John Zandt carefully traced his way into the darkness, through a basement that felt like everywhere he had been in the last three years. There were bays in this section too but they were smaller and full of the lost and forgotten and not-needed-anymore. It was quiet and damp and cold and neglected and felt more like a forest than anything man had made.
He stopped in the centre of the aisle. Forty yards away he could see a dim, milky light, filtering down from some dirty glass pane. Presumably there was a way out there, an emergency-access stairway to the outside world. If so, it was possible Paul had already made his way up it. But John did not think so. He could feel him nearby. He had always known it would come to this, known since the day the Upright Man had taken his daughter from him and destroyed everything he had considered to be his life. He had known that, unless someone took him down first, it would end this way. That the two of them would meet, and leave only one. Or maybe none.
And so he did not feel afraid, or unhappy, or as if anything worthwhile was about to end. Sometimes a death is the only viable answer to a question you never actually heard. You just have to hope it is the death of someone else, and not your own.
It was going to have to be trial and error, and the time was now. He heard Ward shooting in the other section and the sound of a strange impact. Time was getting on.
So he walked up to the first bay and fired into it.
The windshield took a lot of punishment. It took several shots to get beyond its first bulletproof shatter and make a hole.
But the bomb did not go off.
I heard the sound of shooting from down in the darkness. John sounded like he was methodically making some kind of progress deeper into the basement.
And so I climbed up onto the hood and pulled off my coat and started shoving at the glass with my hands, using the fabric to protect me. I pulled until there was a big enough hole to lower myself through and I went straight in, slashing myself on every side rather than take the risk of landing with an impact. But Nina was there, in the back, and I got through to her and kissed her once, hard, in case that was all we had - and then I untied her hands and feet and started pulling her out back the way I had come. She was vague and very pale and moving awkwardly from being in twisted positions for too long, and every moment was backlit with the knowledge that it could be the one that the question of how the locks were wired became irrelevant as someone, somewhere, pressed a button. It didn't matter. I hauled Nina through the windshield and out over the hood and cut myself all over again. I tried to keep her from the sharp edges but the shards got her too. We slid together off the car and fell onto the ground and still the car didn't go off.
I got to my feet and pulled her up with me.
'John?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'Is the bomb on a timer?'
'Paul's got the trigger.'
'Then Nina, we've got to go.'
'Okay,' she said.
I reached in the pockets of the remains of my coat and found another gun. Loaded it. Gave it to her.
'Can you run?'
'I can try.'
'Then let's move.'
I wrapped my arm around her back so I would be between her and the gunman and then pulled us into a run straight across the central aisle. The guy down the end fired at us but I fired back and then we were in the opposite bay.
I helped Nina to the back of it and opened the door and ran straight into the passageway and right down to the end - as quickly as I could, in the hope we'd get there before the shooter decided to run across and be in the bay when we arrived. I kicked open the door Zandt and I had come through and into that first bay. I made sure we were flush against the left wall, cutting out his angle. Waited a second for Nina to get back her breath.
'Okay,' I said. 'This is where we just have to do it.'
She smiled. 'Always is.'
And we ran out shooting.
When he was well over halfway down, John heard a sound from the last bay on the left. Something like a desk or chair, scraping along a concrete floor, accidentally bumped by someone refining his position in the dark. Paul knew what John was doing. He knew he was on the way, working through the bays one by one, emptying half a clip into each. He knew that John would not be turning back. Paul was getting ready for him.
John wondered whether the man felt any fear at all, and suspected probably not. If he did, he might make a break for that ladder, might try to get out of this place and back into the air. In that case, John would nail him. If Paul was without fear, and waiting until the very end, then it was in the hands of whatever negligent spirits nodded and dozed at the tiller of this world. Spirits that had let Karen die but which had also let John find the Upright Man again. Spirits who either didn't care, or were obsessive about never playing favourites.
John reloaded once more. He closed his eyes for a second, and thought of certain people and places and times. In the background he heard the sound of Ward firing his own weapon, a long and sustained burst of shots which sounded further away than before, and he hoped that this would turn out to be a good thing.
