by Nick Randall
“Two bad men came into your house last night! Two bad men who wanted to steal from your home, and could have hurt all of us! Because YOU were careless! Do you want us to get hurt? Do you want your mother and I to get killed and leave you here all alone?” he yelled.
She just continued to cry and scream into her rabbit.
“Enough, Roy! Enough!” Josie put her hands on Roy’s shoulders and pushed him away, into a standing position, and guided him out of the room.
“No more walks at night! Shouldn’t be out there anyway, I can’t believe you would be so damned foolish!” he said, pointing back at Alex as he left the room.
Josie pushed him out of the room and into the hallway.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” she said, smacking him hard on the chest.
“She needs to be disciplined!” Roy responded. “It was her fault they got in!”
“She’s ten, and she made an honest mistake!” Josie countered. “She doesn’t understand how serious this is!”
“Yeah, she understands now I bet!” Roy cut himself off and lowered his voice. “There’s a dead body in the basement now, and two other en out there somewhere. And you can bet they’re bringing bringing friends.”
Josie paused. She’d heard the gunshots, the commotion, and seen him cleaning the blood off his hands, and tossing his blood-stained clothes in the garbage. She knew he’d probably had to shoot someone, but her number one priority was staying with her daughter until the danger was past.
When Roy came back inside, he checked on them in Alex’s room, and without a word, went to the bathroom and didn’t come out until sunrise.
“How do you know there’ll be more?” Josie asked.
“The one I killed said ‘go get the others’ before I shot him.”
“Oh my…”
“We have to assume they’re camped out somewhere, and there could be more. I have some ideas for making this place even more defensible, which is our top priority now.”
* * *
Three hours later, the sun was low in the morning sky, and once again the wife and husband were panting and weary from a long day’s work. Roy looked around; the house was now laden with traps and obstacles.
In between the two barbed wire fences, there was now a layer of wooden pallets with nails and screws sticking up out of them, all between six and eight inches long. They’d taken special care to pull the long grass out there between the slats in the pallets, so that the boards would be a little more disguised.
Roy also spent an hour collecting sage brush and other bushes to place between the fences, to better conceal the nail boards.
Closer to the house, underneath every boarded up window, was a five-foot pit with sharpened dowels and sharpened PVC piping sticking out from all angles along the walls and bottom. The tops of these kill pits were covered with a simple sheet of cardboard and dirt scattered on top. Anybody who tried to break into a window would fall and impale themselves in one of several grievous ways.
The gate was reinforced with extra piping and what remained of the planks, and Roy strung trip wires around the perimeter in two places. The trip wires were armed with military-grade illumination flares.
“We’ll be ready for them, whenever they come,” Roy said affirmatively.
Chapter 6
Roy sat in the living room, on the back of the couch, his scoped Colt AR-15 at the ready and peering out the slot in the window at the fence and front gates.
It had been several hours past sundown, and he didn’t know when the wounded man would return with the rest of his company. Roy didn’t even know if they would return, but it was always better to be safe than sorry.
At very least it would show Josie that he was serious about this, taking his responsibilities seriously, taking their safety seriously. He’d never admit it, but he was sorry he yelled at his daughter. He wasn’t sorry, however, that it had made an impression and that the lesson was probably well learned.
His thoughts drifted, and his eyes drifted with them, across the room and into the kitchen which was lit by a single electric lantern. What was the world going to look like when she was grown up? It didn’t matter, she would grow up because he was here to protect her, and his wife.
Suddenly, a shrill hissing sound came from the front yard, accompanied by an explosion of red light. Roy jerked back to attention and scanned like a hawk out the window. The red light illuminated the whole yard, front to back. Several figures had just reached the fence, and were momentarily stunned.
The attack from Ojo’s gang had begun!
“We’ve got company!” he shouted to the back of the house.
He heard Josie run to Alex’s room without a word, and then the sound of two pairs of feet flew down the wooden stairs into the bunker. Roy didn’t take his eyes off the front yard.
He counted three men, too dark to tell if they were armed, but they were all climbing over the fence. His scope was already dialed in on the fence-line, and just in case somebody got too close, he had his trusty Beretta 92FS holstered on his hip.
He peered through the night-vision scope and zeroed in on the first man climbing the fence: an enormous specimen with a crew cut who, for some reason, appeared to have a pair of aviators on his head even though it was night.
He was crouched precariously on the edge of the fence, looking around in confusion, apparently taken by surprise by the flares. Roy took a breath, targeted the man’s forehead, and fired a single shot.
Just before he fired, the man moved over the edge of the fence, and his hand vanished in a misty puff of blood and viscera, like the streamers from a kids party-popper.
