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something out of the rectangular recess that had been exposed.
Something wrapped in what looked like an old green shirt.
Rydell watched as Fontaine gingerly unwrapped the green cloth, exposing a
squat heavy object that looked like a cross between the square waxed-paper
milk cartons of Rydell's childhood and an industrial power drill. It was a
uniform, dusty olive-green in color, and if it was in fact a firearm, it was
the clumsiest-looking firearm Rydell had yet seen. Fontaine held it with what
would've been the top of the milk carton pointed up at an angle, toward the
ceiling. There was an awkward-looking pistol grip at the opposite end, and a
sort of grooved, broom-handle affair about six inches in front of that.
"What is it?" Rydell asked.
"Chain gun," Fontaine said. "Disposable. Can't reload it. Caseless:
this long square thing's the cartridges and the barrel in one. No-moving parts
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to it: ignition's electrical. Two buttons here, where the trigger would be,
you just point it, press 'em both the same time. It'll do that four times.
Four charges."
"Why do they call it a chain gun?"
"What this is, Martial says, it's more like a directional grenade, you
understand? Or sort of like a portable fragmentation mine. Main thing he told
me is you don't use it in any kind of confined space, and you only use it when
there's nobody in front of you you don't mind seeing get really fucked up."
"So what's the chain part?"
Fontaine reached over and tapped the fat square barrel lightly, once, with his
forefinger. "In here. Thing's packed with four hundred two-foot lengths of
super-fine steel chain, sharp as razor wire."
Rydell hefted the thing by its two grips, keeping his fingers away from those
buttons. "And that-"
235
"Makes hamburger," Fontaine said.
"I heard a shot," Chevette said, lowering her wet cloth.
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"I didn't hear anything," Rydell said.
"I did," Chevette said. "Just one."
"You wouldn't hear much, that little .22," Fontaine said.
"I don't think I can stand this," Chevette said.
Now Rydell thought he heard something. Just a pop. Short, sharp. But just the
one. "You know," he said, "I think I'm going to take a look."
Chevette leaned in close, her one eye purple-black and swollen almost
completely shut, the other gray and fierce, scared and angry all at once.
"It's not a television show, Rydell. You know that?
You know the difference? It's not an episode of anything. It's your life. And
mine. And his,"
pointing to Fontaine, "and his," pointing at the kid across the room. "So why
don't you just sit there?"
Rydell felt his ears start to burn, and knew that he was blushing. "I can't
just sit here and wait-
"
"I know," she said. "I could've told you that."
Rydell handed the chain gun back to Fontaine and got to his feet, stiff but
not as bad as he'd expected. Fontaine passed him up the gun. "I need keys to
unlock the front?"
"No," Fontaine said. "I didn't do the dead bolts."
Rydell stepped around the shallow section of partition that screened them from
the window in the door and the display window.
Someone in the shadows opposite cut loose with something automatic, something
silenced so efficiently that there was only the machine-like burr of a slide
working, and the stitching sounds of bullets. Both Fontaine's windows vanished
instantly, and the glass front of the counter as well.
Rydell found himself on the floor, unable to recall getting there. The gun
across the street stopped abruptly, having chewed its way through a full clip.
He saw himself down in the basement range at the academy in Knoxville,
ejecting a half-moon clip from the stock of a bull-pup assault rifle, pulling
out another, and slapping it into place. How long it took. The number of
movements, exactly, that it took.
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There was a high, thin, very regular sound in his ears, and he realized that
it was Chevette, crying.
And then he was up, shoving the milk-carton nose of Fontaine's lawyer's
Kombinat gun over the bottom of the square hole in the door where the glass
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had been.
One of the two buttons, he thought, must be a safety.
And the other filled the air outside with flame, recoil close to breaking his
wrist, but nobody, really nobody, was going to be reloading anything.
Not over there.
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57. EYE
AND when they are cleaning up, the next day, Fontaine will find a cardboard
canister of coarse
Mexican salt, holed, on the floor, in the back room.
And he will pick it up, the weight wrong somehow, and pour the salt out into
the palm of his hand, through the entrance hole in the side, until out falls
the fully blossomed exotic hollow-point slug that had penetrated the plywood
partition, then straight into this round box of salt, upon its shelf, spending
its energy there as heat. But it will be cold then, like a fanged bronze
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evidence of the ways in which its makers intended it to rend flesh.
And he will place it on a shelf beside a lead soldier, another survivor of the
war.
But now he can only move as in a dream, and what comes to him most strongly in
this silence, this tangible silence through which he feels he moves as if
through glycerine, is the memory of his father, against his mother's ardent
fear, taking him briefly out, into the yard behind a house in tidewater
Virginia, to experience the eye of a hurricane.
And in that eye, after the storm's initial rage, nothing moves. No bird sings.
Each twig of each leafless tree defined in utter stillness, yet perhaps on the
very edge of perception there can be some awareness of the encircling system.
Something subsonic; felt, not heard. Which will return.
That is certain.
And it is like that now as he rises and moves, seeing the boy's hands frozen,
trembling, above the notebook's keys, head still helmed with that old military
set. And thinks for a moment the boy is injured, but he sees no blood.
Frightened only.
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