And-
"Dear Christ, no," Pimli Prentiss moaned. He clapped his hands over his eyes. Finli, on the other hand, was helpless to look away. He saw a low man-Ben Alexander, he was quite sure-chewed beneath the firetruck's huge wheels. He saw another struck by the grille and mashed against the side of Damli House as the engine crashed, spraying boards and glass, then breaking through a bulkhead which had been partially concealed by a bed of sickly flowers. One wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwell and a robot voice began to boom,
"ACCIDENT! NOTIFY THE STATION! ACCIDENT!"
No shit, Sherlock, Finli thought, looking at the blood on the grass with a kind of sick wonder. How many of his men and his valuable charges had the goddamned malfunctioning firetruck mowed down? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen?
From behind Damli House came that terrifying chow-chowchow sound once again, the sound of automatic weapons fire.
A fat Breaker named Waverlyjostled him. Finli snared him before Waverly could fly on by. "What happened? Who told you to go south?" For Finli, unlike Trampas, wasn't wearing any sort of thinking-cap and the message
(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON'T BE HURT)
was slamming into his head so hard and loud it was nearly impossible to think of anything else.
Beside him, Pimli-struggling to gather his wits-seized on the beating thought and managed one of his own: That's almost got to be Brautigan, grabbing an idea and amplifying it that way. Who else could?
And-
Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then Jakli and shouted at them to gather up all the armed guards and put them to work flanking the Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall and the streets that flanked the Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey eyes-panic-eyes-and he could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next two engines with their sirens whooping. The larger of the pair struck two of the Breakers, bearing them to the ground and running them over. One of these new casualties was Joey Rastosovich. When the engine had passed, beating at the grass with its compressed-air vents,
Tanya fell on her knees beside her dying husband, raising her hands to the sky. She was screaming at the top of her lungs but Gaskie could barely hear her. Tears of frustration and fear prickled the corners of his eyes. Dirty dogs, he thought. Dirty ambushing dogs!
And-
North of the Algul compound, Susannah broke cover, moving in on the triple run offence. This wasn't in die plan, but the need to keep shooting, to keep knocking them down, was stronger than ever. She simply couldn't help herself, and Roland would have understood. Besides, the billowing smoke from Damli House had momentarily obscured everything at this end of the compound. Red beams from the "lazers" stabbed into it-on and off, on and off, like some sort of neon sign-and Susannah reminded herself not to get in the way of them, not unless she wanted a hole two inches across all the way through her.
She used bullets from the Coyote to cut her end of the fence-outer run, middle run, inner run-and then vanished into the thickening smoke, reloading as she went.
And-
The Breaker named Waverly tried to pull free of Finli. Nar, nar, none of that, may it please ya, Finli thought. He yanked the man-who'd been a bookkeeper or some such thing in his pre-
Algul life-closer to him, then slapped him twice across the face, hard enough to make his hand hurt. Waverly screamed in pain and surprise.
"Who the f**k is back there!" Finli roared. "WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THIS?" The follow-up fire engines had halted in front of Damli House and were pouring streams of water into the smoke. Finli didn't know if it could help, but probably it couldn't hurt. And at least the damned things hadn't crashed into the building they were supposed to save, like the first one.
"Sir, I don't knozv!" Waverly sobbed. Blood was streaming from one of his nostrils and the corner of his mouth. "I don't know, but there has to be fifty, maybe a hundred of the devils! Dinky got us out! God bless Dinky Earnshaw Gaskie O'Tego, meanwhile, wrapped one good-sized hand around James Cagney's neck and the other around Jakli's.
Gaskie had an idea son of a bitching crowheadjakli had been on the verge of running, but there was no time to worry about that now. He needed them both.
And-
"Boss!" Finli shouted. "Boss, grab the Earnshaw kid! Something about this smells!"
And-
With Cag's face pressing against one of his cheeks and Jakli's against the other, the Wease (who thought as clearly as anyone that terrible morning) was finally able to make himself heard.