When Rome Stumbles

by David Kershner

  The two worked their way on to the balcony for the second floor and locked up out of habit. They made quick work of the stairs even with their fully loaded packs. Evan brought the SUV to a screeching halt beside them.

  As Layla began to open the passenger door, a shot rang out from down the alley. The two girls immediately took a crouching position. Katherine reached out and tore away a velcro patch on the side of Layla’s bag. Once open, she yanked out her sister’s Glock and immediately returned fire at the assailant.

  As Katherine was putting holes in the dumpster, Layla didn’t hesitate to retrieve a weapon of her own from Katherine’s pack. She snatched it out of its compartment, instinctively flicked off the safety, and pointed it down the alley.

  Evan’s primary objective was keeping the girls unharmed. He would have preferred to get out and have the three of them take out the shooter. The narrow alley and the unknown number of assailants provide too many variables. The best option was to load them up and get moving.

  Evan called out for Katherine to open the rear door as he instructed Layla to cover her. As she half stood and reached up to grab the handle, another shot rang out. Layla and Katherine again returned fire. Once it was open, Katherine used it as a shield. The shooters protective dumpster was soon riddled with bullet holes.

  When the alley eventually fell silent, the distant wail of police sirens could be heard.

  “Get in!” Evan yelled at the two. “We don’t know how many more there are!”

  Layla dove in and Katherine followed suit, landing on top of her. The Suburban was quickly thrown in reverse and the gas pedal mashed to the floor.

  “Take the back way to the farm,” Katherine ordered.

  “Roger that,” the driver responded.

  “Holy crap!” Layla exclaimed. “What the hell was that?”

  “It sounds like Mr. Toombs is very resourceful,” he replied.

  “I think we killed him,” Katherine offered.

  Layla jerked her head toward her sister and said, “What!?”

  “Our guns were loaded with armor piercing rounds. I bet the cops find that guy dead behind the dumpster,” Katherine answered as she rolled off of her sister.

  “What the hell! Where’d you get the ammo?,” her sister demanded.

  “After Dad told us about Mr. Toombs, I stopped in the gun shop just outside of Athens and picked up a few boxes. I wasn’t gonna risk having one of those guys get back up.”

  Once the vehicle cleared the alley, Evan said, “We need to call this in. Katherine, take my cell and try and reach you father at the house.”

  “I already tried that. He’s not home. He’s probably showing that hussy around town,” Layla intoned.

  “You know, I’m sick of your little girl temper tantrums. It’s not a mystery why Basilia beat your ass. Sam’s a nice lady and Dad likes her. If you weren’t such a bitch to everyone all the time maybe you’d see it. Stop playing the victim for two seconds, will ya? We’ve got bigger issues than you right now, so shut it!”

  Layla didn’t know what to say. No one had even said anything like that to her before. She was a victim.

  Katherine turned back to Evan and said, “Which route?”

  “Tell him we’re coming in hot on ‘Charlie’ and we request a rendezvous at mile marker 26!”

  Chapter 11

  Josh and Samantha entered the cabin to find the ancient wall mounted phone ringing. He was half tempted to let it continue as he was in no mood to talk after what Samantha had done. No sooner would the incessant noise stop as it would start back up again.

  Frustrated, annoyed, and fuming, Josh snatched it off the cradle and barked, “What!”

  “Hey, Dad. It’s Katherine,” she answered in a disarming tone.

  “What’s up?” he said attempting to hide his ill mood.

  “It seems that Mr. Toombs has attempted to gain access to our school records. We tried to call you, but you didn’t answer so we called Evan instead.”

  “That was good thinking,” he said calmly. “May I speak with Evan please?”

  She handed Evan the phone. He immediately announced his presence on the line by saying, “Evan here.”

  “Sit rep,” Josh commanded.

  “A single shooter was dispatched to the address. The girls returned fire and we evaded in the heavy vehicle,” came the reply.

