eight. Mr. Steinfeld had emphysema, and his wife suffered from a bad bladder and had to wear adult-sized diapers. Changing diapers was a task that would be in Mary's future. She figured it wouldn't be so bad once she got used to it. Besides, it would be Jack's child, and so perfect he'd probably pop out toilet trained. Right, she thought as she smiled faintly in the dark. Dream on.
CinCin returned with her newspaper. No pigs, she told Jack. Everything was quiet.
'Did you see anybody on the street?' he asked her, and when she said no he told her to go upstairs to the armory and get Edward and Janette to help her start loading up the guns and ammo. As a precaution, they were going to leave the house and go upstate for a few days.
Gary came back, a pocketful of change in his purple tie-dyed jeans. No problems, he said.
'Nothing different?' Jack prodded. 'Nothing at all?'
Gary shrugged. 'Panhandler was parked on the ground in front of the Laundromat, and he asked me for a hit on the way in. I gave him a quarter coming out.'
'Had you ever seen the dude before?'
'Nope. It's no big deal, man. He was just a panhandler.'
'You know the old lady who runs that place,' Jack reminded him. 'You ever remember that stiff old bitch letting a panhandler set up shop in her front door?'
Gary thought about it. 'No,' he said. 'I don't.'
At nine forty-two, CinCin reported an unmarked, beat-up panel truck cruising slowly through the back alley. About half an hour later, Akitta thought he heard the metallic noise of a voice on a radio, but he wasn't sure where it was coming from. Toward eleven, Mary was still sitting in her chair in the dark when she thought she saw a movement in one of the black upstairs windows of the Steinfeld house. She leaned forward, her heart beating harder. Did something move over there, or not? She waited, watching, as the seconds ticked into minutes.
She saw it.
A tiny red circle, flaring in the dark and then ebbing again.
A cigarette, she thought. Somebody was smoking a cigarette.
In a house where an old man had emphysema, somebody was smoking.
Mary stood up. 'Jack?' she called. Her voice trembled, and the sound shamed her. 'Jack?'
A floodlight hit the house with such suddenness that it stole Mary's breath. She could feel its heat on her, and she dodged away from the window. A second floodlight came on, and a third, the first aimed from the Steinfeld house and the others from houses on either side of number 1105. 'Shit!' she heard Edward cry out. There was the noise of somebody racing up the stairs, and other bodies flinging themselves to the floor. A few seconds later the lights in the house went out: one of the Storm Fronters had hit the fusebox.
The sound that Mary had dreaded for years finally came: the amplified voice of a pig through an electric bullhorn. 'Attention, occupants of 1105 Elderman! This is the FBI! Come out into the light with your hands behind your heads! I repeat, come out into the light! If you follow my directions, nobody'll get hurt!'
Jack burst into the room, carrying a flashlight and an Uzi submachine gun. 'Fuckers have ringed us! Must've cleared the fucking houses and we didn't even know it! Come on, load up!'
In the armory, guns were loaded and passed around by flashlight. Mary took an automatic and returned to the bedroom window. Janette joined her, carrying a shotgun and with three hand grenades clipped to her belt. The bullhorn squawked again: 'We don't want bloodshed! Jack Gardiner, do you hear me?' The downstairs telephone began to ring; it ended when Jack ripped it off its wire. 'Jack Gardiner! Give yourself and the others up! There's no point in getting anyone hurt!'
How they'd been nailed, Mary didn't know. She would find out, months later, that the pigs had evacuated the surrounding structures and been watching the house for five hours. The incident with the pig car had happened because the overeager Linden cop who'd been trailing Edward and Janette had wanted to see a Storm Fronter at close range. AH Mary knew, as the floodlights blazed and her brothers and sisters crouched down and took aim, was that the eve of destruction had finally arrived.
James Xavier Toombs shot out the first floodlight. Gary hit the second, but before the third could be shot out the pigs switched on their auxiliary lights and opened fire on the green house.
