“Shit.” He lit another cigarette and took a few anxious puffs. “That’s just great. What if that fucker’s took off? What are we gonna do?” Another puff, then he ground it under a heel. “That’s just fucking great.” He stalked back through the garage door with the boys in tow.

They didn’t recognize most of the people inside. That might have seemed strange for a town the size of Isherwood, but the days of knowing your neighbors had faded long go with the Andy Griffith Show and Saturday-night band concerts under the stars. They knew some of them by name, others by deed, and others by gossip, but they didn’t really know them. And that felt strange. There they all were, some friends but mostly strangers, gathered around a pair of picnic tables and a trough of water as if it were the oracle at Delphi. A woman had donned Pete’s welding mask and fired up the acetylene tanks to melt down the silverware. First it was fluxed to eliminate the other alloys inherent in the castings and to somewhat purify the silver content. Then the silver itself was melted, and the molten metal dripped into the trough at her feet. Each drop hissed in defiance as it struck the water and formed a perfect pearl of silver in the process. Then a man would scoop out the newly formed shot and lay it on one of the tables, where it became the focus of another reloading line. It was a slow process, limited by the speed of melting the shot, so another ad-hoc line had been set up on the other table. There metal snips were used to cut fork tines and silver wire and other pieces into smaller bits, irregular in shape. Like shrapnel. Then these too were loaded into shotgun casings. These loads weren’t as pure as the melted shot, but it was better than nothing and too late in the day to argue. In all, a substantial number of shells had been finished, though not enough according to Bean. So there was factory ammo there as well, deer slugs and double-0 buck, just in case. The silver rounds were marked with stripes of luminous paint to distinguish between the two. If it glowed, it could kill; if not, just shoot for the eyes and pray.

Two men sat on stools nearby, sawing the butts and barrels off expensive hunting arms to make scatterguns out of them. Bean got one for Ted and Bart and one for Billie as well, then draped bandoliers of silver shells around their shoulders.