Glen and Harold looked puzzled and apprehensive. That, and no more. They're sitting ducks, Frannie thought with rising panic. She did not fully understand the situation herself yet, but she knew the equation here was all wrong. Four men, eight women, her brain said, and then repeated it, louder, in tones of alarm: Four men! Eight women!
"Harold," Stu said in a quiet voice. Something had come up in his eyes. Some realization. "Harold, don't - " And then everything happened.
Stu's rifle was slung over his back. He dropped one shoulder so that the strap slid down his arm, and then the rifle was in his hands.
"Don't do it!" the bearded man shouted furiously. "Garvey! Virge! Ronnie! Get them! Save the woman!"
Harold began to grab for his pistols, at first forgetting they were still strapped into their holsters.
Glen Bateman still sat behind Harold in stunned surprise.
"Harold! " Stu yelled again.
Frannie began to unsling her own rifle. She felt as if the air around her had suddenly been packed with invisible molasses, treacly stuff she would never be able to struggle through in time. She realized they were probably going to die here.
One of the girls screamed: "NOW! "
Frannie's gaze switched to this girl even as she continued to struggle with her rifle. Not really a girl; she was at least twenty-five. Her hair, ash-blond, lay against her head in a ragged helmet, as if she had recently lopped it off with a pair of hedge-clippers.
Not all of the women moved; some of them appeared to be nearly catatonic with fright. But the blond girl and three of the others did.
All of this happened in the space of seven seconds.
The bearded man had been pointing his pistol at Stu. When the young blond woman screamed, "Now! ", the barrel jerked slightly toward her, like a divining rod sensing water. It went off, making a loud noise like a piece of steel being punched through cardboard. Stu fell off his bike and Frannie screamed his name.
Then Stu was up on both elbows (both were scraped from hitting the road, and the Honda was lying on one of his legs), firing. The bearded man seemed to dance backward like a vaudeville hoofer leaving the stage after his encore. The faded plaid shirt he was wearing puffed and billowed. His pistol, an automatic, jerked up toward the sky and that steel-punching-through-cardboard sound happened four more times. He fell over on his back.
Two of the three men behind him had jerked around at the blond woman's cry. One pulled both triggers of the weapon he was holding, an old-fashioned Remington twelve-gauge. The stock of the gun was not resting against anything - he was holding it outside his right hip - and when it went off with a sound like a thunderclap in a small room, it flew backward out of his hands, ripping skin from his fingers as it went. It clattered on the road. The face of one of the women who had not reacted to the blond woman's shout dissolved in an unbelievable fury of blood, and for a moment Frannie could actually hear blood raining down on the pavement, as if there had been a sudden shower. One eye peered unharmed through the mask of blood this woman now wore. It was dazed and unknowing. Then the woman fell forward onto the road. The Country Squire station wagon behind her was peppered with buckshot. One of the windows was a cataract of milky cracks.
The blond girl grappled with the second man who had turned toward her. The rifle the man held went off between their bodies. One of the girls scrambled for the lost shotgun.
The third man, who had not turned toward the women, began to fire at Fran. Frannie sat astride her bike, her rifle in her hands, blinking stupidly at him. He was an olive-skinned man who looked Italian. She felt a bullet drone by her left temple.
Harold had finally gotten one of his pistols free. He raised it and fired at the olive-skinned man. The distance was about fifteen paces. He missed. A bullet hole appeared in the skin of the pink housetrailer just to the left of the olive-skinned man's head. The olive-skinned man looked at Harold and said, "Now I gonna keel-a you, you sonnabeesh."
"Don't do that! " Harold screamed. He dropped his pistol and held out his open hands.
The olive-skinned man fired three times at Harold. All three shots missed. The third round came the closest to doing damage; it screamed off the exhaust pipe of Harold's Yamaha. It fell over, spilling Harold and Glen off.
Now twenty seconds had passed. Harold and Stu lay flat. Glen sat cross-legged on the road, still looking as if he didn't know exactly where he was, or what was going on. Frannie was trying desperately to shoot the olive-skinned man before he could shoot Harold or Stu, but her gun wouldn't fire, the trigger wouldn't even pull, because she had forgotten to thumb the safety catch to its off position. The blond woman continued to struggle with the second man, and the woman who had gone after the dropped shotgun was now fighting with a second woman for possession of it.