“Just then,Wham!, the Mustang plowed into the front of the Bronk. Terry apparently didn’t realize that my tires were shot out, and assumed that I had backed out of the problem. Just as I would have done, she didn’t pop her head up to check first. From right there laying down on the seat, she just reached down to the selector lever of the automatic transmission, put it in reverse, and stomped on the gas. Too bad I was in the way. She probably would have made it.
“At this point, I yelled to her on the Trick Five Hundred, ‘If you can… bail!’ Whoever it was, they were still shooting up our vehicles pretty well. Luckily, nearly all of the shooting was coming from the passenger’s side of both vehicles, so we were able to snake out of the driver’s sides without getting ventilated. We both just grabbed our weapons and our ALICE packs. We had neither the time nor the inclination to try and carry anything else. Besides, our feet were moving too fast.
“Terry here—who I’ve learned has a cooler head in real shooting situations than I do—came over the headset radio as I bailed out. She said, ‘By bounds, follow me. I’ll fire, you move.’ I made my rush to the side of the street and squatted down behind a parked car.
“Then I radioed back to her, ‘Okay, Joe, I’ll fire, you move.’ Then I started the old H-and-K to work. I shot anywhere from four to six rounds with each of her rushes. It was amazing. Trasel’s training came right back. We just bounded down the street, back the way we had came, in three-to-five second rushes. Each time, I’d hear her say on the headset,‘Okay, Joe, I’ll fire, you move.’ Then I’d look for my next piece of cover and run like heck while she was popping away. We did that for about the first five rushes. We stopped shooting after that, once we realized that by then nobody was shooting back. I guess it was too dark for them to see us, aside from our muzzle flashes, so they didn’t bother wasting ammo.
“We linked up at the end of the block, and checked each other over for bullet holes, more by feel than anything else. Miraculously, neither of us was wounded. As I mentioned before, I had gotten a good smack in the ribs. Aside from that, I was okay. Terry just had a few scratches on her right hand and right cheek from broken glass. We hunched down behind somebody’s hedge at the end of the block for about three or four minutes. Like I say, we were checking each other for wounds.
“It was then, too, that we reloaded again. Only then did I realize that my second magazine was bone dry. I had gone through forty rounds and Terry had burned up about fifty. She had accidentally dropped the magazine that she had used up while she was running, but I still had my empty that I had stuffed into one of the cargo pockets on my trouser leg, so I had Terry stick it into one of the outside pockets of my pack.
“Just as we were about ready to take off again, I saw somebody down at the other end of the block set off a road flare. Within a few minutes, they set up a bonfire. By the way it took off, they must have started the thing with gasoline.
“They started pulling the contents out of the car and the Bronk almost right away. They must have realized that they hit a lucrative target, because they started yelling and screaming. They were whooping it up like Indians on the warpath. I heard Terry say,‘Those heathen bastards.’ I said to her,‘What do you say we make ’em pay dearly for it?’ She answered me, ‘I don’t know. Do you think it’s right?’And I said, “It’s as right as anything could be. They just tried to kill us, and they’ve taken almost everything in the world that’s worth anything to us. I say we make ’em pay for it, with interest.’ She just reached out and clenched my hand, real tight.
“We lay down side by side on the sidewalk to the right of that hedge, and got into good prone positions. Terry says to me,‘I’ve got the guys to the right of the bonfire, you take the ones on the left.’ There was one guy who had what I think was my Remington riotgun and was holding it up at arm’s length over his head. Even from the end of the block, I could hear him quite distinctly yelling,‘I got the power! I got the power!’ He was silhouetted against the fire. I picked him for my first target. I waited till I could also see several other good targets, and then I whispered,‘One, Two, Three!’ and then I cut loose.
“We both burned off a full magazine apiece. I saw the first guy I was aiming at go down for sure, and I think I at least wounded two others. Terry was able to do a bit better, because she has a tritium front sight on her CAR-15. As it was, I could barely see my sights. That’s right, I didn’t have the tritium front sight on my H and K. I’d replaced it with standard front sight post for a high-power match that T.K., Terry, and I went to a few months before. Unfortunately, I never got around to putting the night sight back on. Pretty stupid of me. The darned thing is still probably in my desk drawer back at our house in Chicago. Heck of a lot of good it’s doing me there.”
Terry interjected, “I squeezed off two rounds at each guy. I know for sure that I nailed three of them, and got some fairly decent shots at two others. I couldn’t be sure. Even with their bonfire, it was pretty dark. I used up the rest of the magazine sort of randomly, shooting at places they might have taken cover.”
Ken resumed telling the story. “After we both emptied our guns, we beat feet around the corner, reloading our guns as we ran. This may sound hard to believe but we were laughing. Neither of us had ever so much as been in a fist-fight before this. We had probably killed half a dozen men, and we were laughing about it. Amazing how quickly times—or people, for that matter—change. Anyway, we stopped halfway down that block for a brief confab. We decided that to get around the riffraff that ambushed us, we’d cut south two more blocks, then turn to resume our bearing back west.
“After we had covered about eight blocks in short buddy rushes we were pretty well stressed out and exhausted. It was practically pitch black and we could have gotten blown away by some nervous citizen on any given rush. I said to Terry, ‘There’s got to be a better way. We’ll never get out of town by dawn doing it this way.’ So we sat down in some big bushes next to a church, and draped a poncho over ourselves so that we could look at a street map with a subdued flashlight without turning ourselves into a target.
“From where we sat, we had at least ten miles to traverse before we’d be out of the thickest part of the city and the suburbs. We looked, but there were no parks that we could cut through or creek bottoms that we could follow. It was just continuous blocks of city streets.
“We sat there giving each other dumb looks for maybe twenty seconds, and then Terry said,‘Why not go underground, down in the storm drains, just like we talked about for nuke scenarios.’ I whispered back, ‘I love you!’ Then she asked me, ‘How are we going to get down there?’ Then I reminded her about that thing in the book, Life After Doomsday by Bruce Clayton, where you take two hefty bolts and join them with a piece of wire, and then stick one down the pry hole on a manhole cover. In my pack I had some wire, but no bolts. I spent the next few minutes fishing through my pack looking for a reasonable substitute.
“What I came up with was my old Boy Scout knife-fork-spoon kit, you know the kind that all nest together? Anyway, I twisted the wire around the spoon and the knife. The knife ended up working just great, because it had a bottle-opening notch about halfway down it. That held the wire in place perfectly.
“I put my pack together again, and then spent the next few minutes groping around the street looking for a manhole cover. After a few embarrassing minutes, we found one. I handed my rifle to Terry, and I popped the knife down the hole. When I pulled up on the spoon connected by the wire, the knife toggled around nicely, just like a darned moly bolt. Next, I squatted down and put all my weight into lifting the manhole cover. Those things are heavy! After some grunting and groaning, I got the thing up, and slid it off to the side. I sent Terry down first, then handed down her carbine, then her pack, then my pack, then my rifle. I positioned myself on the rungs that were set in the concrete, and slid the lid back in place. I swear, it took a lot of strength. It closed with a thud that really reverberated down there.