, bitch. I don’t need no paperwork. The Chief sent us down here. The Selectmen ordered it. It’s gonna be a food depot.”

“Rationing? That what you mean?” She snorts. “Not in my town.” She shoves between Mel and Frank and starts hammering on the door. “Open up! Open up in there! ”

“Nobody home,” Frank says. “You might as well quit it.”

But Ernie Calvert hasn’t left. He comes down the pasta-flour-and-sugar aisle. Velma sees him and starts hammering louder. “Open up, Ernie! Open up!”

“Open up!” voices from the crowd agree.

Frank looks at Mel and nods. Together they grab Velma and muscle her two hundred pounds away from the door. Georgia Roux has turned and is waving Ernie back. Ernie doesn’t go. Numb fuck just stands there.

“Open up!” Velma bawls. “Open up! Open up!”

Tommy and Willow join her. So does Bill Wicker, the postman. So does Lissa, her face shining—all her life she has hoped to be part of a spontaneous demonstration, and here’s her chance. She raises a clenched fist and begins to shake it in time—two small shakes on open and a big one on up. Others imitate her. Open up becomes Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Now they are all shaking their fists in that two-plus-one rhythm—maybe seventy people, maybe eighty, and more arriving all the time. The thin blue line in front of the market looks thinner than ever. The four younger cops look toward Freddy Denton for ideas, but Freddy has no ideas.

He does, however, have a gun. You better fire it into the air pretty soon, Baldy, Carter thinks, or these people are gonna run us down.

Two more cops—Rupert Libby and Toby Whelan—drive down Main Street from the PD (where they’ve been drinking coffee and watching CNN), blowing past Julia Shumway, who is jogging along with a camera slung over her shoulder.

Jackie Wettington and Henry Morrison also start toward the supermarket, but then the walkie-talkie on Henry’s belt crackles. It’s Chief Randolph, saying that Henry and Jackie should hold their station at the Gas & Grocery.

“But we hear—” Henry begins.

“Those are your orders,” Randolph says, not adding that they are orders he is just passing on—from a higher power, as it were.

“Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP!” The crowd shaking fisted power-salutes in the warm air. Still scared, but excited, too. Getting into it. The Chef would have looked at them and seen a bunch of tyro tweekers, needing only a Grateful Dead tune on the soundtrack to make the picture complete.

The Killian boys and Sam Verdreaux are working their way through the crowd. They chant—not as protective coloration but because that crowd-molting-into-mob vibe is just too strong to resist—but don’t bother shaking their fists; they have work to do. No one pays them any particular mind. Later, only a few people will remember seeing them at all.

Nurse Ginny Tomlinson is also working her way through the crowd. She has come to tell the girls they are needed at Cathy Russell; there are new patients, one a serious case. That would be Wanda Crumley from Eastchester. The Crumleys live next to the Evanses, out near the Motton town line. When Wanda went over this morning to check on Jack, she found him dead not twenty feet from where the Dome cut off his wife’s hand. Jack was sprawled on his back with a bottle beside him and his brains drying on the grass. Wanda ran back to her house, crying her husband’s name, and she had no more than reached him when she was felled by a coronary. Wendell Crumley was lucky not to crash his little Subaru wagon on his way to the hospital—he did eighty most of the way. Rusty is with Wanda now, but Ginny doesn’t think Wanda—fifty, overweight, a heavy smoker—is going to make it.

“Girls,” she says. “We need you at the hospital.”

“Those are the ones, Mrs. Tomlinson!” Gina shouts. She has to shout to be heard over the chanting crowd. She’s pointing at the cops and beginning to cry—partly from fear and tiredness, mostly from outrage. “Those are the ones who raped her!”

This time Ginny looks beyond the uniforms, and realizes Gina’s right. Ginny Tomlinson isn’t afflicted with Piper Libby’s admittedly vile temper, but she has a temper, and there’s an aggravating factor at work here: unlike Piper, Ginny saw the Bushey girl with her pants off. Her vagina lacerated and swelled. Huge bruises on her thighs that couldn’t be seen until the blood was washed off. Such a lot of blood.

Ginny forgets about the girls being needed at the hospital. She forgets about getting them out of a dangerous and volatile situation. She even forgets about Wanda Crumley’s heart attack. She strides forward, elbowing someone out of her way (it happens to be Bruce Yardley, the cashier-cum -bagboy, who is shaking his fist like everyone else), and approaches Mel and Frank. They are both studying the ever more hostile crowd, and they don’t see her coming.

Ginny raises both hands, looking for a moment like the bad guy surrendering to the sheriff in a Western. Then she brings both hands around and slaps both young men at the same time. “You bastards !” she shouts. “How could you? How could you be so cowardly ? So catdirt mean ? You’ll go to jail for this, all of y —”

Mel doesn’t think, just reacts. He punches her in the center of her face, breaking her glasses and her nose. She goes stumbling backward, bleeding, crying out. Her old-fashioned RN cap, shocked free of the bobbypins holding it, tumbles from her head. Bruce Yardley, the young cashier, tries to grab her and misses. Ginny hits a line of shopping carts. They go rolling like a little train. She drops to her hands and knees, crying in pain and shock. Bright drops of blood from her nose—not just broken but shattered—begin falling on the big yellow RK of NO PARKING ZONE.

The crowd goes temporarily silent, shocked, as Gina and Harriet rush to where Ginny crouches.

Then Lissa Jamieson’s voice rises, a clear perfect soprano: “YOU PIG BASTARDS!”

