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the
old man across the drive, past the pumps. The large building looked not only
closed, but abandoned. Darkness was behind its windows, and spider webs hung
over the cracked white paint of its door frame. I poked the old man with the
carbine muzzle, directing him around the right end of the building and back
into the camp. I was expecting to be jumped or fired at, at any second. But
nothing happened. When I got around the end of the building, I saw why. They
were all at the party.
    God knows, they might have been
normal people once. But what I saw now were somewhere between starving savages
and starving animals. They were mostly late adolescents, rib-skinny every one
of them, male and female alike barefoot below the ragged cuff-edges of the
jeans they wore and naked above the waistband. Every one of them, as well, was
striped and marked with black paint on face and body. They were gathered, maybe
thirty or forty of them, in an open space before the rows of trailers began. It
might have been a stretch of show lawn, or a volleyball court, once. At the end
of it, tied to a sort of X of planks set upright and surrounded by burnable
trash, paper and bits of wood, was the girl.
    Whether she had come there
willingly, I do not know. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that she
had finally despaired of ever having Sunday love her; and when she met those
two other pairs of feet by the creek, she had gone off of her own free will
with them. But she was terrified now. Her eyes were enormous, and her mouth was
stretched wide in a scream that she could not bring forth.
    I poked the old man with the gun
muzzle and walked in among them. I saw no weapons; but it stood to reason they
must have something more than the revolver that had been hidden on the old man.
The back of my neck prickled; but on the spur of the moment the best thing I
could think of was to put a bold front on it, and maybe we could just all walk
out of here—the girl, Sunday and I—with no trouble.
    They said not a word, they did not
move as I walked through them. And then, when I was less than a dozen feet from
the girl, she finally got that scream out of her.
    "Look out!"
    For a part of a second I was so
stunned to hear her utter something understandable that I only stared. Then it
registered on me that she was looking over my shoulder at something behind me.
I spun around, dropping on one knee instinctively and bringing up the carbine
to my shoulder.
    There were two of them, lying on the
roof of the house with either rifles or shotguns—I had no time to decide which.
They were just like the others, except for their firearms. The girl's shriek must
have startled them as much as it had me, because they were simply lying there,
staring down at me with their weapons forgotten.
    But it was not them I had to worry
about, anyway, because—I have no idea from where—the crowd I had just passed
had since produced bows and arrows; perhaps a bow for every five or six of
them, so that half a dozen of them were already fitting arrows to their strings
as I turned. I started firing.
    I shot the two on the roof first,
without thinking—which was pure foolishness, the reflex of a man brought up to
think of firearms as deadly, but of arrows as playthings—because the two on the
roof did not even have their guns aimed, and by the time I'd fired at them a
couple of arrows had already whistled by me. They were target arrows, lacking
barbed hunting heads, but nonetheless deadly for that. The rest of the ones
being aimed would certainly not all have missed me—if it had not been for
Sunday.
    There was nothing of the
Lassie-dog-to-the-rescue about Sunday. The situation was entirely beyond his
understanding; and if the two on the roof or the bow-wielders had shot me
quickly and quietly enough; probably he would merely have sniffed sadly at me
as I lay on the ground and wondered why I had stopped moving. But the girl had
screamed—and I must suddenly have reeked of the body