by Lou Cadle
Kelly fired again. At what, he didn’t know.
And then he felt weak. He dropped the fire extinguisher, confused. He sat.
And then he felt the pain. He’d been shot. Goddamn it all to hell, he’d let himself get shot. He managed to crawl back away from the fire, which was probably casting light on him. He made it almost to the corner of the shop. And then he must have blacked out.
* * *
Kelly cursed herself for how long it took her to find and hit the sniper. By the time she had downed the bastard, the fire had taken hold on the shop wall.
Afraid she’d be shot herself, she ran to Arch’s still form. Her fingers touched his neck, looking for a pulse. She thought she could feel one. She leaned forward, ear to his mouth and heard a faint breath, then the stir of air from it hit her ear. Okay. He was alive. Hit where?
Her neck crawling with anticipation of being shot, she moved around to let the light of the fire shine on him.
She saw the dark patch immediately. Blood, still spreading. Damn, damn. She dug her knife out and cut through his shirt, yanking at the fabric until his front side was entirely exposed. He had been hit low in the shoulder. Lung? She dabbed at the blood until she could see the blood flowing out. No froth, so probably not lung, unless the round had gone bouncing around in there.
Why he was unconscious, she couldn’t say. Shock, maybe. She yanked again at his shirt until it popped out from under him, wadded it up, pressed it over the wound, and then noticed his belt. She unbuckled it, whipped it off, and used it to secure the rough bandage.
The fire was growing. They had food in there, supplies, ammunition. Her heart wanted to do nothing but tend to Arch, but the fire had to be dealt with. She’d been proud of Dev for wanting to leave to back up Henry, to do the right thing, but she could sure use him here now.
She found the extinguisher where Arch had dropped it and emptied the little bit of chemical left onto the fire. Not enough.
There was a hose out here, with a sprinkler head attached, used for the herb garden and a couple of pots of potatoes made up of dirt inside stacked tires. She ran for the hose, made sure the sprinkler was there, and turned the hose on. Thank God Arch was such a stickler about coiling up hoses carefully. Dev had done so, and so it uncoiled easily as she ran it back to the barn, the sprinkler spraying her the whole time.
She lined it up, then fumbled with the switch on the side that would keep the sprinkler head aimed in one direction. Okay, got it. The water would keep the flames from spreading, maybe. Maybe not.
Back to Arch. She needed to know how badly he was hurt before she moved him. “Arch,” she said, close in his face. Then, hating to do it, but needing to, she smacked him.
He moaned. Okay, good. A good sign.
“Arch, you’ve been shot. Can you talk? Can you move?”
“I’m fine,” he said, groggy.
Clearly not. “Can you move all your fingers? Toes?”
He held up a hand, the one on the other side from the gunshot wound. His arm on his injured side lifted a few inches and flopped back down. “That’s numb. You okay? Dev?”
“I’m getting you out of here,” she said, and she propped her rifle against the shop wall and reached down to get him by the good arm. No, maybe not. Feet would be better. She went around and grabbed him by the ankles, pivoted him so his feet were pointing at the truck, and pulled for all she was worth.
It was hard getting him moving, but once he was, it got a little easier. She pulled him back to the truck. Seemed to take forever, but it was probably not even a minute. Then she said, panting a little from the effort, “Try and crawl under the truck bed. I’ll be back in a second.”
He was out of harm’s way, at least from three directions.
The fire was still burning. Kelly ran into the shop. Where was the other extinguisher? It was smaller. There, by the acetylene torch. She grabbed it, realized she could see the interior wall glowing and decided to use it in here, try to keep the fire from burning through the wall completely. She aimed and emptied it onto the wall. The smell of burning wood and chemical flame retardant mixed into a noxious combination.
It was a smell to fear.
Back outside, she checked on Arch. Only then did she think to signal for her son. She whistled the signal that meant “need help.” But with the ongoing gunfire out there, he probably couldn’t hear her.
Arch was breathing but didn’t respond to her asking him how he was. He’d managed to crawl maybe eighteen inches from where she left him, so his hearing and mind were working. Scant reassurance that was. She hunkered down by him and tightened the belt around his arm, feeling the shirt. Wet but not dripping. She hadn’t seen any spurting before, so no arterial hit.
If there had been, she probably couldn’t save him. As he was, she could. Hold onto that thought, Kelly Jean. You can save him.
Save the shop too, or he’ll kill you when he recovers.
The sprinkler might have slowed down the flames, but it hadn’t put them out. She picked it up and wrestled the sprinkler head around, twisting it off the hose. She needed a better stream of water.
By the time she had it off, she was really soaked, dripping water everywhere. She looked at Arch’s rifle where it had fallen, hers where she had set it down. His was wet. Hers seemed okay. She held the hose aiming away from herself and went to retrieve his rifle and put the strap over her shoulder. Then she aimed the stream of water at the base of the flames, using her thumb to half-plug the hose and guide the stream.
It took five minutes for her to see any progress, before one side of the fire started to die back. She was lucky she hadn’t been shot in the back standing here. But she hadn’t been, and she had to get this fire out, totally out, so she could tend to Arch.