  By utilizing the phase ‘heavy vehicle’, Evan invoked a pre-set term indicating that they were in his SUV and not one of the farm vehicles.

  Shocked at the news, Josh yelled, “What?”

  “Yes, sir. I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” Evan provided.

  “Any casualties?” Josh demanded to know.

  “None in our vehicle.”

  “And the shooter?”

  “We believe he’s down.”

  “Which route?”

  “Charlie. We request a rendezvous at mile marker 26.”

  “Copy that,” Josh responded and slammed the phone in the cradle. He then turned to Samantha and looked her up and down trying to decide if he should bring her. In the end, he said, “You comin’?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but hell yeah I am!” Samantha emphatically replied.

  Josh started running for the door and Samantha grabbed her crutches. She opted to just carry the awkward implements and started hopping.

  By the time Samantha had made it to the bottom of the stairs, Josh had pulled an old matte black railroad truck out of a secondary barn. He was barreling towards the porch as she crossed in front of the vehicle. Josh flung the passenger side door open while she threw her crutches into the bed. Samantha was barely in the seat when Josh jammed his foot on the gas pedal. Snow, gravel, and sand from the old farm driveway were churned up in the spinning wake of the rear tires.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We have prearranged routes out of Athens to specific points. Five of the seven routes lead to the farm. The other two either head to their grandfather’s childhood home or...” he said as his voice trailed off.

  “Amanda’s?” she finished.

  “Yeah,” Josh answered and he turned off the driveway and started heading into the forest that blanketed the southern border of his property. He wove his way down a barely perceptible trail through the woods narrowly missing several saplings that had not been trimmed back.

  As he drove, he explained, “The summer before the girls left for college, I worked with some of the guys and we mapped a number of routes out of the university. Routes ‘Alpha’ through ‘Echo’ led to the farm. ‘Foxtrot’ goes to my former father-in-law’s over in Bremen. In dire circumstances, the ‘Golf’ route could be employed to take them to their mother’s in Columbus.”

  It wasn’t lost on Samantha that Josh had issues even saying the word ‘Amanda’. “You can say her name, Josh. She was your wife,” she said and then paused. “Look,” she continued. “I’m sorry if I upset you though. That wasn’t my intent. I thought I was protecting you, me... us,” Samantha concluded remorsefully.

  “I know. I know!” he said exacerbated. “But what were you thinking? Why would you do that,” Josh continued as tree limbs thrashed against the passenger side of the truck. “You had no right to do that.”

  “What was I supposed to do? The insurance guy just showed up. He looked cagey and scared half to death. Which makes sense now that I know you shot at him in a drunken rage, by the way. I watched him on your monitors, and believe me, I was content to stay in the house and let him pass on by. Then he started looking suspiciously around the cabin so I confronted him. Once he explained who he was, and your last encounter with him, he started asking me questions. I panicked all right,” she explained.

  “So you thought I’d be a good idea to tell him you were my lawyer! You know how much I hate that woman. I didn’t want her life insurance money. Now it’s just sitting in my account festering like an infected wound.”

  “I didn’t know, okay!
It’s not like you’re an open book. You just showed me the letter twenty minutes ago!” Samantha shot back.

  “Let’s just drop it,” Josh growled. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “Maybe you should spend it on the girls,” Samantha offered.

  “You know what?” Josh said as he continued to lay into her. “I think now would be a good time to stop talking. You have no idea what it was like to live through that hell. You can’t even begin to imagine. Change the subject, I don’t know.”

  “Fine. Why haven’t you cleared this trail? You’re beating the crap out of your truck,” she responded as the limbs continued to scrape along the side of the railroad vehicle.

  “If I do, it allows for the element of surprise on our fixed position,” Josh answered clearly having switch on his inner Marine.

  Having received a fair share of similar military training herself, Samantha didn’t need anyone to translate what Josh had said. He was right. If you clear a path straight to your position, the enemy can easily work their way up and ultimately take the position through surprise.

