'Get it,' Joe commanded. 'Can you shoot a gun?'
'Of course,' Stewie said. 'I'm from Wyoming.'
Stewie rolled toward the table and began to rise up. As he did, the kitchen window imploded with the force of another bullet and threw shards of glass skittering across the floor. Stewie dropped to a
sprawl, his attitude accusatory toward Joe.
'Forget that!' Stewie yelled.
'What about you, Britney?' Joe asked. She was closer to Coble.
'I will not touch a gun.'
Joe cursed. They were useless.
Joe's mind raced as he lay there, his cheek pressed to the rough wood. Stewie was a few feet away and despite the immediacy and danger of the situation, he couldn't help staring. Stewie, Joe thought, was hideous. Seen in the dusty rods of light from the bullet holes in the walls, Stewie's face looked as if it were made of wet papier-mache that had been raked from top to bottom with a gardening claw and allowed to dry. His mouth was misshapen and exaggerated, capable of making a perfect inverted U when Stewie was angry like he was now. His mouth looked like a child's drawing of a sad face.
Under Stewie's rough, loose clothes, it was obvious that he had been bigger but had recently lost most of his muscle tone. Skin sagged on big bones. His left arm was limp and thin. Stewie's fingernails and toenails needed trimming, and a beard, once full and red, was now pink and wispy The hair on his head grew in patches, like putting greens on a desert golf course.
Joe, however, pulled his attention away from Stewie as he realized that the gunshots had suddenly stopped. Joe guessed that the shooter was reloading. He reached down to make sure his .357 was still in his holster and was relieved to find it was. Unfortunately Joe was a notoriously bad shot, and he knew that it would be close to impossible for him to hit the shooter at this distance,
The shots resumed, but inside the cabin nothing happened. The shooter had shifted targets. Joe heard a faraway shattering of glass, and a metallic clang from the impact of a bullet.
'He found my truck,' Joe spat.
He remembered that his shotgun was in the saddle scabbard. On his knees and elbows he scrambled toward the open door.
'Where are you going?' Britney asked hysterically 'Are you leaving us?'
'Try to calm down, Britney' Stewie implored.
Joe crawled to the side of the doorframe and cautiously leaned forward. His face and head felt stunningly exposed when he peered outside. He wondered if he would hear the bullet before it hit him.
Joe was practically useless as well. The shooter was over 1,500 yards away on the other mountain. Joe's .357 Magnum was not capable of even half of that range. The fat, heavy bullets he fired would fall short at about the distance of the road. Lizzie wasn't where she had fallen, but Joe spotted her further down the meadow. She stood in a pool of shadow just inside the treeline. His saddle had come loose and hung upside down beneath her belly She took a step, faltered, and stopped. She stood stiffly He could see that the bullet had shattered her right rear leg. Her leg, from her hock down, hung like a broken branch.
Suddenly, there was a puff of dust and hair from her shoulder and the horse jerked and buckled into the summer grass as the reverberating sound of shot rolled across the valley
That son of a bitch, Joe thought. That son of a bitch killed Lizzie!
Joe suddenly scuttled back as another .308 bullet blew a football sized chunk out of the doorframe Directly above where his head had been.
'Jesus Christ!' Stewie bellowed.
Joe knew his face was white and contorted with fear--he could feel his own skin pulling across his skull--when he joined Stewie and Britney Earthshare under the table. His voice choked as he asked them if there was another way out of the cabin.
Stewie said there was a side door but that Charlie Tibbs could probably
see them if they went out that way
'There's a window in the bedroom,' Britney said, her teeth chattering as if the temperature were subzero.
They crawled across the floor of the cabin toward the bedroom over shards of glass, splinters of wood, and congealing globules of blood and tissue. A bullet tore through the wall a foot above floor level and smashed into the base of the stove where Britney had huddled just a few minutes ago. Joe felt the cabin shudder with the impact.
In the bedroom, Joe ripped the curtains and rod off of the only window
and shoved it open. It faced the back of the cabin, away from where
Charlie Tibbs was positioned on the mountain.
Britney was trembling beneath her T-shirt as Joe helped her out the window There was a five-foot drop, and she landed awkwardly but recovered. Stewie sat on the sill and grunted, trying to fit his broad shoulders through the frame.
'I'm stuck, dammit,' he complained.
With the heel of his hand, Joe thumped Stewie's left shoulder, forcing him through. Stewie dropped to the ground and landed gracefully.
A sound like a cymbal crashed in the maim room as a bullet tore through the wall and hit a cast-iron skillet hanging above the stove.
Joe dropped through the window and his boots stuck fast to the soft earth covered with pine needles.
'Which way?' Britney asked.
