The men dragged us behind him down the stairs.

Sill continued to talk. “Literally. Don’t you just hate it when people use that word? I mean, I literally hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I want to kill those people. Figuratively. Who am I kidding? Literally.”

We exited the house and stood before a parked line of open military jeeps. “I know what you’re thinking,” Sill said. “Are we there yet? Nope.”

The henchmen sat with Eigen in the back of the lead jeep. I was in the passenger seat and Sill drove. He drove the manual transmission rather expertly; I admired that.

“I take it we’re headed to Fort Knox.”

“Correct.”

“I hear it’s rather heavily guarded,” I said.

“Yes, well, guards are only effective if they are awake.” One of his men pushed gas masks toward us from the rear. “Put it on,” Sill said.

I looked back to see that a mask had already been placed over Eigen’s face. I put it on. It was heavy and smelled of pine disinfectant.

“Sorry about the smell.” Sill’s muffled voice came to me through his mask. “At least you know it’s clean. That’s a good thing, right?” Inside his mask he whistled “Dixie.”

3

As we drove off the highway, I looked up and saw several crop-dusting planes jettisoning their payloads all over the place. A powder-blue Cessna AgWagon swooped low right over us, spraying the mist that I wiped with my sleeve from my mask’s shield. Horses and cows lay motionless in pastures. Squirrels fell from branches. Birds dropped from the sky. Some birds fluttered down, staggered, then fell over. Some fell like stones. We passed a couple of shacks, the shotgun type, set up on square brick standards at the corners. People lay motionless on one of the porches.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nappy time,” Sill said.

We drove past two incapacitated coyotes on the side of the road. “Are they dead?” I asked.

“Of course not.” A black bird, perhaps a crow, crashed onto the hood of the jeep and bounced off into the brush at the side of the road. “Well, that one is. Generally speaking, though, they’re all just sleeping. Even the ones a couple of rungs down the evolutionary ladder.”

I looked at him through my foggy shield.

“The hillbillies.”

“Oh.”

“They’ll wake up wondering which of their cousins they screwed and the planet will keep on spinning and tilting. However, I don’t want you to think that my passion for killing is waning.” We approached a guard’s station set into a three-meter-high razor-wire fence. “Give me your sidearm,” he said, holding his hand back and open to one of his men. He took the pistol that was handed to him and put a bullet through the forehead of one of the sleeping guards.

Eigen screamed.

Sill smiled inside his mask. “See. Same old me.”

I think I peed a little.

He handed back the gun. “I hate those things,” he said. “So heavy. So loud. Didn’t you think that was loud?”