Kornwolf (47 page)

Never again would he doubt Jack's word.

Four state troopers, three downtown cops and a mob of disgusted township patrolmen were roaming the filthy aisles of the compound with handkerchiefs clutched to their blanching faces. Outside, a half dozen volunteer firemen jockeyed to peer through the guarded doorway. Behind them, a black bumper squadron of no fewer than twenty members—including the band of four that had chanced on the scene when, in passing, a scramble of dogs
had poured out of the building—was gathered with torches and clubs in the parking lot. As was a growing crowd of locals.

Everyone present could smell the facility. Those on the inside were viewing the cages. And once the sheriff had arrived with a crime scene photographer, Jarret considered it settled. The mill would never recover from this.

After a couple of minutes, he noticed an officer kneeling by one of the cages. Inside was a Jack Russell terrier: one of the puppies that hadn't been freed to devour its keeper: whimpering frantically, scratching. The officer spoke through a handkerchief. “What's this?” He leaned forward, poking the cage. The puppy licked his fingers. It started to bark.

Around it, the other dogs joined in.

Shaking his head, the officer lifted the bolt on the door. He opened it slowly.

Over his shoulder the animal sprang.

It touched down running: across the aisle and into the clearing. Past Yoder. It weaved through a tangle of legs and coattails.

The sheriff yelled, “
Somebody stop that dog!
”

Too late: it was already out the door …

In the parking lot, startled, a couple of volunteer firemen tried to step in its path. But the terrier slipped them with ease, cutting left—under buggies, then up to the road in a flash. The crowd, seeming unsettled more than curious, watched it stop to sniff at the pavement. Slowly, it lifted its snout to the wind. A couple of men from the squadron pointed. The others stopped talking. Everyone stared.

With his head thrown back, the terrier howled in a shrill, resounding cry to the moon. The rest of the dogs in the building joined in.

Sheriff Highman came out of the mill.

For a moment, the chorus welled up in the night, as a pipe organ filling a roofless cathedral.

The crowd stood motionless.

Then, abruptly, the terrier bolted up the road bank.

A voice went up: “
He's on to something!
”

The black bumper squadron dispersed in a scramble: on foot, they went after it, most of them—hollering: straight up the bank at a charge with their torches. A half dozen Englishmen followed along. The volunteer firemen ran for their cars. Behind them, the city and highway patrolmen spilled from the compound and into their cruisers. Followed by most of the township officers. Sheriff Highman ran back inside. Yoder got into his ATV, determined to stay behind a wheel.

On pulling away, he saw two of the sheriff's men leading a pack of dogs from the building.

Sergeant Billings's radio blared from the otherwise battered heap of his cruiser. It sounded across the pileup scene. A crowd of hundreds was standing by: what looked to be every person the Holt-wood corporation had ever employed. Several more Plain Folk in family wagons. Five infuriated Sprawl Mart crews. A growing fleet of locals on four-wheelers. Members of the press (
that reporter from town
). A motorcade of “registered marksmen” deployed by the Reemsville Pistol and Fishing Brigade. And a phalanx of drunken drivers and urban degenerate trash in masquerade, joy-riding …

Everyone heard or got wind of the message in moments: the hellhounds were onto The Kornwolf. Foraging south, they were: just over there …

The Coalition began to roll.

Owen wound up toward the front of the line. Which he knew better than to want any part of. He edged over, letting the pickup trucks riding his ass move around him. They drifted ahead. Then, before giving up too much placement, he got back in line. He was keeping the pace.

Above, on the right, moving steadily down an embankment toward him, he spotted fire. There were people with torches, on foot. They were running. And shouting in anger. They looked to be Amish.

Brake indicators appeared in the road. Owen slowed down.

Headlights glared from an intersection, directly ahead.

Leading the Orderly mob, Emmanuel Stoltzfus shielded his eyes in the glare. He reared up, waving his torch in the road. Behind him, his sons, with various members of the Brechbuhl, Kachel and Hostler families (an unlikely grouping, if ever there'd been), came out of the downhill charge at a stumble. Coughing, they tripped to the opposite shoulder and, lifting their torches, looked into the forest. The puppy was gone. Too fast, it had been for them: last spotted booming ahead, toward the ridge up above and behind them, and over and gone.

