by Bobby Adair
“You’ll get it,” said the man. “Now pull it off your shoulder by the strap. Don’t put a hand on the weapon.”
“I’ll have to lower my arms,” explained Tommy.
The man nodded permission.
Slowly, Tommy reached over and slipped the strap off his shoulder. With the rifle hanging below, he held it out for the man to take. “What kind of trouble have you been having?”
“Fuckin’ NonCons,” spat the woman.
“What’s a NonCon?” asked Tommy.
“Violent assholes.” The man stepped forward, took Tommy’s rifle, and stepped away again. “You wouldn’t like ‘em.” He handed the rifle to the woman.
She let her rifle dangle as she took Tommy’s AR-15, and inspected it with too much scrutiny. “Looks brand new.”
“My dad taught me to take care of my things,” Tommy explained.
She checked the safety selector, and flicked it off, lazily pointing the rifle in his direction. If Tommy had any doubt about the pair, it died right there.
The man lowered his weapon and stepped up to Tommy. “Gonna pat you down. You carrying anything else?”
“Just my knife,” answered Tommy.
The man patted Tommy's torso. He bypassed the knife on Tommy's belt and slid his hands quickly down Tommy's pant legs. Stepping around behind, he ran his hands over Tommy's shoulders, and arms. "You're gonna have to take off this backpack, so I can search inside.” His hands followed Tommy's waistband, grazed the magazines, and met at the pistol stashed there. "You lyin' son of a—"
Tommy spun, threw an arm around the man’s thick neck and pulled him down into a headlock. In the same motion, he yanked the rusty knife out of its sheath and drove it through the top of the man’s skull. Before the guy even knew he was dead, Tommy let go of him and lunged at the woman.
She stepped back, pulling the trigger on Tommy's rifle, only no bullet was in the chamber, and nothing was in the magazine.
Tommy tumbled over her in a tackle and just as she started to scream, he clasped a hand over her mouth.
She bit him, and in a flash had a knife out, slashing at his face. Tommy yanked his hand back and leaned away. She kicked and hollered, and Tommy pummeled her in the face with his fist, because she wasn't a woman anymore, not even a human. She was a hag who'd thrown a Molotov cocktail into the barn, or locked the door, or lit the match, or played any of a dozen lethal parts in a barbarous crime.
Tommy tried to pin her arm with a knee as she slashed again, so he put his weight behind his fist and smashed her in the nose. Blood spurted, and her eyes rolled back. The knife didn't fall, so he hammered her again and again until she went limp. But his practiced cool from all those years ago was gone, his rage was running hot, so he hauled back and pounded her full-force. Bone crunched. Blood gushed.
She wouldn’t be getting up for a while.
Panting from the fight, Tommy stood as he looked toward the house, scanning the windows for curious eyes.
No movement.
So far, so good.
Tommy took up his rifle as he thought about what to do with the hag. She wasn’t dead, though she soon might be. A stomp on the forehead or a kick to the throat would hurry it along. Yet he did neither. She wasn’t going anywhere, not before the rest of his business in the ranch house was done, and he might be able to wring some value out of her.
Loading a full magazine into his rifle as he spun, Tommy charged his weapon and hurried over to retrieve his rusty knife from the gruff man’s skull.
Still, no one had raised the alarm. That wouldn’t last.
He shed the clumsy duffle bag off his back and raced toward the front door.
***
Knock, knock.
Sounds inside.
Tommy rang the doorbell. “Hello?”
Doubt arose. How many were in there? Tommy thought of the bodies in the barn, and the voice in his head told him the count didn’t matter. He stepped to the side against the wall and drew the pistol.
The door swung open. Not seeing Tommy at first, the man said, “What do—”
Tommy raised the pistol and shot him in the face, exploding brains and skull out the back of his head, as he stepped into the doorway.
