by David Craig
"Sir, I'm Trudy Peace and this is my son Rick, can you please tell us what it's like up ahead?"
"There was a biker gang few miles ahead of you headed the same way you are but they tangled with a group of off-roaders so they probably aren't much of a threat now.
As the rest of the clan walked up to stand behind her as she said, "Oh dear, maybe we ought to go back we've only got one gun."
"But there's nothing back there but looters," said a younger woman in a low cut bright yellow dress who'd come to stand beside the young man with the gun that Beacon now recognized as an expensive 20 gauge over and under sporting clays shotgun. Under powered and slow to reload it wasn't much protection under the circumstances.
Beacon asked detailed questions about what the group had seen and got detailed answers along with some sketchy ideas about the family. The oldest woman was the matriarch; the three young men were her sons. The two oldest sons had their wives with them. The youngest son and his girlfriend were traveling in the first car with the mother who offered Beacon lunch.
Beacon didn't want to make any alliances and he didn't want anyone to know what was in the truck, but the woman's offer to share what little food they had touched him so while declining their offer he offered them resources.
"I can't stop for lunch however I'll give you the best advice I have to give." Beacon took a deep breath and began.
"About five miles ahead there'll be a trail by a big rock beside a dead tree on the left. About 50 yards up the trail you'll find three dead bikers and their motorcycles. You should be able to drain a few gallons of gas out the gas tanks."
Then remembering what he'd seen at the top of the hill he added, "You'd be wise to take all the clothes and crap out of two of your cars and leave them and that gas guzzling GTO there. Traveling in two cars won't be as comfortable, but you'll get further on the gas you've got."
The youngest man and both brides started to protest so he added quickly, "Our infrastructure is down. The gas in your tanks right now is the last you're going to see for decades and it'll only be good for about a year. Without gas the best use for automobiles will be living quarters."
"Lock the clothes and crap in the GTO and siphon the gas out of it. That'll help your remaining vehicles go further and keep anyone from stealing it. You can pretend you'll come back for it all when things get back to normal if it'll make you feel any better."
"Leave your beautiful bright clothes behind," he said nodding to the girl in the bright yellow dress, "they make good targets, but keep the blacks, browns, greens, grays and tans. Work clothes; jeans, long sleeved shirts, coats, jackets and thick pants will be what you'll need when winter comes."
"There's a large group of well prepared off-roaders up ahead of you. You'd do well to team up with them if they'll let you."
Then nodding to the kid with the shotgun, who seemed to know how to handle guns, and the matriarch he added, "If you two will stop in front of my truck I've got a few extra guns I'll loan you." He watched the clan walk back to their cars then hurried back to his truck.
Beacon placed the gas cans and one of the siphon hoses he'd untied from the three biker's motorcycles, the cheap Bowie knife and all three pistols with their ammunition on a piece of cloth in the middle of the road while the others were driving up.
After the others had passed by the older woman and her son stopped he handed the M-2 carbine and a pillowcase full of its magazines to the kid, who introduced himself as Rick and confirmed Beacon's suspicion that he'd been in the military by saying he'd been a driver/mechanic in the Army. Beacon advised him the M-2 was full auto but it would be best to shoot semi-auto to save ammo. "They ain't makin' it any more." He smiled.
Then he gave the sawed off double barreled shotgun to the woman along with a bag of shells telling her, "As the leader your job is directing your troops. Besides I doubt you'd be able to bring yourself to shoot anyone except as a last resort when they closed in on you. This'll stop'em when they get too close, but don't wait too long to shoot."
Then he showed her how to set the external hammers at half cock and admonished both of them to remember the first two rules of firearms safety.
"Never point the muzzle at anyone you do not intend to kill and keep your finger out of the trigger guard until you're ready to shoot," then looking Mrs. Peace in the eye he added, "These guns will be around you a lot more than they'll be near any outlaws you encounter. Make sure no member of your family ever lets a gun point at family."
As they got back in their car the kid asked, "How did you know we wouldn't shoot you with the guns you just gave us?"
Beacon smiled, "They're unloaded."
Outlaws
The next day Beacon was approaching the crest of a hill when the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Something so slight his conscious mind couldn't sense it had tripped the sensors that had kept his caveman ancestors alive.
Paying attention to such things was one of the things that had kept the mountain men alive in Indian country during the early 1800's. At Rendezvous reenactments Old Bill had taught him to obey such warnings. Beacon didn't second guess his senses or Old Bill. He backed up to a side trail and drove thirty yards up the hill before stopping behind some trees.
He'd been driving with his windows open get maximum input from his ears and nose now he turned off the truck and listened before getting out. People! There were some people up ahead.
Grabbing the scope mounted M1A he rolled up the windows and got out, carefully closing the truck door quietly and locking it. Stealthily moving up the hill he peaked over the hillcrest into the valley through a bush.
