Department might not come to any conclusions, but with feds involved, she had the feeling that there would be outside investigations into the deaths.
They couldn't worry about that now. The important thing was to destroy the house.
She watched with her mother and Skylar as Joe hauled out the gas cans and Leslie began unscrewing the caps on the bottles. They worked fast. Under Ned's instructions, Joe dashed briefly into the Williams house carrying two canisters of gasoline. Jolene held her breath until he emerged empty-handed a moment later. He then went over to the north side of the building, broke one of the windows, poured gasoline inside and threw the can after it. He did the same thing in another ground-floor room on the south side ( of the house.
Ned tried throwing a bottle through the open doorway but succeeded only in tossing it onto the porch. It didn't even break. He quit instantly, not wanting to waste their limited resources, and Joe began pitching bottles through the doorway and then through an open window on the upper floor.
The house was dark now, no lights were on, and it felt to Jolene as though the building lay there waiting, | like a predator preparing to pounce. She pulled Skylar back a few steps.
There were only two bottles left. The police chief took a long swig out of one, handed it to Joe, who did the same before passing it back, then pressed one of the rags through the bottle neck. He took the lighter from Leslie. 'Stand back!' he ordered.
Joe held the bottle while Ned lit the rag.
'Now!' the chief yelled.
The policeman threw it through the doorway, and there was a whoosh of hot air and a sudden roar as the foyer went up in flames. Jolene didn't know what Joe had done on his quick trip inside the house, where he had dumped the gasoline, but he'd obviously known what he was doing because the building was instantly ablaze. There was a loud metallic thump, then the tinkling shatter of glass as one of the gas cans smashed through the picture window in the sitting room and came shooting out toward them, hitting a pine tree and bouncing to a stop next to the police car.
They all backed up.
The second bottle had been saved in case the first wasn't enough to start a fire, but that wasn't necessary. Flaming drapes blew outward through the broken picture window, accompanied by billows of black smoke. The sitting room and the foyer were hellish infernos. Another window shattered. And another.
They stood staring, the night darkening around them as the fire grew brighter, moved to other rooms, came onto the porch where Ned's unbroken bottle had landed, touched the shake roof.
Jolene thought she heard a cry of rage from somewhere deep within the blaze, a crazed infuriated bellow that blended with the roar and crackle of the conflagration. Would the fire reach the cellar? she wondered. Even in the upper basement, there wasn't much to burn. Although it seemed highly unlikely that the flames would penetrate the trapdoor, a living person would still suffocate down there from lack of oxygen and probably die of smoke inhalation.
But whatever was down there was neither living nor a person.
Perhaps the heat from above and the weight of the collapsing house would crush the cellar until it was nothing but a pit full of smoldering ashes.
Skylar looked up at her. 'He wasn't in the basement,' he said, as though reading her thoughts. 'Not really. He was in the whole house.'
He hoped he was right.
And as he watched the fire, held tightly to his small hand and heard once again that bellow of rage, she thought that he probably was.
Thirty-six
An old guy who looked like a prospector with three cameras hanging around his neck lay butchered at her feet, his torn, broken body covered with blood and vomit.
Angela wiped her mouth, her stomach still feeling queasy, the stench of death strong in her nostrils. All about her were the dead and dying. She had no idea what that
But just as in Flagstaff, she was apparently immune. The mold had no effect on her. As far as she could tell, it had no effect on any of the Native Americans either.
It affected only white people.
The conclusion appeared inescapable. In Flagstaff, it turned them into raging bigots. Here, it slaughtered them with abandon. Angela could only assume she had been spared because she was of Mexican descent, a minority.
As crazy as everything else was, the concept of a politically correct monster seemed the most ridiculous and hardest to believe. How else to explain what had happened, though? The Chinese dead and their cohorts had spared her and all of the Native Americans but struck down with fury the Caucasian camera crew from CNN. Did that mean . . . ?
She looked around frantically until she saw in the crowd the familiar face she'd been searching for.
Derek.
He was still alive.
They'd been separated in the melee, and she was irrationally, exuberantly grateful that he was unharmed.
She recalled the photo of Derek's father she'd seen in his house, Mrs. Yount standing next to a man considerably darker than herself.
Derek saw her the same instant she saw him. He ran over, giving her a hard, desperate hug. Her heart skipped a beat, and she was suddenly suffused with a feeling of dread. Where was his mom? And his brother? She hugged him back and could tell from the lurching of his shoulders and the tight way he pressed his face into her hair that he was sobbing.
Around them, as if on cue, perhaps following the same instinct that had led them here in the first place, the Native Americans joined hands and started chanting. It reminded her of that Hands Across America thing her parents had done before she was born, although there seemed something vaguely religious about it as well. Many of the men's eyes were closed, and it looked to her like they thought they were going to die and had decided to passively await their fate, the hand-holding and chanting demonstrating their acceptance of death.
As two heavyset men moved to join the line of hand-holders, Angela saw, lying on train tracks behind where they'd been, the body of Derek's mother slit open from throat to groin, her bloody innards spilling onto the railroad ties. Sickened, she looked away, trying hard not to throw up, though she doubted there was anything left in her stomach to disgorge. She felt a distressingly deep void within her, an aching hole that threatened to grow wider and wider until whatever self she had left fell in and disappeared. It was like a sharp stab to the soul to see her friend's mother that way, and to know that his little brother lay somewhere around here as well, murdered and mutilated. She started praying. It was conditioning more than anything else. Habit. Praying made her feel better, gave her comfort in time of need.
Always before when she'd prayed, there'd been uncertainty behind it. She'd sent out her wishes and gratitude
Only she was not sure it was God. It was powerful, no doubt about that. But she