Another man was in the foyer, a few paces back. His eyes went wide as he dove through a doorway to the side. Tommy fired three times, one hit, and the guy tumbled into the doorjamb. Tommy shot twice more through his hips, and the man howled.
Deeper in the house people were yelling, and furniture was tumbling.
Tommy spotted one of the insurgents in the living room ducking behind a couch. Tommy fired again, sending five fast rounds through the leather-wrapped cushions. Just then, a thunder of gunfire and shattering glass exploded from inside.
Tommy dove for the shelter of the wall outside the front door. Summer, Aaron, and Dan were behind the house. They’d worked their way in through the tall grass while Tommy was distracting the watching eyes by strolling down the dirt road. Now they were shooting through the windows on the back of the house, ambushing those inside while they were responding to Tommy at the front door.
Tommy tucked the pistol in his belt and readied the rifle in his hands.
The shooting stopped.
“Tommy?” called Summer through the house.
“Good,” he called back, as he stepped through the doorway. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard the gasps of difficult breathing, zeroed in, and followed the sound into the room just off the foyer.
There lay the second man he’d shot. Blood pumped in a rhythm from a wound in his upper leg, another hole in his hip just up and left of the groin was covered with a pressing hand. A third wound in his stomach went ignored by him. The man’s breath came in shallow pants, and he barely had the lucidity to hold his head up. Beneath him, a pool of blood was spreading fast over the knotted wood floor. The hollow-points in Summer’s pistol had done their lethal work. The guy wasn’t going to live much longer, yet Tommy couldn’t leave him, not with an unknown number of hostiles in the house.
Tommy pointed his rifle at the man’s head. The guy's eyes barely registered, but he mouthed a silent plea just before Tommy pulled the trigger and ended it for him.
Tommy spun and rushed into the living room, counting five bodies on the floor and furniture.
Movement caught his eye, and he turned to see Summer stepping through the shattered glass of a kitchen door. Before Tommy could say anything, she fired two shots out of the kitchen and into a man who had fallen beside the fireplace.
“Living room clear!” she called.
“Clear bedroom!” Aaron called, from somewhere back in the house.
Dan stepped through the kitchen door behind Summer, and he stopped, eyes scanning over the bodies then fixing on Tommy.
“Don’t gawk,” Summer ordered. “Check the rest of the house.”
Dan’s eyes stayed on Tommy. “That was some Hannibal Lecter super Nazi shit. Right through the skull with a knife?” Dan gulped. “What are you?”
***
With no watch and no cell phone of his own, Tommy checked the time on a sat-phone he'd taken off one of the bodies. They'd been in the house for nearly an hour, and from where he stood in the doorway off the foyer with his back to a wall, he could see through the house's front windows. He had a view for over a mile up the road toward Alma. The other way, down toward Spring Creek, the valley stretched for miles, all splashed in the sun's setting colors.
In the house, eleven were dead. Two prisoners, including the hag Tommy had beaten senseless outside.
In an ironic flip of circumstance, of which she was unaware, she was tied to a chair, and spitting mad about it. Her nose was mashed sideways and the left side of her face was swollen grotesquely. Tommy’s conscience told him to feel guilty about what he’d done, yet there was no room in his heart for that, and no desire to find any. She deserved what she’d gotten, and had earned all she still had coming.
How many were up in the barn, burned
to death, with horror’s last moment forged into their ashen faces?
Wispy notions of guilt turned to dust.
An older man, early sixties by Tommy’s guess, had come through the firefight without injury. Ayers was his name. He’d been in one of the upstairs bathrooms, had tried to make a run down the hall with his pants falling, and tripped himself. He’d been unarmed when Aaron and Dan reached the top of the stairs. He was tied to a chair in the kitchen beside the hag. He was making threats about what would happen once the police arrived, once justice was served. He told them that murderers didn’t go free in his country, thugs like them always got what was coming, but mostly he was angry because they’d not shown him the courtesy of allowing him to wipe his ass before they’d bound him to the chair.