Over a hundred outlaw hogs were parked around two beer delivery trucks and a tanker with passed out or sleeping outlaw bikers scattered around the area. Two nearly naked girls were handcuffed to a beer truck, near the center of the group with stacks of cases of unopened beer and a few bikers standing around. One biker in a green T-shirt and blue jean vest with the gang's colors on it went over and made a grab for one of the girls, as Beacon watched he slugged her with his fist when she resisted before going over to take a beer from the stack of cases.
Beacon knew he couldn't take them all on, but he didn't want to leave the girls to the tender mercies of outlaw bikers. Maybe the DDL&BSG LLC could be persuaded to help him take them on. He took out his flat black bullet Space pen and OD "Write in the Rain" all weather notebook and did a SALUTE report:
Size: 100 +
Activity: sleeping it off
Location: valley pasture one dirt road in and out
Unit: outlaw bikers
Time: Noon
Equipment: about 90 hogs plus a few "trikes" and a couple motorcycles with sidecars, two beer trucks and a fuel truck. Lots of pistols, rifles and a few sawed off shotguns.
From what he could see, no attempt had been made to set up a camp or put out security. Through his binoculars Beacon could see hundreds empty beer cans and bottles strewn everywhere.
Suddenly Beacon heard the much muffled sound of Rich Bitch's dirt bike down on the dirt road. Before he could do anything to warn her she'd crested the ridge and was almost among the nearest group of outlaw bikers before she realized they were there.
Sliding sideways to a stop in a swirl of dust killed her engine. For a half second the pampered rich girl and the startled bikers stared at each other in surprise. Then several bikers reached for their weapons while the girl franticly tried to get her bike started.
Unable to find a gun one of the bikers started running towards the camo clad girl with motorcycle helmet painted in matching MultiCam. Because of the brush there was no place kneel or go prone; Beacon would have to shoot from the standing position silhouetted against the skyline.
Standing up he took aim, flipped off the safety and put the crosshairs on the leading edge of the running biker. At the shot the biker fell, the girl looked up at the mountain man and the camp came alive.
Uncertain whether retreating along her back trail would be ju
mping from the frying pan into the fire the girl hesitated.
Beacon yelled, "Get the Hell out of there Rich Bitch!"
Now assured that the rifleman silhouetted against the skyline was a friend who knew her name Rich Bitch began trying to crank the dirt bike back to life once again.
The scope had limited Beacon's field of view. When he lowered the rifle to shout to Rich Bitch he saw other bikers running towards her.
Realizing she wasn't going to get the motor started in time Rich Bitch dropped the dead dirt bike. Pulling the folding stock 870 from the scabbard by its pistol grip she pumped the slide once and, firing from the hip, sent a load of buckshot toward the closest outlaw biker.
Being a girl afraid of rape in this situation she'd been looking at the part of him that scared her the most, his groin, instead of at his feet which is where she should have been looking to get a torso hit with a hip shot from a long gun.
The bottom of the shotgun's pattern whizzed over the biker's head like a swarm of angry bees, however one .33 caliber lead pellet caught him in the forehead. He went down, but the other bikers kept coming and more were joining the race that had a pretty girl as the prize.
Getting control of her fear Rich Bitch unfolded the stock, worked the slide, went down on one knee behind the bike and took careful aim at the next assailant as he took a running shot at her. He missed, she didn't.
Standing; firing downward unsupported at moving targets crossing his front at about a forty-five degree angle Beacon was lucky to get a hit with every third or fourth shot. Rich Bitch fired the eighth and last round from her shotgun and pulled a pistol from her left shoulder holster and resumed firing.
His twenty round magazine exhausted Beacon went down on one knee to pull another magazine from his tactical vest as a bullet whined over his head. He involuntarily turned and ducked. That's when he saw the two MultiCam pickups cresting the hill. They screeched to a halt in swirls of dust on either side of the girl at the bottom of the incline.
Rich Bitch saw her chance. Grabbing an ammo belt from the dirt bike's saddlebag she ran behind Keith's truck with the Remington.
By the time she'd shoved a few rounds into the shotgun's loading port and resumed firing Adonis, firing wildly, had already emptied a thirty round "banana clip" magazine and was fumbling to reload a second one into his scoped tricked out AR-15 carbine.
It was happenstance, not planning and tactics that had one team member firing while the other reloaded. There's training and then there's real life, but the training helped.
Beacon heard a roar down on the road and saw a Humvee painted in the now familiar MultiCam camo pattern with an honest to god turret on top stopping on the road at the crest of the hill. From the looks of the muzzle break on the end of the barrel sticking out of the open top turret he guessed there was a Barrett fifty caliber sniper rifle mounted in the turret and the heavy gray haired guy behind the gun was probably Doc Savage. The rifle roared and Beacon was sure; it was a fifty caliber all right.