Stoltzfus was livid. He stormed in circles, waiting for someone to make a suggestion. Around him, jamming all four of the roadways, the English motorcade rumbled and honked.

A furious Damien Hostler—brother of Abraham, whose daughter had just been shot, demanded in German: “
Where did it go!?
”

The parents of Gideon Brechbuhl shouted: “
What have you done to our children
,
Emmanuel?!
”

Bishop Schnaeder appeared from the crowd, stepping forward to ward off impending violence.

From out of the motorcade, even more Plain Folk rushed toward the argument, ditching their buggies.

The honking rose to a deafening blast.

Finally, a siren let out from the west. Flashing lights appeared in both lines. Traffic parted, crowding the shoulder. The sheriff's cruiser broke through the line.

Buster Highman got out of the vehicle. Two of his men, Billings and Kreider, were there to meet him. Their cruisers were hammered. He led them around to the passenger's side.

He opened the door.

Each of them brought out a pair of dogs.

A cry went up.

Everyone mobbing the road looked over.

The dogs were howling into the forest, straining on leashes, the same way the puppy had …

Dwayne Gibbons, from behind the wheel of his Chevy Blazer, watched everyone scatter: over the pavement and down the slope in a trailing rush of flame they went. They were following Highman, two of his men and the hounds. Gibbons floored the gas … His Blazer lurched to the right—off the shoulder. He drove on an angle past three other pickups. Then he swung back up the incline and onto New Holland Avenue, leading the pack.

Through a break in the trees on his left, he could still see them moving. Torches flared in the overgrowth. Four-wheelers shot down the bank in pursuit of them. Everyone else in the motor-cade fishtailed the corner, following Gibbons's lead.

The torches were starting to drift, dimming into the forest.

A lane forked off to his left. He swung onto it. A van shot past him before he could level out of the turn. He sped up.

The torches appeared from the north, approaching.

Again, the mob poured out of the forest, spilling across the road in his headlights. Again, it continued moving south, with Highman running the hounds among them. And again, the motorcade followed along in tenuously pending loss of contact.

This time, however, a break in the foliage opened up to the side of the road. Gibbons trailed after those in the lead—turning left, down a gravel path through some evergreens: straight for the edge of a broad clearing.

Having caught sight of an island of trees, Gibbons pulled ahead of the pack. His Blazer bounced over rows of stubble. Behind him, the Holtwood crew followed up. They circled around to the rear of the multiple-acre plot of chestnut trees. A couple of pickups cut to the left. The rest of the Sprawl Mart wagons followed them. A phalanx of gas hogs surrounded the island. Their high beams illuminated the overgrowth.

A driver in camouflage hunting fatigues got out of a jeep and waved in the headlights. Gibbons lifted his M-14 from the backseat and went to see what was happening …

A terrier was yapping into the bushes.

The black bumper squadron had only crossed half of the field when a torrent of gunfire erupted. The sheriff, ahead of them, felt a patch of lead shot cut the air above him. He jumped in his boots with Billings and Kreider beside him, then ducked and continued forward. While closing the gap, there were four more shots in rapid succession, then panicked shouting. A moment of silence. A call from the opposite end of the plot. Somebody screaming. The roar of an engine. Two more shots.

Then: a curdling howl.

On the sheriff's orders, Kreider and Billings released the dogs and unholstered their weapons. They ran with their pistols extended in straight-armed braces, stumbling recklessly forward. They passed a van full of volunteer firemen lodged in a cornrow, spinning manure: ahead, the rest of the motorcade rumbled and ground to a halt, surrounding the trees.

Jarret Yoder got out of his muddied 4x4 and looked around. He saw Holtwood patrolmen arrayed in the headlights, training their guns on a clump of thickets. Then he saw cops running up to them, yelling to cool it—as dozens of torch-wielding Orderlies followed from every direction at once.

