The Institute Read online

  Oh you bitch, he thought. You relentless bitch.

  Luke grabbed the laptop and dropped to his knees, cradling it to his chest as Alice Green and Tom Jones came through the shattered double doors. Tag raised his sidearm but took a burst from the HK before he could fire, the back of his uniform shirt shredding. The Glock flew from his hand and spun across the floor. The only other deputy still standing, Frank Potter, never moved to defend himself. There was a stunned, unbelieving expression on his face. Alice Green shot him once in the head, then ducked as more gunfire erupted in the street behind them. There were yells and a scream of pain.

  The gunfire and the scream momentarily distracted the man with the HK. Jones wheeled in that direction, and Tim double-tapped him, one in the back of the neck and the other in the head. Alice Green straightened and came on, stepping over Jones, her face set, and now Tim saw another woman crowding in behind her. An older woman wearing a red pant suit, also holding a gun. Dear Christ, he thought, how many are there? Did they send an army for one little boy?

  “He’s behind the desk, Alice,” the older woman said. Considering the carnage, she sounded eerily calm. “I can see a bandage on his ear sticking up. Pull him out and shoot him.”

  The woman named Alice came around the desk. Tim didn’t bother telling her to stop—they were way past that—only pulled the trigger of Wendy’s Glock. It clicked dry, although there should have been at least one more round in the clip, and probably two. Even in this do-or-die moment, he understood the reason: Wendy hadn’t fully reloaded after the last time she took target practice with it on the gun-range over in Dunning. Such things were not high on her list of priorities. He even had time to think—as he had during his early days in DuPray—that Wendy had never been cut out to be a cop.

  Should have stuck to dispatch, he thought, but too late now. I think we’re all going to die.

  Luke rose up from behind the dispatch desk, the laptop held in both hands. He swung it and hit Alice Green full in the face. The cracked screen shattered. Green staggered back into the woman in the pant suit, her nose and mouth bleeding, then raised her gun again.

  “Drop it, drop it, drop it!” Wendy screamed. She had scooped up Tag Faraday’s Glock. Green took no notice. She was aiming at Luke, who was pulling Maureen Alvorson’s flash drive from the laptop’s port instead of ducking for cover. Wendy fired three times, eyes slitted, uttering a shrill cry with each trigger-pull. The first bullet took Alice Green just above the bridge of her nose. The second went through one of the empty holes in the door where a frosted glass panel had been only a hundred and fifty seconds before.

  The third struck Julia Sigsby in the leg. Her gun flew from her hand and she folded to the floor, a look of unbelief on her face. “You shot me. Why did you shoot me?”

  “Are you stupid? Why do you think?” Wendy said. She walked to the woman sitting against the wall, her shoes crunching on broken glass. The air stank of gunpowder, and the office—once neat, now a shambles—was filled with drifting blue smoke. “You were telling them to shoot the kid.”

  Mrs. Sigsby gave her the sort of smile reserved for those who must suffer fools. “You don’t understand. How could you? He belongs to me. He’s property.”

  “Not anymore,” Tim said.

  Luke knelt beside Mrs. Sigsby. There were spatters of blood on his cheeks and a shard of glass in one eyebrow. “Who did you leave in charge at the Institute? Stackhouse? Is he the one?”

  She only looked at him.

  “Is it Stackhouse?”

  Nothing.

  Drummer Denton stepped in and looked around. His pajama shirt was soaked with blood down one side, but he looked remarkably alert in spite of that. Gutaale Dobira was peering over his shoulder, eyes wide.

  “Holy shit,” Drummer said. “It’s a massacree.”

  “I had to shoot a man,” Gutaale said. “Mrs. Goolsby, she was shooting a woman who was trying to shoot her. It was a clear case of self-defense.”

  “How many outside?” Tim asked them. “Are they all down, or are some still active?”

  Annie pushed Gutaale Dobira aside and stood next to Drummer. In her serape, with a smoking gun in each hand, she looked like a character from a spaghetti western. Tim wasn’t surprised. He was beyond surprise. “I believe everyone who got out of those vans is accounted for,” she said. “A couple wounded, one with a bullet in his foot, one hurt bad. That was the one Dobira shot. The rest of the sons of bitches look like they are dead in here.” She surveyed the room. “And Christ, who’s left in the Sheriff’s Department?”

