“Why do we let her get up there and do that week after week?” My voice was loud enough to shove him back a few inches. “Why don’t we just tell her she can only do four minutes and then she has to sit down and let someone else have a turn? Dammit,” I swore, knocking Jamie all the way outside my personal space, “I’ve got half a mind to shoot her off the stage myself, before she does any more harm.”

The gunshot that followed surprised no one more than me.

Bang!

A beer bottle, a pitcher, and a window shattered, all in one neat line.

Terry flopped backwards, still clinging to the microphone stand. The cords and plugs ripped loose from their mounts in the floor and splayed about. Everyone dove for cover, screaming and hiding under tables, behind chairs. Behind the bar and down the hall. Out the back, for those who could make it.

I was too tipsy to wrap my head around what was going on; or maybe I was drunkenly solipsistic enough to think I’d caused it. “Aw hell, I was only joking!” I shouted above the screams. “I was only joking!” But people were shrieking and Terry was shuddering, one black shoe jerking about at the edge of the stage.

Another shot reverberated but this one hit the roof above me, sending plaster raining down on my head. I wrestled with a sneeze and half dropped, half fell to the floor, officially losing my cool. I wondered where Jamie had scuttled off to, and I took brief, apathetic note of how swiftly he’d abandoned me at the first sign of trouble. I rolled over to an overturned table and scooted behind it, smacking headfirst into another bystander who had also sought shelter there. He lifted his face to mine and I saw shock and fear there that matched my own.

“Hey, Eden, are you okay?” he asked, lightly freckled upper lip trembling.

“I never get any complaints.” Ha-ha. I’m not any funnier under pressure than I am onstage, really. But someone had to keep a level head and something about the chunks of vomit on his shirt told me it wasn’t going to be this guy.

I didn’t know him, but there were more than a few people who knew me without my knowing them. I didn’t recall seeing him at a slam before and I didn’t think I knew him from school. I started to ask who he was, but then I heard the scuffle created by two large men in the process of tackling the gunman to the ground.

“Now the wrath of God has been satisfied!” the shooter was shouting, even as strong hands forced him into submission. “Vengeance is mine—vengeance is God’s!”

No. Oh, no way. No, it couldn’t be.

“I’ll kill him as many times as I have to!”