by Mark Kelly
Ronnie Gourley broke out in a wide grin. He jumped up on the wagon and tried to put an arm around her.
“You’re my kind of gal. How about when we’re done, you come over to the house and have a drink or two or three with me and my brother?”
Lucia’s expression tightened. She shrugged his arm off.
“Vete a la chingada.”
“Huh?”
“Go to hell.”
Gourley threw back his head and laughed. “I’m gonna enjoy getting to know you, darling.”
McNee leaned down to take the reins from his son. He turned his head and stared at the other men. “Are the rest of you coming, or is it just going to be the four of us?”
McNee brought the wagon to a stop near a pond full of murky water at the bottom of a long sloping hill. He jumped down and hitched the horses to the same fence post that Brandon’s horse, Autumn, was already tied to.
“Where’s Brandon?” Simmons asked, looking around for McNee’s son.
“Up on the top of the hill, keeping watch,” McNee said, grabbing his rifle from the wagon floor. He looked at Samantha. “You come with me. You’re the only one who can identify these guys. The rest of you stay here and keep your damn voices down. The crossroads is just over the hill.”
Simmons shared a glance with Lucia. They owed it to Samantha to stay close. He jumped down to join her and McNee.
“I will come too,” Lucia said.
A few hundred yards away, at the top of a steep rolling hill, they found Brandon lying on his stomach behind a cluster of cedar trees with a pair of binoculars trained on the figures on the road.
“What do we have?” McNee asked his son in a low voice.
“Same as when I last called in,” Brandon replied. He lowered the binoculars. “Nothing’s changed. They’ve been poking around the barricade studying it like they’re trying to figure out how to get through.”
“Any sign of the bus yet?”
“No.”
Simmons motioned for the binoculars and brought them to his eyes. He fiddled with the center knob, bringing the figures into focus at the exact moment one of the scouts looked up the hill in his direction. Flinching, he quickly lowered the binoculars and then reminded himself that they couldn’t see him. He watched the men down below gather in a semi-circle. One of them lit a cigarette and passed it around. Even from a distance, Simmons could smell the pungent aroma of marijuana.
“They’ve been smoking weed since they got here.”
McNee frowned at his son. “How do you know what they’ve been smoking?”
Brandon rolled his eyes. “Come on, Dad. This isn’t the 1950s.”
Simmons chuckled and then turned his attention back to the barricade. Unlike the one built by the Mohawks at Akwesasne where the broken-down cars were piled haphazardly on top of each other, this one was constructed with an assortment of vehicles laid out in an extra-strong herringbone pattern. It wouldn’t stop refugees on foot from going around the barricade, but getting anything larger than a motorcycle past it would require disassembling the entire structure.
It was a smart design that provided the greatest amount of defensive capability for the least amount of effort, Simmons thought approvingly.
He tensed at the sound of a large diesel engine approaching. The scouts below heard it as well. They butted out the joint they had been smoking and straighten up as the silver nose of a greyhound bus appeared.
“That’s them. That’s their bus,” Samantha whispered.
The greyhound came to a stop in the middle of the intersection. The door opened and a group of armed men stepped off the bus. Two of the men stood on either side of the door sweeping their assault rifles from side to side while the remainder fan out in a protective ring.
A minute later, an exceptionally tall man appeared in the bus’s doorway. He stooped to avoid banging his head on the top of the doorframe. He wore a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses and was dressed in a pair of dark slacks with a brown Camel hair blazer over a black turtleneck.
“That’s John,” Samantha said.
Simmons glanced at McNee, who was just as confused. The man they were staring at looked more like an English scholar than the leader of a Roamer gang.
The roamer leader waited at the bottom of the steps. He held out his hand as a woman with short black hair stepped off the bus. She was tiny compared to him with the top of her head coming to the middle of his chest. She wore tight black jeans with a white button-down shirt covered by an undersized leather jacket. A pair of black boots ran to the middle of her thighs. Simmons couldn’t decide if she looked more like a dominatrix or a circus ringleader. In either case, all that was missing was the whip.
“That’s his wife, Lilanne.”
With his wife by his side, John limped towards the barricade using an umbrella as a walking stick to support his weight. Two of the scouts left their position and met the pair midway. Lilanne nodded and listened as the scouts pointed at the barricade and spoke. When they finished, she took a step closer and stood with her hands on her hips studying it. After a few minutes, she called the two scouts over. Simmons held his breath, watching her point to specific cars.
Oh, shit…She’s telling them how to take it apart.
The Roamer gang kicked into action. The driver turned the bus around and backed it up. One of the scouts opened a luggage compartment and pulled out a heavy-duty chain. He hitched one end of the chain to the bus’s rear axle while another man attached the other end of the chain to a small green car Lilanne had pointed to. When the two men were clear, the bus driver revved the engine and slowly pulled away, towing the wrecked car behind him.
“That’s one,” Simmons said to McNee, panicking. “Another fifteen and they’re through. If we’re going to stop them, we had better—”
“McNee, what the fuck are you doing up here, sleeping?”
Simmons turned his head to see Ronnie Gourley marching up the hill towards them, chewing on a piece of grass as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Gourley’s brother was next to him, with the rest of the men following.
