At the far end of the bar from Miles stood the busboy, leaning against the wall. He’d been outside once, days ago, and he was starting to realize that these men would inevitably send him out again. He could, it was true, move around out there, being Latino and thus resembling the average rioter far better than any of the white men of Tony’s. No one ever referred to him as anything but busboy; they didn’t even know his name and he liked it that way. Only the woman, Jill, once pushed him so hard for a name that he made one up just to get her out of his face. She still whispered it sometimes to him, only when they were alone, as if understanding it was a secret, or perhaps a bond.

Osmond lay face down in his own booth. The most significant fact about Osmond right now was that he was dead, though nobody at Tony’s had discovered this yet. He died of alcohol poisoning hours ago. Osmond had always suspected he could pull this off when the time came, and he was right. He had appropriated a fifth of one-hundred-and-fifty-one-proof rum for just this purpose when the end started to feel close. Plan was to simply shoot himself if he failed and remained alive, or vomited, after drinking down the bottle. He did neither. The bottle was now under his chest, incredibly not broken by his enormous girth, his obesity, ironically giving him the appearance of being in mid breath. The others were angry. They knew he had cheated and it pissed them off that he should be sleeping so soundly while someone like Langston who played by the rules was going through hell. They ignored him. Well, that was Osmond.

A good shot normally but no help at all when Langston began screaming so loud and suddenly that Jill started to fly out of the other side of that booth even before a mighty spastic thrust of Langston’s chest sent him bolt upright and the table tore up at the bolts as his right shoulder hit it. Everyone froze at the crack of Langston’s shoulder as it popped out of its socket. There was a split second before the table teetered to a precarious rest against the bench where a moment ago Jill had been seated. Langston fell to his convulsions, groaning on the loose bolts and crud of the floor of his booth, and everyone knew then that Langston had always been right: he was the first of them to go down.

“DTs comin’!” hollered Miles from his seat at the bar. But his voice held more fear than mockery.

“Shut up, Miles,” snapped Rudd anyway. He rose from his seat, grabbing the bottle of J&B from which Langston had just been poured a drink. “Jill! Let’s go. I’ll hold him down and you get some more of this into him. Try half the bottle–”

He was interrupted by some heavy work on the front door. Not the simple random wall gunfire that they were accustomed to, no this was a very real attempt to enter Tony’s. Dents-and some holes-were appearing at an alarming rate on the interior security shutter. No way to tell if there was even anything left of the outside shutter, though Rudd had long since ceased to count on it.

“Fuck!” yelled Miles, whose back was pretty much to and near the shooting. He dove across the bar, western movie style, forgetting about his shoulder until his head-first landing reminded him. “Fuck!” he added through real tears.