  In an effort to further distract him from his seething annoyance at her, she said, “So we’re headed to where exactly?”

  “They requested a rendezvous at mile marker 26 on the Charlie route. The ‘26’ refers to the total distance of the route so I know they haven’t been compromised, or forced to call under duress. When they request a rendezvous it means to meet them at the halfway point. The halfway point for Charlie is where the evading vehicle is about to access the railroad bed.”

  “Is that why you grabbed this beat up old thing out of the barn?” she asked.

  “We need this truck because there’s a trestle between the farm and the route out of Athens. The girls are transferred to this vehicle while either Evan or I drive the other up to the main road. Whoever takes Evan’s SUV goes to a rest stop on Route 33 and walks three miles east to the gas station to wait for extraction.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah? Well, it took us two weeks to determine the system and the routes,” Josh said.

  “Seriously? What was the problem?” she asked.

  “We all had similar but different training and each of us had a valid means of execution. So, in the end, we combined what we felt were the most compatible aspects from each.”

  “How very democratic of you,” Samantha sarcastically replied which Josh didn’t pick up on.

  “We thought so,” Josh replied very proud of himself.

  “Idiots,” she said under her breathe.

  “Hey! I heard that,” he answered incredulously.

  Unable to let it go, Sam said, “You know, you can be a real jerk sometimes. As far as I’m concerned, I did you a favor. Who’s the ungrateful one now, huh?”

  Arguing with her any further would be pointless. She didn’t get it. Josh just kept quiet.

  The truck exited the woods near a stretch of rail bed that had been altered to look as if an old road or trail crossing had once existed there. Josh quickly pulled the truck up and on to the tracks and placed the vehicle directly on the rails. Once aligned, he flipped a switch in the dash. The retracted steel wheels deployed and made contact with the track. The pair could feel the suspension decompress.

  “How does this work?” she asked.

  “The railroad mechanism is used to keep us on the track and the rubber tires handle acceleration and deceleration,” Josh answered like a wizen professor as he started heading down the rail line.

  “But I felt the truck lifted up,” Sam said curiously.

  “The suspensions are designed to be very loose. When the rail system is engaged, the suspension just isn’t as compressed. It allows the tire to retain enough friction to start and stop, but it doesn’t put the full weight of the vehicle on the tires. I’ve had Jesus and Abelardo retrofit similar axles on a few other vehicles on the farm.”

  “You didn’t mention that when you showed me the barns,” she admonished him.

  “It was an honest mistake, sorry. I’m not an open book, remember?” he said and threw her comment back at her.

  “Jerk.”

  The two traversed the rail line for a few minutes in silence. Neither party was ready to re-engage in the fight. Samantha hated fighting, but Josh seemed to always know what to say at the right moment.

  She couldn’t bear it anymore. She had to ask, “So, if we are meeting them at the halfway point, and we went about a mile through the woods, we should be there when?”

  “We can pretty much hit whatever speed we want except in the more drastic turns. Doing eighty miles an hour, we should be there in a little over six minutes. It takes them ten to fifteen depending on their location and route through Athens.”

  “So we get there before them and...?” she asked, truly wanting to know the answer.

  “There’s another raised bed on their end. By taking the Charlie route, they have allowed us very little time to spare to get into position in the woods opposite the trailhead.”

  “Get in position to do what?”

  “Blow a hole in the engine block of anyone pursuing them with the Bushmaster .50 cal under the tarp in the back of the truck.”

  “You’ve got a .50?!”

  “Yup, got it at ‘Swappers Day’ up in Johnstown over a decade ago. That was before they implemented universal background checks to include the gun shows.”

  Josh whistled to himself at the memory of the purchase and continued with, “Boy, was she pissed. I spent almost my entire yearly bonus on that thing. Cost me four grand. Come to think of it, most of my guns were bought at swap meets and shows. A handful are from FFL dealers though. I don’t have but maybe seven or eight entries on the Federal Gun Registry.”