Then he walked on to the last bay.
'Hey, John,' said a voice in the darkness. 'Got your daughter in here with me.'
And after that it was just guns talking.
Nina got the shooter, I think. One of us did, anyhow. I saw him spin and fall before I realized there was nothing flying past us any more.
Nina stumbled and nearly fell and I got a better hold on her and dragged her faster towards the sloping access ramp. Though it was uphill the light seemed to pull us, as if we were falling up a waterfall.
When we came into the open air and the area behind the school I started shouting and waving my free arm. It took a moment before anyone understood what I was trying to say - but then it passed through them quickly and everyone broke out of their fire-drill formation and went running out the gates at either side. It was like watching a wall of glass shatter sideways. Slow, and then very, very fast.
As soon as I knew they were going, all of them, and quickly, I concentrated on getting Nina out the nearest gate. She was moving better already and I saw her glance across at all the other people and wonder if she shouldn't be doing something, as if this was her responsibility, and so I put my hand in the small of her back and shoved her. We ran out through the gate and into the street, across it and into a road on the other side.
We turned then and looked back at the school. Kids and teachers were still streaming across the road but there was no one left in the area on the other side of the fence. The buildings looked to me like balloons, expanded to the limits of their endurance.
'We don't know,' Nina said. 'John could have...'
Then it went off.
It was as if the whole world shook, like someone kicked the planet against a wall.
There seemed to be two explosions, one a fraction of a second after the other. The area at the back of the school erupted straight up into the air, at the same time as every window in the school was blown out. The glass had just started to fly when the roof and upper floors collapsed and blew out at the same time, destruction in all directions at once.
People who had still been running in the street behind us turned to stare and then started to back up again, and turn and run, as brick and wood and glass and earth and fire began to rain down. I pushed myself up against the wall of a building with Nina, trying to get shelter, and realized she was shouting something at me.
'Phone,' she was saying. 'Give me your phone.'
I handed it to her as the earth seemed to shake again. The school's tower dropped like a slow and irrevocable hammer, adding to a huge plume of smoke that had started to rise into the sky over the shrouded and collapsing remains of the school buildings, coalescing as if with dark intent, as if it was forming into a face. People were still running past us in the street, white-faced except where the blood of fresh injuries had started to run. The world sounded like thunder laced with screams.
'I can't get anything,' Nina said. She jabbed at a series of buttons, tried again.
'Who are you calling?'
She just grabbed my arm and pulled me back up the street towards the school. I ran with her against the flow of crying children. Fires had burst into twenty-foot waves across the whole school, new ones following them into life effortlessly, leaping out from nothing as if touched into being by somebody's hand. It was scorching from a hundred feet away.
'Where's your car?'
I pointed left and we ran along the back of the school, dodging piles of burning debris. Dust and hot ash had started to snow down. We made it to the end of the block and ran up the street past the side of the school. The trees that surrounded it were all on fire. There was a long, squealing groan as some other part of the building collapsed. I couldn't understand why the earth still seemed to shudder unless the movement was in my own head.
We ran past the big old church to the top of the street, to the road that ran over the hill and past the front of the school down into Thornton, and we stopped. Our steps faltered, and finally we were still.
We turned around, slowly, looking down over the town, and I understood why it felt as if the explosion was still going on. It was.
The whole town was on fire.
Columns of smoke rose on all sides and in every direction. I ran down the street until I could see past the curve. The police station was gone. The historic district was in flames. When I turned in the other direction I saw a huge spilling thundercloud pouring up from the direction of the Holiday Inn.
I saw Nina still trying to get a call through to someone, somewhere, trying to talk to authorities who were no longer there to talk to. I kept turning, not knowing when to stop, and saw a huge field of fire joining the sky from the direction of Raynor's Wood.
Two seconds later we were blown halfway across the road when the church exploded into a blizzard of joyous stone.
