Free Falling

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  Another man laughed. The one who’d stepped forward had not come any closer. He watched her eyes carefully and grinned at her through broken teeth.

  Not caring that they could see what she was doing, Sarah dug into her pocket and fished out a third round. Her eyes never left the man in front of her.

  “Oh, so you’ll be needing to reload to dispatch the lot, eh?” The speaker laughed and slapped the man next to him. “She’s got two chances then she’s done,” he said. “You take ‘er, I’ll get the boy—”

  The words weren’t out of his mouth before Sarah shot him.

  He screamed and grabbed his upper arm which instantly mushroomed red.

  Sarah recovered quickly from the recoil and turned the gun on the nearest man to her when he suddenly made a strangling noise and pitched forward. When he went down, Sarah saw John standing behind him with a large manure shovel in his hands. She didn’t waste the moment he’d given her. She swiveled the gun barrel to the third man and, without taking her eyes off him, shoved another round into the rifle and slid the action forward. She repeated it with a third round. One man lay stunned at her feet, another stood hopping up and down and cursing while he clutched at his shoulder.

  “I got one for each of you now,” she said.

  The unharmed man slowly raised his hands in surrender.

  Now what?

  Sarah took a deep breath and felt the arm that held the gun begin to shake.

  John approached with the shovel.

  “Keep ‘em covered, Mom,” he said.

  Sarah nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She took another deep breath. John turned to look at her and she gave him what she hoped he would interpret as a meaningful look. Then she spoke:

  “John, you remember why we had to kill that dog that was savaging our sheep?”

  John looked at the men. “It was because we couldn’t trust it wouldn’t return and kill more sheep,” he said.

  “Sure, you’re not thinking of killing us in cold blood, missus?” The man with his arms upraised looked from Sarah to the man who was bleeding. “Mack, you hear this maniac?”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Sarah said. “It’s not personal.”

  The wounded man looked at Sarah, his face contorted with loathing. “You can’t just shoot us,” he said.

  “I’m protecting my family,” Sarah said, feeling stronger every second. “I’ll need you to stand away from the barn a bit. I don’t want to have to drag bodies any further than I need to…”

  The stunned man began to stir on the ground.

  “You better get your buddy there to connect with the program, Gilligan,” Sarah said, indicating the groaning man on the ground. “He makes me nervous.”

  “Michael, wake up. Wake up, you stupid sod!”

  “Yeah, Michael, wake up, you stupid sod,” John said, nudging the man with the shovel.

  “Language, please, John,” Sarah said.

  “We’re begging you, Missus. We never woulda hurt you and the lad. We’re just hungry and—”

  “You can’t let ‘em go, Mom,” John said. “Maybe if you kill two of ‘em, the third one will have learned a lesson.”

  Shrieks of horror burst from two of the men. The one John had crowned with the manure shovel howled the loudest. The wounded leader stared at her with an intense expression.

  “That is a good idea, John,” Sarah said, wondering from where he got his acting talent. “But which ones?” She pointed with the rifle barrel at the one in the dirt.

  “Yeah, that’s good,” John said. “And the one you wounded will probably die anyway so he’s a good second choice.”

  “It’s a minor wound,” the man blurted, his eyes darting back and forth from Sarah to John.

  “So are you saying she should kill me then, Mack?” The unharmed man snarled.

  “Well, it’s me that’s led the band up to now,” the other man reasoned in a high-pitched voice.

  “And got us in this mess, too, I’ll be thinking,” the other man said. Suddenly, without warning, he wheeled on John who had walked too close to him and snatched him up. John never let go of the shovel and swung it in a wide arc, banging it into the head of the man with the wounded shoulder who screamed.

  Sarah watched it as if she were watching a movie with the sound turned off. She saw the shovel smash into the man’s head and then drop uselessly from John’s grip. She saw the wounded man’s mouth open in a large cavernous but mute oval. She watched the man who held her son hesitate for a split second to react to his leader’s screams of pain and in doing so dropped John to waist level. That was her moment. She squeezed the trigger and shot the man, straight and true, through the head. She never even felt the recoil.

  Afterward, she would remember John lurching away from the falling corpse, blood sprayed across the back of his jacket. He retrieved the shovel and stood, panting with excitement, next to Sarah.

  She licked her lips, ignoring the body on the ground. “I have two bullets left,” she said, pointing the gun at the man with the bloody arm wound. “You and your buddy leave now before I change my mind.”

  David threw a tarp over the body and returned to the kitchen. He had ridden home, determined not to be separated another night from his family. On the road, he had seen two men stumbling in the dark. There was something about them that worried him and he reached down to touch the small hatchet he carried in his saddlebag. They passed him without a word but he cantered Rocky the rest of the way home.

  “I didn’t take time to think,” she said to David as he ate a late supper of cold chicken and John slept in the next room with a puppy on either side of him. “I just knew that at that range I couldn’t miss.”

  David shook his head. “You didn’t worry about hitting John?” he asked.

  “I didn’t have time to worry about that,” she said. “I just knew I had to stop it now.”

  David looked over his shoulder to the other room.

