Chapter 12 #3
"Ashford," Isaiah said.
Liam went cold.
"What?"
"I took it off Calder's body," Isaiah said.
"The night the trapper killed him. When the town came apart and everybody was running and we slipped out into the dark, I went back into that room for thirty seconds, and I took the pistol off his belt, and I put it in my pack,
and I have carried it for two thousand miles and never told either of you."
Liam stared at him.
"That was four months ago," he said.
"Yes."
"Isaiah. That was four months ago. The trapper. The wolves. Ashford. The mountains. The marina." His voice was rising. "You had a loaded pistol when that trapper had me on my back in the snow and was pulling out a knife."
"Yes."
"So why didn't you use it?"
Isaiah looked up.
And his face was so full of shame that Liam physically flinched.
"Because I was afraid I'd hit you," Isaiah said.
The stove ticked.
"He was on top of you," Isaiah said. "He was on top of you and he had you by the coat and you were underneath him and I had never fired a gun in my life, Liam, not once, not ever, I'd only read the book."
His voice was breaking. "So I didn't take it out. I took out a knife instead, and I put it in his back, because a knife goes exactly where you put it."
Liam could not speak.
"And then afterward," Isaiah said, "when it was done, and I was sitting in the snow with the rock in my hands and I couldn't stop crying. I thought about telling you. And I couldn't. Because you'd have asked me why I didn't use it, and I'd have had to say because I wasn't sure,
and I could not stand for either of you to know that about me."
He wiped his face with the back of his wrist.
"And then it was a week," he said. "And then it was a month. And every day I didn't tell you, it got harder, and I told myself I was keeping it for an emergency, and Chloe went in the water at the marina and I still didn't take it out, because there were twelve of them and I was scared."
He set the pistol down on the blanket between them.
"And this morning a boy pointed a gun at a preacher," he said, "and I finally used it, and now Nell's dead anyway."
Liam reached out.
He picked up the M&P and he looked at it and he set it back down in front of his friend.
"Isaiah," he said.
"Don't."
"Isaiah, look at me."
Isaiah looked at him.
"You have been carrying that thing for four months," Liam said, "waiting to be sure, and this morning you were sure, and you did not hesitate for one single second."
"Nell still died."
"Nell died because a coward with a Beretta shot her in the back," Liam said.
"And she is the only one who died, and there were thirty guns on that wall, and the only reason there was not a massacre in that square is that the man who did it was on the ground before anybody else had time to decide anything."
Isaiah's face crumpled.
"You saved twenty-five people this morning," Liam said. "And you saved my life in a creek bed four months ago with a knife, because you were smart enough to know what you could and couldn't do, and I have never once thought less of you for anything."
He picked up the .40 and held it out, grip first.
"Put it on," he said. "Where I can see it. Where they can see it."
Isaiah took it.
He sat there a moment. And then he stood up and got his own belt, and Liam watched his friend, the fixer, the fat kid, the one the whole camp had said would be the first one cut when the food ran short, strap a pistol to his hip in the middle of a dead city.
"There," Isaiah said.
"How's it feel."
"Awful," Isaiah said.
"Good," Liam said.
They stood there in the lamplight.
And then, from the doorway, a voice said, "That's a very fine sermon on firearms, gentlemen, but I'd like you both to come outside."
James Wilford was standing in the dark.
He had not slept. His shirt was still stiff with a dead woman's blood and he had not changed it and Liam suspected he never would.
"What is it," Liam said.
"The door," James said.
"What about it?"
"Doyle's man is screaming for you," James said. "It's open."
Liam ran.
He went out of the fish stall and down the ruined stair three at a time with the Beretta banging on his hip and the Winchester on his back, and he came around the wall of stacked debris into a knot of Pike men holding lanterns, and they parted for him.
And there it was.
The steel door stood open eight inches.
Not swung wide. Just cracked, just off the seal, and there was light coming out of it, real light, a hard white electric light of a kind Liam had not seen in two years and had almost forgotten existed.
And propped in the gap, holding it open, so that it could not close, was a boot.
A woman's boot.
Chloe's.
And on the concrete in front of it, laid out flat, weighted at the corners with four stones, was a piece of oilcloth, and inside the oilcloth was a folded paper, and Liam knew that paper, he had watched a dying man's shaking hand draw it in a cabin in Minnesota.
The map.
And scrawled across the back of it, in charcoal, in enormous shaking letters, in Chloe Buck's own handwriting, were three words.
DON'T COME IN