Dev hadn’t answered her whistle. Either he had problems of his own or—her mind refused to go there. God could not be so cruel.
Put out the fire, Kelly. One thing at a time.
In another ten minutes, there were no more flames. She didn’t trust the wall not to burst back into flame though. She ran Arch’s rifle to the truck, put it in the bed, went back to the shop and wrestled on the sprinkler head again, dousing herself a third time. Her hair was dripping rivulets into her face. She realized how thirsty she was as she licked her lips and caught a few drops. Before she put down the sprinkler again, she thrust her face into it and took a drink.
Then she positioned it to hit the shop wall. The fire had burned all the way through in a spot big enough to allow a ten-year-old kid to crawl through.
But the shop—and everything they had stored inside it—was still standing. She had saved it.
And now she had to try and save her husband. She retrieved her rifle and went to him, crawling next to him. He was not responsive. Alive, but not awake. She did a quick look around the yard with the NV scope, making sure no one was at the hens or rabbits or smokehouse, and when she saw no one, she felt all right about committing to tending to her husband.
Devlin appeared as she was running out of the house with a first aid kit.
“Sorry, Mom,” he said. “We had problems up at Mr. Morrow’s place.”
She held out her arms and drew him in for a fierce hug. “Thank God.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Behind the truck. Half under it. He’s been shot.”
He stiffened in her arms. “Is he dead?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.” She let go of him. “Go get us a board from the shop, big enough to carry him on. Now that you’re here, I want to get him inside to tend to him.”
Chapter 25
Though they hadn’t slept even three hours after making sure the neighborhood was safe, Pilar woke Sierra at dawn. “Sorry, hon, but there’s a lot of work to do today.”
“I know.”
When she was dressed and seated at the kitchen table he said, “Are you okay?”
“Tired.”
“I mean....” He wasn’t sure if he should bring
it up.
“You mean, am I upset about shooting people? I guess the first one is the hardest, huh?” She gave him a lopsided smile. “How about you?”
“I hate it. I hate every bullet I fire. I hate not having the chance to try to talk people out of what they’re doing. I hate that they’re so desperate it’d be useless to try.”
“The world is what it is,” she said.
“I wanted such a better world for you. A better future.”
“Maybe things will go back to normal once the war is over and they’re sending us oil again. Right?”
“Maybe.” Pilar couldn’t imagine how that could happen. If oil did start flowing again, if the war ended, or if the nation re-negotiated with Venezuela to get some part of their exports, which had been impossible the last five years and didn’t seem any more possible now, people would not go back to using it as they had. Prices would be insanely high. Armed guards would be at gas stations. Or the government simply wouldn’t allow personal use and would stockpile it for police and national guard and fire trucks and food hauling to urban centers, which would require a dozen national guard trucks to accompany every food truck, he imagined.
Or worse, if gas came back and the rule of law did return in its wake, everyone on this road would be arrested, convicted, and jailed for what they’d done this summer. He wondered if the jails were running out of food. Had to be, right? If they couldn’t keep Payson or Phoenix supplied with food, why would they bother supplying prisons? There’d be riots in prisons. Or the guards would just go home and let the prisoners starve to death in their locked cells. It was probably happening already.
“You’re worried about something.”
“No, just thinking about things out there. What it must be like other places.”
“We’re okay, right?”
“If we aren’t hit again. It’s a great year for the garden, though if it doesn’t start raining soon we’re going to be watering a lot from the cistern. But yeah. We have staples. We didn’t lose any more hens. In fact, last night they seemed to focus on the Quinn and Morrow places. Curt Henry didn’t suffer any damage at his place like they did, and neither did we. I wonder why they bothered to tear down the Morrow turbine though.”
“No idea. We were lucky. It could have been us again.”
“We were lucky. And neither of us was shot. I’ll have to go over there and see how Quinn is faring, see if Kelly needs me for anything.”
“When I’m done with my chores, I’m going to the Morrows’ to help him with his garden and hens. And if he needs me to help him lift anything, that kind of thing.”
“That’s good. Tell him that whatever he needs to repair his electric system, I have plenty of components, and I’ll help him whenever I can carve out some hours. Probably tomorrow.”
“What else do you need to do?”
“After I check with the Quinns, we need to dispose of the bodies.”
“You going to bury them all?”
“I hope not. That’d take days.”
“Then what?”
He shook his head. “We can either drag them into the woods for predators and scavengers to take care of, or we can burn them. Maybe Curt Henry will have a third idea I haven’t thought of. I don’t know.”
Sierra finished her breakfast and stood. “Thanks for cooking. Don’t worry about the meals the rest of the day. I’ll make sandwiches, wrap them up and leave them on the counter. You can grab one whenever you have a minute, okay?”
“Thanks, hon.”
She left the house, her step lively, her shoulders squared. If she was troubled by what had happened last night, she wasn’t showing it. Resilience of youth, perhaps.
Pilar had suffered from depression in his teens and early twenties. He hadn’t been troubled as an adult, and he suspected all the physical labor and daily outdoor work on his own land had helped keep it at bay all these years. But this morning he felt the ghost of it just ahead, like a trap, a pit trap of sadness and exhaustion that he could easily slide into again. “Like falling off a log,” he said to the empty kitchen.
