“Because they’re noisy, filthy pigs?” John said with a grin.
“But they’re so cute when they’re little.”
“And so tasty when they’re fried.”
“John, stop it.”
“Sorry, Mom,” he said laughing. “But we don’t have them for any other reason except to eat them. You know that.”
“I know. It’s one of the more difficult tenets of pioneer living, I have to admit.”
“You mean life was better when the gypsies did all the dirty work.”
“Yes, darling, thank you for clarifying that.”
“What did you want to talk about?”
Now it was Sarah’s turn to laugh. “You don’t think I just wanted to take a walk in the dark to a pigsty?”
“Well, sure, that’s what most people would want to do on a nice spring evening, but somehow I don’t think that’s your motive.”
She looped an arm through his. “It’s just we haven’t had a moment to talk since we got back.”
“We talk all the time.”
“We haven’t had a moment to talk where it’s just us.”
“What’s up?”
“I want to make sure you’re still thinking about going to the UK next fall to school.”
John didn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought. You’ve been thinking about not going, haven’t you?” Sarah stopped walking and forced John to face her. “John?”
“Mom, I just don’t see how I can leave you guys. I mean, am I gonna go to school and come back at Christmas and find you and Mike and Gav gone, too?”
“I know. We need answers before you go. We need to find out what happened.”
“And then…” He hesitated.
“What?”
“Well, what if it’s just us? What if the rest of ‘em are gone for good? We find out they’ve all been murdered or whatever?” He shrugged. “It would be horrible but we’re all sort of thinking that might be the case. I mean we hope it isn’t, but we’ve all thought about it.”
“And if they’re gone for good, you think we can’t manage without you?” Sarah squeezed his arm.
“I’m not saying I’m indispensable, Mom. I’m saying in that case every pair of hands is essential. Me staying to help with the harvest and trapping and stuff like that might make the difference between surviving and not. And you know that’s true.”
The hell of it was he was right. And saying he wasn’t would be believed. How could she tell him she wanted him to go to school—to be something more—even if it meant she ate corn stalks all winter? And how could she say that when there was the coming baby to think of?
“When is the helicopter supposed to come for you?”
“In five months. Plenty of time to sort this out. But if we don’t. If we can’t—”
“We will,” she said firmly. “We’ll find our people and bring them back. And you will go to school in the fall.”
“I hope so.”
“You know you’ll always be my baby,” Sarah said, her voice catching with emotion.
“I know, Mom.” He grinned. “Do you still want to look at the hogs now that we’ve had our talk?”
“Not really.”
“I didn’t think so.” They made their way back toward the cottage.
**********
Regan looked at the stars above. She had no idea what the names of any of them were. She just knew that the world had changed for her. The stars twinkled brighter and the night felt velvet and soothing against her skin. The world had surely changed when she walked away from a fight and the other person was punished for it.
She’d rerun the row with Sophia in her head all through dinner—almost not able to believe it had happened like that. Regan had been the injured party, sure, but facts like that had never mattered before. Was the world different? Had something happened to make it different?
“Your father knew the names,” Ellen said softly.
Regan snapped her head around to look at her mother.
“Mum?” she said.
“The stars,” Ellen said. “He could name them for me.”
Regan laced her fingers through her mother’s cold hands. Her gaze was distant as she looked skyward, her head wobbly on her neck. Regan was afraid to breathe, afraid to talk. She tried to remember the last time she’d heard her mother’s voice.
Finally, she couldn’t help herself. “He didn’t leave us on purpose, Mum. He didn’t abandon us.”
Ellen lowered her head and her eyes met Regan’s. She smiled sadly. “My poor lass. You must feel as if the whole world has left you.”
Regan kissed her mother’s cold hands and held them to her face. Her heart was pounding.
“I’ve missed ye so much, Mum,” she said, feeling her heart swell with joy. “So much.”
“He’ll be back for us any day now. Ye must have faith. As I do,” Ellen said, touching Regan’s hair.
“I do, Mum. I think I can bear just about anything if we’re all together again.”
The creak of the foot on a board would have gone unheard if Regan hadn’t been holding her breath to listen to her mother’s voice again. She looked toward where Archie and Sophia stood by the fire. Past them she could see the glow of Sarah and John’s lantern well down the pathway.
It was a sound, furtive and secretive. A sound that shouldn’t be there.
Could someone have gotten inside the compound? John had closed the gate. Regan watched him do it. She squeezed her mother’s hand, her eyes searching the darkness, watching, waiting for a form to morph from the gloom. The sound came again, this time closer. Regan gathered herself into a squatting position next to her mother. She had a short dagger in her boot. Archie made them all wear one. Her hand dropped to her ankle and she felt it, sharp and cold against her fingers.
Was she imagining the sound? How could someone have gotten in? She listened intently, the gentle wheeze of her mother’s breathing the only sound on the night air. She stood up slowly.
“Regan?” her mother said. “What is it?”
Regan didn’t answer. Her eyes were on the four men silently slithering over the top of the front gate.
