IT'S ALL HAPPENING AT THE ZOO!

The zoo’s female gorilla was sick and nobody knew why, so they called in a specialist.

The specialist said the gorilla was sick because she had never mated. And he said that she would remain sick until they found her a mate.

But the zoo couldn’t afford to have a male gorilla flown in to “service” their female.

So the zoo’s Board of Directors told the zoo keeper to ask Benny the janitor if he would be willing to “service” their female gorilla for $500. (Benny was a big hairy guy and not very smart at all.)

The zoo keeper went to Benny that night and told him what was up with the female gorilla. Benny said he was sorry to hear she was sick, and he asked what they were going to do for her.

The zoo keeper said, “Well, Benny, the Board would like to know if you’d be willing to service her for $500.”

Benny stood scratching his head for a minute and finally said: “I’m gonna have to think that offer over.”

The zoo keeper said that was fine and told Benny he’d get back with him in the morning.

The next morning the zoo keeper found Benny and asked him what he had decided.

Benny said, “Well, if I’m gonna do this, I’ve got three conditions.”

The zoo keeper was shocked but he didn’t show it. “Okay,” he said. “What are the conditions?”

Benny said, “First, no one can EVER know about this.”

The zoo keeper said that was no problem.

“Second,” Benny said, “if there are any off-spring as a result of this union, they’ll have to be raised in the Southern Baptist tradition. I won’t agree to it otherwise.”

The zoo keeper didn’t bother to explain to Benny how ridiculous it was to worry about such a thing. “That’s fine, Benny. And lastly?”

“And lastly,” Benny said, “I’m gonna need about three weeks to come up with that $500.”

FRANKENSTEIN

In 1815 the Tambora Volcano errupted on Sumbawa Island, Indonesia. This erruption was so large that the ash from the volcano in the atmosphere caused world temperatures to remain below normal for the next 40 years. Crops failed and thousands starved.

In the summer of 1816 Mary Shelley (age 19), her husband and some other writers were vacationing in Europe at Lake Geneva where it was normally very warm. But that summer it was quite cold, so the writers decided to remain inside and see who could write the scariest ghost story. The cold temps that summer account for the frigid scenes that Shelley wrote into the beginning and the end of the novel.

4th installment of Barn Stormers

That night they heard a woman scream. It was a short scream but it curdled the blood. There were no fires or torches. No attempts to get into the barn of any kind. And no one interfered when they went to the well to fill the water bladders.

“This isn’t right,” Jill said a couple of hours before sun up. “They’re up to something.”

“I think she’s stumped,” he said.

“She?”

“The Oaks woman,” he said. “She must be trying to work this to her advantage somehow. Looking for angle to strengthen her hold on the others. So far we’ve only made her look silly, and if she doesn’t start coming up with better ideas than sending her men to the slaughter, there’s gonna be a coup. You can bet on it. They’re a tribal society, so if the others think that god has turned his back on her, she’s in trouble. And I’m sure she knows it.”

When the sun came up, he started talking about accessing the roof.

“How are you going to get on the roof when we can’t even reach the loft window?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said, “but I’ll bet I’d come up with an answer a hell of a lot quicker if my wife would help me instead of being so goddamn cynical.”

She sighed and said: “Okay, Spiderman. I’ll give it some thought.”

“If I can get onto one of those trusses,” he said, “I can hack a hole in the roof.”

“And do what besides fall off the damn thing and break your neck?”

He looked at her.

“I won’t go out on the roof, stupid. I’ll stand on the truss and be outside only from the chest up. High enough for me to pick their asses off over the hill.”

She put her head back and closed her eyes. “I’m going to sleep for a while.”

But she didn’t sleep and he knew that she was still awake.

“You know,” he said. “I kind of like knowing we’re up against this Oaks woman.”

“Why?” she yawned. “Because women are stupid ?”

“Hey, you’ve been calling me stupid for two days,” he said. “And I don’t know about you, but I think a couple of graduates from MIT should be able to out smart some flat-lander who eats people’s hearts and thinks she’s talking to god on a two-way radio.”

