Chapter 50

  Jacob Hollow

  He used his right hand to pull off the hoodie over his head. He didn’t bother removing his left arm from the sleeve; he just wrapped the cloth as tightly as he could around the mangled remains of his left hand. The pain was intense. Like his hand was in a fire. He had never felt anything like it. He struggled to think coherently.

  The voices in his head were silent. In shock? Or had Black severed the connection with one of his all-destructive bullets?

  He looked up and saw Abraham Black standing directly in front of him, revolvers stowed safely away. Black wasn’t looking at him; he stared up into the sky instead.

  Jacob twisted around to find the kid. There, on the ground in a pool of blood, lay the body of Isaac Milton. A bullet had torn his neck open. But Charlie had disappeared.

  Jacob Hollow sighed.

  Abraham Black sighed.

  “Guess that’s it for both of us,” said Jacob. “We’ll die here in the Cascade with all the humans.”

  “There’sh other waysh in,” said Black.

  “Heh. Right. How could I forget? You…ungh...you never give up.”

  “I’m jusht doing what I want to do. That’sh what it meansh, yesh? To be autonomoush. To be free.”

  “And you want…?”

  “Revenge. Jushtishe.”

  Jacob nodded. “They’re listening to me. They’re reading this.”

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  Abraham Black chuckled. “Tell them I’m coming for them. I won’t shtop. They will pay the prishe.”

  “What happened to you?” Jacob asked. He cringed at a spike of pain from his hand. “What did they do?”

  Black turned and strode back down the road, his heels clicking softly on the pavement. “Besht of luck.”

  Jacob Hollow staggered to his feet, clutching his ruined hand tightly inside the sweater. He crushed it against his chest to apply pressure and cried out in pain. He turned to look once more at Isaac’s body. The kid had died smiling. He had died holding things in his hands. Jacob knelt to take a look. In one hand, the lens. Jacob took it. In the other hand, a crumpled paper, red-white on one side and black on the other.

  Jacob carefully uncrumpled it against the bloody asphalt with his good hand. Black. A drawing of Abraham Black. This was clearly the work of that other one, the artist. The painter. The one who…

  Jacob stood carefully and said under his breath, “We’ll see.”

  He left it there on the asphalt and stumbled away in the same direction Black had gone.

  A minute later he returned and dug Isaac’s blood-soaked cell phone out of his pocket. Then he departed Pikeston, while the sky broke overhead.