  “Do you think he’s okay?”

  “I don’t know. We were joking about shooting them to try to scare them. And then all of a sudden it just happened. So I don’t know.”

  “You were joking about killing them?”

  “I didn’t decide to execute that man out there, David,” she said in a loud whisper. “He grabbed our son. He…he—” All of a sudden, Sarah got an image of the chicken in the burlap bag. She thought of how easy it had been to break its neck, all things considered. “He could’ve killed him with his bare hands in just a moment,” she said quietly. “He had John. No, I…I didn’t think twice.”

  Finn’s pain mirrored his anger, climbing in arcs of intensity higher and higher, until he felt nearly incapable of speech. As he lay thrashing in his cot, his arm blazing in agony although the women had successfully staunched the blood, he thought for a moment he might literally lose his mind.

  By the time he and Georgie had limped back to camp, he was delirious with pain and thoughts of revenge. That bitch! He would kill her and the lad before breakfast and torch their miserable hut with their bodies inside!

  After three months of steady, unfailing obedience from his followers, the disaster at the American’s farm had shocked and destabilized him. He was so beside himself when he entered camp that one of the stupid bitches who rushed forward to attend him actually tried to wipe his face before looking at his arm. He had been literally frothing in a wild fury and she hadn’t noticed the red, sodden flag heralding his gunshot wound.

  That shite, Brandon, had the effrontery to lay his hands on him as if to help him up the steps into the caravan!

  Their first raid and he had made a bollocks of it. Or rather, Ardan had, and gotten himself killed in the process, the ejeet.

  “What happened?” the girl Jules had asked as she bound up his arm. If he hadn’t been so weak from the loss of blood, he would have backhanded her for suggesting the raid had been a cock-up. That moron Georgie babbled out a version of the story to probably the first attentive au
dience of his young, retarded life.

  “It went bad,” Georgie kept saying afterward to anyone who would listen. “It just went bad. And now they got Ardie, and him all dead and everything.”

  Jules had cried as secretly as she could manage when she heard about Ardan. Finn knew they were sweet on each other. It turned his stomach that his younger brother could make the girl smile—and more—and hadn’t he been so nice to her ever since he got back from the clink? It annoyed him to lose Ardan, he needed all the men he could gather for his plan of owning the surrounding countryside. Ardan was a pain in the arse, but he took orders well enough.

  When Finn took a break from his own misery to notice Jules, he found himself somewhat comforted by the fact that there was a clear road to her now.

  As if he wouldn’t have gotten around to taking her from his brother eventually.

  He put his hand out to her from where he lay on the cot. She was pretty, he thought, as if seeing her for the first time, even with reddened eyes and that scared-rabbit look in her eyes.

  “Hush, girl,” he said. He noticed she clamped her eyes shut as if to will the tears to stop, perhaps worried that they were offensive to him.

  “Come to me, girl,” he said, taking a withering breath full of pain and weariness as he spoke.

  She moved to where he lay and sat next to him.

  “I know you loved my brother,” he said, forcing his voice to sound calm. “I loved him, too.”

  Her eyes popped open at that one but he could see he had her. She slid her small, sticky hand into his proffered one and he squeezed it.

  “And we’ll get the bitch did this to me…and him,” he said. “I promise you that.” The girl nodded and seemed to try to smile.

  “In the name of all that is holy,” Finn whispered, his gaze moving away from the girl to stare sightlessly into middle space. “We’ll make her pay in the blood of every living thing she loves.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They needed more bullets.

  And they desperately needed news.

  Since the crisis, Dierdre and Seamus had been getting all their information about the outside world from an old duffer who lived on the edge of Balinagh and who stopped in once a week for a meal. For years he had driven to their place in his second hand Renault. When the crisis happened, he came in his trap, pulled by an ancient polo pony that hadn’t been ridden in a decade. Devon was an elderly widower who knew Seamus from their school days together in the Balinagh boys’ school. His wife had been Dierdre’s sister. Unlike childless Dierdre and Seamus, Devon and his wife had five children, all of them grown and gone and out of the country.

  Devon hadn’t visited in nearly three weeks.

  “So they assume something’s happened to him,” Sarah said as she fixed breakfast the next morning.

  David nodded. “And they’re worried but it’s hard for them to get out. Seamus seems to be getting even foggier and Dierdre knows it just takes one broken cart axel ten miles from home to…you know.”

  Sarah stopped and looked at him.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be good,” he said. “Kind of a risk they don’t feel good about taking, you know?”

  “Did Dierdre ask you to check on him?”

  “No, but you could tell she was really worried about him. Plus, when you think about it, Devon is their only source of news of the outside world and so our only source.”

  “Sounds like you’ve talked yourself into going to look for him,” she said. She turned her back to him to address the stove.

  “There doesn’t seem to be much harm in it,” he said quietly. He had awoken hours earlier to drag the body out of sight. He would spend the rest of the morning digging the trench for it. He was still trying to process what had happened. The fact that thugs had come to the house was bad enough. But knowing that Sarah had shot them and killed one? He still couldn’t believe it. Except for the body he needed to bury.