Chapter 20
When Sarah heard the rifle shot, the first thing she thought of was the fact that she’d left the rifle on the porch and one of the girls had finally killed the other. John’s reaction was very different. He pushed Sarah off the pathway into the tall bushes that lined the walk and ran across the walkway. Sarah watched in mounting horror as he stealthily worked his way to the corner of their cottage. In the moonlight, Sarah caught the glint of metal as John pulled his handgun out of his shoulder harness. Her heart began to beat in double time.
A rifle shot. It could mean anything. Maybe it was Mike and Gavin returning! Maybe they…
Sophia’s scream, long and piercing, killed that fantasy in a heartbeat.
Sarah knew John could see the campfire from where he stood hidden. She reached into her boot for her dagger. She was too big to crouch or make herself less visible and she knew if she got on her knees, she’d never be able to get back up without help. She didn’t dare emerge from the tall bushes.
Men’s voices, loud and unafraid, filtered back to where she stood. She strained to see what was happening. If Sophia had screamed, what happened to Archie? She wiped the perspiration from her lip and tried to make out the two forms she could see moving about on the porch of her cottage. Were there just two? Where were Ellen and Regan? She glanced again at John but his focus was solely on the center campfire. From where she was hidden, Sarah could only hear what was happening. Sophia was whimpering now.
“I tell ye, we’re the only ones here,” Archie said loudly.
Sarah heard the sound of a fist hitting flesh followed by another scream from Sophia. Sarah prayed John would stay still. She forced herself to be calm, to try to count the number of men she saw, to try to determine which one was the leader, to pray none of her people would do something stupid…and that
John would be safe.
Suddenly a form emerged from the porch. Sarah thought she counted three men on the porch and now she could only see one. That meant one of them was inside the cottage, and at least one or more were with Archie and Sophia—although she only heard one voice. Adding those three to the guy coming down the main walkway like he owned the place made four.
She was amazed at his brazenness. He had to be the leader. Have they been watching us? How do they know there aren’t more men here? How do they know we aren’t fully armed?
Most people in Ireland didn’t have handguns—not before the bomb dropped and definitely not after. So this big cocky bastard strolling down their compound main pathway could be forgiven for thinking there were no guns in the place. Sarah had brought twenty handguns back from the States the year before—all of which had been confiscated by the Garda except for the three Glocks and two rifles that Mike had hidden in the forest last winter. Mike and Gavin had taken two handguns with them but had left the two rifles and John’s handgun behind.
As Sarah realized the man’s confidence was likely tied to this assumption, her eye caught movement from John. He wriggled out of his shoulder harness and dropped it in the bushes, then slid his semi-automatic into his back waistband.
John, no!
She watched helplessly as her son’s thought process spin out in frightening detail. Some part of her brain registered that it was exactly what she would have done in his position. Standing by and ambushing the guy as he passed would only take out one man and further endanger the rest of the ones being held—which, at this point looked to be everyone in the compound except Sarah and John. Using the only advantage he had, John was about to do something that Sarah had only imagined in her worst nightmares.
He was going to face down a group of killers with his hands raised in surrender.
Sarah’s knees began to tremble as she started to pray. She prayed the monster walking toward them wouldn’t kill John. She prayed she would get close enough to the man if he did—to slide her knife into his heart.
“Don’t shoot,” John said loudly, holding his hands up and stepping onto the pathway. The big man stopped and pulled a large knife from its sheath at his waist. The sight of the man holding a knife on John made Sarah’s knees tremble. She held her breath to force her involuntary gasp back inside.
“I was just taking a whiz,” John said, “don’t hurt me.”
The man looked past John and then dropped his knife hand casually to his knee in obvious disdain of any possible threat this boy could pose to him.
That’s right, Sarah thought. You’re way too cool to be worried about anything a young boy could do.
“You a Yank?” the guy said as he approached John.
Please don’t pat him down. Please don’t pat him down.
“Yessir.”
The man grabbed John by the front of his jacket and pulled him around to push him forward toward the camp center. He looked over his back toward where Sarah was trying to blend into the tall bushes.
“You alone, Yank?”
“Yessir. Just me, my sisters and my grandfather.”
Sarah watched them walk away. Now she could see Archie and Sophia moving onto the path. A heavyset man with a shaved head held Sophia awkwardly from behind. He held a knife loosely to her throat. He obviously figured that as long as he held the girl, the old guy wouldn’t try anything.
Idiot.
“Oy, Luke, what did ye find then?” the fat man holding Sophia asked.
“Just some kid,” Luke replied.
Sarah waited until they were all grouped together where she could see them. She knew there were still at least two other men in the cottage but there was nothing to be done about that. Taking a long steadying breath and betting her life and the life of her loved ones on the hope that the men in the cottage were not armed beyond knives and her rifle—which hopefully hadn’t been reloaded since she heard it go off—she moved out of the bushes.
“Yo! Dirtbags!” she shouted. “You stepped in my petunia bed!”
She watched as the man called Luke swiveled around with his mouth open to look at her. John had his gun out and aimed in the time it took Sarah to blink. He shot the man holding Sophia first. By the time the leader snapped his head around to see what was happening, Archie’s knife was slashing across Luke’s throat in a jagged, crimson line. Sophia sagged to the ground in a faint.
