As she turned, the guard rose to his knees and retrieved his weapon. He was young, but not so young that he shouldn’t know better. Eugene threw himself to the floor and covered his head as the guard’s shot rang wild, followed by the sharp ratatat of the submachine guns. Screams shrilled out again, as panicked as a bird in flight. Eugene’s mind blanked out in white noise. Someone had ahold of him again, and they were moving—he was moving—everything around him was moving in slow motion as he fought the underwater current of terror, dragged backward to the bank’s door. A body was pressed up against his back, one arm around his chest, pulling him along. He stumbled with every step, unable to catch his footing, unable to wash away that deafening white noise, to make a sound, to control his own body any more than to stay upright and keep from screaming.

When they backed through the door onto the sidewalk, the sun was blinding and the air was thick as water. The body at his back let up and released him from the crush of contact, but the hand stayed wrapped around his forearm, dragging him to the street. A car waited there, its engine grunting with readiness. Monnet slid behind the wheel as Walker shoved Eugene through the door to sprawl across the backseat. Walker slammed the door shut before taking the passenger seat, and the tires screamed against the pavement as they peeled away. Eugene’s head throbbed and his knees stung where they had hit the car floor, blood in his mouth from biting his tongue, but he was alive. His heart beat so loud and so fast he thought it might kill him the way Walker and Monnet hadn’t. No bullet had touched him.

“The guard,” he croaked.

Walker looked over his shoulder, still cradling the gun in his lap. The barrel pointed at the car ceiling, away from Eugene. “Don’t think about it.”

Eugene swallowed bile and covered his mouth with one trembling hand. No heroes, only martyrs. He shut his eyes as the white noise blotted out his vision, and he didn’t open them again.

VI.

Eugene lingered in the churchyard after Mass, waiting for Mary Beth to emerge from confession. The adults had all since drifted away, Eugene's mother bidding him return home in time for supper, and he was alone with only the roses for company. The man was nowhere to be seen. Eugene was wary of drawing his attention, especially without Mary Beth by his side, but the man had been conspicuously absent all morning. Out stalking the bayou, perhaps, as Mary Beth said he was sometimes wont to do.

Thirty minutes turned into sixty, and Eugene finally ventured back inside the church, creeping soft-soled past the pulpit to the private rooms beyond. He had never been in the bowels of the church before. The walls pressed in close, and the air was tense and foreboding rather than serene. He investigated each of the empty rooms until there was only one left. The older boys said it housed the sacramental wine, but Eugene had never joined them to steal a drink. Wine tasted sour to him, and turned his stomach.