Deadline(150)

            Virgil turned and asked, “What?”

            “It’s the Auntie Vivians.”

            “Who’s that?”

            “The Minnesota Women’s Anti-Vivisection League. I’m gettin’ the fuck outa here.” And the guy started running. He turned back just long enough to blurt, “Save yourself.”

            —

            VIRGIL WASN’T SURE what movie it was, but he remembered a scene in which a medieval Scottish army attacked an English army, the Scots sweeping down a long grassy hillside with swords, axes, hammers, spears, and apparently whatever else they had in their barns. This was sort of like that. The people got out of the trucks and looked back and forth, calling to each other, spreading out, and some of them were shouting down the hill to where Virgil and the dog sellers were. The women in the helmets moved to the front of the long line, a wedge of them, and then one of them screamed, and then all of them screamed, and suddenly the line broke and the whole crowd charged down the hill, led by the women with aluminum baseball bats.

            Virgil thought of running out in front of the wedge with his arms raised, and his ID in his hand, but only for a split second: somebody would hit him with a baseball bat, and that would be that. He also thought about pulling his pistol and firing a shot in the air, but his pistol, as usual, was locked in the truck’s gun safe.

            In the end, he ran around behind the truck he was standing next to, then down the line of trucks to where he’d seen D. Wayne Sharf a few seconds before the charge. Truck engines were coming alive when he ran around the nose of a Ford Super Duty pulling a twenty-foot trailer stacked with animal crates, just in time to see D. Wayne jump in the passenger seat of the truck he’d come in.

            Virgil ran up and yanked open the door and said, “D. Wayne, you’re under arrest—”

            That was as far as he got before D. Wayne hit him on the forehead with a half-empty two-liter plastic bottle of Dr. Pepper. Virgil went down, and D. Wayne slammed the door and Virgil rolled away, staggered to his feet, and jumped on the fender over the trailer’s double wheels, and held on to two of the stacked crates. Inside one of the crates, a half-dozen small dogs were rolling around on the hard plastic crate floor as the truck driver wheeled around the end of the line of trucks; in the other crate, a big yellow dog with floppy ears looked out at him with interest.

            About then, the driver found out that there was no place to go. He went anyway, bouncing over what had been a fairly decent alfalfa field, trying to stay away from the crowd that was spreading out over the pasture.

            The dog sellers looked like a tough bunch, and there were certainly a few guns in the various vehicles, but they were outnumbered four or five to one, and as Virgil clung to the dog crate, he saw a woman run alongside a fleeing truck and spear the back tire with one of the long iron rods.

            The tire blew, and the back of the truck sagged; farther down the field, the driver of one of the trucks had been pulled out into the alfalfa, and part of the crowd swarmed over his trailer, unloading the dog crates onto the ground, opening the doors and freeing the dogs, which ran in excited circles, howling and barking.

            One truck driver tried to break through the fence, but the fence hadn’t been made in Hollywood. He dragged a few fence posts loose, but the fence didn’t break and the truck wound up nose-down in the border ditch, where it was swarmed by attackers.

            Virgil thought about jumping off the trailer, fearing that it would roll on him, but the driver made a turn and then a woman in a motorcycle helmet was running alongside, and she speared one of the front truck wheels, and Virgil heard it go out with a POOF-WOP-WOP, and then she got the back one POOF-WOP-WOP-WOP, and the truck began to stall out and parts of the crowd began running toward it.

            Virgil jumped off the fender and ran to the passenger-side door, but got there a few seconds late: a woman with an aluminum baseball bat knocked out the window, then took a swing at Virgil, who shouted, “I’m a cop, I’m a cop,” and she hesitated and asked, “Virgil?” and he shouted, “Yes,” and she ran away.