Sheffer It is cold now. We are back in Patrice's spare cabin, hidden in the forest. We have been here nearly three weeks. In that time winter has come down out of the mountains, creeping closer every night as we sleep. The time for eating on the porch is long gone, but we still spend some evenings down by the lake. We sit and look out over the icy water, watching dark clouds reflected from above. We sit close together, but we don't usually talk very much.
Nina is out there right now, waiting. I am standing at the window watching her. I am not making dinner.
We're going to eat out.
I follow news coverage of the aftermath of events in Thornton very closely. It is impossible to miss. Many days there is no other news. Estimates of the number of dead still vary so widely as to be meaningless. It is certainly well over a thousand, and it seems inconceivable it will not end up far higher than that. Individual explosive devices are now known to have been left in the police station, the church, the school, the Starbucks, the Holiday Inn, the Renee's, the kindergarten, the fire station, two restaurants in the historic district, the main grocery market, the Radio Shack of the strip mall on the road to Owensville, the public library and the Masonic hall. Amongst others. One was also left in the Mayflower bar: Hazel, Lloyd and Gretchen died, along with everyone else inside. Diane Lawton died with them, having stopped by for a coffee after work to prove to herself she could do this without it turning into a full evening drink. Maybe she could have. Maybe not. The receptionist I scared at the Holiday Inn died, along with the seven FBI agents using the hotel as a base, and a young guy I briefly met when he came to check the minibar in Nina's room the second day I was there. He was hopeless at what seemed like a very simple task, but he was personable and had a nice manner. Both qualities are gone now, persisting only in my memory. The number and nature of the other dead defies comprehension. I suspect that Thornton is a place not unused to such things, and something Nina told me, a thing Paul said to her, seems to suggest I might be right. It may have started there long ago. It may always have been a place where people died.
We did what we could, that afternoon and night. We ran down into town and tried to help people out of buildings, to pull them out of the way of the fires which had started to burn everywhere. Everything broke down. Every system, every valued way of being. It was an endless hell. The town dissolved into a fragmented mass of burned and bleeding individuals trying to escape in every direction at once. Even those who wanted to be heroes discovered their nerve deserting them, found themselves dropping people they'd started to help and running away instead. There were no policemen left. There was no fire service. Fires spread quickly, with no one to put them out. Soon it was impossible to tell where they had even started, where the initial explosions had been. It all just went up together.
The best I can do is tell myself that we got everyone out of the school. There were a score of injuries from falling debris, and a heart attack, but it would otherwise have been far, far worse. Hundreds worse. Some days that helps. We went back twice more and tried to find John. We did not find him. You simply couldn't get close enough.
There was no organized assistance until people started making it to Thornton from neighbouring towns, and the eventual arrival of the army. They came in droves, and they came with guns. No one was sure who to trust or who the enemy was. For a time it seemed like everyone might be. In the meantime we helped try to get people to safety. Some of them were saved. Many were not.
We did what we could until we were falling down with exhaustion and the relief had finally arrived. Then we found my car and drove. We drove all the way back up here, over several days, through a country in which many roads were blocked and all air travel was grounded, where every television screen showed one picture, where everybody in every town was wondering if they were next.
So far, nobody else has been. But how long will that last? Nobody knows.
No one has any idea how a terrorist group managed to infiltrate a town and plant so many bombs without anyone being aware of what was going on. Conspiracy theories abound. I see occasional reports of two men, or sometimes one man and a woman, allegedly seen on school grounds immediately prior to and after the explosion there. Some say they issued a warning, but more often it is claimed that they were carrying guns and shouting slogans common to Islamic extremism. The remains of an unknown man were found in the trunk of the remains of a cruiser parked right next to the church, burned out as the fire from there spread. It's believed on the basis of his uniform that he had been a policeman, though due to the confusion and the high number of fatalities amongst members of local law enforcement, this has not yet been confirmed. There are many, many bodies. It is going to take a long time to work out who every one is, or was.
But one has been identified already, of course.
In the debris of a cupboard on the second floor of one of the school buildings, firemen came across the scant remains of a young man. Dental records have confirmed this to be the person responsible for what is now regarded as a diversionary attack on a mall in Los Angeles, on the previous morning.
