Chapter 26
She tugged open the door to ground level and stepped out into the last minutes of a firefight. She looked to the right, away
from the lobby, toward the rear of the building. She saw four polo shirt soldiers gathered around the doors to the rear parking
lot. There was a fifth man, but he was dead, stretched out on his back behind them. It looked like he had been raked with
a claw the size of a loader’s bucket. One talon had carved him open from his right shoulder, down across his chest, to his
left rib cage. A second had split his gut. Wet loops of intestine spilled back between his feet, dangling like loose suspenders.
The dead man’s head was twisted toward her so he seemed to be staring down the hallway, and his mouth was open as if to scream
for help.
The rest of the polo shirts were very much alive, crouched to either side of the Plexiglas doors. She saw flat-top haircuts,
M4s, khaki vests, khaki trousers, and panicked expressions. Beyond them, through the doors, she could see what King Sorrow
had done to their friends.
There was a half-track out there, or what was left of one.
It was burning as if it had been struck with a missile.
The whole top half had been peeled off. A couple of men had got out but had made it only a few yards before falling over—their corpses were still on fire.
The line of Quonset huts had been destroyed.
One was ablaze. One had been crushed in on itself.
One looked as if it had been swept entirely away, cleared off the board by a swipe of God’s own hand.
As Donna watched, she heard someone scream outside—and then saw a man fall out of the night, dropped from a height of perhaps two hundred feet.
He split apart like a rotten fruit when he hit the ground: a human body compressing on itself, striking with enough force to become jellylike. She flinched back a few steps.
One of the polo shirt warriors looked back over her shoulder. It was the big woman with the meaty biceps, a white piece of
tape across the bridge of a recently broken nose. At first, in the dimness and drifting ash, she didn’t seem to recognize
Donna. Then she did.
“Bitch,” she said, an angry crease appearing between her eyebrows. “You fuckin’ bitch. You did this. You did this to us. You—”
But a sound was rising, drowning the big woman out.
It was a mechanical whirring that built and built, a noise like a great iron weight being swung around WHUP—whup—WHUP—whup—WHUP and Donna began to back toward the lobby while the big woman rose from a squat, lifting her M4, putting the stock against
her shoulder, WHUP-whup-WHUP-whup, and Donna stumbled, almost went down, steadied herself against the wall, and that terrible sound built and built, speeding
up as it came closer, and the big woman sighted down the barrel and WHUPwhupWHUPwhuWHUwhu
At the last instant, Donna turned and tried to run. She took three strides toward the lobby, waiting for bullets to stitch
across her back. She didn’t see the chopper plow into the side of the building behind her, but the shockwave lifted her off
the ground. For a moment her legs pedaled uselessly beneath her—she ran on air like a cartoon character—and then she dropped
and there was a shattering blast behind her. Glass and steel flew down the hallway in a burst of dazzling, razor-edged confetti.
Flame gushed behind it. It didn’t reach her, but she could feel its heat on the back of her thighs. A clap of pressure went
off in her ears and then all she could hear was a high-pitched whining sound.
It was a few moments before she could turn over.
She was covered in broken glass. She could see it falling off her in a sparkling haze but could not hear it tinkling against the floor.
When she looked back where the polo shirt soldiers had been, she saw the tail end of an Apache helicopter, the rotor still spinning, jutting down the hallway behind her.
The whole chopper had been spiraling around and around when it came down, struck the building, and liquefied the squad who had been sheltering to either side of the exit.
The front end of the Apache was on fire, rotor blades deformed and folded upward.
The tail had sliced through several walls, torn through the whole back half of the building, shredding drywall, tearing open the ceiling so it was possible to see the bundles of wires and PVC piping in the space between floors.
The still-spinning tail rotor pumped a steady stream of hot air and sparks down the hall.
She got up. One leg of her pajamas was open from ankle to hip and her left knee was bloody, glass stuck in it. She had blood
on the side of her face too. From her ear, maybe? She didn’t know. She tried to walk straight but her balance was wonky. She
staggered into a wall, bounced off, kept going.
Her unsteady route took her into a grand lobby, two stories high, with a brushed-chrome reception desk and a corpse in a polo
shirt hanging from a chandelier. The full-wall windows were blown in, glass glinting everywhere. Outside, she could see a
trio of burning jeeps. One of them appeared to have been picked up and dropped on its front end: the rear bumper pointed into
the night. It was hard to take it all in. Some details caught her attention and stayed in her mind, while her gaze passed
right over others (a black combat boot with a foot still in it and a bone jutting out, a smoldering office chair inexplicably
tossed out in the parking lot, a burning palm tree) without registering them.
There was a two-story building on the far side of the parking lot, a nondescript office made out of tan brick, the windows
dark, smashed in. Someone was firing from one of the shattered second-floor windows. Donna could distantly hear the pop-pop-pop
of the gun, but it was like hearing something through noise-canceling headphones. She could see the white flash of the muzzle
but not what it was shooting at. Something out of sight. Something in the air.
A Sheridan tank, modified for the desert, rumbled swiftly into view, treads frantically clanking, moving from left to right.
It made it about halfway across Donna’s field of view before a deluge of flame erupted from above and billowed over it.
Donna had never seen such a jet of flame.
It was a blinding rope of fire twenty feet wide.
The air quavered from the heat of it, turned the outside world into a rippling desert mirage.
The jet of fire poured down on the tank for a count of three before it was suddenly cut off and King Sorrow screamed again, the sound cutting right through the damage to her ears and making her nerve endings hum.