Firing a scoped sniper rifle from a fixed mount at targets coming almost directly at him Doc Savage had an advantage over Beacon. Almost every biker he shot at tumbled head over heels as the .50 caliber rounds tore them apart.
The outlaw bikers were used to close in fighting in barroom brawls and the occasional gunfight over a drug deal gone bad. There were a few illegal submachine guns and carbines mixed in, but mostly they were armed with semi-auto pistols and large caliber revolvers with a few sawed off shotguns mixed in. Most of these weapons could be fired over a motorcycle's handlebars which is what they tried to do as they charged.
The survivalists, on the other hand, were armed with the latest semi-auto civilian versions of military battle rifles and carbines mostly scoped and sighted in at 100 yards which meant that aiming center of mass on any man sized target would get a hit out to 300 yards.
The tactics of the two groups were different too. The outlaw bikers "hit one of us and we all come after you" credo served them well in bar fights and drug territorial disputes but was ill suited to the open range kind of fight they were in now.
The aroused bikers had jumped on their hogs, brandished their weapons and charged down the valley with savage yells toward the sound of a gunfight in what they imagined to be a motorized version of an old fashioned cavalry charge.
Most civilians would have been terrorized into immobility or panicked flight at the sight of such a charge. Unprepared civilians like Trudy's clan armed with only a few "sporting" guns would have been overwhelmed by the speed and ferocity of the biker's attack and overrun before they could organize an effective defense.
Like Trudy's clan most civilians were still in denial hoping that somehow this was all a bad dream and that in some unspecified way the lights would come back on tomorrow night. While they'd have worried about the legalities of actually shooting another human being the bikers would have cut them to pieces.
The rest of the Rich Guy's Survival Group's MultiCam pattern vehicles were pulling up beside Doc's Humvee forming an impromptu skirmish line on either side of the dirt road.
This was where one of the advantages of uniformity of camo pattern came into play. There was no confusion about what was going on. One look told the recent arrivals that someone was attacking their MultiCam clad people. There was no ambiguity about who was who. Their people were being attacked; they would defend their own.
Eagerly jumping from their vehicles and supporting their scoped rifles on bipods and over the hoods of their vehicles the first of a convoy of twenty some odd vehicles began taking out the bikers before the outlaws were close enough to use their short range weapons effectively. This was the type of fight the survivalists had spent years training for and some were going to be disappointed; arriving too late to the fight.
But the outlaw bikers and the Rich Guys Survival Club survivalists had one thing in common: both groups had instantly realized that TEOTWAWKI made laws and courts moot. Where confused civilians would have agonized over legalities the LLC simply blazed away at evil.
The biker's imitation cavalry charge stumbled like a wave over a rocky shore as most of the outlaws were felled before they got within the effective range of their weapons. With their supported scoped weapons the LLC was firing aimed shots while the outlaw bikers were firing wildly over the handlebars as their bikes bounced over the open ground at high speed.
Like a snake sliding downhill into a buzz saw the charge of outlaw bikers was torn to pieces. A few, realizing what was happening, turned tail and ran. Beacon and Doc Savage took care of them while the rest of the survivalists finished off the charging bikers.
Even with the scope, shooting offhand it took Beacon three or four shots to get a hit on the moving targets at that range, and at that he was satisfied to just knock a biker off his hog, while Doc, firing a mounted, scoped, sniper rifle got a hit with almost every shot. And his targets went down hard, flipping around like torn rag dolls as they flew from their hogs. It took four shots, but Beacon finally hit the biker in the green T-shirt he'd seen raping the girl. The shot knocked the outlaw off his motorcycle, but the guy crawled behind a bush dragging his right leg.
In just a few minutes it was over. As Beacon knelt behind a bush and scanned the valley for more targets Keith and a couple of his buddies drove up with Rich Bitch's dirt bike thrown atop the hood of one of the four wheel drive trucks.
"Don't go down and try to give first aid to any of them," Adonis yelled as they pulled to a stop, "the wounded ones will try to kill you."
"Yeah let's wait half an hour for'em to bleed out." Beacon acknowledged showing the kid he'd read the manuals too.
Rich Bitch walked up, "Thanks and nice shootin' old dude my name's Cindy and this is Keith," she waved her hand toward Adonis.
"Glad to meet you again, I'm Beacon," he said, irked at being called old.
Then the Humvee pulled up beside them and again positioned itself on the crest of the hill. Doc Savage peeked over the side of his turret. "
You kids scope out that valley and tell me if you see anything moving. There are a couple of girls chained up down there and I don't want any of this gang of rapists getting away."