Ayers wasn’t 704, though. His camo jacket sported a shoulder patch for a group called the Colorado Truth Society. An additional patch on the arm read ‘Blitz Force Battalion’. Several of the dead wore the CTS patch, a few old, a few young, and that left Tommy curious, so he searched the bodies for information. The IDs of the deceased led Tommy to the knowledge that the 704 members tended to be from Breckenridge, Frisco, and Vail. Local men and women. The CTS militants were from Fairplay, Buena Vista, and Alma, all farther south. Local enough. All this bullshit was definitely homegrown.
But homegrown across the country sprung from feral seeds of incessant lies into crops so hateful they could drive a man to burn innocent people by the score. Just because they disagreed about which stupid asshole to put in charge of opening a corrupt palm in Washington.
And what none of these assholes seemed to understand was that all of those politicians worked for anonymous American oligarchs and the megacorps anyway. Elections and the endless news cycles packed between them had long ago ceased being the conduit through which self-governance flowed from the masses. Elections were a nationwide coliseum with a bloody floor spread from shore to shore, pitting every citizen against his neighbors so none of them would ever see that the hero politicians they rallied behind weren't truly their choice, and weren't going to Washington to do their work.
All those gray-haired fat men and loud-mouthed faux patriots, kowtowing to a flag they'd draft-dodged their way out of fighting for, were either ring-kissing tools beholden to their deep-pocketed patrons, or eventually would be. That was what the evolved disease of American-style democracy did—it twisted idealists into narrow-minded blabbermouths who forgot every reason they ever picked up a mic and stood starry-eyed in front of their neighbors sincerely promising to make lives better, to level the playing field, end the corruption, feed the starving children, educate the masses, and bring peace to a bitter world.
Anyone who managed to hold on to his integrity and didn't succumb didn't matter, because too many did. The corporate teats were too plentiful, the milk too sweet, the money too green. The corrupt souls were always in the majority, regardless of party. Red and Blue were illusions cultivated by the powerful to keep the rubes from building the guillotines. For the disenfranchised 99% casting their wasted votes, Red and Blue were the colors of faith, a faith that required them to shed their critical thought processes and disregard fact. It was a faith apparently strong enough to plunge the nation into neighbor-rape-neighbor, brother-kill-brother civil war.
The question was, how could so many militants in so many groups, that seemed only to differ by name, coordinate an assault on the country’s governmental structures and keep it secret until the moment the bombs started exploding and the bullets started sizzling the air?
The question seemed urgently important and yet moot at the same time. Tommy looked across the vast living room to where livid Ayers sat tied to a kitchen chair, and Tommy wrestled with the idea of beating him some more until the answer fell out of his mouth. He just didn’t know if he had time.
Way down the valley, as it sloped toward Spring Creek, a gravel-topped scenic lookout bulged the road wide. The spot was a great place to catch the sunsets spreading golden hues through the valley and over the tree-covered west-facing mountains. Tourists liked to pull off the highway there to take pictures of the swaths of yellow aspens in September when the leaves were starting to change. And a pickup sat there at that moment, not facing the long vista down the valley, but pointed up the road, toward the ranch.
Tommy couldn’t tell how many people were inside. It was so far away, he could tell little about the vehicle, except that it was a pickup and it had been sitting there for at least ten minutes. He didn’t know what the driver was waiting for, but his Murphy’s-Law-imagination assured him they were waiting for reinforcements.
Chapter 11
“What are we going to do with them?” asked Summer, walking into the foyer while keeping her eyes on the two prisoners in the kitchen.
Tommy was focused on the pickup. “I’ll take care of them before we leave.”
“Murder?”
Tommy didn’t need to put a word to it. Summer knew what he intended to do. Tommy nodded at the wooden bridge that crossed the river between the ranch house and the highway. Aaron had parked two of the dead men’s cars there, bumper to bumper, to block it off. “Did Aaron take care of the keys?”
