I wonder if they were the skinny guy’s socks.
About all this, I don’t know exactly how I felt; two guys murdered in a blink over a pair of socks. I do know I didn’t feel bad for either one of them, though, the skinny guy or the one who was stabbed. They both were no good and both a threat to the three of us, so on second thought, I guess I was glad they were out of the way. Maybe I’d feel differently if I thought about it some more, but I won’t waste the time.
After the killing, it got pretty hushed up around the warehouse. I suppose nothing like a little death to quiet things down. It wasn’t so silent and sad that there were any tears or anything. Everyone pretty much just went back to what they were doing before, only quieter at it. They probably just didn’t want to draw any more attention from Eric. That would be my guess. One thing the lull did allow, though, was for Alan to finish telling me his plan.
So what he told me was, after he got to the truck, he’d set one of the bombs off in the bed and try to destroy their gun or canon or whatever it was. He’d set the second one off inside the cab area just to make sure it couldn’t possibly be repaired. He worried, though, that the fuse from the first one would burn too fast and it would go off before he could put the second one in place and escape, so he might decide not to set off the second one.
I pointed out to him the propane tank in the back of the truck and suggested that before setting off the first bomb, he cut the hose coming from the tank. That way, when the bomb went off, it might ignite the propane and cause a fire. (At this point, I didn’t know about the gasoline bombs in the back. Alan told me about that later.) I also suggested that he knife the tires as he was leaving. I figured that they wouldn’t likely have the stuff handy to repair them.
He thought both my ideas were good ones and so left to update Anna. We agreed that when everyone was asleep, I’d let him know and we’d put the plan to business.
Anna interrupted at with t center" style="text-align:center;text-indent:.5in" aid="2BG">___________
The last guy went inside the warehouse when the last fire burned itself out, maybe a couple of hours later, on April 18th. I waited a few more minutes just to make sure and crawled back to mom and Alan to let them know it was time.
Mom hugged the both of us and gave us a little smile before taking off. We gave her a few minutes to get set up where she’d have a good view of us making our escape, and then Alan and I crawled our way back toward the truck. Not too much went right after that.
We snuck up on the truck together, Alan and me, except that when we got there, I moved off to one side, behind a dump pile of cement chunks, where I could watch the doors to the warehouse. I guess at this point, I was maybe twenty yards or so from the nearest door. I still had the shotgun, maybe not the best gun for that distance, but good enough with the double aught buck it was loaded with.
Alan hopped up into the back of the truck. Instead of cutting the hose coming from the propane tank, though, I saw him poke around inside one of the boxes on the bed of the truck. A few seconds later, he smelled his fingers and after that started stabbing away at the contents of the boxes. Of course I later learned he was poking holes in the bags filled with the gasoline, but I didn’t understand what he was doing at the time. As he moved from one box to another, he kind of raised up. His head must have popped up above the wood slat sides on the truck bed because I heard someone shout, “Hey, get out of there.” Out from the darkness, behind the closest roll up door, I saw this guy step out.
I shot him right out and didn’t have another thought about it. I saw him react to the pellets hitting him, a little twisting motion, but he didn’t go down right away, so I shot him a second time and reloaded. There was a moment after that when nothing more happened, except that I saw Alan light the fuse on our bomb and jump out of the truck.
He told me to watch out for him and moved back the way we’d come.
So that’s what I did. I stayed there and shot a second man who came out the same door and saw him drag himself back inside, obviously hurt, and fired a second shot into the darkness just for good measure. As before, I fed more shells into the magazine.
It didn’t come to mind at the time, but now it does, that was the first time I ever really shot anyone. Maybe I’ll feel different later, but it wasn’t a moment or anything. It’s nothing to brag about and nothing to cry about either.
Alan called out for me to move back. I did, running past him I don’t know how far. As I ran, I heard his rifle go off two or three times. I wasn’t counting. I think I heard a couple of gunshots coming back at us, too. I set myself up a few steps later, and it was Alan’s turn again.
Just as he was standing up to run toward me, it seemed as if the whole world exploded behind him. The pressure from the bomb, and the ignition of the gasoline wash have only been my imagination6ited me in heat and shook up my insides like marbles in a cup. Alan, who was closer to the truck, was knocked over, face down. But I saw him get up and come my way. Nothing was going to come after us now, not for a while anyway, so I just turned and ran for the concealment of the brush.
As soon as I was there, I turned around but didn’t see Alan. I wondered if maybe he was looking for me, thinking I was still in position. I finally saw him come into view, only thing, he was limping pretty badly. I started toward him, but he waved me on.
I kept moving in mom’s direction but also kept looking back and checking on Alan. When I heard a second explosion and saw this huge fireball, which I figured was the propane tank going up, I knew there was enough time to wait for him.
It was his right thigh. There was blood starting about midway and dripping down. On looking closer, I saw something sticking out. It definitely was a piece of jagged metal, maybe from our bomb or one of the cans filled with gasoline, I don’t know, but it sure looked ugly. I put Alan’s arm around my shoulder and together we walked to mom’s hiding place.