The 5.56x45mm round had struck his wrist, and the man now flung his ragged forearm around. With a panicked scream, he lost his balance and fell with all his weight to the ground, landing on his back onto a pallet of nails.
The man froze as he hit the ground, back arched, body stricken and remaining hand curled in agony.
His screaming rose from fear and shock to the terror of a mortally wounded animal. The nail through his left ear indicated how close to piercing his skull he’d come, and as he writhed to escape, every twitch ripped fire and nausea through his body from the epicenters of the 6-8 inch long screws and nails that held him in place on the pallet. He stopped writhing and began to shiver.
“One down,” Roy grunted.
The second figure on the fence jumped down as Roy first fired, and Roy watched as the man landed with both feet, and immediately collapsed with a shriek and swearing as he put a nail through his right foot.
His swearing continued as he collapsed and hit another nail as his right hand broke his fall, and a third sank under his kneecap as he knelt to catch himself. Roy zeroed in on the man’s head, but a loud scraping sound drew his attention.
The third intruder had jumped back off the first fence and had dragged opened the first gate. Now he crept at a crouch towards the second gate.
The second gate opened and the man kept creeping forward, motivated by some unknown force.
SNAP.
There was another agonized howl as the man at the gates stepped into a cleverly-hidden bear trap that Roy had nicely sharpened with a grinder.
The man flailed and fell forwards, grasping at his mangled foot and whimpering as he felt his muscle and tendons slowly tear.
Roy zeroed in on the man’s head, and when he curled up on his back and held still while gingerly trying to pry the trap open, Roy fired the rifle and the man’s snapped to one side as the exit wound sprayed out blood. The lifeless body fell limp on the ground.
“ROY!” Josie shouted from the back room. “There’s three of them coming from the back! They’re on the fence!”
Roy clicked the safety on and jogged to the back hallway where the back door was boarded shut. As he approached, he saw a fourth man armed with a crow bar and a pistol in his waistband run right up to the house and go for one of the windows.
Then without a sound, the ground gave way b
eneath him, and his lower half disappeared into the kill pit. He caught himself with his hands, his armpits level with the edge, and started shrieking, his eyes and mouth wide with pain and shock as he grasped at the one-inch-wide wooden dowels that protruded through his ribs, waist, and legs. From his gasping mouth came a high-pitched retching.
Roy saw the man go down, then turned his sights on the backyard. A fifth convict was running straight for the back door.
Josie looked at Roy, who held his fire. Immediately, the attacker’s legs vanished in a thunderous explosion that scattered clothes and blood into the yard.
His body cartwheeled into the air and landed with a wind-knocking thud on the ground. Immediately, what was left of the man began to wail, a slowly rising wail of indescribable terror and shock, and vainly, desperately, looked around and began to drag himself towards the fence.
Suddenly his head snapped back from a carefully placed bullet delivered by Roy’s AR-15.
The sixth and last of the attackers saw the carnage and turned and sprinted back towards the fence.
Roy stared down his sights and fired three rounds just to the left of the retreating attacker. The man jumped and instinctively took two steps to the right, away from the shots fired, and with another bone-shuddering explosion, his right leg was left riddled beneath him.
He shrieked as he fell -- Josie had never heard a human being make sounds like this. Ever since the attack started, the air was thick with the screams of the maimed and dying.
The fallen attacker moaned and clutched at his bleeding leg wound as he began to hyperventilate. He took only a few short breaths before Roy’s mercy bullet ended his life.
Roy shouldered his AR-15 and jogged to the front room again. No sign of the second man over the fence, with the nails through his feet and hands.
The whole engagement lasted less than five minutes, but it was long enough for him to have gotten away.
The man impaled in the killing pit out back was still moaning incoherently. Roy stepped back to the back door, opened the latches, and marched cautiously to the man in the pit, keeping his rifle up the whole way.
The poor man was beyond help: both his upper legs, one of his ankles, his waist through the pelvis and out his stomach, and through his ribs, all were pierced by the sharpened dowels. He twitched, and writhed, stuck to where he stood, clutching at the stakes and at the empty air.
Roy drew his Beretta from its holster, aimed at the man’s forehead, and fired a single shot to put him out of his misery.
He turned to see Josie standing in the doorway, a look of such repulsion and shock on her face so terrible that he almost didn’t recognize her.
“Go make sure our daughter is okay,” Roy said flatly.
Chapter 7
The next morning, the pale sun illuminated the carnage of the night before. The stiff, mangled corpses of the ill-fated assailants were scattered across the barren lawn.