“Point taken,” she said, “but I think it’s a mistake to assume she’s a stupid hick. She’s obviously got something on the ball or those other maniacs wouldn’t follow her.”

“Okay, so she’s educated. So she was an engineer for NASA. So the fuck what? She’s clearly insane and I’d say that puts her at a rather distinct disadvantage.”

“Other than her fify fanatics, you mean.”

“You get me a hundred yards of open killing ground,” he said, “and I’ll put those goddamn archers of hers down for good. The rest we can take out at close range if we have to. But that won’t be necessary. Once we put those archers out of the hunt, it’s over.”

“Well, you’re not going to get that much open realestate,” she said. “And even if you do, she’s got at least ten bowmen good enough to hit you at a hundred yards.”

They heard a sudden clanking over near the house, men chattering hurriedly at one another. The two of them moved to the east door and watched out through the cracks.

“I told you they were up to something,” she whispered. “They built a goddamn tank!”

An unknown number of men were pushing what a appeared to be a pair of large wheel barrows fastened together, housed inside a ramshackle steel box. The front plate was sloped back about forty-five degrees and was over six feet wide. They were coming down hill from farm house, so their feet were visible for only brief moments as the men shuffled along inside the rattling contraption. There were two vertical firing slits cut into the steel perhaps two inches wide for firing crossbow bolts.

“Shit, they’re coming to light the barn!” she said.

“No, they’re going for the well,” he said quietly. “They’re dying of thirst.”

Jill was already thumbing three-inch deer slugs into the shot-gun.

“Don’t bother,” he told her. “Those aren’t going to penetrate. Run and grab that clip of black-tipped rounds from my rucksack.”

She ran for the rounds as he covered the clanking battle wagon with his rifle. He considered running outside and out flanking them to shoot them down point-blank, but he realized the other bowmen were probably ready to pour out of the house and shower him with arrows while the men iniside the amored wheel barrow took him down at close range.

No, he could never cover both threats at once with enough certainty. It was time to use the armor piercing rounds that he’d been saving for a rainy day.

“Cover them,” he told her as he switched out the ammo in his rifle, ejecting the ball ammunition and thumbing the 8-round N-clip of armor piercing into the breach.

“I forgot you had those,” she said, keeping her shotgun trained on the approaching threat.

He sighted down the rifle and muttered, “Good night, Irene,” as he squeezed the trigger.

The report of the rifle was followed an instant later by the ting! of the tungsten cored .30-06 round ripping through the half-inch steel plate.

A man screamed from inside the tank and fell backwards just as it was rolling up to the well. The men stopped pushing and started shouting at one another inside the tank, the tinny sound of their voices echoing within.

Dan smiled and sqeezed off another round—another man went down.

“Get ready to shoot when they run for the house,” he said. “I don’t want to waste this armor piercing on them in the open.”

Jill told him she was ready and he fired a third round and another man screamed but he did not go down. It sounded like there were three left alive and they were panicking, on the verge of routing.

One man broke for the house, tossing his crossbow aside as he fled.

Jill fired a blast of double-ought and the man spun in a pirouet on his way to the ground.

Dan fired again and killed another man within the tank.

The fifth man jumped from out behind the contraption and jammed his hands into the air. He was as haggared looking as the others with long hair and a shaggy beard. His clothes were blood stained and his shoes didn’t match.

“I give up!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot!”

“What do you have loaded?” Dan whispered.

“Deer slug.”

“Put ’im down.”

She squeezed the trigger and blasted the man in the gut from fifty feet with a .76 caliber, hollow-pointed lead slug.

The man flew backwards grabbing his obliterated belly at the same time with both hands and lay on his back shrieking.

“So much for their amored assault,” Dan muttered, switching out the ammo.

“I’d hoped to hit him higher,” she said, hating the screaming. “He’s going to live a while, isn’t he.”

He shook his head. “He’s got an exit wound the size of a cantalope. Shock’ll set in quick enough and he’ll be dead. Get your .45 out. We’re making a move.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just sling the shotgun and get that pistol out!” he ordered with sudden authority. They’ve got buckets inside that thing. You pump the water with one hand while I cover the house.”

