The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

Warden James did not move, facing away from Trait, crumpled in pain. His only response was a tuneful wheeze.

“You’re wondering how a man in solitary confinement in the highest security prison in the world could coordinate such an ambitious plan. I got a little help from my friends. The only times I was allowed out of the prison was to provide testimony for one of the members of my ‘disruptive group.’ A few minutes of face time, that was all I needed. You can thank my lawyers for that. I left most of the details to a trusted associate who has been lying low here in town a few days now, your average good citizen, preparing for my release. Other devoted Brotherhood parolees have been drifting steadily into town, getting the lay of the land and jacking tractors and heavy machinery to barricade the main roads and blitz you at the staging area. We took you from behind. You can see, I considered everything.”

Trait was only now starting to appreciate the victory himself.

“You understand now why I had to see the writer? Her requesting a visit one day before the riot, after eighteen months of planning? I was worried the riot was off, but it wasn’t. Tonight I have unleashed the wrath of ADX Gilchrist on its little host town. One night of rampage won’t make up for years of torture, but it is a start. I’m putting their pent-up hostility to good use. The cons are rounding up every citizen in town and bringing them back to the prison. Tomorrow morning I will outline for them my great design.”

The warden’s voice was hushed and pained. “You’ll never control them all.”

Trait was pleased with the warden’s impaired speech. “No more than you could. The difference between you and me is, I don’t intend to try. Tonight I have their enthusiasm and that is enough.”

The satisfaction of the past few hours drained as Trait looked ahead to the strength required to see this thing through to the end. He turned the warden toward him, eliciting a pitiful groan.

“I am not going to kill you, Warden. On the contrary, I am going to do everything within my power to keep you alive. You are my prisoner now. I am going to study you as you studied me.”

Barton James’s slanted jaw garbled his words. “The army will come in here and blow you all to hell.”

Trait smiled. “I give your government two hours before it realizes what has happened here, and another six to eight to mass troops outside the town. By then I will have addressed the country, and that should put things into proper perspective. You think we got lucky breaking out of Gilchrist? I’m working on a fifty-year plan. This is only the beginning.”

It was midnight and Callie Coldwell was sitting in the dark with a loaded .38 in her lap. She never slept well when Ted was gone, but when Channel Seven’s prison remote went to static, she really got scared. She couldn’t see any lights on in the windows down Duggan Way, the main road of the cookie-cutter village of correctional officers known as Gilchrist Falls. She wondered how many other wives had already left.

Ted’s last words to her on the phone that morning were Just sit tight . And she had done that, making an afternoon of it with Becky and C. C. after their early release from school, building a family of snowmen in the front yard and baking sugar cookies to welcome them to the neighborhood. Later, they went tramping over to Dinah’s to go sledding with her two girls. From the hill out back they watched the minivans pulling away, she and Dinah dishing cruelly on the younger wives. Callie was home in plenty of time for Ted’s next call, due six hours ago now. Maybe mixing two highballs after the girls went to bed wasn’t such a good idea. She was getting really paranoid now that something had gone wrong.

That was why Ted’s old gun lay across her thighs. So when the blue-lighted police cruiser turned onto her street, she said aloud, “Thank you, God,” going to the window, leaving the gun behind. Just knowing that the Gilchrist cops were out there — even though Ted called them Mayberry RFD — put her mind at ease. All it took was that one little sign of authority.

Then the cruiser stopped outside her house. All gratitude melted away, and she felt her worst fears were about to be confirmed: Something terrible had happened to Ted at the prison. She stood behind the window sheers, hiding from bad news, praying the cruiser would shine a light in their yard and roll along.

It turned into her driveway, headlights brightening the family room.

Callie rushed into the attached garage, hitting the button and hurrying to the rising door. It opened on bright, flashing headlights and blowing snow.

Two officers were out of the car, closing their doors, coming forward. Callie hugged herself inside her sweater, one hand shading her eyes. “Yes?”

“Yes,” they said, advancing through the flashing lights.

Callie was already backing away in confusion. Neither man wore a police uniform.

A half-mile closer to the center of town, Fred Burnglass awoke to the sound of voices in his yard. He crawled out of bed in threadbare long Johns and felt around for his eyeglasses, only mildly aware of a rare, halfhearted erection. He pulled his specs behind his ears and squinted out his bedroom window. There were shadows prowling around the lumber mill. Those tractor thieves he had been hearing about.

He padded downstairs, barefoot in the dark. He froze near the bottom as a shadow passed his window. They were up on his front porch now. They were near the door.

Fred Burnglass was seventy-one years old. He lived alone, never having married for the simple reason that he had never gotten around to it. He owned six working radios, including the first one his grandfather ever brought home, but no television set — again, simply because he had never gotten around to buying one. He owned a telephone, hanging below his medicine shelf on the kitchen wall in the back of the house. Except for two years in the Army Signal Corps when he was stationed in New Jersey, Fred had never traveled any farther outside Gilchrist than Hardwick, fifteen minutes to the south, and then only for tractor parts. Everyone in the Northeast Kingdom knew to come to Fred Burnglass for good quality-milled wood at a fair price.

He heard more voices, whispering and near. He crept down the rest of the way to his hand axe on the straw mat next to his rubber boots. A flashlight shone through one of his side windows, splitting the darkness. As Fred’s hand closed around the smoothly worn handle of the axe, he heard a single pane of glass pop out, busted.

The crack and tinkle in the rear of his house echoed in Fred’s head. He was seeing shadows everywhere as he fought his way to the kitchen. He reached the cold linoleum of the dark room, fearful of broken glass. Voices outside, quiet and plain, but he was too rattled to make sense of them. He stopped beside the back door and felt the cold air spilling through the broken pane. The tractor thieves were right on the other side of the wall.

One hand came through the busted window, tattooed knuckles and fingernails pointed like saw teeth. It reached for the inside knob as Fred stood mutely, unable to raise his axe blade at a human hand, the trusted tool growing heavy in his grip. He spun it so that the flat edge was facing down, and with both hands steadying his aim he hammered at it once, crushing the tattooed knuckles against the door frame. Fred ran back to the front of the house, away from the howling and the angry voices.

Someone was trying his front doorknob. The door wasn’t locked, but it tended to stick in winter. Fred watched the twisting knob and the entire door seemed to be moving. He stood before it, long Johns sagging off his behind, axe halfheartedly raised.

“Get away,” he said, not sounding like his voice at all, the words ran together as though choked.