Boomy! Boomy! Boomy!
Gun go boo my-jerky, shell outta poppy, gun go boomyjerky! again.
Ha! Ha!
Makey smoke, ma key fire.
Bad 'uns fall down go hurt. Red on them. Look it, red!
Boomy ma key red.
Mar go 'Loady-shooty, loady-shooty” loud. Dell ma key 'gun go boo my again.
Put in shell thing. Gun go klack! then gun go boo my
O’Dell laughed.
Funny, so funny.
“I'M HIT, OH GOD!” screamed Ted, blowing through the soundless ness Now there was noise everywhere. Bud's ears were ringing in pain and it was so loud he hurt. He had a coppery taste in his throat, as if he'd just had a penny sandwich. His lungs creaked and the rasp of Ted's breathing sounded louder than a buzz saw.
Bud didn't remember drawing the Smith, but he just had it there in his hand out of some miracle or something and he was pumping off rounds at the broken window, just squeezing and squeezing, and then another rake of pain ripped across his chest—Vest! Vest! he mourned—and he went down flat. The gun was lost. Then he had it again and brought it up and fired but came up with nothing but the sounds of hammer striking empty primer. He opened the gun and six shells fell out. He stared at it dumbly.
Speedloader. Speedloader!
Clumsily he grabbed at a speed loader from the pouch but his fingers were thick and greasy with blood. It fell from them and rolled in the dust, picking up grit where it was smeared with red.
“I'M HIT, OH GOD I'M HIT!” wailed Ted.
Cover, Bud was thinking, cover. The car was too far.
He rose and half-yanked Ted to the tree ten feet away. A large man ran at him and Bud lifted the Smith to fire and the man ducked. Bud couldn't figure out why the gun didn't fire. He looked. Oh yes. He hadn't reloaded. The speed loader lay in the dust. He thought he had another in the pouch.
Reload, reload, he told himself, pulling the second speed loader out.
He dropped it, too. Then he remembered Ted's gun and tried to get it out, but the security holster wouldn't permit the piece to be withdrawn. Ted shivered desperately beneath him. Blood pulsed out of a hole under his ear, and his whole face was spotted with blood. His legs were also bleeding.
“I can't see,” he said.
“Oh, Christ, Bud, I can't see.”
“Be cool, be cool,” Bud said, trying to make sense of it.
He picked up his dropped speed loader and somehow got the tips of the six cartridges it held inserted in the chambers.
He twisted the knob and the shells dropped into the gun. He slammed the cylinder shut and looked around for targets, but he could see nothing.
The car, he thought. Get to the radio, get backup, do it, do it now} 'Ted, I gotta run to the car.”
“DON'T LEAVE ME, PLEASE, DON'T LEAVE ME!”
Richard tied the last knot too tight and felt the old man shiver in the cruelty of it. But he didn't care. He had other things to do. He looked at the two of them, trussed like pigs. Under other circumstances, a tragic scene. But not now.
He raced up the stairs to the kitchen. His thought now:
Get out of here.
He would run to the barn and into the fields beyond. He simply would disappear while the shooting was going on.
They would find him later. He would convince them: he had nothing to do with it.
But he was halfway through the kitchen when the first blast came, even louder than the one Lamar had fired last night. It was like being inside a kettledrum.
He dropped instantly, his face on the floor.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
It would not stop. The noise level just rose and rose and rose. He had no idea guns were so loud! He lay there on the floor and began to cry.
Please don't let me be hurt.
He tried to free himself from Ted and looked for targets.
But smoke and dust hung in the air, illuminated by the sun.
He blinked. Nothing made a lot of sense. Shotguns, two shotguns, that much he knew.
He thought he saw movement at a corner of the house and fired two-handed this time, fast, two shots, and when he rose to run to the car, a blast took his legs out from under him and blew him down. The gun skittered away. He couldn't see the gun. He tried to crawl.
“DON'T LEAVE ME, PLEASE,” Ted yelled, grabbing at his ankle.
He craweled a bit further, until he looked up at Lamar Pye, standing over him.
“Well, howdy. Dad,” said Lamar.
“Oh, Christ,” said Bud.
“Yes sir, I was you, I'd make my peace too, Mr. Smokey.”
“Fuck you,” said Bud.
“Oh, ain't you a bull stud, though? O’Dell, come see what we have done bagged. Coupla Smokies.” He turned back to Bud.
“Liked that speed reload you done under fire. Right nice. Give this to you—you're a professional. You just got outsmarted. O’Dell, get that other boy's gun from him.”
O’Dell Pye, amazingly big, his red hair tossed every which way, his face blotchy with pimples and freckles, walked over to where Ted cowered bleeding. He kicked him hard in the back. In pain, Ted spasmed outward, and O’Dell reached down and yanked his gun from him.
“Gun,” said O’Dell, proudly, lifting Ted's Smith.
“That it is. O’Dell, that it is.”
Lamar turned to Bud.
“Now, Dad, case you don't know it, your bacon is fried.
I got no beef agin most cops, just other stiffs doing their jobs. But you Smokies shot and killed my old man many years ago. I wasn't even borned yet.”
“Fuck you, Pye, and the horse you came in on. We'll get you, you watch.”
“You watch. Trooper. I'm gonna cut a path across this state nobody won't never forget. A hunnert years from now, daddies'll scare their young kids to sleep with tales of mean old Lamar Pye, the he-lion of Oklahoma. O’Dell, put a shell into that cruiser's radio, and then check it for weapons.”
O’Dell went to the car. Bud heard the report as he fired a shotgun shell into the radio. Then, a second later, he heard the trunk open.
“Eeene gun, eene gun,” sang O’Dell, and Bud saw that he had shaken the case off Ted's AR-15.
Shit, he thought.
Then he thought. Can I make it to my backup? He had the Smith .38 around his ankle.
When Lamar turned, Bud lunged. He got to the gun, but he couldn't get the thumb snap off clean because there was so much blood on his hand and his thumb kept slipping.
Time he got it off, Lamar had leaned a big boot on his ankle, pinning it, and had reached down and removed the gun.
“Big boy like you, little lady thang like this? You ought to be ashamed.”
He tpssed the gun away.
“DON'T KILL ME! PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!” shouted Ted.
“Ted, shut up,” yelled Bud-.
“I don't think he can hear you,” said Lamar.
“I think he done lost his mind.”
“He's just a kid. Let him be. He hasn't even been on long enough to make corporal. He's got a wife. He'll have