  Wendy, Tim thought but did not say. I guess she’s the acting sheriff now. Or maybe Ronnie Gibson will be when she comes back from vacation. Probably Ronnie. Wendy won’t want the job.

  Addie Goolsby and Richard Bilson were now standing with Gutaale, behind Annie and Drummer. Bilson surveyed the main room with dismay—bullet-riddled walls, broken glass, pools of blood on the floor, sprawled bodies—and put a hand to his mouth.

  Addie was made of sterner stuff. “Doc’s on his way. Half the town’s out there in the street, most of em armed. What happened here? And who’s that?” She pointed at the skinny boy with the bandage on his ear.

  Luke took no notice. He was fixated on the woman in the pant suit. “Stackhouse, sure. Has to be. I need to get in touch with him. How do I do that?”

  Mrs. Sigsby only stared at him. Tim knelt beside Luke. What he saw in the pant suit woman’s eyes was pain, disbelief, and hate. He couldn’t be sure which of those predominated, but if forced to guess, he would have said hate. It was always the strongest, at least in the short term.

  “Luke—”

  Luke paid no attention. All of his attention was focused on the wounded woman. “I need to get in touch with him, Mrs. Sigsby. He’s holding my friends prisoner.”

  “They’re not prisoners, they’re property!”

  Wendy joined them. “I’m thinking you must have been absent on the day your class learned about Lincoln freeing the slaves, ma’am.”

  “Come in here, shooting up our town,” Annie said. “Guess you found out, didn’t you?”

  “Hush, Annie,” Wendy said.

  “I need to get in touch with him, Mrs. Sigsby. I need to make a deal. Tell me how to do it.”

  When she didn’t reply, Luke jammed his thumb into the bullet hole in her red pants. Mrs. Sigsby shrieked. “Don’t, oh don’t, that HURTS!”

  “Zap-sticks hurt!” Luke shouted at her. Glass shards rattled across the floor, forming small creeks. Annie stared, eyes wide with fascination. “Injections hurt! Being half-drowned hurts! And having your mind ripped open?” He jammed his thumb against the bullet wound again. The door to the holding area slammed shut, making them all jump. “Having your mind destroyed ? That hurts most of all!”

  “Make him stop!” Mrs. Sigsby screamed. “Make him stop hurting me!”

  Wendy bent to pull Luke away. Tim shook his head and took her arm. “No.”

  “It’s the conspiracy,” Annie whispered to Drummer. Her eyes were huge. “That woman works for the conspiracy. They all do! I knew it all along, I said it, and nobody believed me!”

  The ringing in Tim’s ears was starting to fade. He heard no sirens, which didn’t surprise him. He guessed the Staties might not even know there had been a shoot-out in DuPray, at least not yet. And anyone calling 911 would have reached not the South Carolina Highway Patrol but the Fairlee County sheriff—this shambles, in other words. He glanced at his watch and saw with disbelief that the world had been rightside up only five minutes ago. Six, at most.

  “Mrs. Sigsby, is it?” he asked, kneeling beside Luke.

  She said nothing.

  “You are in a great deal of trouble, Mrs. Sigsby. I advise you to tell Luke here what he wants to know.”

  “I need medical attention.”

  Tim shook his head. “What you need is to do some talking. Then we’ll see about medical attention.”

  “Luke was telling the truth,” Wendy s
aid to no one in particular. “About everything.”

  “Didn’t I just say that?” Annie almost crowed.

  Doc Roper pushed his way into the office. “Holy Jesus on Resurrection Morn,” he said. “Who’s still alive? How badly is that woman hurt? Was it some kind of terrorist thing?”

  “They’re torturing me,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “If you are a doctor, as that black bag you’re carrying would seem to suggest, you have an obligation to make them stop.”

  Tim said, “The boy you treated was running away from this woman and the raiding party she brought with her, Doc. I don’t know how many are dead out there, but we lost five, including the sheriff, and it was on this woman’s orders.”

  “We’ll deal with that later,” Roper said. “Right now I need to take care of her. She’s bleeding. And somebody needs to call a goddam ambulance.”

