“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-” 235 “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. 236 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.
237 57. EYE 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.