Everyone slept in their clothes last night. All they have to do is put their shoes on and piss out the windows. The Shaftoes move about the place faster than Randy does, not because they are more surefooted, but because they never saw this house when it was level and sound. But Randy lived here for years and years when it was, and his mind thinks it knows its way around the place. Going to bed last night, his biggest fear was that he would get up drowsily in the middle of the night and try to go downstairs. The house used to have a beautiful winding stairway which has now telescoped into the basement. Last night, by dint of pulling the U-Haul onto the front lawn and aiming its headlights directly in through windows (whose cracks and jags and facets refracted the light gorgeously), they were able to clamber into the basement and find a ten-foot aluminum extension ladder which they used to get into the upstairs. Once they had gotten up, they pulled the ladder up with them, like a drawbridge, so that even if looters did enter the downstairs, the Shaftoe boys would be able to sit at the top of what used to be the stairway and pick them off leisurely with the long guns (this scenario seemed plausible last night, in the dark, but now strikes Randy as a bumpkin’s reverie).