Gail understood what I meant and threw herself to the floor. I whirled clockwise but had not anticipated that, seeing Gail move, Gunther would whirl to his right. My body didn’t connect with his arm at all and almost spun in a complete circle. I was off balance and facing the wrong way, but I had to do something, so I barreled my entire body into him, leading with my left shoulder. As we both went down, the gun fired and the bullet caromed off the walls as fast as a drummer’s paradiddle. I groped with him on the floor, trying to get his right arm under control with both my arms, an objective that, regretfully, caused the right side of my neck to be stretched and exposed. He bit into it lustily, like a timber wolf. It hurt like I couldn’t believe. Luckily, his teeth had dug in low and caught more of my collarbone than my neck. Rather than pull away, I rammed my right shoulder down into his mouth, making his head bounce off the metal floor. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” I screamed in order to bear the pain. I wanted to split his head open. I wanted his face to be a bigger mess than Adeline’s face had been.

Realizing his strategy had been a poor choice, he unclenched his teeth and tried to find a new line of attack. As we nastily grappled, both my hands still locked around his right forearm, he started to make bleating noises of pain. I turned to see Gail stomping with her right heel on Gunther’s hand and wrist. Stupidly, I’d forgotten that I had a weapon Gunther didn’t have: a twenty-one-year-old woman who could ply the levers of a carillon so that its bells could be heard for miles. She wasn’t using her hands right now, though. She knew we needed the gun, and she was slamming her heel down as if Gunther’s hand was a brush fire she could put out with her feet. The gun fired again, its bullet repeatedly stinging the sides of the truck.

It would have been disastrous to let go of Gunther’s arm, which left my choices for further assault sorely limited. So I kneed him repeatedly in his groin, wincing to myself as I considered what it must feel like to be him. I tried kneeing him in his stomach a few times but I couldn’t get quite the right angle, so I went back to his balls, where I seemed to be getting the best return of pain for the investment of my energy. This and Gail’s constant stampede at almost one hundred and fifty-two beats per minute finally caused Gunther to drop the gun.