'I think you're still liable to get your ass blown away by tribal enemies, in America, Mr. Fontaine.

'That's true, Fontaine said, shifting his buttocks, 'but Martial's got that post-traumatic thing, right?

'You help him with these problems? You help him by holding a weapon for him, Mr. Fontaine? Something he wouldn't want to keep on his own premises?

Fontaine looked at Rydell. Pursed his lips. Nodded.

'Where is it?

'It's in the wall, behind us.

Rydell looked at the wall between them. 'This is plywood?

'Most of it, Fontaine said, swinging around, 'See here? This part's a patch, gypsum wall filler. We built a box in here, put it in, plastered it over, painted.

'Guess someone could find it with a metal detector, Rydell said, remembering being trained how to search for stashes like this.

'I don't think it has a lot of metal in it, Fontaine said, 'anyway not in the delivery system.

'Can we see it?

'Well, said Fontaine, 'once we get it out, I'm stuck with it.

'No, Rydell said, 'I am.

Fontaine produced a little bone-handled pocketknife. Opened it, started digging gingerly at the wall.

'We could get a bigger knife, Rydell suggested.

'Hush, Fontaine said. As Rydell watched, the point of the knife exposed a dark ring, the size you'd wear on your finger. Fontaine pried it up and out of the hardened plaster, but it seemed to be fastened to something. 'You pull this, okay?

Rydell slid his middle finger through the ring, tugged it a little. Felt solid.

'Go on, Fontaine said. 'Hard.

Plaster cracked, tore loose, as the fine steel wire attached to the ring pulled out around the patch, cutting through it like dry cheese. A rough, inch-thick rectangle coming away in Rydell's hand. Fontaine was pulling 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 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-

'Makes hamburger, Fontaine said.

'I heard a shot, Chevette said, lowering her wet cloth.

'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.

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 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.

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 kernel of popcorn, 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.

All guns exist to be fired, he knows, and Rydell has proven this by firing Martial's, that ugly thing, Russian, vicious booty out of the Kombinat states by way of Africa, out of wars of an abiding stupidity, ethnic struggles smoldering on for centuries, like airless fires down in the heart of a dry bog. A gun for those unable to be trained to shoot.