That’s when the chunk of rock flies. The first rock-thrower is never identified. It may be the only crime Sloppy Sam Verdreaux ever got away with.

Junior dropped him off at the upper end of town, and Sam, with visions of whiskey dancing in his head, went prospecting on the east bank of Prestile Stream for just the right rock. Had to be big but not too big, or he wouldn’t be able to throw it with any accuracy, even though once—a century ago, it seems sometimes; at others it seems very close—he was the starting pitcher for the Mills Wildcats in the first game of the Maine state tourney. He had found it at last, not far from the Peace Bridge: a pound, pound and a half, and as smooth as a goose egg.

One more thing, Junior had said as he dropped Sloppy Sam off. It wasn’t Junior’s one more thing, but Junior did not tell Sam this any more than Chief Randolph had told Wettington and Morrison, who had ordered them to stay on station. Wouldn’t have been politic.

Aim for the chick. That was Junior’s final word to Sloppy Sam before leaving him. She deserves it, so don’t miss.

As Gina and Harriet in their white uniforms kneel beside the sobbing, bleeding RN on her hands and knees (and while everyone else’s attention is there too), Sam winds up just as he did on that long-ago day in 1970, lets fly, and throws his first strike in over forty years.

In more ways than one. The twenty-ounce chunk of quartz-shot granite strikes Georgia Roux dead in the mouth, shattering her jaw in five places and all but four of her teeth. She goes reeling back against the plate-glass window, her jaw sagging grotesquely almost to her chest, her yawning mouth pouring blood.

An instant later two more rocks fly, one from Ricky Killian, one from Randall. Ricky’s connects with the back of Bill Allnut’s head and knocks the janitor to the pavement, not far from Ginny Tomlinson. Shit! Ricky thinks. I was supposed to hit a fuckin cop! Not only were those his orders; it’s sort of what he has always wanted to do.

Randall’s aim is better. He nails Mel Searles square in the forehead. Mel goes down like a bag of mail.

There is a pause, a moment of indrawn breath. Think of a car teetering on two wheels, deciding whether or not to go over. See Rose Twitchell looking around, bewildered and frightened, not sure what’s happening, let alone what to do about it. See Anson put his arm around her waist. Listen to Georgia Roux howl through her hanging mouth, her cries weirdly like the sound the wind makes slipping across the waxed string of a tin-can mooseblower. Blood pours over her lacerated tongue as she hollers. See the reinforcements. Toby Whelan and Rupert Libby (he’s Piper’s cousin, though she doesn’t brag on the connection) are first to arrive on the scene. They survey it … then hang back. Next comes Linda Everett. She’s on foot with another part-time cop, Marty Arsenault, puffing along in her wake. She starts to push through the crowd, but Marty—who didn’t even put on his uniform this morning, just rolled out of bed and slipped into an old pair of bluejeans—grabs her by the shoulder. Linda almost breaks away from him, then thinks of her daughters. Ashamed of her own cowardice, she allows Marty to lead her over to where Rupe and Toby are watching developments. Of these four, only Rupe is wearing a gun this morning, and would he shoot? Balls he would; he can see his own wife in that crowd, holding hands with her mother (the mother-in-law Rupe wouldn’t have minded shooting). See Julia arrive just behind Linda and Marty, gasping for breath but already grabbing her camera, dropping the lenscap in her hurry to start shooting. See Frank DeLesseps kneel down beside Mel just in time to avoid another rock, which whizzes over his head and

shatters a hole in one of the supermarket doors.

Then …

Then someone yells. Who will never be known, not even the sex of the shouter will ever be agreed upon, although most think a woman, and Rose will tell Anson later she’s almost sure it was Lissa Jamieson.

“GET THEM!”

Someone else bellows “GROCERIES!” and the crowd surges forward.

Freddy Denton fires his pistol once, into the air. Then he lowers it, in his panic about to empty it into the crowd. Before he can, someone wrests it from his hand. He goes down, shouting in pain. Then the toe of a big old farmer’s boot—Alden Dinsmore’s—connects with his temple. The lights don’t go completely out for Officer Denton, but they dim considerably, and by the time they come back up to bright, the Great Supermarket Riot is over.

Blood seeps through the bandage on Carter Thibodeau’s shoulder and small rosettes are blooming on his blue shirt, but he is—for the time being, at least—unaware of the pain. He makes no attempt to run. He sets his feet and unloads on the first person to come into range. This happens to be Charles “Stubby” Norman, who runs the antique shop on the 117 edge of town. Stubby drops, clutching his spouting mouth.

“Get back, you fucks!” Carter snarls. “Back, you sons of bitches! No looting! Get back!”

Marta Edmunds, Rusty’s babysitter, tries to help Stubby, and gets a Frank DeLesseps fist to the cheekbone for her pains. She staggers, holding the side of her face and looking unbelievingly at the young man who has just hit her … and is then knocked flat, with Stubby beneath her, by a wave of charging would-be shoppers.

Carter and Frank start punching at them, but they land only three blows before they are distracted by a weird, ululating scream. It’s the town librarian, her hair hanging around her usually mild face. She’s pushing a line of shopping carts, and she might be screaming banzai. Frank leaps out of her way, but the carts take care of Carter, sending him flying. He waves his arms, trying to stay up, and might actually manage to do so, except for Georgia’s feet. He trips over them, lands on his back, and is trampled. He rolls over on his stomach, laces his hands over his head, and waits for it to be over.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 671