“Jack, are you okay?”
Stella’s gloved hand was on my arm.
The recording echoed in my head.
My father’s voice after.Jack. It’s not what you think.
I forced a nod.
That was when a hail of bullets streamed out from the roof and various positions at the front of the steel mill. Out in the open field between the railroad tracks and Carrie Furnace Boulevard, the ground exploded—dirt, dust, and grime filled the air just ahead of the large mob moving toward the building.
The people in white weren’t running. Instead, they all walked at an extremely fast clip, the candles cradled between their hands and held out before them.
They didn’t slow down.
They didn’t acknowledge the gunfire at all.
They kept coming.
They didn’t stop coming until they reached the concrete surrounding the main buildings of the steel mill. At that point, they finally stopped advancing forward and went still.
I could see their faces now. They were close enough. Their expressions, all were blank, void of any emotion or thought, and that blank stare probably frightened me more than anything else about them. I thought about how quickly I had turned my gun on Hobson back at Cammie’s house when David Pickford told me to. I thought about what he told each of these people, his voice probably being the last they heard.
Over the radio, I heard,“I’ve got eighteen on the north lawn!”
“Sixteen on the south end,”someone replied.
“Twenty-eight in and around the front of the building.”
I did the math in my head.
Sixty-two.
“The ones out in the open are standing still, but we’ve got movement in the trees. Couple dozen out there, maybe more.”
This was hopeless. I don’t think any of us were prepared to kill nearly a hundred people.
All of them took a step forward at the same time, perfectly in unison.
“Holy shit, you see that?”
“How are they coordinating?”
Someone fired a shot from the roof. The ground in front of one of them, a balding man in his late thirties, exploded in a puff of black dirt. He didn’t budge, his face blank.
Another step. All of them, moving closer.
“I think we’re done with warning shots. We need to start laying them out.”
“Negative,”Dunk replied.“We open fire, they rush us, and we’re done. We can’t stop them all, not like that. There’s too many!”
I recognized Hobson’s voice.“If the Pickford kid is telling these people what to do, they may be innocent in all of it. Just pawns. Like what he did to me.”
I pressed the button on my radio. “Does anyone see him? We take out Pickford, and maybe we end this.”
Nobody replied. Only a handful of us even knew what David Pickford looked like.
Without any noticeable command, every person in white reached behind their backs and pulled cowls up and over their heads, hiding their faces.
