“I probably wasn’t yesterday. But a lot has changed. I am scared shitless, but I will shoot you and your family dead if they get in our way.”

Chaney measured Adam for a long ten seconds, then said, “This isn’t over ’tween you and me.” Then, louder: “Move back, boys. Give the lady all the space she needs.”

“Talk to me, Em,” Adam called. He desperately wanted to look back to check on her, but he didn’t dare look away from Chaney even for an instant.

“They’re moving,” Emma said.

“Move around where I can see you, fellas,” Adam said. As he spoke, he moved away from and around Chaney, keeping the rifle at his center of mass.

Chaney pivoted with him, never taking his eyes from Adam.

When he could see Chaney, his sons and Emma all at the same time, Adam stopped. The boys and the Bronco were just blurs, because he forced himself to stay focused on the front sight. Chaney needed to see him doing that, needed to believe that Adam would kill him if he had to.

Emma dropped the stuff she’d taken from the hardware store onto the Bronco’s cargo bed, then slid in behind the wheel. The engine started and she backed out of her spot and onto the road. As she pulled away, Adam backed up more.

Chaney took a step closer.

“Please don’t,” Adam said. “Just don’t.”

Emma drove the Bronco to the intersection of Routes 44 and 52 and parked with the nose pointing north.

As Adam backed all the way to the vehicle, the Chaneys formed up into a loose line, shoulder to shoulder. As one, they took a couple of steps closer, but Adam judged those more as protests than threats.

He didn’t want the distraction of pausing to shed himself of all the gear to fit into a seat, so he opened the tailgate and sat on it.

“I’m in,” he said. “But go easy, please. Don’t buck me out.” He kept his sights on the Chaneys until they were far enough away not to pose a threat, and then lowered the weapon and lay down on the steel cargo bed. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

“Are you okay?” Emma asked.

“I am now. None of the guns were loaded.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SPEAKER PENN GLENDALE DECIDED THAT THE ASSEMBLED MEMBERS of the House would for now become a committee of the whole. Sooner than later, the fate of the executive branch would be made known, and when that happened, however the news broke, and whatever it brought, the House of Representatives needed to be prepared to act. Ordinary rules of decorum seemed unnecessarily cumbersome under the circumstances, so he announced that for now, in the absence of precedent, the business of the House would resemble more of a town hall than the formal deliberative body that it was.