In the near distance, a cheer went up, and then voices turned ugly as they hurled epithets and threats. It sounded like budding violence. In the near distance, a mob had formed. Not a crowd, a mob.

“Boys, stay with the major,” Victoria said, and she took off to see what was happening.

McCrea grabbed her biceps to stop her. “That’s not our fight,” he said.

She pulled away. She recognized the crowd for what it was, a vector to violence. “That’s a lynching in progress,” she said. “Take care of my kids.”

“Bullshit,” Caleb said. “Nobody’s taking care of me.” He took off after his mom, and Luke reluctantly followed his brother.

“God damn it,” McCrea spat. “First Sergeant, that means us, too.”

As she passed the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Kanawha Street, headed toward the river, Victoria cringed at what she heard. Kill them and execute them jumped out plain and clear. Whatever this was, it was spinning out of control.

The crowd was growing by the second as the commotion attracted otherwise baffled residents. Victoria saw a complete sampler of citizens. Men and women, boys and girls, black and white. They stood gathered in a rough circle, maybe twenty feet across. Two young men, neither of them yet twenty years old, cowered on the ground in the middle of the circle. One was shirtless, the skin of his back and chest scraped and bleeding, and the other was nearly so, his shirt in tatters and barely hanging off his neck and left arm. That one had also lost his shoes in whatever melee had spun up around them.

“You Foster boys was never no good!” yelled a woman who might have been in her seventies.

A little girl in jeans and a Hello Kitty shirt stormed out to the men and kicked the shirtless one in the small of his back.

This was no doubt a lynching, and if it hadn’t already passed its tipping point, it was close.

A man in his forties, dressed in the striped shirt of a gas station employee, stepped forward with a lever-action .30-30 hunting rifle. He strode toward the boys and leveled the rifle at the shirtless one’s head.

“Stop!” Victoria yelled. Without thinking, acting purely on adrenaline, she sprinted forward and charged the man with the rifle. She hit him hard from behind, knocking him forward and causing him to trip over the man he’d been about to murder.

The man she’d tackled hit the ground hard, but Victoria was able to stay on her feet and recover her balance quickly. By the time the man in the Exxon shirt was able to roll to his knee and regain control of his rifle, Victoria already had her 10/22 up to her shoulder, her red dot focused on the third button of his shirt. At this range, sights didn’t even matter.