Collie Entragian’s house has been replaced by the Two Sisters Millinery, where can be found The Finest in Ladies” Fashions. Serge leans out, draws a bead on the storefront with his shotgun, and yanks the triggers. There is another shattering double crash, and again that long, wailing shriek, as of a bomb falling dead-center-true down the gravity-well toward its target.

“Make it stop!” Susi screams. “Oh please someone MAKE IT STOP!”

The top half of Two Sisters seems to lift off in a storm of boards and shingles and glass and nails. Again there is that flicker, almost as quick as a hummingbird’s wing, and in it Entragian’s house may be glimpsed, even Gary Ripton’s bike and plastic-covered body may be glimpsed, shimmering like the mirages they have now become. Then the house is gone and it’s the Two Sisters (where in The Regulators we first see Laura DeMott, saloon lass with a heart of gold, surreptitiously buying cloth for a church dress) again, with half its roof gone and all its windows blown in.

From the badlands (sagebrush and huge tumbled boulders of cartoon roundness) north of Poplar Street, where Bear Street now isn’t, the silver Rooty-Toot Power Wagon appears. Rooty is behind the wheel, his eyes flashing on and off like traffic lights; Little Joe Cartwright is in the seat next to him, devil-may-care grin on his face, a shotgun chrome-plated with futuristic swoops and doodads in his hands. Directly behind Rooty-Toot comes the Justice Wagon, and behind Justice there appears a humming electric nightmare. In the bonelight of the moon, the Meatwagon looks wrapped in black silk. No Face is in the steering-pit. Countess Lili is in the nav-pit, her sexy eyes gleaming in her ashy vampire-maiden’s face. Jeb Murdock is above them, in the Doom Turret. In the prime shooting-station.

Because he is the meanest.

And so the final Power Wagon assault begins, with three vans swinging into the Force Corridor from the north and three more from the south. Hideously amplified shotgun blasts shake the air; the whistling passage of the shells thrown from the muzzles of those guns sounds like a flock of banshees. The Cattlemen’s Hotel (formerly the Soderson house) is shivered backward on its foundations; the left side first slumps, then actually crumples, spitting off dry boards and wooden shingles. The house north of it-a wattle-and-daub construction Brad Josephson would never have recognized as his own lovingly maintained split-level-seems to explode outward in all directions, shooting jagged chunks of wood and slabs of dried mud into the air.

On the other side of the street, the false front of Worrell’s Market amp; Mercantile (once Tom Billingsley’s house; the corpses of the Sodersons lie in an aisle of big round bags, all labelled disintegrates under a series of rifle shots from the Justice Wagon-each arriving round as loud as a mortar shell. Colonel Henry is driving; poked out of the firing trap and doing the shooting is Chuck Connors, also known as The Rifleman. His son is right next to him, grinning from ear to ear. “Good shootin, Paw!” he exclaims as smoking boards from the false front ignite the decade’s worth of trash and dust that has been hiding behind it. Soon the entire building will be on fire.

“Thanks, son,” Lucas McCain says, and turns his missile-firing Winchester on to Lushan’s Chinese Laundry. Lushan’s, once the home of Peter and Mary Jackson, has been pretty well bashed about already by Rooty-Toot, but that doesn’t deter The Rifleman. His son joins in, firing a pistol. It’s a small one, but every round from it sounds like a bazooka shell, just the same.

At the end of the run, a haze of gunsmoke hangs over Main Street. Several of the houses on the west side of the street-the adobe hacienda where the Gellers once lived, the log cabin where the Reeds hung their assorted hats, the wattle-and-daub Brad and Belinda once called home-have been almost totally destroyed. The Cattlemen’s is still standing-more or less-and so is the Two Sisters on the east side, but the Mercantile will soon join the Owl (formerly the Hobart place) as so much ash in the wind.

Only one house on the east side of the street remains as it was before the regulators came: the Carver place. There are bullet-holes in the siding and broken windows from the previous assault, but on this run it has been completely untouched.

Dream Floater, Tracker Arrow, and Freedom have reached the north end of what used to be Poplar Street’s two-forty block. Rooty-Toot, Justice, and the Meatwagon have reached the south end. The firing slackens, then ceases entirely. The people in the Carver house can hear the crackle of fire from the other side of the fence-the Market amp; Mercantile they still think of as Old Doc’s bungalow-but otherwise there is a deep quiet that lies like balm against their ringing ears. In it, the survivors cautiously raise their heads.

“Is it over, do you think?” Steve asks, in the tone of someone who doesn’t want to come right out and say it wasn’t as bad as he thought… but who is thinking it.

“We ought to-” Johnny begins.

“I hear it again!” Kim Geller cries from the living room. Her voice is high, shivering on the edge of hysteria, but the rest of them have no reason not to believe her; she is closest to the street, after all. “That awful humming! Make it stop!” She rushes through the door into the kitchen, her eyes bulging and crazed. “Make it stop!”

“Get down, Mom!” Susi calls, but she herself does not stir from beside Dave Reed, who is lying with one arm around her and his hand (the one his creepy mother can’t see from where she is) against her breast. Susi doesn’t mind his hand a bit; would mind, in fact, if he took it away. Her terror and her almost maternal concern for the surviving twin have combined to make her really horny for the first time in her life. All she really wants right now is to be with David in a place where they can take their pants off without being noticed.

Kim ignores her daughter. She goes to Audrey, grabs her by her hair, yanks her head back. “Make him stop it!” she shouts into Audrey’s pale face. “He’s your kin, you brought him here, NOW MAKE HIM STOP!”

Belinda Josephson moves fast; she’s up from where she’s been lying, she’s across the room, and she has Kim Geller’s free arm twisted up behind her back almost before Brad can blink.

“Ow!” Kim screams, immediately letting go of Audrey’s hair. “Ow, let go! Let go, you black bi-”

Belinda has taken all the tiresome racist shit she intends to for one day. She yanks Kirn’s arm up even further before she can finish. Susi’s mom, who supports the Girl Scouts and never sends the Cancer Society lady away empty-handed, shrieks like a factory whistle at quitting time. Then Belinda turns her, hips her, and sends her flying back into the living room. Kim crashes into a wall. All around her more Hummel figures tumble to their doom.

“There,” Belinda says in a businesslike voice. “She had that coming. I don’t have to put up with that kind of-”

“Never mind,” Johnny says. The humming is louder now, louder than it has ever been: a steady, cycling beat like the sound of a huge electric transformer. “Get down, Bee. Right now. Everybody. Steve, Cynthia? Cover those children!” Then he looks, almost apologetically, at Seth Garin’s aunt. “Can you make him stop, Aud?”

She shakes her head. “It’s not him. Not now. It’s Tak.” Before she puts her head back down, she sees Cammie Reed looking at her, and there is something in that dry glance that frightens her more than all of Kirn Geller’s shouting and hair-pulling. It’s a serious look. No hysteria, only flat murder.

Who would Cammie murder, though? Her? Seth? Both? Audrey doesn’t know. She only knows she cannot tell the others what she did before leaving, that simple thing that might solve so much-if. If the window of time she’s hoping for opens; if she does the right thing when it does. She can’t tell them there’s hope, because if Tak is able to reach out and catch hold of their thoughts, all hopes will fail.