It came.

“Now,” he whispered.

He gathered Marsha’s mind, Bill’s, Charlie’s… and then the others that were close and particularly locked in. He merged them, compressed them, and then flung that single word like a silver bullet into the heads of the three hundred and seventeen people in Old Man Gosselin’s barn:

NOW.

There was a moment of utter silence before hell’s door flew open.

Just before dusk, a dozen two-man sentry huts (they were actually Porta-Potties with the urinals and toilet-seats yanked out) had been set up at intervals along the security fence. These came equipped with heaters that threw a stuporous glow in the small spaces, and the guards had no interest in going outside them. Every now and then one of them would open a door to allow in a snowy swirl of fresh air, but that was the extent of the guards” exposure to the outside world. Most of them were peacetime soldiers with no gut understanding of how high the current stakes were, and so they swapped stories about sex cars, postings, sex, their families, their future, sex, drinking and drugging expeditions, and sex. They had missed Owen Underhill’s two visits to the shed (he would have been clearly visible from both Post 9 and Post 10) and they were the last to be aware that they had a full-scale revolt on their hands.

Seven other soldiers, boys who had been with Kurtz a little longer and thus had a little more salt on their skins, were in the back of the store near the woodstove, playing five-card stud in the same office where Owen had played Kurtz the ne nous blessez pas tapes roughly two centuries ago. Six of the card-players were sentries. The seventh was Dawg Brodsky’s colleague Gene Cambry. Cambry hadn’t been able to sleep. The reason was concealed by a stretchy cotton wristlet. He didn’t know how long the wristlet would serve, however, because the red stuff under it was spreading. If he wasn’t careful, someone would see it… and then, instead of playing cards in the office, he might be out there in the barn with the John Q’s.

And would he be the only one? Ray Parsons had a big wad of cotton in one ear. He said it was an earache, but who knew for sure? Ted Trezewski had a bandage on one meaty forearm and claimed he’d gouged himself stringing compound barbed wire much earlier in the day. Maybe it was true. George Udall, the Dawg’s immediate superior in more normal times, was wearing a knitted cap over his bald head; damn thing made him look like some kind of elderly white rapper. Maybe there was nothing under there but skin, but it was warm in here for a cap, wasn’t it? Especially a knitted one.

“Kick a buck,” Howie Everett said.

“Call,” said Danny O'Brian.

Parsons Called; so did Udall. Cambry barely heard. In his mind there rose an image of a woman with a child cradled in her arms. As she struggled across the drifted-in paddock, a soldier turned her into a napalm road-flare. Cambry winced, horrified, thinking this image had been served up by his own guilty conscience.

“Gene?” Al Coleman asked. “Are you going to call, or-”

“What’s that?” Howie asked, frowning.

“What’s what?” Ted Trezewski said.

“If you listen, you’ll hear it,” Howie replied. Dumb Polack: Cambry heard this unspoken corollary in his head, but paid it no mind. Once it had been called to their attention, the chant was clear enough, rising above the wind, quickly taking on strength and urgency.

“Now! Now! Now! Now! NOW!”

It was coming from the barn, directly behind them.

“What in the blue hell?” Udall asked in a musing voice, blinking over the folding table with its scatter of cards, ashtrays, chips, and money. Gene Cambry suddenly understood that there was nothing under the stupid woolen cap but skin, after all. Udall was nominally in charge of this little group, but he didn’t have a clue. He couldn’t see the pumping fists, couldn’t hear the strong thought-voice that was leading the chant.

Cambry saw alarm on Parsons’s face, on Everett’s, on Coleman’s. They were seeing it, too. Understanding leaped among them while the uninfected ones only looked puzzled.

“Fuckers’re gonna break out,” Cambry said.

“Don’t be stupid, Gene,” George Udall said. “They don’t know what’s coming down. Besides, they’re civilians. They’re just letting off a little st-”

Cambry lost the rest as a single word-NOW-ripped through his brain like a buzzsaw. Ray Parsons and Al Coleman winced. Howie Everett cried out in pain, his hands going to his temples, his knees connecting with the underside of the table and sending chips and cards everywhere. A dollar bin landed atop the hot stove and began to bum.

“Aw, fuck a duck, look what you d-” Ted began.

“They’re coming,” Cambry said. “They’re coming at us.”

Parsons, Everett, and Coleman lunged for the M-4 carbines leaning beside Old Man Gosselin’s coatrack. The others looked at them, surprised, still three steps behind… and then there was a vast thud as sixty or more of the internees struck the barn doors. Those doors had been locked from the outside-big steel locks, Army issue. They held, but the old wood gave with a splintering crack.

The prisoners charged through the gap, yelling “Now! Now!” into the snowy mouth of the wind and trampling several of their number underfoot.Cambry also lunged, got one of the compact assault rifles, then had it snatched out of his hands. “That’s mine, muhfuh,” Ted Trezewski snarled.There was less than twenty yards between the shattered barn doors and the back of the store. The mob swept across the gap, shouting NOW! NOW! NOW!

The poker-table went over with a crash, spilling crap everywhere. The perimeter alarm went off as the first internees struck the double-strung fence and were either fried or hooked like fish on the oversized bundles of barbs. Moments later the alarm’s honking, pulsing bray was joined by a whooping siren, the General Quarters alert which was sometimes referred to as Situation Triple Six, the end of the world. In the plastic Porta-Potty sentry huts, surprised and frightened faces peered out dazedly.

“The barn!” someone shouted. “Collapse in on the barn! It’s an escape!”

The sentries trotted out into the snow, many of them bootless, moving along the outside of the fence, unaware that it had been shorted out by the weight of more than eighty kamikaze deer-hunters, all screaming NOW at the top of their lungs, even as they jittered and fried and died.

No one noticed the single man-tall, skinny, wearing a pair of old-fashioned horn-rim specs-who left from the back of the barn and set out diagonally across the drifts filling the paddock. Although Henry could neither see nor sense anyone paying attention to him, he began to run. He felt horribly exposed under the brilliant lights, and the cacophony of the siren and the perimeter alarm made him feel panicky and half-crazy… made him feel the way Duddits’s crying had, that day behind Tracker Brothers.

He hoped to God Underhill was waiting for him. He couldn’t tell, the snow was too thick to see the far end of the paddock, but he would be there soon enough and then he would know.

Kurtz had everything on but one boot when the alarm went off and the emergency lights went on, flooding this godforsaken piece of ground with even more glare. He felt no surprise, no dismay, only a mixture of relief and chagrin. Relief that whatever had been chewing on his nerve-endings was now out in the open. Chagrin that this fucking mess hadn’t held off for another two hours. Another two hours and he could have balanced the books on the whole deal.

He jerked open the door of the Winnebago with his right hand, still holding his other boot in his left. A savage roaring came from the barn, the sort of warrior’s cry to which his heart responded in spite of everything. The gale-force wind thinned it a little, but not much; they were all in it together, it seemed. From somewhere in their well-fed, timorous, it-can’t-happen-here ranks, a Spartacus had arisen-who would have thunk it?