  Mrs. Sigsby looked at Luke, bared her teeth in a smile that said I win, then looked back at Roper. “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you.”

  “There’s a biddy with sand in her craw,” Annie said, and not without admiration. “Fella I shot in the foot, maybe not so much. I’d go see him, were I you. I think he’d sell his own grammaw into white slavery for a shot of morphine.”

  Mrs. Sigsby’s eyes widened in alarm. “Leave him alone. I forbid you to talk to him.”

  Tim got to his feet. “Forbid and be damned. I don’t know who you work for, lady, but I believe your days of kidnapping children are over. Luke, Wendy, come with me.”

  38

  House lights had come on all over town, and DuPray’s main street was full of milling people. The bodies of the dead were being covered by whatever came to hand. Someone had taken Orphan Annie’s sleeping bag out of the alley and draped it over Robin Lecks.

  Dr. Evans had been completely forgotten. He could conceivably have limped his way to one of the parked mom vans and gotten away, but had made no effort to do so. Tim, Wendy, and Luke found him sitting on the curb in front of the Gem. His cheeks gleamed with tears. He had managed to work his shoe off, and was now staring at a bloody sock covering what looked like a badly deformed foot. How much of that was bone damage and how much swelling that would eventually go down, Tim neither knew nor cared.

  “What is your name, sir?” Tim asked.

  “Never mind my name. I want a lawyer. And I want a doctor. A woman shot me. I want her arrested.”

  “His name is James Evans,” Luke said. “And he’s a doctor. Just like Josef Mengele was.”

  Evans seemed to notice Luke for the first time. He pointed at the boy with a trembling finger. “This is all your fault.”

  Luke lunged at Evans, but this time Tim held him back and pushed him gently but firmly to Wendy, who took him by the shoulders.

  Tim squatted on his hunkers so he could look the pallid, frightened man dead in the eye. “Listen to me, Dr. Evans. Listen closely. You and your friends came high-riding into town to get this boy and killed five people. All police officers. Now, you might not know it, but South Carolina has the death penalty, and if you think they won’t use it, and double-quick, for killing a county sheriff and four deputies—”

  “I had nothing to do with it!” Evans squawked. “I was here under protest! I—”

  “Shut up!” Wendy said. She still had the late Tag Faraday’s Glock, and now she pointed it at the foot that was still shod. “Those officers were also my friends. If you think I’m going to read you your rights or something, you’re out your goddam mind. What I’m going to do if you don’t tell Luke what he wants is put a bullet in your other—”

  “All right! All right! Yes!” Evans reached down and put protective hands over his good foot, which almost made Tim feel sorry for him. Almost. “What is it? What do you want to know?”

  “I need to talk to Stackhouse,” Luke said. “How do I do that?”

  “Her phone,” Evans said. “She has a special phone. She called him before they attempted . . . you know . . . the extraction. I saw her put it in her coat pocket.”

  “I’ll get it,” Wendy said, and turned back toward the sheriff’s station.

  “Don’t just bring the phone,” Luke said. “Bring her.”

  “Luke . . . she’s been shot.”

  “We might need her,” Luke said. His eyes were stony.

  “Why?”

  Because it was chess now, and in chess you never lived in the move you were about to make, or even the next one. Three moves ahead, that was the rule. And three alternates to each of those, depending on what your opponent did.

  She looked at Tim, who nodded. “Bring her. Cuff her if you need to. You’re the law, after all.”

  “Jesus, what a thought,” she said, and left.

  Now, at last, Tim heard a siren. Maybe even two of them. Still faint, though.

  Luke grabbed his wrist. Tim thought the boy looked totally focused, totally aware, and also tired to death. “I can’t get caught in this. They have my friends. They’re trapped and there’s nobody to help them but me.”

  “Trapped in this Institute.”

  “Yes. You believe me now, don’t you.”

  “It’d be hard not to after what was on the flash drive, and all this. What about that drive? Do you still have it?”

  Luke patted his pocket.

  “Mrs. Sigsby and the people she works with mean to do something to these friends of yours so they end up like the kids in that ward?”