But he couldn’t let himself go there. Sierra needed him. His neighbors needed him. The damned hens even needed him. Though he felt fifty pounds heavier than he had yesterday, he made himself stand up and wash the breakfast dishes.
* * *
Dev watched his mother bathe his father’s wound. His dad was pale, and his face was pinched. It must hurt, but he didn’t make a sound or complain.
“I think you’ll be just fine,” his mom said.
“It’s still in there.”
“There’s no exit wound,” she said.
“I don’t know if it can stay in there.”
“It can stay,” she said.
“Better to dig it out now than a week from now.”
“Let’s see what happens,” she said. “I’m the medic, right? Bullets are inert. This one can’t hurt you more than it already did. I wish you’d take a pain pill.”
“It won’t get infected?” His father had never sounded so fretful to Dev before.
“Probably not. Soldiers live long lives with lots more shrapnel than this in them.” She re-bandaged the wound—which was really gross-looking—and patted his father on the cheek. As she passed Dev, she said, “Breakfast in ten minutes.”
“Son,” his father said, “come sit.”
Dev didn’t want to sit on the bed and make his father hurt any more than he obviously already was. He pulled up a step stool from the wall by the closet and sat on that.
“I’m going to need to rely on you more than ever.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you think you can handle it?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Good. You might have to do things you’ve never done before.”
Dev thought he already had. He’d killed, he’d buried, he’d hidden the tracks of their killing. He’d taken the training and theory he’d been given his whole life and for the first time really put it into action. And they’d won. Not without cost—his father had been shot—but they’d won last night. To his father, he said, “I’m ready.”
“Obey your mother.”
“I will.”
“And ask Henry—or even Crocker—if you need help with anything around the property.”
“Okay.”
“Good.” His father shifted and winced. “I wish I could move this damned arm more.”
“It’ll get better.”
“As long as it doesn’t get worse. Now don’t keep your mother waiting.”
Dev moved the stool back to where it belonged. He paused on his way out at the door, looking at his father, lying there in bed with the white bandages. He thought about telling him he loved him, but that’s not the kind of thing you said to Arch Quinn. “Don’t worry,” he said, knowing it was what his father needed to hear. “I’ll get everything done.”
In the kitchen, his mother handed him a spoon, a pill, and a saucer and said, “Smash this up for me.”
Dev figured she was going to sneak it into his father’s food. The first time he tried to smash it, the pill flew off the plate and skittered off the edge of the kitchen table. Dev crawled around until he found it, just under the refrigerator. He did better the second try, keeping his hand around the pill so it couldn’t go anywhere.
“When you’re done, put it in there,” his mother said, putting a steaming cup of coffee on the table.
Dev finished the job while she cooked up eggs. “I doubt your father will eat these, but I’m going to sit there and try and make him,” she said. “Can you eat alone?”
“Sure, and I’ll clean up.”
“No need for that. I want to stick close to the house today in case he needs me. Don’t bother with the garden at all today. Tend to the animals and take your guard shifts. When your father falls asleep, I’ll go out to the garden and weed and water and harvest. Do you know what to do?”
“Animals first. Then I need to find Mr. Henry and figur
e out what to do with the bodies out there. And then I want to look at the shop and figure out how to fix it, what I need, if we have everything.”
“We should. Thank you, Devlin.”
“I feel bad about leaving you two last night.”
“You shouldn’t. How many did you kill on the road?”
“Over a dozen.”
“Better that than letting them come up here. You did your part. It wasn’t you that got your father shot. You know that, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s a load off my mind knowing I can count on you.”
“Always,” he said, and got up to give her a quick peck on the cheek. “Go on, take care of Dad.”
He shoveled down his breakfast, eggs and cornbread with honey as fast as he could, rinsed the plate, and went outside. Rabbits first—they seemed agitated still. All the noise and shooting. Or maybe it was the fire. Animals hated the smell of burning wood. The chickens were fine. Too stupid to remember there’d been trouble the night before. He collected the eggs in a wire basket and set it on the back porch.
The hose was still out. He touched the charred edges of the hole in the shop wall. He’d need to saw out the bad section and then patch it. He’d prefer to have his father’s expertise, but Crocker was good at this sort of thing. Dev would come up with a plan—tomorrow, maybe—and check their supplies. He’d explain it to Crocker and ask him if he’d forgotten anything important. Long before his father was out of bed, the wall would be repaired.
He trotted down to the road, meaning to walk up to Henry’s, but the man was already there on the road, on his guard shift. He had taken the body off the top of the downed tree and dragged the bodies closer together. He said to Dev, “You shot a couple in the woods?”
“Yeah. And two on the road, but I don’t know if they’re still there. Maybe their people took them.” The cars were gone. They had been by the time he’d returned to the road to check.
“Let’s go get the casualties, however many there are. Here, I banged together a stretcher this morning.” He had an oiled canvas stapled over two dowel rods. Rolled up, it looked easy to carry.
