After the fifth shot, a bib-front-overall-clad dirt farmer came tumbling out from behind the curtain of green. He crashed through the stalks, flattening them as he fell, arms outstretched, handblaster slipping from his fingers. He hit the ground and lay sprawled, head down, over the lip of the bed for a moment, then as he regained consciousness, started thrashing his arms, struggling to get out of the line of fire. Struggling in vain.
Furlong shot him again. The bullet plucked at the fabric of his T-shirt six inches below the base of his skull, just above the crisscross of his bib-front straps. The arms stiffened and then went limp.
An instant later, the head roustie was surprised to see the body scoot backward a foot, back between the corn stalks. Then he realized that someone had hold of the dirt farmer by the ankles and was trying to drag him back behind cover. Furlong dropped his aimpoint and touched off five more rounds. Ears of corn exploded juicily, broad leaves went flying, and the stalks parted for a second, revealing a second bib-fronted man, spurting jets of red from a devastating head wound as he slumped over the legs of his dead pal.
Autofire from behind the front and rear bumpers of the wags mowed down the six or eight ville sec men trying to advance to the closest of the plant beds. The rousties whistled and taunted the surviving sec men, even as their friends twitched in the dirt, trying to make them mad enough to charge into the killzone. Nobody charged. The farmers had discipline. After that, there was a lot of random shooting from both sides. A lot of gray smoke drifted about, but no chilling.
Everyone had taken hard cover.
There were no clear targets for Furlong out the gunport, so he held his fire. It appeared that only a few of the ville folk were attacking them. Less than a dozen shooters were hidden behind the beds. He was relieved at that. He couldn’t see out the windshield more than ten feet because of the wag parked in front of him. He had no way of knowing that the driver of the lead wag hadn’t gotten his steel shades down quickly enough, and had been hit several times in the face and neck by high-powered slugs, and was unconscious and rapidly bleeding out on the floor of the driver’s compartment. Because the lead wag completely blocked Furlong’s view of the main road ahead, he couldn’t see all the armed, angry folks slipping across it, then filtering between the predark buildings in order to circle behind him.
How a few of the dirt farmers could’ve escaped the death tent puzzled the head roustie, but it didn’t worry him much. Once the other carny folk had figured out what happened, they would close in from the rear and wipe out the stragglers.
The looters weren’t all that worried, either. The two guys in the back slipped off to resume their robbing. Because the carny chillers were partially protected by the three parked wags, blocked from the view and aim of the shooters, the flow of stolen goods from the huts continued to trickle into the rear bins. If anything, the rousties worked a bit faster because of the threat of being hit by random fire.
Gradually the shooting from the beds and the thunk of bullets rattling through the wag’s rear compartment slowed to a steady trickle.
Then the potshots stopped altogether.
When Furlong first saw the ville folks breaking from cover and firing the other way, he thought for sure the carny side had finally launched an overdue counterattack. Several dirt farmers dropped in their tracks and three others sprinted away, two boys and a fat woman in a baggy dress.
“Now you’re gonna get it!” he shouted over the roar of looter blasterfire that had already begun. He angled the muzzle of the Llama toward the fleeing trio suddenly caught in the middle of a cloud of yellow, bullet-raised dust.
Furlong aimed at the fat woman and fired four quick shots. What with the flying dirt and all the other bullet strikes, he couldn’t tell if he’d hit her. Not that it really mattered. In the space of a heartbeat, all three lay in a dead heap in the middle of the road.