They must have got tired of waiting, Simmons thought. It was like a damn parade and those two clowns were leading it.
“Shh!” McNee hissed as Gourley reached him. “They’ll hear you.” He waved his hands furiously and then shouted, “Get the hell down.”
It was too late.
Simmons buried his face in the dirt as a fusillade of automatic gunfire tore through the trees, shredding the branches above him. A figure thudded to the ground, and the sweet scent of cedar was replaced by the musty metallic odor of blood.
He cracked open an eye and saw Paul Gourley staring at him, lifeless. Samantha ran over and crouched down. She put her ear to Gourley’s chest and listened. After a moment, she looked up, her cheeks smeared with blood.
“He’s gone. It was instant—”
Ronnie Gourley’s face darkened with rage. He grabbed his brother’s hunting rifle, jumped to his feet and raced to the nearest tree. Spittle flew from his mouth as he screamed at the roamers.
“Motherfuckers! You’re all going to die.”
He brought the gun to his shoulder and blindly fired round after round. When the gun was empty, he dropped it on the ground and grabbed his own. When that one was empty, he yelled at McNee to give him another.
“Stop!” McNee shouted, reaching up and yanking the crazed man to the ground.
Ronnie’s eyes were wild. For an instant, it looked like he was about to attack McNee, but the rage disappeared as quickly as it had come.
“They need to die,” Gourley said, baring his teeth. “Every one of them. I want them all dead.”
“I understand,” McNee said, “but now they know we’re here. We need to figure this out, or we’ll be the ones who are dead. Anyone else hurt?”
Simmons rolled onto his side and checked the rest of McNee’s men. They were all lying on their stomachs in the grass and dirt. Half of them were shell-shocked, a cou
ple looked scared witless, but there were no other casualties.
He rolled back and shook his head.
“Good.” McNee started barking out orders. “I want two of you on each flank and one watching our rear. And for God’s sake, stay low to the ground.” Glancing at Paul Gourley’s body, he added, “I don’t want to have to bury any more of you.”
As the men dispersed to their assigned positions, Lucia slipped up beside Simmons and spoke. “How many of them are there?”
“I’m not sure…maybe twenty,” he answered, “but I have no idea how many are still on the bus.”
She brought the gun to her shoulder and stared through the scope. “Thirteen outside,” she said after a minute. “And more on the other side of the bus, but I can not see how many.”
“What are they doing?”
“Nothing. They are just watching. They know we are up here, but they are not sure how many of us there are.”
She twisted her head and gave Simmons and McNee an uneasy look. “They are being cautious right now, but soon they will find their bravery and come for us. Then they will go to town.”
“Can we pick them off as they hook the chains up?” Simmons asked McNee.
McNee shook his head. “I don’t think they’ll try taking apart the barricade while we’re up here. If I were them, I’d wait until it was dark and send a few men around the hill. They could lay in the tall grass until morning and we’d never see them until they jumped up and mowed us down.”
“Then we better bring this to a conclusion before nightfall. And we’d better do it before he does something stupid,” Simmons said, glancing at Ronnie who was pacing angrily, his fists clenched by his side.
“I have an idea,” McNee said, motioning Samantha over. “At the house, you said these people were gutless. What exactly did you mean by that?”
She shrugged. “They’re like schoolyard bullies. They go after anyone who is weak. When the Cyclones started to consolidate their position in Toronto, Lilanne knew it would be a big problem for her and John. She convinced him to leave by telling him there wouldn’t be as much competition outside the city.”
“What are you thinking?” Simmons asked McNee.
“That they might leave us alone if they think we’re more trouble than we’re worth,” McNee said.
“Why would they think that? We’re out-gunned and outnumbered.” Simmons glanced at Ronnie and lowered his voice. “We might have had a chance if that idiot hadn’t announced our presence to the world.”
“True, but those bastards down there don’t know that. All they know is there are people up here with guns. They don’t know how many of us there are or what weapons we have. Maybe, we can put the fear of God in them.”
McNee turned to his son. “Brandon, did you do what Bruce told you to do?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they?” McNee asked.
“In the green Honda and the white Ford half-ton.”
“What about the controllers?”
“In my backpack.”
“Go get them.”
8
A big bang
Brandon reached inside his backpack and pulled out two small black molded plastic boxes. With their thumb-sized joysticks and small antennas, the devices looked like they were part of a child’s toy.
“What are they?” Simmons asked, perplexed.
“They used to be controllers for radio-controlled cars; now, they’re remote detonators,” McNee said.
Simmons realized the canisters Bruce had given Brandon back at the farm probably contained the matching explosives for the controllers.
“You built bombs?”
“I think improvised explosive device is the correct term,” McNee said with a hint of a smile. “A few months ago when we were scavenging, we found a couple of sticks of dynamite locked up in the maintenance shed at the gravel pit. Bruce took the dynamite and rigged up detonators using blasting caps connected to parts he took from the radio-controlled cars the boys had when they were kids.”
Where on earth did he learn to do that?
The pleased look on McNee’s face disappeared.
