By the light of the moon

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 often did. The thunder of
gunfire disturbed him, but he seemed less scared to distraction
than focused intently on some enthralling thought.
    The gunfire stopped.
    The house popped and creaked with settling ruination.
    In this certain to be brief cease-fire, Dylan dared to motivate
Shepherd with the threat of what was coming: 'Gooey-bloody, Shep.
Coming fast, gooey-bloody.'
    Having moved out of the upstairs hall, into rooms on both sides
of the house, the gunmen opened fire again.
    The killers were not yet in the room immediately below the attic
corner in which Jilly, Dylan, and Shep huddled. But they would
visit it in a minute. Maybe sooner.
    Although the brutally pounding fusillades were concentrated in
two widely separate areas, the entire attic floor vibrated from the
impact of scores of heavy rounds.
    Wood cracked, wood groaned, bullet-struck nails and in-wall
pipes twanged and clanked and pinged.
    A mist of dust shook down from rafters.
    On the floor the bird bones trembled as if an animating spirit
had returned to them.
    Freed, one of the few remaining feathers spiraled up through the
descending dust.
    Jilly wanted to scream, dared not, could not: throat clenched as
tight as a fist, breath imprisoned.
    Rapid-fire weaponry rattled directly below them, and in front of
their eyes, swarms of bullets ripped through stacked storage boxes.
Cardboard puckered, buckled, shredded.
    As his eyes popped wide open, Shepherd thrust off the floor,
stood upright, pressing back against the wall.
    With an explosive exhalation, Jilly bolted to her feet, Dylan
too, and it seemed the house would come apart around them, would be
blown to pieces by the cyclone of noise if not first blasted
and shaken into rubble by the shattering passage of this storm of
lead, of steel-jacketed rounds.
    Two feet in front of them, the plywood floor ruptured, ruptured,
ruptured, bullets punching through from below.
    Something stung Jilly's forehead, and as she raised her right
hand, something bit her palm, too, before she could press it to the
higher wound, causing her to cry