One of the men at the cottage jumped down from the porch and began walking towards them, but stopped when he saw his companions lying in the dirt and a fourteen-year old boy standing over them, and aiming a gun at him. He raised his hands, his eyes large and white with fear.
“Don’t shoot!” he called.
Sarah lumbered up the pathway and touched John’s shoulder.
“Well done,” she said, her voice cracking with the effort not to join Sophia on the ground in a dead faint.
“You, too,” he said hoarsely.
“Regan?” Archie called. “Are ye all right, lass?”
The rifle and the other man were still not accounted for.
“I…I am,” Regan replied breathlessly, her voice shaking. She appeared on the porch, gripping the bannister for support.
“The man in there with you?”
“He’s…dead,” Regan said as she sat down heavily on the porch step.
Archie looked at the man standing in the path with his hands still in the air.
“Any more of ye?” Archie asked.
The man—who couldn’t be more than eighteen—shook his head. “Don’t kill me,” he said.
“Shut up,” Archie said. “Throw down any weapons ye have. If I find one ye missed, I’ll kill ye for the oversight. Watch him, lad,” he said to John.
Sarah glanced down at the man John had shot. He lay on the ground with a bullet hole in his shiny bald head. The knife he’d held to Sophia’s throat lay in the dirt next to him.
**********
An hour later, they stood on the outside of the compound as the young man they’d captured showed them how he and his companions had gained access. They’d dragged a ladder to the front and climbed over the top. It was that simple. As Sarah suspected, the four men had watched the compound for two days—long enough to see there was just an old man, a kid and a handful of women—before they made their move.
The man they’d captured was named George Bailey. He had a narrow scar that traced the line of his jaw and his dark eyes darted nervously from Sarah to Archie as though he was trying to determine which one it would do the most good to appeal to.
“We were just hungry!” Bailey said as he stood over his friends’ bodies laid out on the ground. Archie had tied Bailey’s hands behind him but only after they made him drag the bodies one by one out the front gate.
“You don’t look hungry,” Regan said. “You look like you’ve been eating good.”
Both her cheeks were bruised and her lips were swollen and bloody from whatever had happened to her on the porch. Sarah would hear all about it later but first things first.
Sarah turned to their prisoner. “See, my problem is I’m compelled to want to sleep tonight without worry that you’ll come at us again. So to that end, shooting you seems the safest course.”
“Are ye mad? That’s murder!” Bailey sputtered, looking at Archie.
“We look at it more like…insurance,” Archie said with a shrug.
“Jaysus, I’m sorry, Missus,” Bailey said to Sarah in a high whiny voice. “I’ll never come back. I promise ye.”
“As comforting as your promises are,” Sarah said. “I’m going to need to sleep on it. Meanwhile, it’s late. Tomorrow you’ll drag your pals down the road a ways and bury them in a grave that you’ll dig for them.”
“And then you’ll let me go?”
“As I said, I’ll sleep on it.”
After Archie tied Bailey to a tree, John pulled the gate down and locked it in place.
“For all the good it’ll do,” John said.<
br />
“It’s better than nothing,” Sarah said. They went back to the cottage where Sophia was making tea. Sarah knew giving the girl a simple chore wouldn’t erase the memory of the terrible evening from her mind but it might help calm her nerves. Inside, Ellen sat on the couch in the living room, her teacup cold and untouched before her on the coffee table.
“Did you kill him?” Sophia asked, rubbing her hands against her jeans and looking past them as if expecting the man to come in for tea too.
“No, petal,” Sarah said, holding her arms out to her. Sophia ran to her and Sarah held her tight.
“I was so afraid,” Sophia said.
“I know, darling. You were damn brave. It’s all over now.”
“It’s my fault,” Archie said gruffly. “I let them get the jump on me.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Sarah said. “We are too few and this place is too big to defend. Now let’s all of us have our tea. We’ll sleep here tonight, all of us together.” She kissed Sophia who went back to the kitchen to pour the tea.
Sarah sagged onto the couch next to Ellen and picked up her hand. Regan was on the other side of her mother.
“She was so good tonight,” Regan said. “She was like her old self again.”
Ellen was staring at nothing, not reacting to either of them.
While John and Archie brought in the tea tray and cookies and dragged chairs around the couch, Sarah touched Regan on the wrist. “Tell me what happened,” she said.
“I saw them coming,” Regan said, her eyes filling with tears. “I couldn’t believe it. Then I saw your rifle where you’d left it on the porch.”
Sarah nodded.
“I grabbed it up and shot at them.”
“That was plucky, lass,” Archie said.
“But I didn’t hit anyone,” Regan said, her lips trembling. “In fact, the gun jerked back and knocked me over! When I tried to get to my feet, they were on the porch and standing over me. They grabbed the rifle.” Her voice ended in a sob.
Sarah reached across Ellen and squeezed Regan’s hand.
Irish End Games, Books 4-5-6 Page 60