  “What? There’s no gun registry?”

  “Yeah right. They’ve had it since the day they started asking law-abiding folks to fill out paperwork for FBI background checks. It wasn’t until the universal checks were implemented that they snared the gun shows and effectively shut them down. A lot of people didn’t want to be on the ‘imaginary’ list so they stopped attending. It’s all black markets now for most of us.”

  Quickly changing subjects, Josh said, “Here comes the trestle. We’ll be there in two minutes.”

  “Do any other routes use the tracks?” she asked inquisitively.

  “No, just Charlie. We ride the rails and do all kinds of stuff though. Most tracks in this country take you through places you can only see from the air, or on foot.” As he reached over to open the glove box, he continued, “When I was homeschooling the girls, we would load up with a few days’ worth of supplies and the Norfolk Southern system map and just go explore.” He then handed her the folded railroad chart to look over.

  “What are all these red dots?”

  “Those are the locations of any solar panels used by the owner of the rail line to power some of the more remote equipment,” he replied as he started decelerating.

  “And why would you need to know that?” she asked.

  “Some other time,” he replied. “We’re here.”

  Josh brought the vehicle to a stop and flipped the switch to retract the steel wheels.

  “The railroad didn’t install these raised beds, did they?” Sam inquired.

  “Nope. The ingress and egress points were installed by us once we came up with the Charlie route. Same with the defilade position we are about to park this truck in.”

  “So there were no crossings here before?” she wanted to know.

  “No. I got the rock from a quarry up the road on the cheap and scrounged up some old railroad ties to make the waypoint. The old guys that run this line haven’t said anything about ‘em yet,” he answered unemotionally.

  Josh quickly backed into position on the far side of the tracks. The position was designed to maximize concealment, but still allow someone to stand in the bed of the truck and use the rifle. By backing the truck into the dugout position, the vehicle was parallel to the tracks and its n
ose was headed out of the position. This allowed for quick access back onto the tracks. The spot was not designed for passengers to exit or enter the vehicle so Samantha had to scoot her way across the bench seat to get out of the cab.

  Josh grabbed a fistful of zip ties and a bore sight from a panel on the cargo box and jumped into the back of the truck. He removed the canvas covering on the rifle and began setting up the Bushmaster in its firing position.

  “Where do you want me?” Samantha asked.

  “I want you up here on the .50 while I take a secondary position on the other side.” Josh handed her the bore sight and said, “The scope is ranged for four hundred yards. Use this to recalibrate it when Evan’s SUV comes down the path. They’ll be parked and motionless for less than sixty seconds. If anything else shows up, you send a round into the engine. Got it?”

  “Clear,” she replied as Josh reached down and grabbed her under the arms and hoisted her into the bed of the truck.

  “Whoa,” Josh said in amazement.

  “What?” she asked quizzically.

  “Nothing. I just forgot how light you were,” he answered.

  “Why, Josh Simmons, was that a veiled compliment or were you flirting with me?”

  Josh scowled at her and she quickly understood he was still not in a playful mood. “They don’t know you’re alive so don’t talk, stay under cover, and don’t come out into the open,” he replied as he scurried over the embankment and headed toward the other side of the tracks.

  Samantha disengaged the bolt, verified that it was not loaded, and then inserted the bore sight. She placed the knee of her broken leg on the side rail for stability. In the distance, the sound of tire noise on pavement could be heard.

  Evan pulled the vehicle off of the road and began traversing the path to the rail bed when Josh stepped out from the brush and leveled his 9mm at the driver. He quickly brought the vehicle to a stop as Josh retracted his arm. The rear doors of the SUV flew open as the girls disembarked the vehicle. Without saying a word, the two headed for the truck in its concealed position. Samantha deftly began recalibrating the scope with the aid of the sight.

  Josh approached the stopped vehicle as Evan pressed the button to bring the window down.