“How many did you say?”
“Four.”
“I’ll be damned if there’s anyone other than Angel Tucci packing donkeys around here. But that midget doesn’t have three friends to pull together.”
“Why would he be running shine out here now?”
McCutchen stood motionless on a roof with his back against the chimney. The conversation between Vezzoni and his goons should have been his main focus. Instead, the flatlands of Thurber held him transfixed. For the first time since accepting his grim assignment, McCutchen had come close enough to the epicenter at night to witness the inexplicable—flickering lights. Signs of life, in a town that should have been completely dead.
A gravelly voice rose from the sidewalk directly below him. “You tell me.”
Shaken, McCutchen struggled to focus. Why hadn’t he confirmed the effects of the contagion? Turning his back on the ghosts of Thurber, he focused on the voices. He’d never met the superintendent of the mines, a man named Vezzoni. But the ire in the gravelly voice indicated he was the man in charge.
“I got no idea, honest.”
“No side operation run out of an abandoned home?”
A gust rustled McCutchen’s duster and washed away the rest of the argument. No matter. He’d wait until just before they made their move and take away their element of surprise. Then they’d be equal-numbered and out-maneuvered. On a night like tonight, the odds suggested that no one would even get shot. He certainly wouldn’t.
Through the corner of his eye he glanced toward the Thurber flat. How could people have survived the contagion right at its heart? If the sickness hadn’t killed ‘em, the infected—
The wind shifted back in his direction, “…see if these goggles work. Which one?”
“The brick one.”
“You sure?”
“I seen a lamp through the winder. At first I wasn’t sure. I could see ‘em standing in the middle of the road one minute, then the next they was gone. It’s so damn dark—”
“Stop your yammering.”
“Yessir.”
“Hmmm, interesting. These things actually make it brighter, but they block your peripheral.”
“Sir?”
“Bah. Rabbit, you’re with me. Picard, you take these imbeciles. You men know what’s at stake here. Word gets out and it’s all our asses.”
A swirling gust from the north tugged at McCutchen’s hat. He tightened the strap around the back of his neck and closed his eyes. The infected. The infected were living in Thurber, but how?
McCutchen clutched the top of the chimney for balance. He lost his grip. The surface was covered in a cold slime—pisquachie. Damn it all, he’d chosen a buzzard roost. Again the wind picked up, swirling around him and tipping him further off balance. He shifted a boot too loudly on the surface of the cedar shakes.
“What was that?”
Blasting him from the other direction, the wind forced him to hands and knees. The heat of his skin slicked the frozen surface of the manure-covered shingles, creating a ski slope out of the steep pitch. He slipped several feet and rolled onto his back before he caught the gutter with his boots.
“Someone’s on the roof.”
“It’s a trap. Shut up and scatter!”
McCutchen swore. Before he could lift himself up, a rifle crack split the curtain of night wide open. The roar reverberated from deep inside the house beneath him, not from Vezzoni or any of his crew. Swears in a potpourri of languages swarmed from the porch like hornets out of a pipe as Vezzoni and his men poured into the street and scattered.
McCutchen scrambled for a purchase on the slickened shingles before finally giving up. He clutched the gutter with both hands, swung over the edge of the roof, and dropped to the ground below. From his knee, he caught a glimpse into the darkened house.
A second flare of gunpowder lit up a face blacker than the night. He spun and leapt off the porch. As his boots hit the ground, the bark of the rifle flooded the front porch with wave after wave of gunfire. Beneath the echo of the sundering blasts he heard a familiar angry babble. Nanette.
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