“Afghanistan, in the Panjwayi district. He deployed in 2003 with the Royal Canadian Engineers’s Counter-IED team. His unit was tasked with keeping the roads around Kandahar airport clear. He defused thirty-four IEDs, but the thirty-fifth got him.”
“Is that how he lost his leg?”
“Yes.”
McNee handed one of the controllers and a pair of AAA batteries to Simmons. “Put the batteries in but don’t turn the controller on until I tell you to.”
Simmons took the controller and flipped it over. A large number 1 was scrawled in white permanent marker on the back of the battery compartment lid.
“Which car is this for?”
“The green Honda,” McNee replied. “Brandon has the controller for the Ford.”
Simmons’s hand shook as he inserted the first battery. He reminded himself the flimsy plastic box a couple of feet from his face was the controller and not the IED. Still, it made him nervous and he flipped it over, checking again to ensure the on-off switch was in the off position.
“How big will the explosion be?”
McNee answered with a slight frown. “Not as big as you’d think. Someone standing next to the vehicles will be badly injured or killed, but if they’re more than a few dozen feet away, the worst that will happen is a blown eardrum or minor shrapnel wounds. What I’m hoping is the explosions will put the roamers off-balance…get them worried about who and what they’re dealing with—”
They both ducked their heads as the crackle of gunfire filled the air. Chunks of bark and broken branches flew everywhere. Simmons lifted his head high enough to see Lucia shooting back, one carefully aimed shot at a time. Gourley and a couple of the men joined in.
“Cease fire and save your ammo!” McNee shouted. “We’re only going to have one chance to do this right.”
“One chance for what?” Ronnie Gourley snapped back at him. “To sit here picking our noses while we’re getting our asses shot off?”
“If you’d be quiet and listen, I’ll tell you,” McNee said over the clatter of gunfire. He pointed to Simmons and Brandon. “They each have a controller that will detonate a small explosion in the barricade. Once both the cars are blown, start shooting. We aren’t hunting deer, so don’t wait for a clean shot. Wounding one of those bastards is just as good as killing them.”
As the men moved into position, Simmons ran his eyes over the barricade, searching for the Honda and not finding it. Certain McNee had said it was green, he looked again and found the car—thirty feet down the road and nowhere near any of the roamers.
Damn it. It was the first one they moved.
“Look,” Simmons shouted, pointing at the Honda.
McNee cursed under his breath. “Blow it anyway and then grab your gun and start shooting.”
Simmons looked down at the black box in his hand. He tensed and flipped the switch to on.
Nothing happened.
A burst of gunfire from the roamers sent everyone scurrying for cover. One of the men staggered backward, clutching at his shoulder as he fell to the ground.
“Professor, blow your damn car!” McNee yelled.
“I tried,” Simmons yelled back, holding up the controller. “I turned it on and nothing happened.”
“Beep the goddamn horn!”
Beep the horn?
Simmons saw a tiny red button on top of the joystick and pressed it.
The explosion, more like a loud crack with a dull thud, was unimpressive, but a cloud of smoke and dust billowed into the air, hiding the car temporarily from sight. After a few seconds, the cloud dissipated, and the green Honda reappeared, minus its hood and front fenders. Parts of its engine and radiator lay scattered on the ground.
Caught by surprise, the roamers instinctively moved away from the source of the explosion towards the perceived safety of the barricade.
>
“Shoot now!” McNee yelled.
A staccato of gunfire broke out as McNee’s men shot their weapons in a steady and measured manner.
Simmons brought his gun to his shoulder and stared through the scope. The explosion had rattled the roamers. The few that weren’t scurrying around, fired their weapons in panicked bursts. He watched a half-dozen men run from behind the bus to the edge of the barricade. They covered the short distance so quickly he didn’t have time to aim or shoot.
McNee saw the men too. “Brandon, blow the truck now!”
The white Ford pickup truck exploded, and the men at the edge of the barricade disappeared in a cloud of dirty white smoke. Screams of agony filled the air. A wounded man with one arm ending in a bloody stump lay on the ground amidst pieces of twisted and burnt metal.
Through the magnifying power of his rifle’s scope, Simmons saw the wounded man’s lips move as he cried out for help. Two shots rang out in quick succession, striking and killing him.
Simmons gazed down on the chaos below. A handful of bodies lay in the open, some unmoving and dead, others still alive. The roamers who weren’t hurt ran for the bus. He saw a puff of black exhaust smoke emerge from the greyhound’s tailpipe. Suddenly, the leader of the Roamer gang crawled out from beneath the bus and scurried towards the open door.
Caught off guard and not having a good shot, Simmons pulled the trigger and missed. He watched the roamer leader climb the steps and disappear inside the bus. At the top of the stairs, the woman with the thigh-high boots was standing behind the driver, hitting him on the shoulder, urging him to go.
They’re leaving!
“Cease fire…Cease fire,” McNee shouted as he crawled behind the men. “Cease fire and save your ammo.”
With the exception of Ronnie Gourley who continued to shoot like he was possessed by a demon, the men lowered their rifles. “I’m gonna kill every last one of them,” Gourley said, ignoring McNee’s shouts.