Bullets tore through the walls, ricocheting off pipes and whining over their heads. 'No surrender!' Lord Jack roared over the noise. 'No surrender!' Akitta repeated. 'No surrender!' CinCin Omara echoed. 'No surrender!' Mary heard herself shout, and Janette's voice was lost in the hell of Storm Front guns bellowing their death cries. The pigs were firing, too, and in a matter of seconds every window in the green house was shattered, the air a razormist of flying glass. Janette's shotgun boomed, and Mary fired shot after shot at the window where she'd seen the glow of a pig's cigarette. In the scant lull between fusillades, Mary heard the crackle of radios and the shouts of pigs. Downstairs, someone was screaming: Gary Leister, shot through the chest and writhing in a pool of blood. Janette was pumping shells into the shotgun and blasting as fast as she could, the spent cartridges flying into the air. She stopped to pull a grenade from her belt, and she yanked its pin and stood up to toss it at the house across the street. The grenade bounced up under a car parked at the curb, and in the next second the vehicle was lifted up on a gout of fire and crashed over on its side, burning gasoline streaking across the pavement. By the flickering light, the pigshadows darted and ran. Mary shot at one of them, saw him stagger and fall onto the Steinfelds' front porch.
The next blast of pig bullets shook the green house on its foundations, blew a hole the size of a fist in the back of Sancho Clemenza's skull, and ripped away two of James Xavier Toombs's fingers. Mary heard Lord Jack shouting: 'No surrender! No surrender!' One of the Storm Fronters threw a stick of dynamite with a sparking fuse, and the house next door exploded in a geyser of fire, wood, and glass. A vehicle of some kind was coming along the street: an armored car, Mary saw with a jolt of horror. The snout of a machine gun spat tracer bullets, and the slugs tore through the punctured walls like meteors. Two of those bullets hit Akitta Washington in the remains of the kitchen, and sprayed his blood across the refrigerator. Another stick of dynamite was thrown, destroying the Steinfeld house in a thunderclap. Flames leapt high, waves of black smoke rolling across the neighborhood. The armored car stopped, hunched on the street like a black beetle, fiery tracers spitting from its machine gun. Mary heard Janette sob, 'The bastards! The bastards!' and Janette rose up in the flickering red light and yanked the pin from a second grenade. She threw her arm back to toss the grenade through the window, tears running down her face, and suddenly the room was full of flying wood splinters and ricocheting tracers and Janette Snowden was knocked backward. The grenade fell from her fingers, and Mary watched as if locked in a fever dream as the live grenade rolled across the blood-spattered floorboards.
Mary had a second or two in which her brain was seized up. Reach for the grenade, or get the fuck out? Janette's body was jittering on the floor. The grenade was still rolling.
Out.
The thought screamed. Mary stood up, crouched low, and ran for the door with cold sweat bursting from the pores of her flesh.
She heard the grenade thunk against the baseboard. In that instant she lifted her hands to shield her face, and she realized she should have shielded her unborn baby instead.
Surprisingly, she did not hear the grenade explode. She was aware only of a great heat lapping against her midsection, like the sun on a particularly fierce day. There was a feeling of lightness, of stepping outside her body and soaring upward. And then the sensation of gravity caught her again and wrenched her back to earth, and she opened her eyes in the upstairs hallway of the burning house, a hole in the bedroom's flaming wall and much of the ceiling collapsed and on fire. Somebody was trying to help her up. She saw a gaunt, bearded face and a ponytail. Edward. '… Up, get up!' he was saying, blood streaking his forehead and cheeks like war paint. She could barely hear him for the buzz in her ears. 'Can you get up?'
'God,' she said, and three seconds after that God answered by filling her body with pain. She began to cry, blood drooling from her mouth. She pressed her hands against the swell of her baby, and her fingers sank into a crimson swamp.
It was hatred that got her to her feet. Nothing but hatred that could make her grit her teeth and haul herself up as blood streamed down her thighs and dripped to the floor. 'Hurt bad,' she told Edward, but he was pulling her through the flames and she went with him, docile in her agony. Bullets were still ripping through the Swiss-cheese walls, smoke thick in the air. Mary had lost her gun. 'Gun,' she said. 'Gun.' Edward scooped up a revolver from the floor, near Gary Leister's outstretched hand, and she closed her fist on its warm grip. She stepped on something: the body of CinCin Omara, the cameo face unrecognizable as anything that had once been human. James Xavier
