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Finally the ground leveled out, the woods got thick again and we realized that we were totally lost. Jim stayed cooler than I did and made us stand there for a while, getting our hearts and lungs under control. Eventually we were able to hear highway noises, in roughly one direction. Comparing that with a map and the location of the sun, we drew an approximate bead on the site of the ax-throwing competition. We spread out, about a hundred feet apart, and tried to move forward quietly.

Which is a joke when you're knee-deep in last year's leaves. The wind was blowing in the treetops, covering our noise a little, but I still felt kind of conspicuous, as though I was. driving a tank through the woods. But down here the trees were skinny and widely spaced and I was pretty confident that Dolmacher wasn't lurking anywhere, ready to spin out from camouflage, both hands wrapped around his pistol, drawing down on me. I didn't want that to be the last thing / I ever saw.

It got worse and worse. We saw brighter light up ahead and we knew there had to be a clearing. We heard a crowd, heard the cash register ringing at the concession stand. Dolmacher had to be between us and that. The undergrowth got a lot thicker and I came across a gully. Had to slide down one side and clamber up the other, helpless, white and stupid. I was thinking of those old World War II pictures of captives standing in the trenches, about to be gunned.

My first handhold ripped loose and I did a semi-controlled plunge back to the floor of the gully. Now I was ankle-deep in mud, covered with dirt and leaves, and wet. I moved downstream a few yards, toward where Jim was supposed to be. But I hadn't heard or seen him in ten minutes. Finally the walls of the gully opened out a little bit and I found an obvious way to get out of it.

And Dolmacher had preceded me. I stood there in stoned amazement and traced his tracks right up to the top. And at the top there was a wild-raspberry cane sticking out across his path; it was still vibrating.

Someone was moving around up there. I could hear him underneath the murmur of the crowd, the drone of the announcer. It was either Jim or Dolmacher or both. Then the sounds were all drowned out by the applause of the crowd.

I took that as a free ticket, out of the gully. I clambered most of the way up, making plenty of noise, and flopped onto my stomach on the top. No reason to expose myself; if Dolmacher knew I was right behind him, he'd be waiting.

But he didn't know. I saw the bastard, walking slowly, carefully, toward the clearing, not more than fifty feet away from me. Through gaps in the trees I made out an awning over a raised log bandstand and a waving American flag, and when I climbed up to my feet I could see the parking lot. That's what I remember, because when you've been thrashing through mud and leaves for a while, nothing looks stranger than a bunch of cars glinting in the sunlight.

I couldn't see Jim anywhere. Had Dolmacher already taken him out? I turned around and checked the length of the gully, but no sign of Jim. He'd already made it across. He was somewhere out there, off to Dolmacher's right.

The Groveler was droning on about something through the P.A. system, but then there was a commotion. Dolmacher turned around and squatted behind a tree. Out at the edge of the clearing I could see a man in a trench coat appear from nowhere and run away from us.

Dolmacher saw it too, jumped to his feet, and headed for the clearing at a dead run. He knew he had his opening. He knew he could make noise, at least for a minute, covered by the shouting match that was now going on over the P.A. system, i

"Let the man talk! Wait a minute, let's'hear what the man has to say," Fleshy was shouting. "I have no qualms about my environmental record."

It was Boone. He'd done it. He was engaging Fleshy in mouth-to-mouth combat. And Fleshy was stupid enough to

bite. Everyone remembered Reagan's performance in New Hampshire years ago: "I paid for this microphone!" It had won him the election. Anyone with Pleshy's instincts, and his reputation for being a wuss, would view Boone's challenge as an opportunity to pull a Reagan on national TV.

I got up and ran like hell. It looked like Dolmacher was making his move, but he slowed down when he was almost in the open, dropped back toward his crouch. If he turned around now I was screwed, because I'd dropped all caution and was just chugging along in the open, thirty feet behind him.

He turned around. I froze; he saw me.

He did it just like I'd expected him to: reached into his armpit, came up with the gun, clasped it in both hands, brought it down so all I could see was the barrel. I threw myself on the ground. But you can't throw yourself the way you'd throw a baseball. The best you can do is drop yourself-take your legs out from under and wait for gravity to pull you down at thirty-two feet per second squared. If you're falling off a bridge, that seems very fast. But if you trying to dodge a bullet, it's worthless.

Fortunately, at this point, Dolmacher got an arrow between his floating ribs; it went in three inches and stuck. He flinched, as though he'd been kicked, but he clearly didn't really know what it was. He just turned around, the arrow whacking against a couple of birch trunks, and strode calmly and purposefully into the open, taking his knowledge of the toxic bugs with him, stored up there in his big, unprotected melon.

The trench coat who'd left his position when Boone made his move was-on his way back. Dolmacher nailed him with his Tazer, melted his nervous system, left him thrashing around quietly on the ground. Didn't even break his stride. A bunch of folding chairs were set up for spectators and he stood up on one of those, at the back.

"This is a hypothesis out of science fiction," Fleshy was saying. "To release genetically engineered bacteria into the environment-why, that's illegal!"

Jim Grandfather cut off my view by stepping in front of

me and drawing a bead on Dolmacher. The arrow got him in the left kidney just as he was pulling the trigger.

On TV it's amazing. Fleshy is standing there looking like a possum who has wandered onto an interstate. His eyes are wide open, his eyeglasses luminous in the TV lights, sweat breaking through the powder on his brow. He's looking every which way. Boone is standing six feet away, a rock, talking calmly and quietly like a nursery school teacher handling an obstreperous child. They're talking simultaneously about genetically engineered bacteria. But there's rising commotion in the background and suddenly the camera swings drunkenly away from them. It happens just as Pleshy's saying "Why, that's illegal!" Everything goes dim and grey for a second because we don't have the TV lights on our subject, but then the camera's electronics adjust to it and we have Dolmacher, pale and righteous, standing on a chair, calmly drawing down on Fleshy just the way he drew down on me.

If they stay on that camera you can actually see the arrow coming into the last frame. But if they cut to the other camera, the one that's still on the podium, you see Fleshy looking at something else-he never even saw Dolmacher-and you see Boone, confused for just an instant, then focusing in on the man with the gun. And for a second, he actually thinks. That's the amazing thing: you can see him thinking about it. Then he's moving forward, he puts up one arm and clotheslines Fleshy. Fleshy falls away like a tin duck in a shooting gallery and Boone raises his hands, almost in triumph. Just as he's turning to face Dolmacher, his face disappears, replaced by an eruption of red. It splatters everywhere-onto Pleshy's notes, onto the lens of the camera, onto Pleshy's stupid plaid mackinaw.