Page 79 of Havoc

The world goes very small and very far away.

"Junie called it in. She's⁠—"

I don't hear the rest of it.

Nine miles.

I have run that road ten thousand times in fifteen years and I could not tell you one thing about those nine miles. Not one. I have got no memory of gettin' on the bike and no memory of the bridge and no memory of the turn, and the next thing that exists is a gravel lot full of people standing outside a building with its whole front wall shot through and every window gone.

She's on the tailgate of somebody's truck.

That's it. That's all of it. She's sitting on a tailgate with a bar towel wrapped around her left forearm and Junie has got an arm around her and she is talking, she's talking fast and loud with her free hand going, and when she sees me come off that bike she stops in the middle of the sentence.

I get to her and I don't say anything.

I put both hands on either side of her face and I put my forehead on hers and I stay there a while.

"Glass," she says. "It's glass. Junie put me under the bar."

"Junie put you under the bar."

"She had me down before the second one." Lennox's hand comes up and gets a fistful of my shirt. "Eli. Eli, look at me. Nobody's dead. There's a man in the parking lot who caught one in the leg, and there's about nine people cut up, but everybody is alive."

Junie is standing three feet away with her apron soaked through with somebody else's blood and her hands shaking and her voice completely level, telling a deputy exactly what kind of truck it was and which way it went.

Eight years behind that bar.

She got a woman under the counter before the second burst.

"Where's Gigi?" somebody says.

"She ain't on tonight." Junie doesn't even turn around. She's got a hand out to the deputy for his pen. "Switched with me Sunday, she took the Friday instead."

Nobody follows it up.

There's a man on the ground in the parking lot with a belt around his thigh and there's a woman crying in a car and there's a building with no front on it, and a deputy who wants to know about the truck, and nobody in that lot has got one second to spare for who was and wasn't on the schedule.

I don't think about it again for a long time.

Blitz went down at the yard and I did not know it.

The east fence was burning and there were men shooting at us and Cricket was carrying a sixty-one-year-old woman out of a building, and then Tyrant said The Fang and I got on a bike and I left, and Blitz was already on the ground behind the shop by then and I did not know it and I did not look for him.

When I get back, it's twenty after midnight.

They've got him on a tarp in the gravel between two trucks with the headlights on him. Deacon's got both hands flat on his left side above the hip and there's a jacket under him and Ransom is kneeling in the rocks by his head talking to him steady, low, the way you'd talk to a horse.

"Ambulance is nineteen minutes out," Tyrant says. "They got two wrecks on the interstate."

"Then we drive him."

"Deacon says don't move him."

"Deacon."

"Through and through," Deacon says, without lookin' up. "Went in the back of the left side and came out the front and it ain't in his belly and it ain't up in his chest. I can see both holes and they ain't but four inches apart. If it was the other thing he'd be gray by now and he ain't gray, he's mad."

"I'm very mad," Blitz says.