Tonight, however, she was curious about the boy who had jumped from the train. She decided to drift on over to the sheriff’s station and see if she could find anything out. They probably wouldn’t let her in the front, but sometimes Frankie Potter or Billy Wicklow came out into the alley, where she kept her air mattress and spare supplies, to have a smoke. They might tell her what the kid’s story was if she asked nice. After all, she had cleaned him up and comforted him some, and that gave her a rooting interest.

A path from her tent near the warehouses ran through the woods on the west side of town. When she went to the alley to spend the night on her air mattress (or inside, if it was chilly—they let her do that now, thanks to helping Tim with his go-slow banner), she followed the path as far as the backside of the Gem, the town’s movie theater, where she had seen many interesting movies as a younger (and slightly saner) woman. Ole Gemmie had been closed for the last fifteen years, and the parking lot behind it was a wilderness of weeds and goldenrod. She usually cut through this and went up the old theater’s crumbling brick flank to the sidewalk. The sheriff’s station and the DuPray Mercantile were on the other side of Main Street, with her alley (so she thought of it) running between them.

This evening, just as she was about to leave the path for the parking lot, she saw a vehicle turn down Pine Street. It was followed by another . . . and another. Three vans, going just about nose to tail. And although twilight was advancing, they didn’t even have their parking lights on. Annie stood in the trees, watching, as they entered the lot she had been about to cross. They turned as if in formation, and stopped in a row, with their noses pointed back toward Pine Street. Almost like they might need to make a quick getaway, she thought.

The doors opened. Some men and women got out. One of the men was wearing a sportcoat and nice-looking trousers with a crease in them. One of the women, older than the others, was wearing a dark red pant suit. Another was wearing a dress with flowers on it. That one had a purse. The other four women didn’t. Most of them were wearing jeans and dark shirts.

Except for the sportcoat man, who just stood back and watched, they moved quickly and purposefully, like folks on a mission. To Annie they looked sort of military, and this impression was confirmed in short order. Two of the men and one of the younger women opened the back doors of the vans. The men took a long steel box from one of them. From the back of another van came holster-belts, which the woman handed around to everyone except for the sportcoat man, another man with short blond hair, and the woman in the flower-dress. The steel box was opened, and from this came a couple of long guns that were not hunting rifles. They were what Annie Ledoux thought of as school shooter guns.

The woman in the flower-dress put a small handgun in her purse. The man beside her stuck a bigger one in his belt at the small of his back, then dropped the tail of his shirt over it. The others holstered up. They looked like a raiding party. Hell, they were a raiding party. Annie didn’t see how they could be anything else.

A normally wired person—one who didn’t get her nightly news from George Allman, for instance—might have merely stared in dismayed confusion, wondering what on earth a bunch of armed men and women might be doing in a sleepy South Carolina town where there was only a single bank, and that one locked up for the night. A normally wired person might have whipped out her cell phone and called 911. Annie, however, was not a normally wired person, and she knew exactly what these armed men and women, at least ten of them and maybe more, were up to. They hadn’t come in the black SUVs she would have expected, but they were here for the boy. Of course they were.

Calling 911 to alert the folks in the sheriff’s station wasn’t an option in any case, because she wouldn’t have carried a cell phone even if she’d been able to afford one. Cell phones shot radiation into your head, any fool knew that, and besides, they could track you that way. So Annie continued along the path, running now, until she reached the back of the DuPray Barber Shop two buildings down. A rickety flight of stairs led to the apartment above. Annie climbed them as fast as she could, holding up her serape and the long skirt beneath so she wouldn’t trip and take a tumble. At the top, she hammered on the door until she saw Corbett Denton through the ragged curtain, shuffling toward her with his big belly leading the way. He pushed the curtain aside and peered out, his bald head gleaming beneath the light of the kitchen’s fly-specked overhead globe.

“Annie? What do you want? I’m not giving you anything to eat, if that’s—”

“There’s men,” she said, panting to catch her breath. She could have added there were also women, but just saying men sounded more fearsome, at least to her. “They’re parked behind the Gem!”

“Go away, Annie. I don’t have time for your foolish—”

“There’s a boy! I think those men mean to go to the station and take him away! I think there’s going to be shooting!”

“What the hell are you—”

“Please, Drummer, please! They had machine guns, I think, and that boy, he’s a nice boy!”

He opened the door. “Let me smell your breath.”

She seized him by the front of his pajama shirt. “I haven’t had a drink in ten years! Please, Drummer, they came for the boy!”

He sniffed, frowning now. “No booze. Are you hallucinating?”

“No!”

“You said machine guns. Do you mean automatic rifles, like AR-15s?” Drummer Denton was beginning to look interested.

“Yes! No! I don’t know! But you have guns, I know you do! You should bring them!”

“You’re out of your mind,” he said, and that was when Annie began to cry. Drummer had known her most of his life, had even gone stepping with her a time or two when they were much younger, and he had never seen her cry. She really believed something was going on, and Drummer decided what the hell. He had only been doing what he did every night, which was thinking about the basic stupidity of life.

“All right, let’s go look.”

“And your guns? You’ll bring your guns?”

“Hell no. I said we’re going to look.”

“Drummer, please!”

“Look,” he said. “That’s all I’m willing to do. Take it or leave it.”

With no other choice, Orphan Annie took it.

25

“Oh my dear God, what am I looking at?”

Wendy’s words were muffled, because she had a hand over her mouth. No one answered. They were staring at the screen, Luke as frozen with wonder and horror as the rest.

The back half of Back Half—Ward A, Gorky Park—was a long, high room that looked to Luke like the sort of abandoned factory where shoot-outs always happened at the end of the action movies he and Rolf had liked to watch a thousand years ago, back when he had been a real kid. It was lit by fluorescent bars behind wire mesh that cast shadows and gave the ward an eerie undersea look. There were long, narrow windows covered by heavier mesh. There were no beds, only bare mattresses. Some of these had been pushed into the aisles, a couple were overturned, and one leaned drunkenly against a bare cinderblock wall. It was splotched with yellow gunk that might have been vomit.

A long gutter filled with running water ran alongside one cinderblock wall, where a stenciled motto read YOU ARE SAVIORS! A girl, naked except for a pair of dirty socks, squatted over this gutter with her back against the wall and her hands on her knees. She was defecating. There was that rasping sound as cloth rubbed across the phone in Maureen’s pocket, where it was perhaps taped in place, and the image was momentarily blotted out as the slit the camera was peering through closed. When it opened again, the girl was walking away in a kind of drunken amble, and her shit was being carried down the gutter.

A woman in a brown housekeeper’s uniform was using a Rinsenvac to clean up what might have been more puke, more shit, spilled food, God knew what. She saw Maureen, waved, and said something none of them could pick up, not just because of the Rinsenvac but because Gorky Park was a looneybin of mingled voices and cries. A girl was doing cartwheels down one of the ragged aisles. A boy in dirty underpants with pimples on his face and smeary glasses sliding down his nose walked past. He was yelling “ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya” and hitting the top of his head on every emphasized syllable. Luke remembered Kalisha mentioning a boy with zits and glasses. On his first day at the Institute, that had been. Seems like Petey’s been gone forever, but it was only last week, she had said, and here that boy was. Or what was left of him.

“Littlejohn,” Luke murmured. “I think that’s his name. Pete Littlejohn.”

No one heard him. They were staring at the screen as if hypnotized.