He handed her a Heckler & Koch P30L handgun, saw with interest that she checked the magazine. She recalled with perfect clarity how Preach had taught her how to handle an old Mauser, how to load it, fire it, clean it, take it apart and put it back together in pitch darkness. How he had kissed her in the moonless night as a reward. Before tying her back up and laying her down with a tenderness she had heretofore never experienced, before he had taken her from behind, grunting and rutting like a sweat-slicked animal. Afterward, as he pressed down on her in the heat of a night with not even a whisper of a breeze to cool her off, she had burned with the humiliation his repeated violation of her body caused her. And still the violation of her body was the least of it. Each time he took her she could feel him inside her mind, worming his way through her thoughts, emotions, and memories. This was the thing that terrified her down to the marrow of her bones, the thing that caused her to steal the Mauser while on a nighttime bathroom run, shoot the man who was guarding her, and tear off through the bayous surrounding the church like a series of circular picket fences.

She ran and ran, fully expecting Preach—or a posse of his acolytes—to come after her, but either that didn’t happen or she managed to elude them. Near dawn, she jump-started a jeep outside someone’s house, and drove all day, until the tank ran dry. Then she hitched rides on semis, sometimes giving her body as payment, sometimes just talking with the lonely drivers. Heading north, always north, snorting lines of coke in an increasingly desperate attempt to forget what had happened to her in the Louisiana bayous, until somewhere in North Carolina the state police and the FBI had caught up with her in the forecourt of a sad motel.

Now, without hesitation, she stepped behind the first casualty, placed the H&K at the base of his skull and pulled the trigger. In a burst of blood and bone, he lurched away from her, sprawled over on his side. She held the second one down as she shot him. The third one gave no resistance at all—he was too far gone to know whether he was dead or alive, or to care.

As she handed the H&K back to White, two men wearing plastic overcoats entered the chamber and began to carry the dead men out.

Lucy looked at White. “You have the stones?”

“As you asked,” he said. “But I’m still unclear as to why you need them.”

Instead of answering him, she followed the two men with the last of the corpses. As soon as they had cleared the chamber, high-powered jets of water sluiced the blood and bits of bone down a large central drain.