She took over from there, in that calm way she does in times when things aren’t going so well. She told me to take her place watching until she was through and helped Alan sit down.
I kept watch for maybe five or six minutes before I heard her say we needed to get moving. When I rejoined them, they were already walking south, Alan not limping so badly now but still limping. I could see that she had wrapped his leg with another piece of cloth cut from one of our blankets. The bandage laid flat to his thigh, so I figured that mom had pulled whatever was stuck in him, out. I could also see that he had this very tight look to his face, which could only be from the pain.
I remember Mom looked at me and said, “You did good back there.” That was it, nothing more.
You know something, right this minute, because I just thought it and wrote it, is the very first time that I remembered about what she said to me. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I’m sort of important. It also makes me realize that somewhere along the way, between our rescue and this point in our trip back home, she stopped thinking of me as a little kid. At the time she said it, though, I didn’t think any of this stuff. I was way too worried about the trouble we were in and how we were going to get out of it. I just wanted to mention it is all. You know what I mean?
Anyway, there was a lot to be worried about. For one thing, Alan was hurt, and it was obvious that he was going to slow us down. The other reason to worry was that Eric now knew there was somebody trying to put a stop to his plan. I didn’t need to think out what he was going to do about that. As soon as they picked the metal out of their butts, they’d be after us with a real hate-on.
I told mom and Alan I’d hang back a little to see if we were being followed; you know, kind of watch the trail behind us. When I said it, Mom got this look on her face like she didn’t think much of the idea, but she didn’t say anything ex-wife and daughter y point . So I dropped back fifty yards or so; enough anyway that we were out of sight of one another.
As it turned out, Eric must have sent someone right off, or more likely several someones, all in different
directions, to locate us and cut us off. That way, I guess, the rest of them could catch up and finish us off. They weren’t even being quiet about it either. They were coming on fast, making a lot of noise. If you think about it, it was a good plan, too.
I’ll also bet you anything, he offered them something, a reward of some kind to do it — sex, drugs, maybe a good weapon. See, I know how he did things. I also know what the men who did his dirty little jobs talked about. Other than food, it was women, drugs or guns. He’d play off that. He’d done it before.
So there I was, faced with a decision. I could lay for them, in which case Eric would get what he wanted. He’d know where we were. Or I could try to warn mom and Alan, and we could hide out from them. But if we let them go on past, we’d just have to deal with them later. The third choice, as I saw it, was to try to take their guns and tie them up and gag them. Taking their guns would be hard, though. It would mean we’d have to show ourselves at some point. If we tied them up, they could escape. And if we tried to do away with them quietly, well I could see problems with that as well. How do you keep three people quiet while you are killing them one by one?
I can’t say that I thought these things out all logical, like one, two, three. It was really more a matter of having them in my head all at the same time, and them bouncing around all mixed up. See, I didn’t have all that much time to think about it like I do now. They were coming straight at me. They were close enough that I could hear them talking, too. I just couldn’t make out what they were saying. So in deciding it, there was only one choice that seemed the best, and I bet you can guess what that was.
First, I ran back away from them to a tree growing at an angle next to a rock and kneeled down behind it. The ground was flat there, between them and me, dotted with rocks of different sizes but none so big that it could hide a man all the way. There also was plenty of brush, mostly up to my hip but also some stuff that was tall, along with an occasional tree running to maybe six, eight inches thick. All in all, it was pretty open and light enough to see.
I’ll admit I was scared at this point, and I don’t know why. I mean I wasn’t scared back at the warehouse, at least I don’t remember feeling that way. Now I found myself breathing hard for no good reason. My thoughts were a little jumbled around at this point as well, fast like and jumpy. Part of me said, ‘get the hell out of there,’ while another part said ‘do what needs to be done.’ I took several deep breaths, but that only seemed to help a little.
They came into view, all three of them walking fast. The one most in the front wasn’t much older than me. He was wearing camouflage, army type pants, the ones with those big pockets on the legs, and a purple sweatshirt. He was also clean shaven and had his hair cut in a Mohawk type cut — shaved down to the skin on the sides and long, from front to back, down the middle of his skull. He was holding a full ex-wife and daughter y point length rifle with a wood stock. As soon as he came into view, I saw him turn his head over one shoulder and say, “this way for sure.” His voice was high pitched and seemed like it should have come from someone else’s mouth.
The guy he was talking to was a little older and very dark skinned, wearing a black or blue watch cap, a green ski jacket, and blue jeans. He was carrying a gun of the type I didn’t recognize. It was shorter than a rifle and longer than a pistol. I figured it was probably a small machine gun of some type. I decided to shoot him first.
The third one, the one with no weapon at all, was the oldest by maybe five or six years. He was big, both in height and weight. He was wearing a dirty white cowboy hat that lost its shape and a brown coat that was too short in the sleeves. I also noticed that he was huffing pretty hard, but seeing him breathing like that made me take notice of the fact that my breathing had completely settled down; weird huh?
