CHAPTER 32
The shot and the echo of the shot rang out across the little clearing and bounced up into the trees and then the sky.
Peter turned and saw the man on horseback, his arm raised, holding a rifle at a right angle to his body. His brain at first refused to believe the information being transported to it by his sleepy eyes. A warning shot. The man brought down the rifle and aimed straight at Peter. He wouldn’t warn again. His uniform was that of the Missouri National Guard.
Peter understood enough of what was occurring to know that he should not raise his own rifle. He put his hands in the air, and from around him appeared other soldiers who swooped down on him like hawks. They disarmed him and pulled his hands behind his back.
The man on the horse, the one with the rifle, was lecturing him about the new laws. Specifically, the man was telling him that it was a death penalty offense to be carrying a weapon of any kind. The officer droned on for a moment, the horse turning from side to side, as Peter was led to a tree at the edge of the clearing. It took the entirety of this time for Peter to become cogent enough to understand that he was not in a dream.
The man ordered the other soldiers to tie Peter to the tree, and they did so without any hesitation. It was at this point when reality zoomed back into focus, the brain sleep cleared, the adrenaline began pumping, and Peter realized that he was seconds away from being killed.
When the firing started from down the hill, the man on horseback, the leader of this Missouri National Guard unit, was sighting down his rifle and just about to pull the trigger in order to execute Peter for the crime of illegally bearing arms. He hesitated though, just as he was about to squeeze off the fatal round, when he heard shots ring out from just down the hill, near the cabin. His eyes shifted towards the sound of the shots and he spotted the interruption just in time to see the second soldier, who was just then attempting ingress into the cabin, fall mortally wounded.
During that millisecond when his eyes cut to the cabin, his rifle swayed. It was a tiny motion. Most people would have never noticed it. Perhaps the sway was involuntary, but it was enough. Bringing his attention back to his task, he had to take just a tiny second longer to steady his aim, sitting on the horse, and at that moment, almost the instant he found his target again, his head burst into a spray of blood, brains, and bone.
The body toppled off the horse, and as the dead officer’s blood began to pump into the snowy ground, his body writhed. Two more of his men dropped in succession—felled by bullets fired from somewhere in the distance.
The shots that killed the soldiers could only be faintly identified as sharp cracks piercing the crisp morning air. The sound echoed for a moment and then was gone. The remaining soldiers began to drop to the ground in panic, and they attempted to crawl back over the low rise, but before they could find cover, two more of them were shot dead from afar.
It was a turkey shoot.
Lang awoke to the sound of gunfire. Really close gunfire. He remembered waking up this way that last morning in Warwick, and he instinctively rolled over and felt the pain shoot up his wounded arm. It was a different pain, and his brain registered the difference. He was feeling better, he could tell. The sugar cure was working, and even without any food last night or breakfast this morning, he felt like life was returning into him. He’d gone to sleep not knowing if he would ever wake up again, but now he was awake, and the gunfire gave impetus to his feelings of being free and alive. However, now there was shooting going on, and he needed to find out what it was all about.
He low-crawled into the hallway and saw a dead soldier slumped over the broken wood of the door, and could see another dead soldier only a few feet outside the entryway, splayed backwards and bleeding from his mouth and nose.
Lang heard shuffling and felt a strong tug on the back of his jacket. He looked up to see Natasha and Elsie pulling him. He lurched to help them, and they dragged him out from the sight lines of the doorway and into the front bedroom. He looked around at the room. It was the one that Natasha had first rolled into when the men tried to invade the cabin. He rolled up on his shoulder and, just as he did, more gunfire shattered the morning. Bullets pierced through the walls like they didn’t even exist, and Lang noticed as little holes of light appeared in the walls and streams of sunshine flowed through the little holes and splashed across the floor in tight lines. A wooden building is not a great place to be in a battle, he thought.
“Nope. Not this room!” Natasha shouted, and now Lang was being dragged again, like a mannequin, past the hallway and into the kitchen. Natasha had noticed when they’d first entered the cabin that the exterior walls of the kitchen were made of heavy field stone. If she remembered correctly, the stone went at least four feet up the surface. Natasha, Elsie, and Lang stumbled in their low crawls into the kitchen area as the cabin began to rock with the gunfire that relentlessly pierced the structure.
Kent was sick. He could feel his stomach spasm, and the stew and vodka tumbled around in his gut and would not settle. It was not the food and drink from the previous night that had made Kent sick — at least it was not primarily the food and drink. He was sick of everything. Mostly he was sick of Val.
“Damn, are you drunk, again, pudgy boy?”
It was Val, talking over his shoulder. The large, brutish man had become for Kent a symbol of everything that made him sick, of everything that was making the whole world sick.