“Three hundred and seventy-six houses. Ninety-seven murders—sometimes everybody in a house, and sometimes none. Sometimes the people on a street heard a commotion and abandoned their houses to avoid the escapees. When the escapees killed somebody in a house, sometimes they would set the place on fire to destroy evidence. After the first gunshots, we got calls and we went to work. Firefighters deployed to fight the fires, but they were shot at right away and had to retreat while we fought the escapees.”

“Did you lose any officers?”

“Eight. That’s twenty percent. We concentrated on stopping them on the east side of Main Street, because none of them had made it to the west side yet. We killed seventy-eight of them there and wounded a hundred more, but we held. Fortunately, the average violent offender isn’t as good at violence as he might be. We were far better shots. In the end, the sun came up, and it was over. It was like a horror movie, where the zombies just turn to dust in the sun. The last ones who could get cars to move did it then. The state troopers and the FBI were on their way here, and they caught most of them at roadblocks. The ones still on foot we rounded up and locked in the school gym with armed guards at the doors and on the baseball field. We drove them back to the prison in trucks starting around noon.”

“That’s a terrible story.”

“It sure is,” she said. “They murdered Weldonville. People started packing up, locking their houses, and driving away before we had even taken all the escapees back to prison.”

“Jesus.”

“That night didn’t help His popularity. Some people came back for the funerals, or stayed for them. Since then the churches have been practically empty on Sundays. The congregations are mostly gone.”

“What’s being done now?”

“Right now, we’re doing basic police work. It’s a federal prison, so the FBI is the lead agency. The state police are working on it, and we’re working on it.”

“What does ‘working on it’ mean?”