The light tank trundled another thirty feet, but it was drifting off course and slowing all the while. It was still on fire,
a bonfire on iron treads. Bullets went off inside it, a sound like a string of firecrackers erupting on Independence Day.
The tank finally ground to a relieved stop and a moment later something exploded inside it, lifting it off the ground and
dropping it again. An iron hatch fell with a clang fifty feet away, embedding itself a foot deep into the blacktop.
The man in the building across the street opened fire again. Donna had the dazed impression he was the last one fighting.
She couldn’t hear any other guns.
“Come on, you son-of-a-bitch!” Salem shouted from his position in the office building. “Come on and get a mouthful a this!” He loosed a fresh burst from his assault rifle.
A streetlight, thirty feet long, a great lance of chrome, was thrown like a spear from the night into that open second-floor
window. It impaled the whole building with a jarring slam, and the gunfire abruptly stopped.
The silence that followed was so deep, so intense, it stunned; another explosion would’ve been far less stunning.
King Sorrow gave a grinding, ugly shriek of satisfaction. Sparks whirled in the smoky night. By the time Donna made it to
the far side of the lobby to look outside, he was gone.
She climbed through a broken window and onto the asphalt. She stepped on a dead body and almost fell over, got her balance
back, and went on without looking back.
The night stank of burning kerosene and scorched metal.
A hot wind whipped at her hair. Beyond the central laboratory—the secret prison in which she had been held for over four months—Donna saw a curving wall of sandbags, about chest high.
The wall was on fire in places, smashed in at others.
Dead men hung over it or lay together in mounds.
Another Apache helicopter had been tossed into the side of a different two-story building made of beige bricks—the tail protruded into the night.
Out beyond the curving wall of sandbags was the nearly twenty-foot-high chain-link fence, with coils of barbed wire on top.
It had been flattened here and there, including the gate and a thirty-foot-wide section of fence on rails that could be opened
from a sentry booth. A motorboat had been dropped on the booth itself, flattening it entirely.
Beyond the smashed-down gate was a wide two-lane dirt causeway to the mainland, with seagrass and sand on either side, and
as she approached it, Donna caught a mouthful of fresh air: the cold, briny breeze running in off the Atlantic. I will live where I can see the ocean, she thought to herself. I will live the rest of my life where I can smell this smell.
As she walked toward the fence she saw headlights approaching. She was out in the open, halfway between the fence and the
wall of sandbags, and had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. She was too tired for hiding anyway. She could hardly stay on her
feet but had one hand ready to reach for the King, if she needed to. She swayed, nearly overcome by lightheadedness, but Van
steadied her. She rested her head on his shoulder, even shut her eyes for a moment. Then she remembered Van was dead and jerked
her head upright, came out of her waking doze.
The headlights brightened and came closer, and through her injured eardrums she could hear music. A couple of guitar-slingers
were dueling with one another while Geddy Lee produced a dragon shriek of his own over a jaunty seventies beat. Or at least
she thought it was Rush—it might’ve been Boston. They all sounded the same to her. Van would’ve known. She felt herself relaxing,
going almost boneless as she limped on toward the gates. The approaching vehicle passed under a streetlamp and then she knew
who it was for sure. She had been in that car often enough, buckled into the passenger seat of Llewellyn’s cherry Caddy convertible.
It drove rattling over the collapsed gate and right up to her, and before her knees could give out, Colin was out from behind
the steering wheel to catch her. Firelight reflected off the polished-looking surface of his bald dome. He put his arms around
her and she rested her head on his chest, limp as a raincoat.
“It’s all right,” Colin promised her. “It’s all right now. Are you ready to go home?”
“Van—” she choked.
“I know. I’ve been reading their emails. I know all about it. We’re going home now. To The Briars. No one can touch you there.
No one is going to touch you ever again, my love.”
The causeway was just over a mile long, and she was almost asleep in the passenger seat when they reached the mainland . . .
but she lifted herself up when Colin slowed and then stopped the Caddy and rolled down his window.
There was a black Porsche 911 pulled over on the side of the road, pointed back toward the compound. Beyond the Porsche was
a sign: cherokee island federal virology research and response center—authorized personnel only.
Mr. Francis climbed out from behind the wheel of his 911 and stood in the open driver’s door, wearing a bomber jacket. He
looked toward Colin, clocked Donna in the passenger seat.
“That car suits you, Donna,” Francis said. “So does freedom. What happened to Valentine in there?”
“Me,” Donna said. Francis nodded and then stared toward the red haze of sparks and smoke where the lab had been.
“Paul,” Colin said. “Paul Follett.”
Mr. Francis slowly turned his head once more and looked impassively back at him. “You know my name then?”
“For a few months now, yes. I’m Colin Wren—so now you know mine. If you didn’t already. Give me a call sometime?” He put his
thumb and pinkie finger to the side of his face, miming a telephone. “We’ve got a lot to talk about. How this is going to
work from here on out. Who’s going to report to who. What will be done to make amends for this—this—foolish and destructive
waste of my time and my friend’s life.”
Mr. Francis nodded again, as if all this struck him as perfectly reasonable.
“One more thing,” Colin said. “We want the body back. Donovan’s body. So we can put him in the ground properly. I expect the
coffin to arrive at the Portland Jetport in Maine by Monday night. Let us bury our boy . . . or you’re going to wind up burying
a whole bunch more of yours.” And at that he stopped smiling.