Before she could argue he kicked open the door and dashed to the well. She followed close behind him, pistol hand. He dropped to his belly just beyond the pump and kept the rifle trained on the house.

“Watch the Alfalfa while you’re pumping!” he ordered.

Jill snatched a pair of plastic mop buckets from inside the tank and stuck one beneath the spigot. Her victim was still screaming just four feet away and she was tempted to shoot him, but she thought better of it. Three dead men lay slumped grotesquely inside their perferated armoured car. She grabbed the handle and began to pump as fast as she could to fill the bucket with water.

“Here they come!” he shouted. “Keep pumping!”

Dan shot the first two archers to come running from behind the house. Two more sprang out on the other side and fired simultaneously into the air. He managed to hit only one of them before they ducked out of sight. Both arrows fell long.

Trusting her husband with a practiced discipline, she did not look behind her to check his judgement but kept her eyes trained on the alfalfa field for any bowmen who might decide to pop up and take a shot at them. But nothing moved in the field.

Two more men with crossbows jumped out on each end of the house and fired.

“Duck!” Dan shouted.

Jill dropped flat as three arrows streaked through the airspace above her.

“Up!” he shouted, firing and killing one of the bowman.

Two more men jumped out on each end of the house with compound bows and fired into the air.

“Down!”

Jill dropped flat again as three arrows rained down around her. The fourth stuck in her butt.

“I’m hit!” she screamed. “Keep firing!”

She was on her knees pumping for all she was worth with an arrow sticking out of her rump. She was filling the second bucket as Dan killed another bowman and more arrows rained down around them.

He reloaded and rolled to his left, knowing it would throw off the next group of bowman.

Three more jumped out and he shot two of them dead before they could take a proper aim. The third arrow missed so badly that the archer might as well have been shooting at the moon.

“Moving!” she shouted as she hefted the buckets and ran for the barn.

He was up and shuffling backwards now, but he did not bother to fire as the last volley of arrows fell short. He grabbed a compound bow from inside the tank and hastily gathered a number of arrows on his way back into the barn.

With the door barred, he set about checking his wife’s butt. She’d been stuck in the right cheek, but it hadn’t penetrated more than a few inches.

“You’re lucky,” he said.

“It hurts like a sonofabitch!”

He jerked the arrow out of her and she screamed and spun around, slapping him.

“Fucker!”

He chuckled and held it up for her to see. “It’s just a target arrow. No deer head.”

She grabbed the wooden shaft away from him and examined the blunt aluminum point.

“Pants down,” he said. “I’ll pour some alcohol on it.”

When her wound was cleaned and dressed she took a seat on a hay bail and cursed.

“Can’t even sit proper now.”

“Small price to pay for seven gallons of water, baby.”

“Yeah, well next time you take an arrow in the ass. Jesus christ, fucking cowboys and Indians!”

He laughed out loud for the first time in months.

“Can you imagine how pissed they gotta be right now?” he said. “Tonight we’ll go fill those other two buckets out there.”

“How many did we kill?” she asked.

“Let me think,” he said, recounting the skirmish in his head. “Including the guys inside the tank, around twelve. I may have only wounded one or two.”

“Did you miss any?”

“Sweety, you know I never miss,” he said with a smile. “Not when I got a clear shot.”

“They got balls,” she said. “I’ll give them that.”

“Sounds like your man out there has finally given up the ghost,” he said.

They drank greedily, quenching their thirsts completely for the first time in days. Then they went back to paying extra close attention to what was going on outside the barn. There was no movement of any kind for an hour. Finally, a man came out of the house waving a white rag on a mop handle.

“What do you think?” Dan asked.

“Shoot his ass.”

“Let’s hear him out first. You keep watch around while I parley.”

Jill kept a close eye out for treachery on the other three points of the compass as the man slowly approached.

He was as slovenly a character as the others, but he looked a tad less wild in the eyes. Dan opened the door part way and aimed the .45 at his face.

“Fuck you want?” Dan said.

The man tried to look dignifed, but he was obviously very frightened.

“You win,” he said. “We’re out of water and it’s just too damn hot.”

“So you’re ready to surrender?”

