“Yeah.”

“I’m pulling in right there.”

He’d slowed to forty miles an hour: they’d be at the roadblock in half a minute if they continued at the same speed. “Can’t slow down too much, or they’ll figure out what we’re doing.”

“What’re we doing?”

“What you always wanted to do. We’re gonna kill a fuckin’ cop.”

“I think we done that already.”

They rolled on, not slowing, into the town, past a convenience store and gas station, a tire place/garage, a bar/café, a used-boat dealer, and a couple of low-rise commercial buildings, which appeared to be abandoned. They could see the cop on the far side of his car, holding up a hand, warning them to stop, a rifle on his hip, and two hundred feet away, Pilate swerved off the road, up a short gravel driveway and behind the blue house.

As soon as he was out of sight of the cop car, he jammed on the brakes, shifted into Park, grabbed the rifle, and ran to the corner of the house.

He peeked around the corner, and saw that the cop, a highway patrolman, had moved to the far back corner of his car and was aiming his rifle over the roof, right at Pilate. Pilate yanked his head back and ran around the house to the far side, peeked again. The cop was still looking at the other corner. Pilate couldn’t see much of him, and the cop was yelling something that he couldn’t make out.

He got up his guts, set his feet, and quickly poked the gun around the side of the building and fired three quick shots at the cop’s head. The cop dropped, but Pilate had the sense that he hadn’t hit him. He fired three more shots, this time under the car, hoping that ricochets might take out the other man.

No luck. He saw a quick flash of hat as the man went farther back, behind the car’s tires.

The cop started shouting again, and then Kristen was behind him, shouting, “What should I do? What should I do?”

Pilate didn’t know what she should do, but it didn’t matter, because another car rolled up the highway, behind the cop. They could see the cop’s hand as he waved the other car down. The car stopped, and a moment later, the passenger-side door popped open. Richie, who’d been up at the lake, and who’d come south to rendezvous with Pilate, got out with his rifle, poked it over the top of the door, and began firing at the cop. The cop made a stumbling run for the side of the bridge, trying to get into the creek or ravine beneath it, but was hit and knocked down as he got to the edge.

He went flat for a moment, dropping his rifle, then managed to pull himself up and throw himself over the edge of the bridge.

Pilate ran out from behind the house, toward the cop car, and Richie ran toward the bridge from his side. Standing back a bit from the bridge, they both looked into the space beneath it. It wasn’t quite a creek, but not quite a ravine, either—more like a swale, currently occupied by a marsh. They could see where the cop had landed in the marsh weeds, a five-foot drop, and where he’d pulled himself under the bridge, but they couldn’t see the cop.

“I think he’s hit, I hit him pretty hard,” Richie called. Then, in the best movie fashion, in which the speaker never got shot, he called, “Cover me.”

He went out into the yard on the far side of the bridge, so he could better see under it, pointing his rifle at the bridge as he did it. He’d just squared up to the bridge, crouching a bit, when there was a single gunshot from beneath it, and Pilate saw the dirt spit up just in front of Richie’s legs—the bullet must have gone right between them. Richie screamed something and ran back toward the bridge, where the cop couldn’t see him.

Behind Richie, Ellen and Carrie had gotten out of the car. The women ran toward the bridge, then out on it, Ellen picked up the cop’s rifle, and then Carrie stooped again and Pilate realized she’d gotten two or three more magazines.

Pilate shouted, “This way, this way . . .” and at the same time, fired a burst of three shots under the bridge, with no idea of where the cop might be. As he did it, Richie, Ellen, and Carrie ran across the bridge and around behind the house. Another car pulled up behind Richie’s, and Coon and Chet got out.

Pilate yelled at them until they understood the situation, and Pilate and Richie fired two more bursts under the bridge while Coon ran up to the cop car. He stopped to look into it, and as he did, a bullet banged off the windshield. And then another, and Coon dropped behind the car as Chet, who hadn’t stopped, dashed across the yard. A bullet whanged off an old clothesline post, not more than a foot from Chet’s head as he passed the post.

Coon popped up and yelled, “I can’t get out of here. They’re shooting at me from the gas station.”

Richie said, “Hang on,” and he ran down to the corner of the blue house, then across an empty lot to a pink house, crawled to the front corner of it and started banging away at the filling station. The station’s window glass went out with the fourth or fifth shot and Coon dashed across the open space to the blue house. Richie jogged back from the pink house and they huddled in the shelter of the blue house.

“We gotta get that cop and get him fast,” Richie said. “We gotta move that car.”

“No keys in it,” Coon said, breathing hard, more from excitement than exercise. “That’s why I stopped to look. He must’ve had them on him.”

“Here’s what we do—I mean you guys with the rifles,” Kristen said. “One of you runs a way down that creek, and another one runs down the creek the other way, until you’re far enough down that you can shoot under the bridge. That’ll kill him or push him out in the open where we can kill him. Once we get him, we move his car off the bridge, bring the RV and the Firebird across, put the cop car back on the bridge, shoot up the gas tank, set it on fire, so nobody else can cross, and we take off.”

“Works for me,” Pilate said. His brain seemed stuffed with cotton; he was freaking out. Then, over Coon’s shoulder, he saw the RV rumbling into town. “Here’s Bell.”

Bell hardly slowed coming through town and ran past them in the side yard of the blue house, and got out, wild-eyed. The RV had a half dozen bullet holes in it: “It’s like a fuckin’ shooting gallery out there,” he said. Laine got out of the passenger side, a streak of blood on her face. Bell looked back the way they’d come, and added, “That goddamn pickup’s still back there. He followed us all the way down here.”

Pilate went to look: the pickup was probably six hundred yards away, idling in the middle of the road.

“He’s been tracking us the whole time.”

“I’ll get him,” Bell said. “You guys hang here.” He pulled a magazine out of his rifle and slammed another one into it. To Pilate he said: “This is it, man. This is the Fall. This is what we trained for. This is fuckin it.”

He ran behind the houses and commercial buildings along the main street. He’d gone two hundred yards and was jogging across an open space between two buildings, when a door popped open on a place called BAR and somebody fired a shot at him.

The shot missed, but he saw the door moving and fired back as he ran, ducking behind the next building. He went on, running hard, and at the last of the commercial buildings, risked running down the side of one of them, to look down the street. The pickup had backed away and was farther out of reach than it had been when they began.

“Shit.” He jogged back toward Pilate and the rest of the group, sprinting through the open space where he’d been shot at.

“He’s backing off—I can’t get to him, but he’s gotta be calling all the other cops from everywhere,” he told Pilate.

“Too late,” Kristen said. A black SUV was coming down the highway, flashers on the front bumper. “Here come some more of them.”

Pilate looked around, wildly, trying to find a way out. He didn’t want to hear that Fall bullshit.