by a guy with a machine gun than continuing their attack.

Whatever.

He looked both ways, and dashed across the kitchen. The living room had apparently been splashed with gasoline, and the fire was large and growing quickly, the furniture fully involved. He could see a body stretched in the flames, already badly burned, unrecognizable. Nothing to do about that. He turned up the stairs, shouting, “Virgil, Virgil,” turned the corner at the landing, saw a dead man lying on the stairs. He hopped over him, shouted, “Virgil,” turned the corner at the top and saw Coakley standing in the open bathroom doorway.

He went that way, saw Dunn sitting behind the bathtub, and a young girl inside it. He shouted, “Come on,” and Dunn said, “My foot’s gone,” and Virgil said, “Push yourself up the wall.”

He handed the rifle to Coakley, who was holding the cardboard photo box, said, “Give the box to the kid. C’mon, you lead.”

Virgil half squatted, told Dunn to drape himself over his shoulders, got one arm between the other man’s legs, and lifted him in a fireman’s carry.

They went down the hall, Coakley leading with the rifle muzzle, the girl following, and then the girl darted into a side room, and Coakley screamed at her, and she came back out, carrying a coat. Virgil and Dunn last; Dunn probably weighed two hundred pounds, but wasn’t so much heavy as awkward.

Nobody on the stairs, the fire growing wilder, and down they went, into the kitchen, to the top of the stairs by the back door, and Coakley said, “Oh, shit,” and turned and gave the rifle to Virgil and said, “I’ll be right back. Ten seconds.”

“Where the hell . . .”

But she was gone, and a minute later, over the sounds of shouting outside, and the sounds of cars, and more gunfire, there was a sudden crash of glass, and then Coakley was back, took the rifle and they were out and Virgil was shouting, “Right into the trees, right into the trees.”

He ran as best he could, with Dunn on his shoulders, and when they got into the tree line, they stopped, crouching behind the thick-trunked box elders, and Virgil put Dunn down. Dunn groaned as he did it, and then said, “Man, thanks. Thank you.”

Virgil took the gun from Coakley and said, “You guys stay here. There’s another guy with me, he’ll be coming round the back of the house, probably, don’t shoot him. His name is Jenkins.”

“Where’re you going?” Coakley asked.

“I’m going to shoot some more people,” he said.

HE DIDN’T. There’d probably been a dozen of them, or even twenty, but they’d taken casualties and had finally broken, running for it, piling into their trucks and cars as Jenkins gave them a send-off. One truck was nose-down in the driveway ditch, with its headlights still burning. There were two bodies on the ground in front of the house.

And it was silent, finally, and then somebody moaned. Virgil, moving slow again, walked down the side of a shed and found a man on the ground, his face and neck a mass of blood; he’d been hit in the face with a shotgun, Virgil thought, and if he didn’t die, he’d be blind.

The man had been firing a hunting rifle into the house, and the rifle lay on the ground next to him. Virgil kicked it away, and the man heard him and tried to say something, but was so badly hurt that he mostly swallowed blood: but he might have said, “Help me.”

Virgil got down behind a tractor wheel on an old John Deere parked next to the shed, and called, loud as he could, “Jenkins!”

A moment later, “Here.”

“You okay?”

“Okay. I’ll meet you back where we started.”

VIRGIL MOVED SLOWLY to the back of the house. He got to Coakley, Dunn, and the girl just before Jenkins came in. Virgil was on the phone, calling the highway patrol guys and the local cops off the watch at the Einstadt meeting, and to warn them about men with guns.

“We need you here, but stay clear of any big bunch of cars—they may be coming your way. We’ve got one dead cop and one wounded. We’re gonna need a fast run into town. . . . We need a fire truck. . . .”

“We’re coming.”

Coakley asked, “Are we clear?”

“I think so,” Jenkins said. “There may be some wounded who still want to fight. Gotta be careful.”

“Bob’s dead,” Coakley said. “Ah, God, what am I gonna tell Jenny? Ah, God