“Surrender?” the man said. “No, we don’t wanna surrender. But we’re willing to let you go. If we’d known you were real soldiers, we’d never have bothered you.”

Dan looked him over, considering the offer. “How do we know you won’t attack as soon as we’re out in the open?”

“Hell, I think you just showed us, mister. You done killed all our best men.”

“Bullshit,” Dan said. “Those goons in the tank were barely able to walk. And that crack shot of yours never even showed his face.”

The man looked at the ground. “Well he’s sick,” he said. “Got the shits real bad.”

“Shoulda boiled that trough water!” Jill shouted from across the barn. “Now he’s gonna die from giardia! Stupid ass!”

“What’s ’at?” the man asked.

Dan grinned. “It’s a real nasty bacteria. The bastard’s gonna dehydrate and die.”

“Well, that’s our offer,” the man shrugged. “You need some time to think it over?”

“What do you say, Jill?”

Jill came over to the door and shot the man in the head with her .45.

“I say they’re all a bunch of goddamn liars,” she said holstering the weapon and turning away.

Dan kicked the man’s foot out of the way and barred the door.

“It’s going to start to stink around here real soon in this heat,” he said. “I’m thinking maybe tonight’s the night. Hell, they think we’re real soldiers for god’s sake. They probably just want us to get the hell out of here.”

“You might be right,” she said, “but why haven’t they tried to burn us out, angry as they are?”

“It’d be a serious waste,” he said. “What are they going to use to heat that house this winter?”

“Fine,” she said. “Then we burn this thing to the ground when we go. No! Better yet—we stay until they all die of dehydration. They started this and I say we finish it. It’s like you said, that corn puts us over the top. And we do control the water.”

“That pin-prick really pissed you off, didn’t it.”

“They’re vile human beings.”

“What about those two kids?”

“You know what I think about those two kids,” she said. “Nobody gave a shit about mine!”

This was the first time that Jill had referred to their dead children on her own in over a year. Her eyes filled with tears and she turned and walked away.

OBAMA!!

Never in my life have I watched a leader speak and been moved in the way that Obama moved me tonight! Finally.

3rd Installment of "Barn Stormers"

In the morning she went to sleep and Dan kept watch. Zigzagging slowly back and forth across the barn through thin beams of dusty sunlight, knothole to knothole, alternating his route in case someone with a bow tried to get lucky.

He knew that eating the dead man’s leg was a good idea, but he was equally sure that Jill would sooner starve. So he had dropped it without argument. He wished there was still a loft in the barn, but it was gone, dismantled sometime after the plague— probably for firewood during the second winter, after the nation’s infrastructure had finally collapsed completely and things had really gone to hell.

If he could just get himself up high enough to see out the loft window he could probably pick the bastards off like ten-pins where many of them hid during the day in defilade just beyond the rise. He and Jill had tried stacking the hay bales on the first day, but they were about ten bails short, no matter what configuration they had tried. He’d been foolish to let them be cornered in a barn—foolish try crossing an open plain by day.

Something snapped up front and he whipped around, crouching low as an arrow arced through the wall and into the dirt floor.

Jill sat up and grabbed the shotgun. “What the fuck was that?”

“Harassment fire,” he said with a chuckle.

He went to the door and tried to see through the crack whether the bowman was still in sight, but they never were. He picked up the arrow and examined it. It was an aluminum shaft with a four-bladed razor head. The fletching had torn away as it ripped through the plank.

“Well, this is one less arrow to worry about.”

She got up and went to the east wall, shotgun in hand. “Think we should try the water again? See if we can keep one bladder full at all times?”

“It’s a risk,” he said. “They’ve probably come up with a plan by now.”

“Like what?” she said doubtfully. “We’d be back inside before they could fart.”

“Suppose William Tell out there dug himself a hole last night somewhere near the pump and he’s lying in wait?”

“When you suppose shit like that it makes me glad you’re in here and not out there.” She stood watching out. “I’d still like to try though. You can keep watch with the rifle and I’ll fill the bladder on my own.”

“How are you going to pump and hold the pack at the same time?”

“Here’s an idea,” she said. “What if we went to the pump and then suddenly broke for the house? There might be food inside.”