His name was Lee John Hudek.
It is now a name which no one will ever forget. Even if his remains had not been discovered, his face was already familiar, one which local survivors report seeing around town on the day of the attack. Positive IDs from a score of reliable witnesses put him in the grocery market and strip mall, the Starbucks, near the church, and at a number of other locations which were later destroyed in the initial explosions - apparently accompanied at these places by a short, Arabic-looking man. He was also seen by a number of pupils at the school, to some of whom he gave drugs. It has become obvious to everyone that this behaviour was a cover for planting the devices which he and his associates deployed. Hudek is also believed to be responsible for the murder of a former friend, one Bradley Metzger, whose body was found in a warehouse in the Valley. The deaths of another young man from their circle, and a young woman, are considered to be connected, though no one seems certain how. Testimony concerning an overheard conversation, submitted by local businessman Emilio Hernandez, has led to the working assumption that they were co-conspirators disposed of by Hudek before the final attack.
One thing is for sure. There is now a public face for what happened at Thornton. No one will ever be able to see behind it, to wonder quite how this thing came to be. There may be something else going on. There probably always is.
Ryan and Lisa Hudek have appeared on television on a number of occasions, carefully shielded by lawyers at press conferences. There is a degree of hatred towards them, but many Americans seem to feel they are victims too, loyal citizens who lost their only child to a foreign darkness none of us can understand. Neither Hudek has any idea why their son might have become involved in a terrorist organization. His mother has tearfully confessed that Lee John had been behaving oddly over recent months, and recently admitted that on one occasion she heard him become heated in a discussion of certain episodes of recent US foreign policy, characterizing them as 'acts of war'.
But they have no explanations. Ryan Hudek in particular appears numb.
Julia Gulicks is still alive, barely. She's never going to wake up, but as she confessed to two murders they'll keep her going as long as they can. They need someone or something to stand trial eventually. I wonder if sometimes across her cloudy sleep comes the memory of an afternoon when her father shambled drunkenly to the top of the stairs of her old home in Dryford: and I wonder if in her endless dreams another little girl comes to visit, one who would have been a few years younger than her back then, but who evidently never left their street.
Because a man called James Kyle was apprehended, in the back yard of a house he had occupied before abruptly leaving Dryford twelve years before. It was believed at that time he had left town with his wife and young daughter, though this has now been thrown into serious doubt. On the afternoon of the attack on Thornton, a neighbour reported a man behaving strangely in the garden of the old Kyle house. He made this observation from the road and did not get close enough to detect the presence of a dead FBI agent in the long grass. If he had, and reported it, it's possible that police would have made it to the scene more quickly: though more likely not, as when they finally arrived in the area there was far more pressing business elsewhere. On that particular afternoon dead law enforcement officials were commonplace. When someone eventually responded they found a badly wounded man in his sixties sitting by a shallow hole he had dug with his hands in the corner of the property. He was extremely distressed, and holding the bones of what appeared to be an eight-year-old child.
Matters in the Gulicks case have been somewhat complicated by the fact Kyle is now claiming responsibility for the two dead men discovered around Thornton over the previous week. While he is unable to provide any corroborating evidence for this, he firmly maintains they are his fault. He also claims there are other bodies to be found in the local area. Very many bodies.
Nobody is deeply interested in that side of things just at the moment. Thornton has become enough of a town of the dead without going back a decade to find more. So for the time being Julia lies in the hospital, marking time, neither guilty nor innocent, neither dead nor alive. I am careful not to mention her name to Nina.
Charles Monroe has been buried, one of many. We sent flowers.
I have no idea if Paul is still alive. I know that when Nina and I left the basement of Thornton school I could still hear the sound of John hunting for him. It's very hard to imagine how Paul could have escaped in time to avoid the detonation he triggered, sending a signal not just to the explosives in the back of the black car in the basement, but also all the other devices planted around the town.
