"Sounds like a plan," I say. We wait until after three, when everyone in the happy household has struggled home or out of bed. We're almost twenty when assembled, ranging from little Tiny Tim to bulldog Pawn-Shop Maggie, all of us unrecalcitrants snagged in the tangle of Tony's hypertrophied organisational skills. The kitchen at Tony's is big enough to prepare dinner for forty guests. We barely fit as we struggle into our parkas and boots. I end up in a pair of insulated overalls with one leg slit to make room for my knee/soccerball. If this was Dad and Mum, it'd be like we were gathered for a meeting, waiting for the Chairman to give us the word. But that's not Tony's style; he waits until we're approaching ready, then starts moving toward the door, getting out the harness. Daisy Duke shoulders a kegger of foam and another full of kerosene, and Grandville gets the fix-bath. Tiny Tim gets the sack of marshmallows and we trickle into the yard. It was a week and a half after Hallowe'en when the vast cool intelligences from beyond the stars zapped away. The whole year since they'd arrived, the world had held its breath and tippytoed around on best behave. When they split, it exhaled. The gust of that exhalation carried the stink of profound pissed-offedness with the Processors who'd acted the proper Nazi hall-monitors until the bugouts went away. I'd thrown a molotov into the Process centre at the Falls myself, and shouted into the fire until I couldn't hear myself. So now I'm a refugee on Xmas Eve, waiting for fearless leader to do something primordial and cathartic. Which he does, even if he starts off by taking the decidedly non-primordial step of foaming the side of our squat that faces the neighbours', then fixing it, Daisy Duke whanging away on the harness's seal with a rock to clear the ice. Once our place is fireproofed, Daisy Duke switches to kero, and we cheer and clap as it laps over the neighbours', a two-storey coach-house. The kero leaves shiny patches on the rime of frost that covers the place. My knee throbs, so I sit/kneel against the telephone pole out front. The kids are getting overexcited, pitching rocks at the glass to make holes for the jet of kero. Tony shuts down the stream, and I think for a minute that he's pissed, he's gonna take a piece out of someone, but instead he's calm and collected, asks people to sort out getting hoses, buckets and chairs from the kitchen. Safety first, and I have to smile. The group hops to it, extruding volunteers through a nonobvious Brownian motion, and before long all of Tony's gear is spread out on the lawn. Tony then crouches down and carves a shallow bowl out of the snow. He tips the foam-keg in, then uses his gloves to sculpt out a depression. He slops fix-bath on top, then fills his foam-and-snow bowl with the last of the kero. "You all ready?" he says, like he thinks he's a showman.