“How are we going to defend that great big house with all those windows? We can barely defend this barn. We don’t even know how many are in there. Just because we never see anyone come or go doesn’t mean it’s empty. They’re probably circling around below the rise and up hill to the back door.”

“I was thinking we’d kill whoever was inside. They obviously don’t have any guns. Maybe we’d even catch some of those bowmen asleep.”

“The devil himself could be in that house for all we know.”

“It beats starving to death,” she said. “Let’s hit’em at sundown.”

“High noon’s better. It’s hotter and they’ll be feeling lazy.”

“Better get some rest then,” she said. “I’ll stand watch.”

Dan made himself a nest in the hay and fell asleep in a very short time.

Jill kept a watch similar to his but made her rounds with a .45 pistol in her hand, keeping the shotgun slung over one shoulder. The past few months had been hard on their ammo supply. In fact, they’d fired more rounds in the past two months than they’d fired in the previous two years. The upside was that they could move faster now without having to lug so much ammo along, but once they ran out they were going to be in deep shit.

The group they had spent the last year with had finally made the decision to disband the month before. There had been twenty of them in the beginning but their numbers had dwindled to only six, and so they had paired off, divvied up the ammo and food and let out in three different directions, each couple convinced their own was the best bet.

Three days ago she and Dan had been caught in the open by a feral community and chased into the barn. The two of them had shot a bunch down on the run, but there were too many and they were too close to get them all before being overwhelmed, so they’d run into the barn and barred door, shooting a few more through the wall as they tried get inside.

This community had obviously found a means of growing some food, but there weren’t any live stock and meat was all too scarce since the plague had killed off so many species of mammals. Feral communities had begun to spring up over the past winter, after the last of the canned goods had been eaten up. Some of the more civilized communities bred chickens rather successfully and ate their eggs, but those communities were often raided by the more violent ones and murdered to the last man or woman, and the chickens were usually eaten straight away without any thought to their more practical value.

In a feral community you didn’t want to get sick or badly injured. You didn’t even want to risk becoming unpopular with your peers. If you did, you got devoured.

Dan awoke to her kicking his boot.

“What now?”

“That kid’s standing out there with his hands up,” she said. “Over by the well.”

Dan got dizzily to his feet in the heat and staggered to the east-side door, peeking out.

“He looks sick.”

“Shoot him.”

He looked at her then opened the door a crack, motioning the boy forward.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Be calm,” he said.

He let the boy into the barn and they stood looking at him. He was about fourteen and his clothes were filthy. His face was dirty and his eyes were sunk into their sockets. He was missing a tooth in front and his gums were bleeding.

“What do you want?” Dan asked, not unfriendly.

“Me and my little sister need some water,” the boy said.

“You can bring her to the well,” Dan said.

“She’s pretty sick.”

“Sick like you?”

The kid nodded.

“You’ve got scurvy,” Dan told him. “And it will kill you if you don’t do something about it. You and your sister get yourselves a good drink and then go out there in the field and start chewing on the alfalfa. Don’t eat it, just swallow the juice. It’s got vitamin C in it. Chew it reguarly, every day.”

“I’ve seen the others doing that,” the boy said. “I didn’t know why.”

“Where are your parents?”

“They died.”

“Then the others are probably just waiting for you and your sister to die too,” Dan said.

“Will you take us if you get away?”

“Do you know how we can get away?”

“Not right now,” the boy said shaking his head. “Wish I did.”

They questioned him about the community and found out there were still fifty people left, but that only thirty-five or so were healthy enough to chase after anyone. They also learned that a woman was in charge, a woman who claimed to be in touch with the All Mighty. A "hell buster" she apparently called herself. The kid told them she ate the hearts of the people they cooked because she claimed she could take their souls to heaven that way. He said she was about forty and that she slept with a number of the stronger men.

“She isn’t going to mind you coming in here and talking to us?” Dan asked.

The boy shook his head.

“She told me to. She said: ‘Go up and ask’em to let you get a drink.’ She said not to lie about nothin.”

“Who’s in the house?” Jill asked.

The boy looked at her. “The hunters.”

