Will started listing the supplies from the mental list he had been creating since the plan was decided on. The rest of the group set about scouring the store to gather them. They stowed them in storage tubs near the rear door, ready to go at a moment’s notice. From cook-stoves and fuel, snowshoes and crampons, to fishing poles, and dozens of pair of socks, the pile of gear grew and grew. The hours plodded on and the sky outside began to darken, their prospects of making it to Lake Erie before night dissipated. Though delayed in their journey by another day, none of them were disappointed with the idea of spending a night locked indoors before the fearsome journey across the unknown. It was Laura who finally spoke about it.
“So, are we going to spend the night here?” she asked.
Jen turned to look out at the darkening sky and the others noticed and expression of fear and confusion come across her features. They all watched as a set of headlights bounced down into the parking lot out front. The car came careening down from Route 60, wheels spinning and fishtailing across the snowbound lot. Jen grabbed Sophie who was playing cat’s cradle with parachute cord and ran toward the back of the store. The front end of a Honda Civic hopped the front curb at speed and blew through the front of the shop. The front wall of glass exploded inwards.
Laura and Chris ushered Luna and Sophie into the storeroom. The others stood at the ready with their weapons raised towards the navy blue sedan as it came to rest just inside the store. Heavy chunking noises came from the stalling engine as smoke and steaming anti-freeze pooled out from under the front end. After a moment, the passenger’s side door opened, creaking heavily as it squealed it way past bent steel.
“Don’t shoot! Please!” came a voice from inside the car.
A pair of hands raised above the window and a bearded man stood erect.
“Please!” he begged. “My wife and daughter are in the car.”
“Get everyone out of there,” Bjorn called, his M4 aimed directly at the man.
The man moved to the side, allowing a woman and a pre-teen to move out into the open of the showroom. The man kept nervously glancing out of the shattered front of the store.
“Look, they are coming for us, we just want to get out of here. Please, just let us go!” the woman pleaded.
Before any of them could respond to the woman’s statement, three sets of headlights came bouncing down the ramp into the parking lot. The woman let out a weak cry.
“Get over here!” Jen yelled at them.
The trio moved past them into the storeroom. The four exchanged glances before Jen spoke.
“I’ll keep an eye on them,” she said.
Jen moved off after the three strangers as Bjorn clicked off the lights inside the store. One of the vehicles moved out of sight, around the side of the building, and the other two parked in front of the store, headlights aimed at the building.
“Laura! Jen! One car went around back! Lock the door and stay away from it,” Tim yelled back.
They waited in silence for a few minutes to see what was going to come of the situation. The sound of a megaphone cut through the air, sounding clearly over the wind whipping outside.
“Gary, we warned you,” came a simpering voice through the megaphone. “Come out now with the girls; don’t make us come in there. Things won’t end well for anyone if we have to do that.”
Tim and Bjorn shared a look. Will understood that there was a line that these men had just crossed. The wound that the men had suffered the day before, caused by the knowledge of what happened in the farmhouse, was too fresh in their minds to ignore. Will noted their grim faces and took a deep breath to steady himself for what was to come.
“Wait until they move into the store,” Bjorn hissed at the two of them.
Minutes ticked by, filled with the tension of the confrontation they knew was coming, before the rest of the doors on the two vehicles outside swung open. All at once, the men stepped out into the open, and trudged through the snow to meet behind the cars.
“Seven?” Tim called after a quick headcount.
Bjorn nodded; he had come up with the same number in his own count. The men huddled up between the two cars for a moment. They were conferring or receiving direction. All three men inside struggled to determine who the leader was, thinking that if they could lop the head off the snake, they may not have to engage in a fierce firefight. One man lifted a two-way radio to his ear for a moment before speaking to the rest. As a unit, the men spread out and began moving towards the front of the store with hunting rifles in hand.
*
Nala heard a body thud to the ground inside followed by the sound of a person running down a flight of stairs. Another volley of gunfire ensued, and a moment later, one of the convicts backed out of the front door. He looked wounded and he tripped backward over the body in the threshold, tumbling down the stairs and landing heavily on his back at the edge of the fire. She took aim as a man in handcuffs came out with a pistol in hand. Her shot came first, striking the biker in the side of the head. The man on the porch looked confused then scared and he dove to his side back into the house.
Nala remained silent for a few moments before the man spoke.
“I know you helped, that you killed the ones out here,” the voice said.
“Yeah, nothing personal, but we can talk if you throw your gun out here,” she replied. “I’ve been following these assholes for over a week now.”
Nala waited, poised to either shoot or run, for the span of a few heartbeats before the man’s gun came flying out the front door, bouncing off one of the corpses with a dull thud. He came out, sticking his empty hands out before him, defenseless. He looked down the length of the front porch in her direction before stepping fully out in the open. She stepped forwards with her gun still aimed in his direction.
“Who else is in the house?” she demanded.
“No one,” the man replied, emotion shaking his voice. “My wife was…but…”
“You don’t have to,” Nala replied. “I’ve been following those pig-fuckers since Fort Collins…I know.”
