Page 78 of Havoc

Not a bang. That's the thing nobody tells you. It's a whump, low and soft, like a sheet snappin' out, and the windows on that side of the clubhouse go orange all at once and every man in that room is on his feet before anybody's said a word.

"Yard!"

Warden's already through the door.

I come out into a night that's turned the color of a furnace. They've done the crushed stacks on the east fence, four rows of 'em, and there's forty years of oil and gas and God knows what in those cars and it is going up in a wall thirty feet high, and the heat off it hits me across the lot like a hand.

Two figures at the fence line.

Then a third at the gate with somethin' in his hands, and Raider hollers DOWN and the gatepost comes apart about eight inches above where my head was.

Here's what it actually is, and it ain't a movie.

It's dark and it's loud and it's over fast. There ain't any planning in it. Warden's got a shotgun out of the shop and he's usin' the block wall of the bay for cover and he is the calmest thing on that lot, calling it out — two at the fence, one movin' left, Deacon get down — and Deacon is a mountain who does not get down, and Tyrant is behind a truck axle with a pistol he probably ain't fired in six years.

Somebody's screaming somewhere and it goes on a long time.

Raider gets to the gate side by going around the outside of the fence line, which is a thing nobody would think to do and nobody would survive twice, and there's a fight down there in the dark that I can't see any of and then there's one man on the ground and the other two are running for a truck on the shell road.

It don't last two minutes.

Two minutes, and forty years of scrap is burning, and the office where I've stood a thousand mornings has fire coming out the window.

"Cricket's in the shop."

It's Blitz who says it. He's got the phone in his hand and he's turning in a circle.

"He was in the shop, he was doin' the floor, I told him to stay⁠—"

The shop is on the east side.

The shop is on the east side, and the roof of it is already going, and I get about six steps toward it and Deacon gets a whole arm across my chest and takes me off my feet.

"He's out," Deacon says. "Look at me. Havoc. He's out, he come out the far door⁠—"

And he did.

He's coming around the corner of the burning building with a woman under one arm.

Marisol who does the shop books, sixty-one years old, been in that office three nights a week for eleven years, and Cricket has got her whole weight on his hip and he's carrying her out of a fire in a swamp parish with his own sleeve smoking, and behind him there's a kid from the shop floor about nineteen years old with a shirt over his face.

He puts her down in the gravel.

Then he turns around and goes back toward the building and Warden catches him by the back of the cut and throws him — actually throws him, six feet — and stands over him hollering in a voice I have never in fifteen years heard that man use.

Cricket lies there in the gravel and laughs.

Twenty-one years old, flat on his back with his forearm burned through his sleeve and his eyebrows gone, laughing.

"There wasn't nobody else!" he yells at Warden. "I checked! I checked both rooms!"

Tyrant's phone goes at eleven twenty-two.

I know the exact time because I've looked at it since. Eleven twenty-two, standing in a gravel lot with the whole east fence burning and a man face down at the gate and Marisol coughing into Deacon's shoulder.

Tyrant takes it four steps away and comes back with his face wrong.

"The Fang," he says. "Somebody came through the lot and put thirty rounds in the front of it."