She and Dan exchanged glances.

“Are they asleep?”

“They’re ready for you all the time,” the boy said. “Miss Oaks says you two are the last of the devil’s breed. That people like you brought the plague.”

“Go on and get your sister,” Dan said. “But hear me… if either of you tries to take any water to the others, I’ll shoot you down. Understand?”

The boy left the barn to fetch his sister and they barred the door after him.

“That boy’s the enemy,” Jill said. “When you’re turning on the spit he’ll be standing around licking his chops.”

“Maybe so,” Dan said, taking a seat in the hay. “But he won’t be the one who killed me.”

They watched on a short time later as the boy and his sister came to the well. The boy pumped for his sister while she drank her fill and then she pumped for him. She looked about twelve, frail and dirty and very obviously suffering from rickets, her legs bent and spindly.

“You should do them both a favor and shoot them,” Jill said turning away.

“Here.” He offered her the M1.

“If I thought I could kill them both in just two shots, I would,” she said.

**********

“I still say we storm the place,” Jill said later. “They won’t be expecting it. The well’s almost half-way to the house anyway.”

“Are you forgetting how accurate that guy was? He dead-centered me on the run. The only reason I’m not dead is the steel ammo can in my ruck sack.”

“You keep telling me not to give up,” she said, “but all you plan for is to sit here and starve.”

“I’m waiting for them to make a mistake.”

“What mistake?” she demanded.

“This Oaks woman didn’t send that kid up here for water,” he said. “She sent him up to do some recon whether he knew it or not. She probably questioned him the second he got back—which means she’s going to think we’re worse off than we really are.”

“You must have a pack full of food I haven’t seen,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what I do have,” he said. He went to the corner and kicked away a bunch of hay to reveal a two dozen big ears of dried field corn.

Her eyes grew wide and she ran over and grabbed two of them up as if they were bars of gold. “When did you—?”

“Found them while you were asleep this morning,” he said. “I felt them under my feet when I came over here to piss.”

Using her thumb, Jill broke a number of kernels from the fat end of the ear and put them into her mouth, crunching them.

“Careful,” he said. “Don’t break to a tooth. Suck on them to soften them up. We’ll eat an ear or two a day… along with our rations… we’ll hold out.”

“As long we control the water,” she said.

“Which we’ll continue to do, no problem. And because of this corn, they’re water problem just became a lot more critical than our food problem.”

2nd Installment of "Barn Stormers"

He was working the handle on the pump and she was holding the water pack beneath the flow when one of them came into sight. It was a young male, but he kept his distance, watching them from behind a large tree which stood alone near the farm house. They both watched him without speaking. When the water packs were full, Dan held his head under the spigot for a moment, then they trotted the fifty feet back into the barn and barred the door.

“I saw that one last night about this same time,” he said, raking his fingers through his soaking hair. “He’s not aggressive like the others.”

They sat down, back-to-back against an oak support beam, her watching the front, him watching the rear.

“I wish you hadn’t cut your hair off,” he said after a while. It had been bugging him. “All that beautiful red hair.”

“What the hell do I need to be beautiful for?”

“I’m not dead yet.”

“Yes, you are. You’re just too stupid to admit it.”

“I want to fuck,” he said, twisting to peer at her around the beam.

“Don’t be cute.”

“I’m not being cute,” he said, standing to unbutton his camouflaged trousers.

She looked up at him in dismay. “My god, you’re serious.”

“I want you, Jill. Get your pants off.”

She laughed sardonically and looked away. “I know what you’re trying to do,” she said.

“Jesus, Jill. I’m not that stupid.”

Though they had both survived their hellish bouts with the plague and were now immune to it, the contagion was known to leave most of its very few survivors infertile, and the chances of them both having avoided that side-affect were terribly remote.

“That stuff’s behind us,” she said. “Go jerk off.”

“Then I want you to say her name.”

She sighed aloud and got wearily to her feet. “If they come in the middle of it…”

“Hopefully, you’ll come in the middle of it,” he said with a grin.

“Ha, ha.” She walked over to the pell-mell pile of hay bails and pushed her trousers to her ankles and lay back. “Hurry up. The straw’s hurting my butt.”