  “They were already doing it, but then they got out. Mostly because of Avery, and Avery was there because he helped me get out. I guess you’d call that irony. But I’m pretty sure they’re trapped again. I’m afraid Stackhouse will kill them if I can’t make a deal.”

  Wendy was coming back. She had a boxy device that Tim supposed was a phone. There were three bleeding scratches across the back of the hand that held it.

  “She didn’t want to give it up. And she’s surprisingly strong, even after taking a bullet.” She handed Tim the gadget and looked back over her shoulder. Orphan Annie and Drummer Denton were supporting Mrs. Sigsby across the street. Although she was pale and in pain, she was resisting them as much as she could. At least three dozen DuPray townsfolk trailed behind them, with Doc Roper leading the pack.

  “Here she is, Timmy,” Orphan Annie said. She was panting for breath, and there were red marks on her cheek and temple where Mrs. Sigsby had slapped at her, but Annie looked not the slightest bit discomposed. “What do you want us to do with her? I s’pose stringing her up is pretty much out of the question, but ain’t it an attractive idea.”

  Doc Roper set down his black bag, grabbed Annie by the serape, and pulled her aside so he could face Tim. “What in God’s name are you thinking of ? You can’t transport this woman anywhere! You’re apt to kill her!”

  “I don’t think she’s exactly at death’s door, Doc,” Drummer said. “Hit me a lick like to break my nose.” Then he laughed. Tim didn’t believe he had ever heard the man laugh before.

  Wendy ignored both Drummer and the doctor. “If we’re going to go somewhere, Tim, we better do it before the State Police get here.”

  “Please.” Luke looked first to Tim, then to Doc Roper. “My friends will die if we don’t do something, I know they will. And there are others with them, the ones they call the gorks.”

  “I want to go to the hospital,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “I’ve lost a lot of blood. And I want to see a lawyer.”

  “Shut your cakehole or I’ll shut it for you,” Annie said. She looked at Tim. “She ain’t hurt as bad as she’s trying to make out. Bleeding’s already stopped.”

  Tim didn’t answer immediately. He was thinking of the day, not so long ago, when he had swung into Sarasota’s Westfield Mall to buy a pair of shoes, nothing more than that, and a woman had run up to him because he was in uniform. A boy was waving a gun around up by the movie theater, she said, so Tim had gone to see, and had been faced with a decision that had changed his life. A decision that had, in fact, brought him here. Now he had another decision to mak
e.

  “Bandage her up, Doc. I think Wendy and Luke and I are going to take these two for a little ride and see if we can straighten this thing out.”

  “Give her something for pain, too,” Wendy said.

  Tim shook his head. “Give it to me. I’ll decide when she gets it.”

  Doc Roper was looking at Tim—and Wendy, her too—as if he had never seen them in his life. “This is wrong.”

  “No, Doc.” It was Annie, and she spoke with surprising gentleness. She took Roper by the shoulder and pointed him past the covered bodies in the street and at the sheriff’s station, with its smashed windows and doors. “That’s wrong.”

  The doctor stood where he was for a moment, looking at the bodies and the shot-up station. Then he came to a decision. “Let’s see what the damage is. If she’s still bleeding heavily, or if her femur’s shattered, I won’t let you take her.”

  You will, though, Tim thought. Because there’s no way you can stop us.

  Roper knelt, opened his bag, and took out a pair of surgical scissors.

  “No,” Mrs. Sigsby said, pulling back from Drummer. He grabbed her again immediately, but Tim was interested to see that before he did, she was able to put her weight on her wounded leg. Roper saw it, too. He was getting on, but he still didn’t miss much. “You’re not going to do field surgery on me in this street!”

  “The only thing I’m going to do surgery on is the leg of your pants,” Roper said. “Unless you keep struggling that is. Do that, and I can’t guarantee what will happen.”

  “No! I forbid you to—”

  Annie seized her by the neck. “Woman, I don’t want to hear no more of what you forbid. Hold still, or your leg’s the last thing you’ll be worrying about.”

  “Get your hands off me!”

  “Only if you’ll be still. Otherwise I’m apt to wring your scrawny neck.”

  “Better do it,” Addie Goolsby advised. “She can be crazy when she gets one of her spells.”