The blond girl grappled with the second man who had turned toward her. The rifle the man held went off between their bodies. One of the girls scrambled for the lost shotgun.

The third man, who had not turned toward the women, began to fire at Fran. Frannie sat astride her bike, her rifle in her hands, blinking stupidly at him. He was an olive-skinned man who looked Italian. She felt a bullet drone by her left temple.

Harold had finally gotten one of his pistols free. He raised it and fired at the olive-skinned man. The distance was about fifteen paces. He missed. A bullet hole appeared in the skin of the pink housetrailer just to the left of the olive-skinned man’s head. The olive-skinned man looked at Harold and said, “Now I gonna keel-a you, you sonnabeesh.”

“Don’t do that! ” Harold screamed. He dropped his pistol and held out his open hands.

The olive-skinned man fired three times at Harold. All three shots missed. The third round came the closest to doing damage; it screamed off the exhaust pipe of Harold’s Yamaha. It fell over, spilling Harold and Glen off.

Now twenty seconds had passed. Harold and Stu lay flat. Glen sat cross-legged on the road, still looking as if he didn’t know exactly where he was, or what was going on. Frannie was trying desperately to shoot the olive-skinned man before he could shoot Harold or Stu, but her gun wouldn’t fire, the trigger wouldn’t even pull, because she had forgotten to thumb the safety catch to its off position. The blond woman continued to struggle with the second man, and the woman who had gone after the dropped shotgun was now fighting with a second woman for possession of it.

Cursing in a language which was undoubtedly Italian, the olive-skinned man aimed at Harold again and then Stu fired and the olive-skinned man’s forehead caved in and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

Another woman had now joined the fray over the shotgun. The man who had lost it tried to throw her aside. She reached between his legs, grabbed the crotch of his jeans, and squeezed. Fran saw her hamstrings pop out all the way up her forearm to the elbow. The man screamed. The man lost interest in the shotgun. The man grabbed his privates and stumbled away bent-over.

Harold crawled to where his dropped pistol lay on the road and pounced on it. He raised it and fired at the man holding his privates. He fired three times and missed every time.

It’s like Bonnie and Clyde, Frannie thought. Jesus, there’s blood everywhere!

The blond woman with the ragged hair had lost her struggle for possession of the second man’s rifle. He jerked it free and kicked her, perhaps aiming for her stomach, catching her in the thigh with one of his heavy boots instead. She went quick-stepping backward, whirling her arms for balance, and landed on her fanny with a wet splat.

Now he’ll shoot her, Frannie thought, but the second man whirled around like a drunken soldier doing an about-face and began to fire rapidly into the group of three women still cringing against the side of the Country Squire.

“Yaaah! You bitches!” this gentleman screamed. “Yaaaah! You bitches!”

One of the women fell over and began to flop on the pavement between the station wagon and the overturned trailer like a stabbed fish. The other two women ran. Stu fired at the shooter and missed. The second man fired at one of the running women and did not. She threw her hands up to the sky and fell down. The other buttonhooked left and ran behind the pink trailer.

The third man, the one who had lost and failed to regain the shotgun, was still staggering around and holding his crotch. One of the women pointed the shotgun at him and pulled both triggers, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth grimacing in anticipation of that thunder. The thunder didn’t come. The shotgun was dry. She reversed it so she was holding it by the barrels and brought the stock down in a hard arc. She missed his head, but got the place where his neck joined his right shoulder. The man was driven to his knees. He began to crawl away. The woman, who was wearing a blue sweatshirt which said KENT STATE UNIVERSITY and tattered bluejeans, walked along after him, bludgeoning him with the shotgun as she went. The man continued to crawl, blood now running off him in rivers, and the woman in the Kent State sweatshirt continued to whale on him.

“Yaaaaah, you bitches!” the second man screamed, and fired at a dazed and muttering middle-aged woman. The distance between muzzle and woman was at the most three feet; she could almost have reached out and plugged the barrel with her pinky finger. He missed. He pulled the trigger again, but this time the rifle only dry-fired.

Harold was now holding his pistol in both hands, as he had seen cops do in the movies. He pulled the trigger and his bullet smashed the second man’s elbow. The second man dropped his rifle and began to dance up and down, making high jabbering noises. To Frannie, he sounded a little like Roger Rabbit saying “P-P-Pleeeeze! ”

“I got im!” Harold cried ecstatically. “Got im! By God, I got im!”

Frannie finally remembered the safety catch on her rifle. She thumbed it off just as Stu fired again. The second man fell down, now clutching his stomach instead of his elbow. He went on screaming.

“My God, my God,” Glen said mildly. He put his face into his hands and began to weep.

Harold fired his pistol again. The second man’s body jumped. He stopped screaming.

The woman in the Kent State University sweatshirt brought the stock of the shotgun down again, and this time she connected solidly with the crawling man’s head. It sounded like Jim Rice connecting solidly with a high, hard fastball. The shotgun’s walnut stock and the man’s head both shattered.

For a moment there was silence. A bird called in it: Whitwhit… whitwhit… whitwhit.

Then the girl in the sweatshirt stood astride the third man’s body and gave a long, primeval scream of triumph that haunted Fran Goldsmith for the rest of her life.

The blond girl was Dayna Jurgens, from Xenia, Ohio. The girl in the Kent State sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun’s crotch, was Patty Kroger. The other two were quite a bit older. The eldest, Dayna said, was Shirley Hammett. They didn’t know the name of the other woman, who looked to be in her mid-thirties; she had been in shock, wandering, when Al, Garvey, Virge, and Ronnie had picked her up in the town of Archbold, two days before.

The nine of them got off the highway and camped in a farmhouse somewhere just west of Columbia, now over the Indiana state line. They were all in shock, and Fran thought in later days that their walk across the field from the overturned pink trailer on the turnpike to the farmhouse would have looked to an observer like a fieldtrip sponsored by the local lunatic asylum. The grass, thigh-high and still wet from the previous night’s rain, had soon soaked their pants. White butterflies, sluggish in the air because their wings were still heavy with moisture, swooped toward them and then away in drugged circles and figure-eights. The sun was struggling to break through but hadn’t made it yet; it was a bright smear feebly illuminating a uniform white cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon. But cloud cover or no cloud cover, the day was hot already, wringing with humidity, and the air was filled with whirling flocks of crows and their raucous, ugly cries. There are more crows than people now, Fran thought dazedly. If we don’t watch out, they’ll peck us right off the face of the earth. Revenge of the blackbirds. Were crows meat-eaters? She very much feared that they were.

Below this steady trickle of nonsense, barely visible, like the sun behind the melting cloud cover (but full of power, as the sun was on this awful, humid morning, the thirtieth of July, 1990), the gunbattle played over and over in her mind. The woman’s face disintegrating under the shotgun blast. Stu falling over. The instant of stark terror when she had been sure he was dead. One man crying out Yaaah, you bitches! and then sounding like Roger Rabbit when Harold plugged him. The steel-punching-through-cardboard sound of the bearded man’s pistol. Susan Stern’s primitive cry of victory as she stood astride the body of her enemy while his brains, still warm, leaked out of his cloven skull.