“He threw them in the river. Why’s that important?”
Tommy nodded through the window.
Summer glanced. “What?”
“Way down. At the overlook.”
Summer squinted. “You think they’re 704?”
“They’ve been there awhile.”
“We should go, then.”
Tommy glanced into the kitchen, past where Ayers grumbled and bled. A stolen truck was backed up to the shattered kitchen door. While Tommy had been interrogating Ayers, and searching the house for the list of the names of those in the barn, Aaron and Dan had moved the truck there. They’d planned to load it with weapons and any other booty they deemed worthy, but Tommy had stopped them. If they cleaned the place out, it would look like a NonCon raid and play into Frank Lugenbuhl’s narrative. Tommy had other ideas. “Where are Aaron and Dan?”
“Upstairs.”
“Still looking for Lugenbuhl’s kid?” Tommy asked, knowing Dan, Aaron, and Summer had checked each of the outbuildings for signs of life and found no child and no guardians.
“They found your list.”
Tommy glanced at the folded edge of the papers sticking out of Summer’s front pants pocket. The list consisted of a few crumpled sheets stapled together with the torn corners of at least a dozen more missing pages. Altogether, they had a hundred names. Two-thirds were crossed through—some in pen, others in marker of various shades and tips. Tracking the list had obviously been a collaborative effort. More proof the militants in the house had all participated in what happened up at the barn. Justification, in Tommy’s mind, they had all deserved their fates.
The good thing about the list—it didn’t have Faith’s or Emma’s names on it.
They both might still be alive.
Summer stepped to the other side of the wide doorway and leaned against it. She sighed at her fatigue as she stared back into the house, eyes wide, still numb to the sight of the dead laying everywhere she looked. “Is that truck down there going to come?”
“Not until...”
“Until what?” she asked.
“I’ll know when it happens.” Tommy took his eyes off the truck and scrutinized Summer. “What are you trying to get around to asking me?”
“I want you to be honest.”
“I came down here to find that list and murder these criminals.” Tommy turned back to the road, his disclosure complete.
“You don’t feel bad about what you did?”
“If I’m sticking with honesty?” Tommy shook his head.
Summer seemed to have something caught in her throat when she said, “I do.”
Tommy glanced over at her again. “I figured you were too zealous for self-doubt.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
Tommy didn’t respond, not right away. “You�
��re strong. I think that’s what I should have said. And as long as I’m being honest, I think that intimidates me a little bit.”
“You never seemed to like me much.”
“I never disliked you.” Tommy’s eyes were on the sky, watching the color slowly change to dark. “I guess I was never around enough to get to know you.”
“Sorry I got after you in the car last night.”
“On the way down to Spring Creek? Don’t worry about it. It was a rough night.” So much had happened so fast, Tommy felt like more time must have passed. He felt like he’d fallen through a trapdoor into an alternate reality, one where he’d taken a different path.
“Please don’t think I hate you because of what I said.”
“Why don’t you just ask me what you want to ask me?” Tommy knew their time in the house was drawing short. Another car was coming up the road, headlights on, not yet to the rest stop.
“Dan’s upstairs right now, crying.” Summer looked toward the stairs. “If you listen, you can hear him.”
“That’s what that is?” Tommy had thought the noise was something else, maybe a lovesick cat in the attic, or a branch brushing against a screen in the wind.
“He’s horrified by what we’ve done,” said Summer.
“He didn’t seem that bothered by it when we were driving down here this morning.”
“He was,” Summer countered. “He’s like the rest of us, trying to deal with what we’re suddenly doing.” She stared at him long and hard. “But not you.”
“Everybody deals with it in their own way.”
“Faith told me—” Summer’s reluctance to go on won out.
“What?” prompted Tommy.
“She said you were all closed up emotionally. She said sometimes that living with you was like living with a robot.”
Tommy sighed. “We’re not going to do this again, are we?”
