Cag screamed at them to get out of the wayand could hardly hear himself in the cacophony. He saw Joey Rastosovich pulltwo of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid bump aside another. A few of thecoughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire engine and scattered on theirown. Then Fire-Response Team Bravo was plowing through the guards from the westwing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli House, spraying water to everypoint of the compass.

And—

“Dear Christ, no,” Pimli Prentiss moaned.He clapped his hands over his eyes. Finli, on the other hand, was helpless tolook away. He saw a low man—Ben Alexander, he was quite sure—chewedbeneath the firetruck’s huge wheels. He saw another struck by the grille andmashed against the side of Damli House as the engine crashed, spraying boardsand glass, then breaking through a bulkhead which had been partially concealedby a bed of sickly flowers. One wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwelland 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 hismen and his valuable charges had the goddamned malfunctioning firetruck moweddown? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen?

From behind Damli House came thatterrifying chow-chow-chow sound once again, the sound of automaticweapons fire.

A fat Breaker named Waverly jostled him.Finli snared him before Waverly could fly on by. “What happened? Who told youto go south?” For Finli, unlike Trampas, wasn’t wearing any sort ofthinking-cap and the message

(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOUWON’T BE HURT)

was slamming into his head so hard and loudit was nearly impossible to think of anything else.

Beside him, Pimli—struggling togather 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 thatway. Who else could?

And—

Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then Jakli andshouted at them to gather up all the armed guards and put them to work flankingthe Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall and the streets that flankedthe Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey eyes—panic-eyes—andhe could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next two engineswith 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 casualtieswas Joey Rastosovich. When the engine had passed, beating at the grass with itscompressed-air vents, Tanya fell on her knees beside her dying husband, raisingher hands to the sky. She was screaming at the top of her lungs but Gaskiecould barely hear her. Tears of frustration and fear prickled the corners ofhis eyes. Dirty dogs, he thought. Dirty ambushing dogs!

And—

North of the Algul compound, Susannah brokecover, moving in on the triple run of fence. This wasn’t in the plan, but theneed to keep shooting, to keep knocking them down, was stronger than ever. Shesimply couldn’t help herself, and Roland would have understood. Besides, thebillowing smoke from Damli House had momentarily obscured everything at thisend of the compound. Red beams from the “lazers” stabbed into it—on andoff, on and off, like some sort of neon sign—and Susannah remindedherself not to get in the way of them, not unless she wanted a hole two inchesacross all the way through her.

She used bullets from the Coyote to cut herend of the fence—outer run, middle run, inner run—and then vanishedinto the thickening smoke, reloading as she went.

And—

The Breaker named Waverly tried to pullfree 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 hispre-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 fuck is back there!” Finliroared. “WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THIS?” The follow-up fire engines hadhalted in front of Damli House and were pouring streams of water into thesmoke. Finli didn’t know if it could help, but probably it couldn’t hurt. Andat least the damned things hadn’t crashed into the building they were supposedto save, like the first one.

“Sir, I don’t know!” Waverly sobbed.Blood was streaming from one of his nostrils and the corner of his mouth. “Idon’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 onegood-sized hand around James Cagney’s neck and the other around Jakli’s. Gaskiehad an idea son of a bitching crowhead Jakli 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 theEarnshaw kid! Something about this smells!”

And—

With Cag’s face pressing against one of hischeeks and Jakli’s against the other, the Wease (who thought as clearly asanyone that terrible morning) was finally able to make himself heard. Gaskie,meanwhile, repeated his command: divide up the armed guards and put them withthe retreating Breakers. “Don’t try to stop them, but stay with them! Andfor Christ’s sake, keep em from getting electrocuted! Keep em off the fence ifthey go past Main Stree—”

Before he could finish this admonishment, afigure came plummeting out of the thickening smoke. It was Gangli, the compounddoctor, his white coat on fire, his roller skates still on his feet.

And—

Susannah Dean took up a position at theleft rear corner of Damli House, coughing. She saw three of the sons ofbitches—Gaskie, Jakli, and Cagney, had she but known it. Before she coulddraw a bead, eddying smoke blotted them out. When it cleared, Jakli and Cagwere gone, rounding up armed guards to act as sheepdogs who would at least tryto protect their panicked charges, even if they could not immediately stopthem. Gaskie was still there, and Susannah took him with a single headshot.

Pimli didn’t see it. It was becoming clearto him that all the confusion was on the surface. Quite likely deliberate. TheBreakers’ decision to move away from the attackers north of the Algul had comea little too quickly and was a little too organized.

Never mind Earnshaw, he thought,Brautigan’s the one I want to talk to.

But before he could catch up to Ted, Tassagrabbed the Master in a frantic, terrified hug, babbling that Warden’s Housewas on fire, he was afraid, terribly afraid, that all of Master’s clothes, hisbooks—

Pimli Prentiss knocked him aside with ahammer-blow to the side of his head. The pulse of the Breakers’ unified thought(bad-mind now instead of good-mind), yammered

(WITH YOUR HANDS UP YOU WON’T BE)

crazily in his head, threatening to driveout all thought. Fucking Brautigan had done this, he knew it, and theman was too far ahead… unless…

Pimli looked at the Peacemaker in his hand,considered it, then jammed it back into the docker’s clutch under his left arm.He wanted fucking Brautigan alive. Fucking Brautigan had some explaining to do.Not to mention some more goddamned breaking.

Chow-chow-chow. Bullets flicking allaround him. Running hume guards, taheen, and can-toi all around him. AndChrist, only a few of them were armed, mostly humes who’d been down forfence-patrol. Those who guarded the Breakers didn’t really need guns, byand large the Breakers were as tame as parakeets and the thought of an outsideattack had seemed ludicrous until…

Until it happened, he thought, andspied Trampas.

“Trampas!” he bawled. “Trampas! Hey,cowboy! Grab Earnshaw and bring him to me! Grab Earnshaw!”

Here in the middle of the Mall it was alittle less noisy and Trampas heard sai Prentiss quite clearly. He sprintedafter Dinky and grabbed the young man by one arm.