“Nooo! Tori? Tori?” Greg wailed as Kincaid wrapped him up, and then there were more hands and other men bearing him to the cold stone as Greg thrashed. “No no no!”
And in all of that, there was one thing more: the moment doddering old Henry stumped up the altar to stare down at the Changed boy, who was, miraculously, still alive.
“Jesus Lord,” Henry piped, his high voice cutting above the gabble. “It’s Ben Stiemke.”
52
“What?” At first, Greg wasn’t sure the voice, so dead and flat, was his. Still huddled in the circle of Kincaid’s arms on cold, blood-smeared stone, Greg felt eight years old again, a little boy waiting for the adults to make everything all right, and he had never missed his father quite so much. “Stiemke? Like on the Council?”
“Holy shit, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Pru said, his rifle still trained on the dying boy. “I thought all the kids from Rule were dead.”
“Oh Lord,” Kincaid groaned in an undertone. His face was ashen. “You sons of bitches, you did it. You really did it.”
“Did what?” Greg asked as Sarah staggered toward them through the crowd. Her right pant leg was sodden, and tears had eaten tracks through the blood caked on her cheeks. “Doc, what are you talking about?”
Before Kincaid could respond, Henry said, in his clear bugle, “Yup, that’s Ben, all right. Known him since he was a little guy, oh . . . yay high.” Henry patted the air down around his knees. “Recognize him anywhere on account of that bad case of the acne.” Henry looked down the aisle toward the Council members, who’d worked their way through the swell of people crowding into the sanctuary. None of the Council wore their robes, and while Yeager was in the lead, only Ernst, broad-chested and very tall, with a still-substantial gut in spite of rationing, retained even a vestige of authority. Stiemke, a withered little man, blind in one eye, only cringed alongside Ernst. Greg couldn’t decide if Stiemke was in shock or trying to hide.
“Mr. Stiemke?” Henry called. “This is your grandson, isn’t it?”
Yeager spoke for the quailing Stiemke. “Yes, that’s Ben.” Yeager’s tone was even enough, but his skin was bleached so white his bald head looked like a cue ball. Without his robes, Yeager looked like a homeless person in mismatched socks, sagging trousers, and that red-checked flannel. Yeager’s eyes, usually so bird-bright with calculation, only looked furtive and a little frightened, like those of a mouse that can’t decide if running will only make the cat spring faster. “Obviously, Ben got away, a fact of which we were unaware.”
“Obviously? Got away? Unaware?” Rifle held high, Jarvis shouldered his way past the others to stand in the center aisle. Any resemblance to a turkey was gone. Jarvis looked more like a buzzard. “You run this place for decades, make all the decisions. You tell us, grown men, to follow orders from kids”—Jarvis jerked his head down at Greg—“but we do it because we are loyal and God-fearing, and now you say you didn’t know this boy had gotten away?”
Peter. The realization broke over Greg in a kind of icy wash. He said they rounded up all the Changed and shot them; that no one got away. Greg’s eyes drifted to the dying boy. So Peter would’ve known Ben wasn’t dead.
“Where I was from, before Rule? Those kids always came back,” someone in the crowd said. Murmurs of assent rippled through the rest of the men, and now Greg saw more than a few women had filtered in, too, armed with baseball bats, shotguns, like a village mob from an old black-and-white monster movie. He spotted one woman—Travers?—her hair a gray fury, clutching a Warren hoe, its blade tapering to a wicked point. “Lot of ’em hunted in packs. It was one of the reasons you said we’d be safer here, ’cause all your kids were dead.”
“So how that little monster’s alive in the first place is what I want to know.” It was Travers, the stormy woman with the hoe, which she now shook at Stiemke. “What’d you do, only kill kids like my Lee? Because we’re not important enough? Did you spare this monster because he’s yours?”
“Hell with that,” someone else rumbled. “How many others like that one are there? Because if one kid got away—”
“Or they let him get away!” another person shouted.
“There got to be others.” Travers brandished her hoe like a spear. “So where are they?”
“Where the hell do you think?” Jarvis aimed a look of black thunder at Stiemke. “They’ve been out there all this time, maybe even close by. But why? You said you were doing God’s work, taking our grandkids, ending their torment. What did you do, you and that son of a bitch, Peter, and Chris . . .”
“My grandson knew nothing about this,” Yeager said, and Greg thought from his tone that this was the truth. Yet Ernst remained silent, not a flicker of emotion on his bullish features.
