The problem with tracks in the winter, especially when there’s no snow on the ground, is that any grasses or other small vegetation don’t spring back up after a while. You can’t tell if it’s recent or not. I did look, but there weren’t any tire impressions at all, just the two parallel lines of depressed vegetation.
“Farm wagon?” asked George.
“Probably. Either that,” I said, “or the lab van backed in there, maybe to turn around?”
“Sure,” said Hester.
That was it.
“Well,” I said, “if somebody comes here to hide out, they’ll come up the drive. Maybe check it out as they go, so they might come up pretty slow. I’d think they’d want to park behind the barn, here. Wouldn’t be seen from the road.”
“So, what’s the plan if they do that? “asked Sally. “I mean, do we just step out and say hi or what?”
“I’d say,” said Hester, “that two of us go up the stairs to the main floor, and one of us goes on each side of the barn. At the word ‘go,’ we all confront them at once. No place to hide. No place to run.”
“Excellent,” said George.
“It’ll probably be after dark, so just remember not to concentrate on the headlights. Really screw up your night vision.” I looked back down toward the roadway. “As long as we can hear ‘em driving, we really don’t need to look out much at all. And headlights will light up faces through the slats,” I said.
“Yes, Mother,” said Hester.
“Yeah, yeah. The important thing,” I said, “is that, once they’re in, they don’t get out. No matter where they stop, we have to have somebody between them and the roadway just as fast as we can.”
“Well, then,” said Sally, “let’s get inside where it’s warmer.”
As we all started walking to our right, back to the barn, with our backs to the sheds, there was a yell, then another. I think we all turned at the same instant to see what was going on.
Three dark shapes emerged from behind the right-hand shed, near the path that wound up along the creek bed. All three were bobbing and weaving like crazy, and it took me about a second too long to figure out what they were doing. They were trying to confuse anybody who was shooting at them. Only nobody was. Then they opened fire.
I swear to God, there must have been fifty slugs smacking into the dirt, the barn, fence posts, and the limestone foundation all at the same time.
Hester, I think, reacted first. None of us did the proper move, which would have been to fall to the ground and crawl for cover. All four of us just took off for the barn as fast as we could go. And I mean fast. George, who was in front of me, spun around with his handgun drawn, and popped off three or four rounds as I passed him. I noticed him turning back toward the barn as I went by. That made me third through the door, as Sally and Hester were much faster than I was. George came thundering in right behind me.
“Fuck!” That was me. I didn’t have enough breath to say anything more.
“Who in the hell is that?” came from Hester.
“Jesus Christ!” said Sally. “They’re shooting at us!”
George said, “Three subjects. They all got down when I shot, but I don’t think I hit anybody.”
Hester was breathing hard. “Where in hell,” she gasped, “did they come from?”
I shook my head. “Those are automatic,” I said, referring to the rifles.
I grabbed my own rifle off Sally’s pile of blankets and headed to the right side of the barn. As I got there, I saw movement in the middle distance, going to my left.
“They’re going toward the biggest shed,” I said. “Heads up!”
We took up positions against the long limestone foundation on the upslope side of the barn. That foundation was the only bulletproof feature in the whole barn.
We were all able to find cracks or holes in the vertical boards of the siding, about four feet off the floor. We all looked out onto the long, brown grass of the slope that led to the big shed. We couldn’t see anything moving.
After about ten seconds, when the shock began to wear off a bit, Hester said, “Maybe we should watch all four sides?”
Hester went to the right, George to the left, and Sally took the side facing the roadway.
“Call the office,” I said to Sally. “Get backup coming.”
Sally picked up her walkie-talkie mike, and said “Comm, Three!” She used my number because she didn’t have one.
No answer.
She tried again, and again. Nothing. Before I could stop her, she was crouching near the top of the stair, holding the walkie-talkie up above the floor line with one hand, and talking into the mike at the end of the stretched pigtail cord.
“Comm, Three, ten-thirty-three. I repeat, ten-thirty-three.”
She got an answer. “Three, I’m ten-six. Hold your traffic unless ten-thirty-three.” Somebody wasn’t paying attention.
“Comm, Three needs ten-seventy-eight, this is very ten-thirty-three, multiple ten-thirty-two, shots fired. Repeating…” Ten-seventy-eight meant that we needed assistance, the 10-33 indicated an emergency, and multiple 10-32 meant more than one armed suspect. With all the rest, 10-33 might sound redundant, but it was an official declaration of an emergency and enabled certain authority to accrue to the dispatcher automatically.
I heard the voice on the radio say, “Nation County has ten-thirty-three traffic.” That meant that everybody else had to shut up and only speak when spoken to.
“Where’s backup at?” asked Sally, speaking to me from her perch on the stairs.
“Lamar’s in Battenberg,” I said. There really wasn’t anybody else within fifty miles, at least not on duty.
“He might want to stay there for a few minutes. If we’ve got some here,” said Hester, meaning the terrorists, “there might be some where he is, too.”
All well and good, but we were dealing with very limited resources. “There won’t be more than two troopers within thirty miles of us,” I said. “Get our next-out duty officer, and local cops from Maitland and Battenberg. Call out the rest of the department after that.”
“Where’s the cell phone tower from here?” asked Hester, as Sally began talking to Dispatch again.
I pointed back toward the road. “That way.”
“Good,” she said, and pulled her phone from her jacket pocket. “I’ll get the state TAC team headed up this way.”
That was an excellent idea, and I said so. I looked back up the stairs, just in time to see Sally stick her head up past floor level to get a quick look through the big barn doors. I just started to tell her to get down, when a burst of fire ripped through the slats above her, and she ducked so fast she fell most of the way down the stairs. I thought she’d been hit.
I was over to her in four steps. “You okay?!”
“Yeah,” she said, uncertainly. “Shit. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“Jesus, keep your head down.”
She stood. “Yeah, just my knee hurts…skinned it, I think. Holy shit, did you see that!?”
“I saw it all right,” I said. “That’s a good way to get killed.”
“I saw one of em,” she said, her voice wavering slightly. “Looked right at him. He was in the big shed, looked right at me. No shit. Just like a neighbor. Somebody else shot. He didn’t. He just looked.”
“Okay. Just don’t stick you head up like that again, okay?”
“No shit.” She brushed off her uniform pants. “I don’t know why you let me do things like that.”
“And if you do it again, lose the scarf. You really stand out with that.”
George and Hester were both on their cell phones, talking in muted tones and trying to get a view of whoever had been shooting at us. I did the same, but couldn’t see anybody along the whole upslope side of the barnyard. Belatedly, I remembered to pull the cocking handle of my rifle sharply to the rear. I never carried a round in the chamber and had nearly forgotten to load one in. That could have been embarrassing, to say the least. I searched my mind to see if there was anything else I should have done, or should be doing. Little mental lapses like that mean that you aren’t getting up to speed as quickly as you should, and are lagging behind events. Not permissible, if you want to survive a bad one.
