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.”

FIRST ENTRY: What's this blog about anyway?

I've entitled this blog "In Time of War" because it's been created in a time of war and because I am a historian of war in general.

Mostly, however, I've created the blog as a place for me to create, to stimulate my mind in directions which my traditional fiction writing may not take me and as a way to keep the creative juices flowing when I'm not working on a project.

The first photo I've chosen to post is one from REUTURS of two female soldiers away at war. (Note the personal photos in the hat.) They remind me of my friend Shannon who fought in this war and who came home different from the way I remembered her, different in a way that only war can change you. I post the photo as a tribute to her and to all of our women at war. The men who fight for us, all of whom are better men than I, are no less deserving of such tribute and you will likely see photos of them as well.

I’m likely to post all sorts of pictures and stories, and this blog won’t always be of a serious nature. Sometimes it might even be down right silly.

Lastly, if you are a person of a conservative mind, I doubt very much this blog will be to your taste, though you are indeed welcome to read it and to share your thoughts…