But Peter knew. Greg saw Sarah study Ernst’s face, then drop her eyes as the first fingers of scarlet crept up her neck. A tear splashed onto a cheek, which she knuckled away. Greg gave her free hand a small squeeze, but she didn’t look up or acknowledge him in any way. Sarah knows it now, too. Peter was in on it all along. Letting some of the Changed get away might even have been his idea. Peter was the one who’d told each patrol where to go, and when. Because he knew where the Changed were most likely to be at any given time?
And Jarvis had said maybe even close by . . . Changed, in the Zone? Of course. Now that someone had finally said it, this made perfect sense.
“So did Chris find out?” Travers, the woman with the hoe, shouted. “Is that why you got rid of him, said he organized an ambush when he didn’t?”
“Chris ran.” Yeager said the words like a curse. “He betrayed us.”
“Like you betrayed us?” Until the words hung in the air, Greg hadn’t known they were on his tongue. He tottered to his feet. “You didn’t give Chris a choice. He denied it, but you’d already decided. No matter what he said, you’d have sent him to the prison house.”
“Because he defied me.” Yeager seemed to be getting some of his old fire back. His coal-black eyes shifted to Jarvis. “You owe Rule your life. Don’t dare to judge—”
“Shut up. Let’s judge you for a change.” Jarvis jabbed a finger into Yeager’s chest, hard enough to rock the old man back a stumbling step. “You lied. I don’t know how many of our grandkids you let go, but that abomination on the altar is a councilman’s grandson. You had to know. Does that mean our grandchildren are still alive? Why would you do that?”
“So what are we going to do about it now?” Travers’s wrinkled face was the color of a prune. She jabbed the point of her hoe at Ben. “What are we going to do with that?”
Uh-oh. Greg rifled a warning look to Pru. The other boy gave a small nod and took a step back from Ben Stiemke, who had gone still and watchful, his lips frothy with blood bubbles.
“Leave him be,” Stiemke wheezed. His face was contorted, his blind left eye as milky as a white marble. His remaining eye, with its faded gray iris, was runny, the lower lid sagging like melted candle wax to reveal pale pink flesh. “Let the poor boy die in peace.”
“Peace?” The way Travers’s hands were wrapped around the hoe’s wooden handle reminded Greg of the fighting sticks Naruto used in Ultimate Ninja Storm. “Boy? It’s an abomination!” she shrieked, and darted at Stiemke. With a sudden, violent thrust, she whipped around the blunt handle of the hoe like a bat. There was a muted thuck. Stiemke’s head snapped back so quickly it was a wonder his neck didn’t break. A fan of blood unfurled as Stiemke let out a gargled ugh and dropped to the stone floor.
“No!” Yeager squawked, at the same moment that Kincaid bawled, “My God, what are you doing?”
“Doc, no!” Greg grabbed Kincaid’s arm as the doctor started forward. “Don’t.”
“Listen to the kid. Stay out of this, Kincaid,” Jarvis warned.
“Peace? I’ll showing you fucking peace!” Travers aimed a kick at Stiemke, who was on his belly, moaning, trying to eel away. This time, the crunch and crack as Stiemke’s nose shattered and his neck kinked too far to the right weren’t muted. Blood burst over Stiemke’s mouth and chin, but his neck did not roll back. It stayed exactly where it was, the ear neatly cupped over the hump of Stiemke’s left shoulder. Stiemke’s body went as limp and flaccid as a drowned worm.
For a moment, there was that kind of stunned, surprised, soundless hiccup Greg knew well from years of school lunches and dropped cafeteria trays, when everyone was craning a look, getting ready to burst into laughter and shouts of duuude!
She killed him. Greg couldn’t tear his gaze from the buggy white marble of Stiemke’s dead eye. He felt his legs try to turn to water. She broke his neck, she—
Pulling away from Greg’s suddenly boneless fingers, Kincaid squatted alongside Stiemke. He put a finger under Stiemke’s ear, then raised his stricken face to the woman. “Do you realize what you’ve done? What you’re doing? You think this will make things right? Killing each other isn’t the way to solve this!”
“Yeah? Well, it’s a goddamned good start.” Travers hawked out a rope of spit. Half splashed Kincaid’s hand; the rest splatted Stiemke’s glassy cheek to slither in a snot-trail onto the old man’s lips.
That seemed to trigger something, as if the crowd was a coiled spring under more pressure than it could bear. In the next instant, what seemed like a solid shock wave of screaming people surged forward, some stampeding for the altar, others moving to surround Yeager and the rest of the Council. Greg felt hands plant themselves on his chest as Jarvis gave a mighty shove. “Out of my way, boy, outta my way!” Jarvis bellowed as Greg staggered back. “I’m done! You hear me? From now on, you’re taking orders from me, boy, from me!”