He knelt between her splayed knees and lowered himself, sliding inside of her. He smiled adoringly as she looked back at him with benign indifference.

“I’ve never seen a woman as beautiful as you,” he said. “Even still.”

She slid her hands behind his neck and laced her fingers as he moved gently in and out of her. “There are shadows at the back.”

He lowered his face to kiss her and she kissed him back, and that was all that it took for him to finish. There was a sudden clatter in the far corner against the outside wall as he pulled up his trousers. A small cluster of men were jamming a crowbar between the planks. He grabbed the rifle, snapping off a shot. A man screamed and fell over howling as the others fled. The crowbar clanged against something outside.

She fastened her trousers and got to her feet, taking up the shotgun.

“See?”

They stood listening to the mortally wounded man as he howled pitifully.

“Are you going to finish him or let him scream like that?”

“He can scream all he likes. I’m not wasting the bullet.”

So they resumed their watch at the center of the barn and sat waiting for the wounded man to fall silent. Sometime after dark he died.

They saw the first torch about an hour later, a hundred or so yards out into the alfalfa. It came to a stop and stood burning like some eerie beacon of death.

“Do you think they’ll fire the barn?”

“No,” he said. “They’ll try to starve us out before they do that.” He chuckled and said, “We won’t have as much meat on our bones by then, but the barn’s irreplaceable.”

“Not everybody thinks like you, you know. Most people aren’t looking very far into the future.”

“Know what? I think that torch is meant for a distraction.”

He stood and crept through the dark towards the back of the barn and stood listening with his ear pressed to a knothole. A small twig snapped somewhere out in the darkness, the soft crunching of dried grass under foot. He backed away from the wall and sought cover behind a redoubt of hay bails, keeping the rifle trained on the wall. One of those bastards out there was damn good with a crossbow and he didn’t want a bolt coming through the wall to skewer him.
He could hear steps just beyond the wall now, but he couldn’t gain a sure enough sense of where the interloper was to risk a shot.

“Hey ya, hey ya,” called a deep voice, and Dan knew that whoever it was had already taken cover behind the concrete watering trough six feet off the back of the barn.

Neither Dan nor Jill ever spoke back when they were taunted because the locals were trying to get them to give away their locations inside the barn.

“Hey, ya. Hey, ya,” the man called again. “Hey, hey, hey.”

Dan could hear the soft scraping of metal against concrete as the man chanted, and he realized the man must be ladling stagnant water from the trough into a jug or a canteen. He took his pistol from its holster and was moving towards the wall to position himself for a shot when he heard a blast from Jill’s shotgun at the far end.

The caller behind the trough jumped up an instant later and scurried off, the sounded of sloshing water receding with him.

They met in the center of the barn.

“What’d you see?” he said quietly.

“Someone tapped on the wall with stick or something,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have fired. Was that the same caller from last night?”

“He was getting water from the trough.”

“Let them drink that putrid shit if they want to,” she said. “They’ll be sorry if they don’t boil it.”

More torches appeared in the distance and soon there was a blazing bonfire way out in the alfalfa, flames licking ten feet into the air. People standing around it singing hymnals.

Dan thought to try shooting one of them, but it was too far in the dark to risk wasting the bullet.

“How can they stand a fire like that in this heat?” he wondered.

“Maybe you should go out and tell them about the lions,” she said.

“God, you’re funny.”

They found their places and sat with their hands cupped behind their ears, listening intently for the slightest disturbance. In time they smelled meat cooking on the breeze and their stomachs began to churn in spite of what they knew the meat to be.

“That is people, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s people for sure this time.”

“I refuse to let it make me hungry.”

They were quiet for a while.

“How can they be singing to god?” she said finally.

“They’re fucking nuts, that’s how. You know, that looks like most of them over there. I think we should make a break for it.”

“Don’t be stupid. Those guys with the bows are out there and you know it. They slept all goddamn day, and now they’re right out there in the dark waiting for us.”

“Day after tomorrow our rations run out,” he said. “After that we’ll have no choice.”

“This is our Alamo,” she said. “We make our stand here.”

