At least, it looks like she’s firing at the crowd. She’s really firing just over their heads, but in all the sound and clamor and panic, nobody’s figured that out yet. And like Moses parting the Red Sea, Atlanta parts the ocean of bodies as they start to scream and yell and run the other way.

Chaos. She needs chaos.

Atlanta runs into the crowd, firing off another two shots, a cowboy moving his herd. She darts into the throng, moves through it, away from it, lost within it. And soon as she can’t see the octagon anymore, she bolts for the woods with Whitey swiftly in tow.

The wound looks worse than it is, she thinks—a few teeth marks, still bleeding but the punctures are shallow, so she and Whitey hunker down in the woods not far from Wayman’s farmhouse. She sits behind a stack of firewood and holds the dog close.

He sniffs her ear and licks it.

She cries. First just a little. Then great big gulping sobs. She yells at herself inside her own mind to stop, but that only opens the floodgates wider.

It takes time to wind down, for the sobs to hitch and stumble and hiccup before eventually quitting. All the while, she holds the bleeding dog close. The day is hot but she’s got the chills. Trauma. Shock.

Soon she’s still. And the forest goes still with her. Noises of the Farm are present but distant, as if in another world. Once in a while she looks over the stack of wood corded between prongs of rusty rebar and she can see the Farm. Folks mill about. Crowd looks a little thinner but not by much. She doesn’t see anybody looking for her, but then, why would they? She can’t go anywhere. Whole property is fenced in. One way out, and it’s the same way she came in.

They’re going to wait till the day is over. Then they’ll come find her.

But she knows the cavalry will arrive long before that.

Holger will bring her people, and it’ll all be over.

Except . . .

Time seems to tumble forward like falling rocks, and still nobody’s coming. No Holger. No cruisers. It’s then the panic hits her guts like she just quaffed a shot of battery acid—they’re not coming. They’re not coming. The cops are crooked. Aren’t they? All of them. Petry was able to get ahead of it somehow. Here he was, walking around without a care in the world. He knows he won’t get caught. Holger’s crooked. They’re all crooked.

She suddenly feels very alone and very scared. With a trembling hand she pops the Luger’s magazine, thumbs the bullets into her palm, and counts—

Three bullets left. Little golden 9-millimeters catching dappled sunlight from above.

Whitey stiffens. His head perks up and he starts to growl.