  “David.” Sarah put down his plate of eggs and then looked out the kitchen window to catch sight of where John was. “You have enough to do right here without finding an excuse to go wandering about the Irish countryside.” She sat down with a thump. “What more has to happen to convince you that it is not safe here?”

  “Look, Sarah…” He reached out a hand to touch her but she pulled away, refusing to be mollified. He hesitated and picked up his fork instead. “We need news of what’s going on,” he said. “I need news.”

  “Fine,” she said, getting up again. “Then I’ll go.”

  “You?”

  “Look, David, I killed a man last night, okay? I think I can handle it.”

  He noticed she was breathing fast. He stood up and took her into his arms and held her.

  “Of course you can handle it,” he said. “I just hate that you have to,” he murmured into her hair. “I wish I could protect you from all of this.”

  The kitchen door flew open and John entered, his hair wild with the wind, his face flushed red from the cold.

  “Awwww, mushy stuff,” he said, plopping himself down at the kitchen table. “Are these for me?” He grabbed David’s fork and began to eat his second breakfast of the day.

  David grinned and released his wife.

  “They are now,” he said.

  Sarah broke three more eggs into a bowl and turned back to the stove.

  John was on strict orders to stay in the house with the dogs while David worked on the grave. They did a run-through of John yelling from the kitchen window to see if David could hear him from behind the barn where he was digging. No problem. David would keep the gun with him while he worked. John would keep all the doors and windows locked, with the small kitchen window open so he could easily hear and be heard.

  Sarah tacked up Dan. She carried a knife and two bottles of Côte de Rhône. She hoped to be able to trade the wine for ammunition or something else more useful to them.

  Ballinagh was a little over nine miles to the west, which should take her about two hours at a walk. She fully intended to trot Dan most of the way home to cut her time. He could use the exercise and the light would be fading by then.

  She and David had decided that she would go straight to Balinagh to see if there was anyone there who had news. Devon had reported that some of the people who hadn’t left the area were still in the habit of coming to the now deserted village to set up trading markets. Her hope was that she would find a market and be able to trade her wine and pick up any news.

  On the way back, she planned to swing by where David thought Devon’s cottage was. This would only take her about a mile off her route. David was very serious in reinforcing to her that if she saw anything at all that looked dangerous or threatening, she was to bypass the place. Sarah wondered, as she rode away from the cottage, waving to her son and husband, what that might look like. If it was totally quiet when she showed up, should she assume someone was waiting for her in ambush or that Devon was hurt and praying that help would arrive? If she saw activity in his front yard—dogs barking, or whatever—should she stop? It occurred to her that if Devon’s house looked like there was no trouble there, that wouldn’t explain why he hadn’t come to Seamus and Dierdre’s in almost a month. She would just have to make a decision based on what she saw and hope it was the right one.

  The ride to Balinagh was cold and although Sarah had volunteered for it—and thoroughly surprised herself in the process—she was pleased to note that the trip already felt like it was doing her good. She stretched out her legs on either side of Dan and relaxed her spine and when she did she could feel him relaxing, too. She held his reins loosely in her left hand and scanned the horizon for any movement or activity. It had been a full eight weeks since she’d been to the village and she wasn’t at all sure what to expect when she arrived.

  She realized that the decision to go, herself, was a good one. A part of her couldn’t bear to have David leave so soon after being gone. She was surprised to realize that the burden of protecting their cottage–and he
r son—was heavy. Every step that took her away from that terrible responsibility seemed to free her just a little. Or was it every step that took her away from the body of the man she had slain?

  She had worked hard during the night to not think of it. She had alternately hugged her sleeping boy and her exhausted husband and put thoughts away of the man’s eyes as he’d breathed his last—because of her. She found other thoughts just as disquieting creep into her head, thoughts of wondering about his birth and boyhood. Had his mother loved and cherished him just as she did John? Did he have children of his own? If this crisis hadn’t happened, would she have known him? Sat next to him in church?

  The brutal fact that she had extinguished him came upon her in moments without warning. Staring at the goat butter bubble in a hot pan; watching an arc of Roseate Terns swoop languidly over the snowy pasture; cleaning up after one of the dogs. And then his face would appear to her, his startled then glazed eyes, his blank, face full of nothingness now. At one point in the night, she actually found herself thinking with amazement that he was lying out there in their courtyard when any sane person knew enough to find a place for warmth and shelter.

  If you do it out of instinct, are you any less culpable?she wondered. There had been no decision, no thought process, she had simply reacted. And her reaction was an instantaneous action to strike someone from the list of the living. She shook her head and took a long breath.

  Dear God, who will I be when and if we finally ever make it back home?

  The burly Irishman hoisted himself into the back of the wooden wagon and raised his arms to the gathering crowd. He had deliberately parked the wagon near the center of the village square in Balinagh, waiting until the peak of trading and marketing had waned. He figured that would guarantee the attention of a maximum number of people but with fewer distractions to contend with since the heaviest drinking had yet to fully begin.

  “If I could have your attention,” he bellowed to the forty or so people milling about the wagon. “Your attention, please.”