He refused to accept that.

“The guy I shot before dark is right over there on the other side of the wall,” he said. “I could dig under and get hold of his leg. Drag it in and hack it off at the knee with the tomahawk. We could make a fire in here tomorrow and cook it. That alone would buy us an entire day.”

She closed her eyes and tried to block him out.

The first segment of "The Barn Stormers"

BARN STORMERS



She was leaning back against a bail of hay as she stared up into the rafters of the barn at an owl’s nest built so long ago that it was frayed and sagging over both sides of the truss, thin wisps of grass hanging down in long strands like lifelines to nowhere.

“Why do you still look at me that way?” she asked.

“Because I still see the children in your eyes,” he said.

She held the shotgun across her lap, feeling sad for him, but there was nothing she could do for him now.

“Well the children are gone,” she said. “It’s time you accepted that.”

He nodded and said that he knew it.

Yes, he said that he knew it, but she knew what he was thinking. She knew he was thinking there was a still place for them somewhere, a life to be re-made somehow. And she wondered where he found such baseless hopes.

He crawled quietly across the dirt floor to a crack in the wall boards, watching to see if anyone was coming.

“The sun’s going down,” he said.

“They’ll come again when it gets dark,” she said. “They won’t give up.”

“Neither will we,” he said, turning to look at her, to make sure that she was still with him. He drew back the bolt on the old M-1 rilfe to make sure that it was loaded, the way he did every half an hour. A man could never be too sure of his weapon.

“Do you remember the summer in South Dakota?”

“I don’t want to remember South Dakota,” she said irritably. “Why do you always do this just
before things get crazy?”

“Do you remember what Tabitha said when she first saw Mount Rushmore?”

“Dan. Stop.”

“She said, Mommy, look. George Washington! Do you remember?”

She stared at him.

“God, she was smart,” he said, smiling into the long ago. “Only five years-old and she already knew who the hell he was. She got that from you, you know. How smart she was.”

She shook her head, having long forgotten.

“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “She’s gone.”

“Say her name, Jill.”

“No.”

“Say it.”

“I told you no, Dan. Enough.”

“Jill, say your daughter’s goddamn name!”

“No!” She jammed the barrel of the shotgun up under her chin, staring him defiantly in the eyes.

“I’ll do it!”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” he said, waving her off. “It’s way too soon for that.”

She got to her feet and walked a small circle. “So where are they already? They’ve changed their routine.”

“Just one last time?” he asked quietly.

She walked over and crouched before him with the shotgun cradled in her arms, looking almost soulfully into his eyes. “I’ve told you no a dozen times. Now stop it.”

She went to the front of the barn where they had barricaded the door with a giant stack of hay bails and watched through a knothole in the wall. She didn’t see any movement at all. There didn’t even seem to be a breeze among the alfalfa. She fluffed her fatigue shirt to circulate the air over her otherwise bare breasts. The temperature was well over 90 degrees and it was humid as hell.

“Why don’t they come?” she muttered. “Ferals never give up.”

She cast a glance towards the back of the barn where her husband sat looking at the photos in his wallet. Maybe it’s because he didn’t carry them for nine months apiece, she told herself, resenting him. She went to him and stood over him, her hand out for the wallet. “I want to see.”

He shook his head and stuck the wallet back into his fatigues.

“No. No, if I thought you really wanted to see them, I’d give it to you, but you don’t. You’ll do something to it. Throw it out there with them maybe. I can’t help it you’re jealous.”

She kicked his boot and turned away again.

“It’s stifling in here.”

“Sit back down,” he said. “You’re wasting energy. Water too. Hey, do you know why lions sleep all day?”

“You mean back when they’re were lions?” she said.

“To conserve energy—water.”

“Well, there’s a pump right out there,” she said pointing, “and when it gets dark, I’m going back out to refill the water bladders. Let’em try and stop me.”

He chuckled and reached up his hand.

She took it and hauled him to his feet.

“They might not like you using their well,” he said, shifting his combat harness around to adjust the fit. “Especially now that we won’t let’em near it. Better we both go.”

“Now?”

“Why not? They’re not expecting us to come during the day.”