The General cups a hand to his ear irritably. He can’t hear anything except for the pair of Zeroes converging on him and Shaftoe at three hundred odd miles per hour, liquefying tons of biomass with dense streams of 12.7-millimeter slugs. He keeps a sharp eye on Shaftoe as a trail of bullets thuds across the parking lot, spraying Shaftoe’s trouser legs with mud. The same line of bullets makes a sudden upwards right-angle turn when it reaches the wall of the General’s house, climbs straight up the wall, tears out a chunk of the balcony’s railing about a foot away from where the General’s hand is resting, beats up a bunch of furniture back inside the house, and then clears the roof of the house and vanishes.