The man dropped to his knees and fell to pieces. Nala dragged the remaining bodies out of the house, slowly and painfully, tucking one of their ankles in the armpit of her good shoulder and pulling. She brought the man inside and laid him on the couch, racking with sobs. Nala found his wife, naked and dead in a corner of the kitchen with a gunshot to her head and a pistol in her hand. She took the linen tablecloth off of the dining room table and she draped over the woman. When she was done, she locked the house securely and climbed out the bathroom window, moving back into the dark night. She slept securely in the shed behind the Quonset building and left the following morning without seeing the man again.
*
“It was late the next morning when I stumbled up to the east wall of Donner and found you all,” Nala said, breathing deeply as the doctor prodded at her broken nose.
Linda shook her head at the woman’s story. She was simply amazed that the woman had survived at all, nevermind bringing herself over a hundred miles of rocky mountain wilderness with a broken arm.
“I don’t know what to say,” Linda stated honestly. “I guess there is only one thing I can say. Welcome to Donner.”
Linda knew that Tar would give her a serious tongue lashing for inviting someone in without consulting him first, but she couldn’t let the woman spend another night out there. Not with her arm in the shape it was in.
“We are going to have you stay a night or two at the clinic before we get you settled into a place. Hope you don’t mind staying with me,” Linda asked hopefully, knowing Tar would be quicker to accept the decision if she were to place herself responsible for the woman.
“That sounds wonderful…thank you.”
*
“When they come in, they’ll have to move in close together to get around the car,” Bjorn said quietly. “Wait to fire until the first one gets through the doorway and the rest are bottlenecked at the opening. Full automatic.�
��
As they neared the front of the store, the men split, three moved to the right side of the store and three to the left, both sets of men moving out of sight. Only one man trudged through the snow directly towards them. The man looked nervous, fidgeting and glancing off to the group on the left frequently. Tim guessed that he hadn’t volunteered for this duty. In the storeroom, Laura shrieked in surprise as she heard one of the dumpsters getting dragged away. A moment later, someone started hammering loudly on the rear door with something heavy…an ax or a sledgehammer.
“Last chance to make it out of this alive, Gary!” a man from the left side of the front of the store yelled. “Bring out the women or we kill you and take them.”
The nervous man walked to the crushed glass of the shattered doorway. Bjorn held his hand out to pause the others. The man stepped in with great trepidation, glass crunching underfoot. He stood, trying to see inside the darkened store, the only illumination coming from the headlamps of their cars outside, which didn’t penetrate past the second row of displays. The heavy slamming continued from the stockroom, making the three defenders extremely anxious. After a few minutes of the man standing at the shattered front of the store in silence, peering around, he finally spoke. They could hear only a bit of the conversation as the little snippets of sound that the wind didn’t steal, the heavy hammering that continued in the stockroom behind them, obscured.
“– Don’t see –”
“Well – in – asshole!”
The men to either side of the door started edging out from their cover, cautiously at first, moving into sight as the man in the doorway started shuffling forwards into the gloom. Tim leaned over and tapped Will on the shoulder. When he got his attention, he pointed at Will and then at the door to the back room. Will nodded and limped back through the open door, still leaning heavily on the closet rod. When he got into the back room, he joined Jen, seated with their rifles pointed at the heavily damaged steel door.
The man was about fifteen feet into the store when the others got bold enough to come out into the open. They congregated at the ruined front wall, all six of them within a five-foot radius. Bjorn and Tim exchanged a glance and pressed their triggers almost simultaneously. The muzzle flash was blinding and the sound of the weapons in the cinder-block structure was deafening, as the first volley of automatic fire tore into the cluster of men. They both toggled the weapons down to three-round bursts and took a moment behind the rear counter to let their eyes readjust. They heard no movement since they stopped firing and Bjorn popped his head up to see that three forms lay unmoving outside the front doors. A fourth man was crawling to the side along the sidewalk, towards the safety of the next store front when a burst from Tim’s weapon halted him permanently.
“Fuck!” a man yelled from outside.
Bjorn and Tim set about scanning the darkened room to find the meek man who had entered first. Bjorn spotted him by the movement of a tent on display as the man crawled into it. He sent a burst from the M4 into the tent, and hearing a high-pitched squeal after the first burst, he sent a second burst which caused the man to fall silent. Tim glanced at Bjorn who held up two fingers then pointed to the right side of the storefront. The two moved to the left side of the shop to increase their field of vision on that side and waited, reloading their weapons. It was just then that Tim noticed that the hammering had stopped from the stockroom.
The two friends started moving towards the front of the store, using the store display racks as cover. As the first man came into view, a set of headlights came from the side of the building. The two men bolted from cover and started running towards the parked cars. Bjorn and Tim stood and took aim. Bjorn fired at the men running on foot. He took one man out in stride, hitting him in the hip and sending him headlong into the snow. The other man made it to the first car, sliding into the driver’s seat before Bjorn sent a flurry of bullets through the windshield.