Crows circled overhead and perched on the fence posts, laughing among themselves as they eyed the killing field. Blood stained the ground all around the home and spattered the walls, marking the locations of the fallen.
Inside the house, Josie’s hands were shaking vigorously as she set breakfast on the table: powdered eggs, a glass of water and half an apple for everyone, and the last of the bacon. Roy sat down and set his rifle next to him leaning against the table.
Alex sat down at her place at the table and glanced between her father and the AR-15 resting against the wall.
“Don’t you go near any of those windows, Alex, you don’t need to see any of that,” Josie said sternly as she set Roy’s plate in front of him with a clunk and took her seat.
The three of them sat in silence for a moment before Roy started in on his food.
She made eye contact for a moment before nervously breaking her gaze and starting on her breakfast. Josie stared at her husband as she sipped on her water.
Josie finally broke the silence: “Roy, there were explosions outside last night. When those men got close enough to the house… what was that?” she asked, though she already knew the answer. He looked up at her with arched eyebrows, either indifferent or incredulous at her question.
“Mines,” he said, through a mouthful, glancing around before going back to his food.
He felt the air grow a little colder, and he looked back up at her. Josie’s face puckered with anger, and her eyes narrowed on him.
Roy continued: “I didn’t have time to tell you, okay? And what does it matter? Alex ain’t walking around out there anymore, neither are you. And we were expecting them. And obviously it was necessary.”
She glowered and folded her hands in her lap.
“Where did you get those kinds of weapons, Roy?” she said, spitting out his name like it hurt her teeth.
“I made ‘em,” he said with the same casual tone, without looking up from his plate. “At my workbench.”
“You had those in our house?!” she hissed through gritted teeth, hands and head trembling with rage.
“Okay, you want to know the truth about war?” Roy asked, putting down his fork and tossing his napkin on an empty plate.
He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, never taking his eyes off Josie.
Roy began, his voice taking on a fact-of-the-matter tone: “The whole thing was such a damned mess. I got stranded with my unit in a small outpost out in the middle of nowhere, some filthy dirt mountain range nobody gave enough of a shit about to even name.”
“Language,” Josie hissed.
Roy ignored her and continued on: “We were out there for a whole week, pinned down by insurgents. They must have sent the whole force after us, and we just held our ground and kept picking them off as they came. We ate whatever we could by the end, including the birds that came in to eat the dead. Water was rationed so tight we had to drink our own piss. Choppers tried to come get us but it was too hot. Airstrikes didn’t do squat, the hajjis just hid in their holes and waited. It was just us, and them, and there was nothing to do but wait them out. And eventually, they stopped coming, and we humped it out. It was life and death. In a situation like that, you put your money where your mouth is or you perish, and there ain’t no middle ground. And it’s the same right here.”
Roy thumped the table with two of his fingers to enunciate his point.
“No government is coming to save us, no police, no authority. The only authority we have now, the only one we need, is sitting right here,” he said, pointing to the AR-15 resting against the wall. “And I will do anything I need to to protect my family, especially against such a bunch of degenerates.”
He walked back to the front door, unlatched it, and walked onto the porch. Alex quietly went back to her plate. Josie sat, her hands folded and trembling.
Chapter 8
The gang members were encamped around half a mile away from the homestead. Six men had been sent to probe the homestead’s defenses and all six had been taken out in the attack, and along with the loss of Pills and Dominic, their total strength was now reduced to fifteen men.
But even though the homestead was much better defended than Ojo had anticipated, it hadn’t lowered his resolve one bit. If anything, it had only strengthened it tighter.
Ojo had gathered all of the gang members in a circle so he could address them from the center.
“Benny boy, would you like to say anything to us?” Ojo asked.
Ben shook his head.
“Now’s your chance,” Ojo pressed.
Ben took a gulp and then spoke: “I didn’t know they were that well-defended.”
“Oh really?!” Ojo stepped up to him. “You were there before, weren’t you?!”
“Yes, but they didn’t have any of those booby traps and shit set up then!” Ben argued back. “They were ready for us this time!”
“It’s as if there’s a whole damn battalion in there!” Ojo screamed in fury. “They got the whole place rigged up like that evil little brat in
those Christmas movies! Sharpened sticks and barbed wire, damn nail boards, swinging door traps, an assault rifle!”
In his rage, Ojo pushed Ben hard to the ground.
“My only blood brother on this planet has died and do you want to know who’s fault it is?!” Ojo continued. “Some homesteading scum in a random old house in the middle of the woods that’s more fortified than an army base!”
Ben scrambled up to his feet and realized he displayed the reaction of a man in fear. He decided to change that right then and there.
