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.
“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.
1 comment:
Jim,
That's action writing! Amazing. It reads so swiftly and I took in everything like a sponge soaking up water. You even manage to get a couple of licks in between this husband and wife killing team.
I really like reading a novel this way,
Bob
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