The man who'd shot him was clambering up the metal risers to the catwalk, a second invader right behind him. The two of them coming to finish him off.

Furiously wishing to God that he knew where he'd dropped his rifle, Thibodeau turned his head downward and saw to his amazement that was it still in his right hand, his fingers clutched around the grip, its barrel jacket pressed almost vertically against his side.

He dropped his cheek to the floor again, dropped it into a pool of his own blood, no longer able to keep it up. He was funneling all his willpower into getting the hand to move. He told it to move, begged it to move, and when it failed to respond silently began cursing it, demanding that it quit giving him bullshit, insisting angrily that it could fuck with him later on, could fall right off his shoulder if that was how it had to be, but that right now it was going to obey him and raise the goddamned rifle.

Thibodeau heard himself take a racking breath. He could see the invaders in their black helmets and uniforms, getting closer, pounding up the stairs.

Come on, you bastard, he thought. Come on.

And then suddenly his arm was coming up, dragging the gun with it, dragging it through his spilled blood, getting its barrel under the railing and pointed down at the stairs.

He triggered the rifle and felt it rattle against his body, spraying the stairs with rounds. The invaders almost collided with each other as they halted in their tracks and shot back with their own weapons. Bullets whizzed over Thibodeau's head, tocking like hailstones against the projecting edge of the catwalk and the wall behind him. Recovered from their surprise at being fired upon, seeing that Thibodeau was badly wounded, the two invaders were coming at him once again, crouching, their guns stuttering as they began climbing the stairs. A third man, meanwhile, had opened fire from the aisle below.

Thibodeau pumped out another burst, but knew he was weakening, knew his clip would be empty soon, knew he was nearly finished.

Laissez les bons temps rouler--wasn't that what he'd told Cody earlier? Let the good times roll, roll on to the very last, take me rolling down nice and easy, amen, God, amen, he thought half deliriously.

And fired again at the invaders with the remainder of his strength and ammunition, braced for what he was certain would be the final moments of his life.

"Thibodeau's down," Delure said. "Christ, we've got to do something."

"Give me the 'hog's position," Cody replied. He was staring at pictures being sent by ceiling-mounted surveillance cameras in the payload storage bay. Now under the remote control of the monitoring room, their feeds normally appeared on a television screen every ten minutes in a rotational sequence that included feeds from other medium- and high-security buildings, and that should have been automatically overridden in the event of a trespass, with the system tripping an alarm and locking its visuals upon the area that had been breached. But the cameras' regular transmissions had been neglected as the attack at the compound's periphery gathered momentum, and the invaders had apparently gained entry to the warehouse through authorized means, defeating the override.