Tim flipped the toggle of his M4 to automatic, and unloaded a full magazine into the fleeing vehicle at shoulder level. The bullets shattered every window in it before it could pull out of the lot. The engine raced, propelling it across the road where it slammed into a parked car and sat unmoving. Bjorn fired again as they encountered the bodies on the ground, sending bullets into them, to ensure they were not lying in wait, playing possum.
“I give up, just don’t kill me!” the man with the ruined pelvis cried at them as they approached.
The man flipped over in the deep snow, holding his hand up defensively. Bjorn fired directly into the man’s face, exploding out the side of his skull like a crushed melon. Tim’s stomach heaved at the sight but he managed to bite it back, so long as he avoided looking at the caved-in face. Bjorn put one more round into the side of the man’s head seated in the driver’s seat as the two crossed the lot.
The adrenaline started to relent and Tim started shaking as they moved towards the Subaru stalled against the parked car across the street. Tim skirted around to the passenger’s side while Bjorn made a wide berth around to the driver’s side. Bjorn unloaded the rest of his clip into the doors of the car before reloading and creeping forward to look in the car. Tim covered him from the opposite side, making sure to keep the angle away from his friend. Bjorn took a deep breath and moved in the last few feet, peering over top of the door into the car. Inside were the corpses of three men, riddled with bullets.
*
Tar walked slowly up the steps of his house, having spotted Linda from the street. She was waiting expectantly with a bottle of bourbon and two glasses. His mouth went dry at the sight of the liquor and defused his irritation of her presence after the long day. Tar flopped heavily down into the chair across from her and absently rubbed his knuckles and the backs of his hands as she poured glasses. He lit a cigarette and clinked glasses with the woman. He still hadn’t looked at her, unsure if she were here to gloat over the interview process she had arrived at or if she were bearing bad news. Either way, he figured one was as bad as the other.
“How did it go?” she asked at last.
“Well…Yen is a good man,” he replied smoothing out his mustache.
She nodded, trying to get a feel for the mood the man was in.
“I heard they are being allowed in.”
Tar nodded, taking a sip of the bittersweet liquid.
“Seventeen?”
Tar nodded again.
“Goddamn it, Tar! I’m looking to talk with you, not at you. Can you give me some feedback at least?”
“Well, the Ute are resourceful. They will work for their food or hunt it themselves, so it shouldn’t be a drain on us at all.”
“And the other interviews?”
“I only had time to speak to a couple others today. Yen took most of the morning. Another family out of Steamboat Springs…had ID to prove it. They didn’t encounter much, to be honest. They’ve been camped here since November. They’ll need to scavenge a bit to come in, not much in the way of marketable skills. The last guy I spoke to was a real slimy kinda fella, he ain’t gonna be welcome here.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Yeah, we escorted him to the east barricade. Gave him three days’ provisions and read him the riot act.”
“Riot act?”
“We made clear the consequences if he were to return.”
Linda nodded, glad that she was only interviewing the women and children.
“How did your interviews go?” Tar asked, more so because he knew she expected him to, rather than a sincere interest on his part.
“A lot of tragic stories,” Linda started, pausing to refill their glasses before continuing. “One woman, Nala was her name, she had an intense story. I wanted to talk to you about taking her under your wing.”
Tar survived enough years of marriage to know better than to openly scoff at the idea, but he had no inclination to do so. Seeing his hesitation, Linda spoke again.
“At least talk to her, listen to her story before you make up your mind.”
“Okay, that I can do.”
Tar lit another cigarette and sipped slowly on the bourbon, enjoying the warmth it spread down his throat and in his stomach.
*
By the time Tim and Bjorn returned to the store, Jen and Laura were busy loading the newly acquired supplies onto the back of the trailer while Will sat off to the side, with his leg up and weapon in hand. The man who had crashed his car through the front of the store approached them with his hand extended.
“Thank you,” he stated, grasping Tim’s hand followed by Bjorn’s. “Thank you.”
Bjorn continued past without giving the man a second of his time. Tim stopped, feeling obligated to speak with the man.
“Was that you guys shooting over at the Walmart? Gary, is it?” he asked.
“Yeah, Gary,” the man acknowledged. “Yeah, we snuck into the Walmart this morning to try and get some food and supplies. We had been hiding in the attic of our house since all this happened and ran out of food three days ago…anyways, those men cornered us and…well…”
“Yeah, we get what they wanted,” Tim replied quietly.
“Yeah. Well, that horde followed them into the store, and while they fought them off, we were able to sneak out to the car and run.”
Tim nodded as the man spoke.
“We are headed over to Mary’s brother’s house in Albion if you all want to come,” Gary offered. “We haven’t heard from them of course, with the phones being out and all, but he has a nice plot of land, and a stable with a strong fence.”
“Appreciate it, Gary, but we are headed west…Wisconsin,” Tim stated.
“You got people out there?”
“Will does. The rest of us are just stray sheep looking for a flock, I guess.”
“Would you all mind if we kept you company tonight? I don’t think we can travel on foot in the dark and we’d appreciate your protection.”
Harvest of Ruin (Book 2): Dead of Winter Page 26