By the Light of the Moon

Shepherd climbed, climbed. 'Ice.'

'Show.'

'Ice.'

'Storm.'

'Ice.'

'Tea, ax, breaker, man, chest, water,' Jilly said, talking him up the last rungs and into the attic.

She helped him off the ladder, to his feet, away from the trapdoor. She hugged him and told him he was terrific, and Shep didn't resist, though he did say, 'Where's all the ice?'

Down in the closet, Dylan switched off the light. He climbed quickly in the darkness. 'Good work, Jackson.'

'De nada, O'Conner.'

On his knees in the gloom, Dylan folded the accordion ladder upward, as quietly as possible reloading it onto the back of the trapdoor, which he would then pull shut. 'If they aren't upstairs yet, they're coming,' he whispered. 'Take Shep over there, the southwest corner, behind those boxes.'

'Where's all the ice?' Shepherd asked too loudly.

Jilly hushed him as she guided him across the shadow-choked attic. He wasn't tall enough to rap the lowest rafters with his forehead, but his big brother would have to duck.

In lower realms the wrecking crew crashed into another room.

A man shouted something unintelligible. Another man returned his shout with a curse, and someone barked with laughter.

A hardness, a roughness, a swagger of presumption in these voices made them sound less like men to Jilly, more like the never quite defined shapes in a nightmare chase, which pursued sometimes on two feet, sometimes on four, alternately howling like men and crying like beasts.

She wondered when the cops would come. If they would come. Dylan had said the nearest town was miles away. The closest neighbor lived half a mile south of here. But surely somebody had heard the gunfire.

Of course the assault had started just five minutes ago, maybe six, and no rural police force would be able to answer such a remote call sooner than another five minutes, more likely ten.

'Where's all the ice?' Shepherd asked as loudly as before.

Instead of hushing him again, Jilly answered in a soft voice with which she hoped to set an example: 'In the refrigerator, honey. That's where all the ice is.'

Behind stacked boxes in the southwest corner, Jilly encouraged Shep to sit beside her on the dusty floor.

Filtered through a screened fresh-air vent, a blush of daylight revealed a long-dead bird – a sparrow, perhaps – reduced by time to papery bones. Beneath the bones were trapped a few feathers that drafts had not stirred to other corners of the attic.

The bird must have stolen in here on a chilly day, through some chink in the eaves, and must have been unable to find its way out. Perhaps having broken a wing battering against rafters, certainly exhausted and hungry, it had waited for death by the screened vent, where it could see the sky.

'Where's all the ice?' Shepherd asked, this time lowering his voice to a whisper.

Worried that the kid had not come as far out of his ice corner as she had thought when he climbed the ladder, or that he was sliding into it once more, Jilly pressed forward with her new game, seeking dialogue. 'There's ice in a margarita, isn't there, sweetie? All slushy and nice. Man, I could use one now.'

'Where's all the ice?'

'In a picnic chest, there'd be ice.'

'Where's all the ice?'

'Christmas in New England, there'd be ice. And snow.'

Moving gracefully and quietly for such a large man, Dylan loomed out of the deeper darkness swaddling the center of the attic, into the bird light that dimly illuminated their refuge, and sat next to his brother. 'Still the ice?' he asked worriedly.

'We're going somewhere,' Jilly assured him with more confidence than she felt.

'Where's all the ice?' Shep whispered.

'Lots of ice in a skating rink.'

'Where's all the ice?'

'Nothing but ice in an icemaker.'

Boots met doors on the second floor. Rooms were breached with crash and clatter.

Whispering yet more discreetly, Shepherd said, 'Where's all the ice?'

'I see champagne in a silver bucket,' Jilly said, matching his quiet tones, 'crushed ice packed around the bottle.'

'Where's all the ice?'

'North Pole has a lot of ice.'

'Ahhh,' Shepherd said, and for the moment he said no more.

Jilly listened tensely as voices in rooms below replaced the boom and crack of violent search. Mummified conspirators in pyramidal tombs, speaking through their grave wrappings, could not have been less clear, and nothing said below was intelligible up here.

'Ahhh,' Shep breathed.

'We have to move along, buddy,' Dylan said. 'It's way past time to fold.'

Under them the ravaged house sank into silence, and after half a minute, the disquieting hush grew more ominous than anything that had preceded it.

'Buddy,' Dylan said, but made no further plea, as if he sensed that Shep would respond better to this silence, this stillness, than to additional pressure.

In her mind's eye, Jilly saw the kitchen clock, the pig grinning as the second hand swept around the numbers on its belly.

Even in memory, that porcine smile disturbed her, but when she wiped the image from her mind, she saw instead, equally unbidden, the Minute Minder with which Shep timed his showers. This image shook her worse than she'd been shaken by the pig, for the Minute Minder looked remarkably like a bomb clock.

Gunmen opened fire on the ceilings below, and geysers of bullets erupted through the attic floor.

41

Starting at opposite ends of the house but moving toward each other, gunmen fired bursts of heavy-caliber, penetrant rounds into the ceiling of the second-floor hallway. Bullets cracked through the plywood attic floor, spitting sprays of wood chips, admitting narrow shafts of pale light from below, establishing a six-foot-wide zone of death the length of this upper space. Slugs slammed into rafters. Other rounds punched through the roof and carved blue stars of summer sky in the dark vault of the attic ceiling.

Jilly realized why Dylan wanted to be in a corner, back pressed against an outer wall. The structure between them and the lower floor would be denser along the perimeter, more likely to stop at least some of the rounds from penetrating into the attic.

Her legs were straight out in front of her. She drew her knees in toward her chest, making as small a target of herself as possible, but not small enough.

The bastards kept changing magazines down below, reloading in rotation, so the assault remained continuous. The rattle-crack-boom of gunfire numbed the mind to all feeling except terror, precluded all thought except thoughts of death.

No shortage of ammunition in this operation. No reconsideration of the recklessness or the immorality of cold-blooded murder. Just the relentless, savage execution of the plan.

In the thin wash of daylight from the screened vent in the eave, Jilly saw that Shepherd's face was animated by a succession of tics, squints, and flinches, but that behind his closed lids, his eyes were not twitching as they so