She’d almost lost her meagre dinner when the enormous Mormon they called Big Ben had brought a sledgehammer down on his first victim’s skull, in the opening seconds of the attack on the Hy Top Club. Choking down her nausea, she brought out the Remington and waited for a target to present itself. In the excitement, she nearly opened fire on the first thing that resolved in her telescope, bracketed against the fire and torchlight of the camp. That would have meant shooting Orin, one of her own group, not to mention giving herself away. Sneakiness was the watchword of the evening, she reminded herself; sneakiness and not shooting the wrong people. She forced herself to wait.

When the first camp whore screamed, she tracked the muzzle onto her, but a sledgehammer blow silenced the woman before Sofia could fire. The whore’s boyfriend struggled to rise off the couch, where he’d crashed, drunken and sated, on the grass just in front of the tumbledown clubhouse. She recalled him as if he was standing right in front of her in the loft in KC. A bearded, shaggy, potbellied maggot with a red bandana tied over his head.

Sofia brought the crosshairs of her Remington up to Bandana Boy’s unibrow, took a deep breath, and let it out. As she exhaled, she kept the muzzle on target until her finger had completed the trigger pull. Bucking in her arms, the rifle put a single round through the road agent’s forehead, disintegrating the top half of his skull in a spectacular shower of bloody gruel and dropping the corpse back onto the couch. She felt a surge of anger and . . . something else.

A feeling she did not recognise, but it was powerful. No, it was power itself.

She felt her power over the man she had shot, whose life she had taken. It was a good feeling.

Sofia forced herself to mechanically work the bolt, spitting out the spent .30–06 casing and sliding a fresh round into the chamber. The Mormon men, having now traded the sledgehammers for M16s, took cover, uselessly, behind the couch and exchanged fire with those attempting to run back inside the Hy Top.

She tracked two more road agents sprinting for the door, dispatching the first with a clean torso shot, which spun her target off his feet and into the dry wall façade with a crash that shook the entire front of the building. The other man, she drilled in the ass, slowing him down long enough for the Mormons to pour a stream of tracer fire into his back. So intense was the fire, it disassembled him from the hip up to shoulder height.