O'Farrell snarled and brought up his gun. Arch fired from behind Culquhoun. The leader spun on his heel, crumpled, and sagged with a shriek. Arch felt sick.
His nausea didn't last. It couldn't, with the sudden storm of lead which sleeted against the house. Culquhoun sprang back, closing the door. "Out the rear!" he snapped. "We'll have to fight!"
They retreated up the hill, crouching, zigzagging, shooting at the disorderly mass which milled in slow pursuit. Culquhoun grinned savagely. "Keep drawing 'em on, boys," he said as he knelt in the slush and snapped a shot. "If they spread through town, we'll have hell's own time routing 'em all out—but this way—"
Arch didn't know if he was hitting anything. He didn't hear the bullets which must be whining around him—another cliché that just wasn't true, he thought somewhere in the back of his head. A fight wasn't something you could oversee and understand. It was cold feet, clinging mud, whirling roaring confusion, it was a nightmare that you couldn't wake up from.
Then the rest of the Westfield troop were there, circling around to flank the enemy and pumping death. It was a rout—in minutes, the gang had stampeded.
Arch leaned on his rifle and felt vomit rising in his throat. Culquhoun clapped his shoulder. "Ye did richt well, laddie," he rumbled. "No bad at all."
"What's happening?" groaned Arch. "What's become of the world?"
Culquhoun took out his pipe and began tamping it. "Why, a simple shift of the military balance of power," he answered. "Once again we have cheap, easily operated weapons which everyone can own and which are the equal of anything it's practical for a government to use. Last time it was the flintlock musket, right? And we got the American and French Revolutions. This time it's capacitite.
"So the Soviet dictatorship is doomed. But we've got a rough time ahead of us, because there are enough unstable elements in our own society to make trouble. Our traditional organizations just aren't prepared to handle them when they're suddenly armed.
"We'll learn how fast enough, I imagine. There's going to be order again, if only because the majority of people are decent, hard-working fellows who won't put up with much more of this sort of thing. But there has to be a transition period, and what counts is surviving that."