If he died, I'm sure he died happy. The Straw Men got their day, spilled the blood of many angels. Nobody is talking about anything apart from what happened in Thornton. Somehow the fact that the attack was explicitly designed to destroy a small town, that it was directed at where normal people live, seems to make it much harder for everyone to take. This was not an attack against a symbol, or some place you only see on the television. This darkness came and found people where they lived. The fact the terrorists destroyed a place which had a significant FBI presence at the time just means the public at large is even less convinced of the government's ability to protect them, regardless of increasingly strident daily statements on the subject. Maybe that was intentional too, along with having members of the media already in place so they could show the horror right from the beginning so no one could possibly be mistaken as to how it had been. Was this good fortune, or were these parts of a big puzzle put meticulously in place? With Paul, you just don't know. As James Kyle told Nina, he was a forward-thinking boy.
I have tried calling John's phone. Every day, and I know Nina has too. All we get is a dead tone. He was never good at returning calls, but at least you could leave a message.
Probably in time we will stop trying. You have to stop, in the end.
Agent Nina Baynam is provisionally listed as a fatality in Thornton, given that she had already been missing for several days when the attack took place. She has not yet decided whether to contradict that assumption.
In the meantime we help Patrice and other neighbours with manual work. I don't let Nina do heavy lifting. Unless she insists. We have quiet dinners down in Sheffer, and sometimes get a little drunk over the pool table in Bill's bar. We sit close on the bench out by the lake, or in the chairs inside our cabin.
And we spend time with each other.
In not a single report have I seen a reference to a dead CIA agent found in a coffee house restroom. The Starbucks was burned to the ground. In photos you can't even tell where it was. Carl Unger's remains are likely mixed with those of the others who died there, returned to dust in the hidden undertow of history.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the story he told us, trying to conceive of it as a possible truth. The problem is that I don't believe in Edens. I don't believe in hells either. They're both attempts to explain who we are, and who we are is not a question: it is a fact. The dark kernel at our centre is a death dream, and individual killers are merely its isolated priests. Every now and then some lunatic will attempt genocide on our behalf and the world will quiver for fifty years in his wake; in the meantime the lone gunmen are quietly getting the job done. Once in a while we catch one, and kill or incarcerate him or her or them; there will always be others. There will always be death because it is in our hearts. We do not fight wars and kill our neighbours and destroy other species because we are stupid or short-sighted, or at least not only because of that. We were the first animal to comprehend death, and we feel a need to demonstrate we are not powerless in its face. Maybe our thirty-thousand-year murder spree is an act of defiance, an attempt to own our nemesis: we know death is coming for us and so sometimes we take the fight to it. Or perhaps Paul and his kind are right, and there is nothing wrong with it. Maybe killing is what we do.
But that is not all we are; and death is never simple. What would I have done if I had been given a straight choice between Nina and the school?
Don't ask me that.
Right now, I do not know what to think. But I don't believe, as Carl seemed to, that history repeats itself. There is no cycle. History is permanently doing the same thing. Sometimes we don't notice what's going on, that's all - and sometimes we have no choice but to see. Every attack kills the innocent. Every counterattack does the same. We cower in the centre of a circle of spite, not knowing which way to turn. Killers of all denominations and faiths and eras stand around the edges of our world, firing inwards. They see only the people on the opposite side of the circle, their chosen foes, the demonized others. The rest of us are invisible to them.
How unreal we must seem, we normal folk, how lacking of their bright cleansing fire. How unheroic we are, in our small-minded wish to be allowed to get on with the short lives our various gods have allotted us; in our simple desire to last our span without being shot or starved or blown to pieces over vested interests or ideals about which we neither know nor care.
Yet still they kill us. It's how they live, and it's what they do. We must resist them, always and forever. We must find a louder way of saying no.
Three days ago, one question at least was answered. For two weeks after we got back up here, Nina suffered intermittent periods of nausea. She remained quite weak and found herself prone to headaches. We hoped these were merely a temporary result of her incarceration in an old vehicle leaking fumes, but when they failed to fade, I eventually persuaded her to go see a doctor.