Page 113 of The Chain House

CHAPTER71

IT WAS LIKE a car wreck.

Sam knew he shouldn’t look, but he couldn’t not look.

He knew he should have moved away from the glass—he’d been told, warned—but none of them moved.

They’d all stood stunned for too long—if seconds could be considered too long—before ducking or diving or running like they should have done.

And by then, the bullet—or maybe it was shattered glass—had struck Sam in the shoulder and neck area, spinning him away from the chaos down below and onto the carpeted floor, with Jennifer yelling his name and coming to his aid.

Him bleeding on the floor, losing consciousness, his mind replaying what he’d just witnessed in the yard below.

CHAPTER72

Seconds before

THE FIRST GUNSHOT had been premature, too early, and not aimed at Sal Batise.

One of the four guards, in the exact moment after Sal had spoken something to the cameras and Warden Wren, turned toward the warden and fired, blowing the man back across the lawn. Sam, at that point, while Jennifer screamed in horror and Governor Hawthorne shouted, Nooooooo, saw Agent Givens drop to the ground, not because he’d been hit but to avoid the gunfire that had begun spraying across the yard from every direction. From the towers, from the walls. Because the first shooter was not the only guard turned traitor. Guards fired at guards. Guards fired at the camera crew. Guards fired and prison workers fled from the madness, and soon, alarms were blaring, and lights were flashing, and walls were breached, and prisoners were escaping from cells.

And then, when Sam should have been taking cover—Jennifer had literally been trying to pull him to the ground, where Carl and Governor Hawthorne lay covering their heads—Sam saw Sal Batise, hunkered down and moving through the very chaos he’d predicted, looking for cover, looking for his way out.

Then Sam saw Agent Givens, kneeling down and aiming, the barrel of his gun tracking Batise’s every step. He pulled the trigger at the same time he, himself, was hit by a bullet in the chest. Agent Givens was blown back on the grass and Batise, across the yard, had gone down on one knee, before standing again and limping away. He’d been shot in the leg but was still alive, and Sam couldn’t stop watching, couldn’t stop …

Couldn’t stop.

And then suddenly Batise, only steps away from an open door and perhaps his ultimate freedom, was shot multiple times from somewhere, from someone, or from several at once, his body riddled with bullets and dancing like a bloody puppet maneuvered by invisible marionette strings.

And then the window in front of Sam shattered, and he went down in a shower of glass.

After

HAMMERING ECHOED OVER the front yard, and the air smelled of fresh wood.

The framing of the house next door was going up quickly, Sam thought on his way to his father’s front porch, still, even six months later, in disbelief that after all the time they’d lived next door to the Halls, after all the time his father had spent secretly and silently pining over Lizzie Hall, in particular, that they were now off somewhere living together.

Exactly where that was, Sam didn’t yet know but felt secure in his dad’s promise that one day soon, he would. They’d send word, an exact address, but for now—it was better if Sam was in the dark, just in case the police came back with new questions about the fire that had occurred next door six months ago, and the fact that Jake Hall, a fireman, had died in the conflagration, his body too scorched for an autopsy no one was eager to conduct. But as Trevor had told Sam on the phone months ago, it’s easier to say “I don’t know” when you truly don’t know.

And so far, although it was clear the fire had been started by gasoline, too many of Jake’s fellow firefighters had concurred that Jake had been acting odd of late, and maybe they should have seen it coming, but as one of the men said, We just didn’t think he’d do it by fire.

Sam called bullshit on all of it, and could only gather from those firemen’s comments that none of them really liked Jake Hall to begin with, and that they’d suspected for some time that he was abusing his wife, and they’d concocted a suicide story for Lizzie with a little bit of, Good for you, Lizzie Hall, sorry we didn’t help out sooner. And so Lizzie, even before any investigation from the life insurance policy had been completed, had the quarter acre cleared and construction on a new home started from afar. A home she planned on putting on the market as soon as there were new floors down.

And now, as Sam and Jennifer and Carl went back to work for their fourth straight day of rooting through Professor Harper’s house, getting it ready to sell, Sam thought why not get the same realtor and put them up together.

A package deal, just like his father and Lizzie seemed to be.

Sam had thought often in the six months since his release from the hospital, with everything that had happened that night and afterward, with thousands of unaccounted-for prison inmates still on the loose after their escapes from forty-seven prisons around the country, no one gave a shit about something as small as Jake Hall possibly perishing in a fire. Whether he’d died by baseball bat or flames, the local authorities didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it when they were still trying to round up the nearly two thousand inmates who’d escaped from Twisted Tree State Penitentiary that night.

Nowadays, with a curfew that had started as temporary and now seemed permanent, at least until the inmates were caught, everyone carried a gun, just in case. Even Carl and Jennifer had handguns now. Jennifer had bought hers the day after what the media had dubbed The Great Breakout, and then bought extra ammunition when she learned Nancy Tanner, within hours of their visit that night inside the women’s prison, was killed inside her segregation unit cell.

Working on the never-ending documentary consumed their time.

Going through Trevor Harper’s house helped take their mind off things going on out there, and as life tended to do after chaos, it went on. The final Mallard Malone novel, found edited in typed manuscript form inside a bedroom of that horrible Chain House, was set to come out in two weeks’ time.

Sam had started working through the drawers and closets of his father’s bedroom, the same room that had at one time belonged to his father and Annie, before taking a break and leaving for a quick lunch. Now that they’d returned, Sam went back to work on the closet, where he’d been pulling out boxes and files and clothes and junk. He pulled out a Nike box and opened it, and was a bit taken back by what was inside it.

College brochures from SCAD in Savannah. The University of Kentucky. The University of Virginia, and finally, a stack from Centre College in Kentucky.