I still didn’t see much choice on what to do and don’t remember thinking about it anymore than I already had. I just straightened up and shot the guy with the smaller gun, pumped another shell into mine and shot the second guy as well. It couldn’t have taken more than two seconds, but in the time between my first shot and the second, the one with the full length rifle raised it up and fired at me. His bullet went right down the coat sleeve of my left arm, grooved my elbow and exited. Man that was close. Of course I didn’t think about just how close it was until later, after things calmed down so to speak. I was one lucky you know what. A little up and a little over, and he would have shot me right in my eye. I’m still here, though, and I guess that’s the only thing that counts.
Now the third guy, the big one, he turned around while all this was going on and started running the other way, so I took off after him. As I passed by the first one I shot, I could see that he was still alive. His eyes were wide open, big as my fist, his face and chest splattered with blood, and he was panting like a dog in the hot sun. Like I said, it could just as well have been me laying there breathing like that, so I don’t now feel anything about him.
I stayed right after the last one. Almost right away, I tried to get a shot at him but found that I hadn’t pumped another shotgun shell after shooting the man, kid, whoever with the rifle, so ended up pulling the trigger with no bang. I guess I was a little excited about getting shot and forgot to reload. A mistake like that could get me killed, I’ll tell you that.
So anyway, I kept after him and pumped the shotgun. After that, though, it was hard to get my barrel on him because he was zigzag running, and I was running as well. I also fell, face down into a bush. I guess I must have tripped over a rock or root or something, but whatever it was, I went down hard. It knocked the breath out of me and scratched the heck out of my face. Despite all that, I got up and kept after him, even though at that particular moment, I couldn’t exactly see where he was at.
That’s when I heard three rapid shots, bam-bam-bam, a pause and then a fourth. It was mom. She got him. She doesn’t miss too much.
She later told me that she also heard our trackers coming for us and was already on her way back to help me when I started shooting. She saw the whole thing happen. and when the third man took off running, she just ran right with him until she got a clear shot. She didn’t see me fall, though, and had no idea how close that one bullet came to nailing me. And you can bet I didn’t tell her either. Telling her would just give her another bad thing to think about.
At that point, we were in bad trouble and we knew it well enough that we didn’t even have to talk about it. Eric would be coming for us with everything he had. He might not know exactly where we were, but he knew our general direction and would spread everyone out going our way. Those were my thoughts anyway, and I’ll bet my boots that’s what he did.
As mom and I got back to where the first two were, Alan was already going through their pockets. The one who had been alive had died I guess, or maybe Alan finished him off, I don’t know, I didn’t ask, and the truth is it doesn’t much matter now one way or the other.
The rifle with the wood stock wasn’t much use to us, so I leaned it against a rock and stomped it until the barrel bent enough that it couldn’t be fired. The other one, the short one, used the same type of ammunition that mom’s gun used, so we took all his bullets for her. As far as the gun itself went, we couldn’t think of a way to wreck it. We figured out how to take it apart, though, and took the firing part with us to be got rid of later. We were off again after that, as fast as Alan’s leg would let us go.
We moved along for another twenty minutes or so before we heard them again. There were three pretty quick shots fired off behind us. Because of their distance, I knew they weren’t directed at us; they were about us, however. They were most likely a signal the bodies had been found and for the others to gather up and start out from there. They were zeroing in.
In my head, as soon as I heard those shots, I did some rough figuring on how much time we had.
Here’s how my thinking went: I figured that we had, at the least, about twenty minutes on them. If we were lucky, though, the one or ones wh
o found the dead guys would wait until the others caught up to start out again. I thought this pretty likely because they’d be staring at what happened to the last of them who came at us, and so they wouldn’t be too much in a hurry to start out on their own. That would give us more time. So I gave us another ten minutes before they started off. That made thirty minutes between us.
But at the same time they were walking, we would be walking, too, so it wasn’t like they were thirty minutes away from catching us. It would take longer than that. They might not even catch us at all if it wasn’t for the fact that Alan was hurt and walking slower. Anyway, slowly they’d eat away at our lead until they finally caught us. The soonest they’d catch us would be about an hour; that’s if they sent someone running. At the other end, I gave them three hours tops.
I also figured that we had come five miles from the warehouse and had another fifteen or more to go before w have only been my imagination6ite got to the outskirts of Woburn. I knew there was no way that we’d make fifteen miles in any two or three hours. So I thought that our best chance was to get as close to Woburn as possible and hope that the people there would hear our shots and come to our rescue. We moved on, same as before, me hanging back.
Little by little, Alan’s leg got worse. He was limping more and getting slower. A couple of times I caught up with them, even moving as slow as I was, and so had to sit a while to let them get ahead again. At one point, I was close enough to hear the two of them arguing and listened-in for a while. Alan wanted her and me to go on ahead and leave him. He said he would find a place to hide, and we could come back for him later. She cut him off and told him it was out of the question, they would find him, and she wasn’t leaving him behind to face Eric on his own.
Talk about a change in people. It wasn’t that long ago that she would have left him without any discussion at all. In fact, it would have been her idea. This whole experience has sure made her a different person.
Journal Page 24