Yoder moved forward to see what was happening. Several policemen and one of the Holtwood officials were arguing back and forth—soon to be joined by the mob all around them.

Another barrage of shots went up. A horrible cry let out from the darkness.

Dwayne Gibbons ran into the bushes. A moment later, his rifle boomed. Then it came flying back out of the ecotone—followed as quickly, end over end, by the lifeless body of Gibbons himself:
it slammed into one of the Sprawl Mart wagons and dropped in a splayed array of limbs. Officer Billings ran over and, crouching, checked for a pulse.

Gibbons was dead.

Across the way, on the northern edge of the plot, Owen saw someone collapse. It was one of the Holtwood droogs. He was screaming, clutching his chest in the weeds. He'd been shot.

Everyone scattered, leaving him there. Owen ran back to his car. Some Plain Folk were hiding behind it in terror already. He crouched in their midst. A couple of volunteer firemen hit the dirt behind them.

The shooting and screaming continued: along with that sickly, curdling howl from the darkness. Then, over the top of it, multiple bullhorns issued an order to “
Hold your fire!
”

The shooting desisted. From out of the calm rose a scream. The Holtwood droog was in agony. “—
shot
me! Bastards.”

A voice followed up in the bullhorn: “
Everyone out of there! Now!
”

A moment of silence gave way to more shouting: “What are
you
gonna do about it, Sheriff?”

“Yeah, Buster!”

More voices: “To hell with him!”

“—
SHOT
me!”

Confusion.

Again, from the bullhorn: “We'll
torch
it out, that's what!”

And Highman wasn't the first to have thought of it. Off to his left, a pickup truck driver had lifted a gas can out of a hatchback. Behind him, a growing mob of Orderlies muttered in understanding compliance: such had been their intention, it seemed.

They parted, spreading in both directions. As the Holtwood droog was pulled to safety, they probed the brush for brittle thickets.

The sheriff repeated: “We'll
torch
it out then!”

A Sprawl Mart official emerged from the plot, looking terrified. Then came a tall man in dungarees.

When no one else stepped from the darkness, Highman resumed. “Is everyone out of there now? Where's Manny?”

“Dead!” someone called. “Forget him.”

“Now hold on … ”

Down the row, they were dousing the brush with accelerants.

Highman repeated: “Hold
ON!
”

They ignored him, backing away.

A wall of flame leapt up in the brush.

The sheriff started forward: “No! You idiots!!”

Tripping, he fell on his face.

On the southern end, several Orderlies, aided by superstore guards toting gallons of gasoline, managed to link the blazes. The flames rose quickly. The heat forced everyone back.

For the first time, a cry of grim jubilation went up from the crowd.

“
BURN!
” someone yelled.

A roar of agreement.

The sheriff's orders were lost in the cheering.

Again: “
Burn, you son of a bitch!
”

And chanting: “
DIE! DIE! DIE!
”—in unison.

They fired their guns in the air …

Owen looked around in amazement.

There were hundreds of people now—most having left their vehicles back in the traffic or jammed in the mud at the edge of the field, and come running: a motley procession of firemen, farmers, cops, Plain Folk and honky suburbanites.

Just when Owen had thrown in the towel on The Sacred Chao in Stepford Town, enter: The Devil, as advocate
par extraordinaire
.

He still hadn't seen it.

After all that had happened, he would never lay eyes on it …

He could
hear
it, though: screaming like something washed up on the wrong end of Pluto's moon.

Owen couldn't help but relate.

Part of him felt to be in there with it.

Slowly, he emerged from the shadows behind his car. He turned away from the blaze.

A feeling of homesickness—or maybe of home
less
ness: pangs of the uprooted—overtook him. Ready to sit out the final act, he spotted the glare of headlights approaching …

From out of the woods to the north—through which, so far, no other automobiles had materialized—barreling over the rows in a lurching of high-powered beams and the roar of hydraulics: the F-150 was already turning heads. It was closing too fast for the distance—approaching dead-on. The cheering subsided. A wave of alarm swept over its path.

The crowd divided, dodging to either side in a chorus of panicked hollering.