Fuck it, she thinks and fires a shot toward the rafters of the barn. The gun barks. What’s probably a handful of asbestos dust comes raining down.

But the gun’s blast is lost to the music.

They keep playing.

JUG JUG JUGGA GRRAOW GRRAOW RAAAAR!

“Aw, what the heck?” she says, but her voice, too, is swallowed. In fact, her ears are starting to ring. Chris has his ears plugged with his fingers.

She pops the breach. The shell hops out like a spring toad, hits the ground. The smell in the air crawls up her nose: expended gunpowder. It’s suddenly like she’s falling sideways toward a memory she hopes dearly to avoid right now (Smell is the most potent conjurer of memory, she thinks, and this is not a good time), and so she pushes through it by popping another shell in the chamber, taking aim over the barrel, lining the bead just right—

And blasting one of the drummer’s cymbals right off its stand. The birdshot sends the cymbal spinning into the wall. The stand wobbles but doesn’t fall.

Manboob stops playing.

That gets their attention. They all look first at the cymbal as if it might’ve been possessed by a ghost or the devil or the spirit of Adolf Hitler himself.

Finally, they turn and see Atlanta and Chris standing there.

“Took you long enough,” she says, and then she realizes she’s yelling. Can’t help it. Ears are still going eeeeeeeee.

The skank with the ass crack is like a rattler ready to strike: she’s already got her bass guitar down on the ground and a baton in her hand—with a whip of her arm, it extends into a three-foot-long polycarbonate beat-down stick.

Manboob has fetched the cymbal—the golden metal is now pockmarked with birdshot. He holds it and looks sad, as if he just lost a friend.

John Elvis is nowhere near that fast. He’s still throttling the neck of that Steve Vai special like it’s a chicken, or his dick. His jaw is tightening and relaxing, teeth grinding: telltale signs of an addict. Meth, probably. Shoulda figured he was into crystal.

“What the fuck is this?” he asks.

“A friendly visit,” she says. Atlanta cocks her head toward Chris. “Remember him?”

“Yeah,” Chris says, voice shaking like he’s going to lose it. “Remember me?”

Skinny Skank hisses at them, further completing the visual of the viper.

“I remember you,” John Elvis says. “The Jew. And now, apparently, his Jew-loving bitch.”

Atlanta scrunches up her face, looks at Chris. “You Jewish?”

He shakes his head and gives an uncertain shrug as if to say, No?

“Uh, yeah, he’s not a Jew,” she calls. “Not that it’d be a problem if he was, but we just figure, if you’re going to hate on somebody, then hate them for the right reasons.”

“Not a Jew?” John Elvis says, confused.