"Inside!" Valentine yelled to Stuck. He was fumbling around with the wheel Thursday had used to raise the gate.
The Bushmaster rumbled through the gate.
A flash of brown and Duvalier was up on the gate rails. Duvalier had leaped nine feet in the air and now hung from a manual handle, trying to bring it down with her slight weight.
Valentine finally thought to look on the side of the wall opposite the crank and saw a pawl in the teeth of a wheel. There was a simple lever to remove it.
The compressed thunder that was the fire of the automatic shotgun licked out into the night, turning snowfall orange.
"Cease fire," Valentine shouted. If the Bushmaster opened up with its cannon, it would draw every ravie for a mile. "You'll just attract more. Habanero, tell the people in Boneyard and Bushmaster to turn off lights and engines-don't fire. Don't fire!"
Habanero repeated the orders.
The smaller door on the back of the Bushmaster opened, and Boelnitz jumped out, pulling a bloody-shirted Rockaway out, and the two ran for the mill.
Panicky fool! The fear of ravies caused just as much damage as the sufferers.
A shirtless figure tore out of the darkness. It didn't so much as tackle Boelnitz as run over him. It pulled up, as though shocked he'd gone down so easily.
Rockaway fell on his own.
Stuck took a quick step from the door crank and swung with his rifle butt, cracking the ravie across the back of the neck. It turned on him, swinging an arm that sprawled Stuck.
Valentine aimed the Type Three and put two into the ravie's back. It went down on its knees. Boelnitz, stunned, crawled toward the door and the safety of the mill's interior, lit by the headlights of Rover and Chuckwagon. Stuck picked Rockaway up by his belt and almost threw him through the door like a bowler trying for a strike.
"The hell's the matter with you?" Stuck said, kicking Boelnitz toward the mill. "Why didn't you stay in the APC?"
Valentine let loose the lever on the pawl, and the door, still with Duvalier hanging on it as she tried to force it with her leg, descended. Valentine stopped it high enough so a man could still enter at a crouch.
Stuck rolled in and sighted his gun to cover Bushmaster.
Valentine dragged Boelnitz in.
"Dumbshit didn't shut the door on Bushmaster," Stuck said, swinging the barrel of the auto-shotgun and pressing it to the thick, soft hair on Boelnitz's head.
Mrs. O'Coombe hugged her bloody son. "My God, my God . . . ," she kept repeating.
Valentine kicked up the gun barrel, and Stuck head-butted him in the gut.
Duvalier dropped from above, landing on Stuck's shoulders, and wrapped her legs around his back. She put her sword stick across his throat.
"Okay, okay," Stuck said. "Get 'er off!"
"Close the door, somebody," Valentine gasped as they untangled themselves.
Mrs. O'Coombe worked the lever and the door rattled down at last.
A pair of hands thrust themselves under the gate. Mrs. O'Coombe pushed the pawl back in, held it there.
Metal bent at the bottom of the gate as though a forklift were being used to pull it up instead of a pair of hands. The bottom of the gate groaned and began to bend.
Duvalier's sword flashed and sparked as it ran along the gate bottom, leaving severed fingertips lying about like dropped peanuts.
"The pawl, ma'am," Valentine shouted. Rockaway reached for it. Mrs. O'Coombe broke out of her reverie and extracted it.
Valentine stomped the handle hard. The door slammed shut.
"You better?" he asked Stuck.