Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series (7 page)

As she passed the sink, Sara glanced outside through the single kitchen window. The window looked out across their sparse backyard to the boundary of weeds on the hill behind them. Their lawn looked pitiful. She and Will had sown grass and planted trees, but it had been a busy summer and the children needed their attention constantly. Yards took time to fill out and mature. Perhaps by next summer the yard would be more presentable.

She turned back to her work, then froze. Something outside had caught her eye and was only now registering with her brain. She backed up. There had been something else there, something out of place.

She scanned the yard close to the house but it was so bare that anything unusual would have been readily apparent. She looked higher onto the hillside, where the knee-high weeds merged with the woods that bordered their property. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw three men standing there.

These were not normal men. Besides all of them wearing black clothing from head-to-toe, they were also wearing masks. They were pullover cloth masks that covered the wearer’s face from the eyes down. The masks were printed with a skull pattern that made them appear to be leering at her from the hillside. In another time and place the getup might have been laughable. Now, with full knowledge of what type of people would be wearing such an outfit and why they would be wearing it, it filled her with terror.

They made no attempt to hide themselves as they watched the house. She was nearly certain that they could not see her because of the glare off the window. She backed away slightly, just in case, putting her body off to the side of the window. She watched to see if they would walk away but they continued watching.

She ran to the front door in a panic. She looked out and couldn’t see her dad or Will. They were probably unloading the trailer into the garage for now and the garage wasn’t visible from her front door. She could yell for them but it was several hundred yards. They probably wouldn’t be able to hear her. She started to run out the front door and toward her parent’s house but with the yard bare of any concealing vegetation she would be out in the open. What if they came after her? If they took her, no one would have a clue where to even start looking.

She found that the idea of running away did not set well with her. She did not want to be afraid in her own house. She wanted to stand her ground. She had been raised to do that. She was not a victim and she would not
let
herself become a victim. This was
her
house. She needed to calm down and take control of this situation. She had not seen any visible weapons. If she could calm herself, she could take care of this.

She closed the front door and locked the deadbolt, then made a quick pass around the lower floor of the house and confirmed that all of the doors and windows accessible from the ground were locked. She ran back to the kitchen and glanced out the window again. The men were still there. One held a long knife in his hand now and was using it to point. It looked like he was pointing toward the French doors that led from her dining room to the patio. Surely they couldn’t think the house was abandoned. If they’d been watching it for any time at all, they would have seen her father and husband leaving with the trailer full of stuff. Maybe they knew it was still occupied and didn’t care.

She ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Though they planned to take all of the guns with them to her dad’s house, they’d not started moving them yet. They had a gun safe in the bedroom that her dad had bought them as a housewarming gift. She punched the code into the digital lock and threw the lever. The weapon that both her dad and Will had encouraged her to use if she ever had to defend her home was the 12 gauge shotgun. It was a Mossberg 590 tactical model and they kept it in the front of the safe with the tube magazine loaded and the chamber empty. All she had to do to ready the weapon was to rack the pump and chamber a round. If the sound of the pump action cycling was not sufficient enough to deter these trespassers, then perhaps a chest full of 00-buckshot would do the job.

Shutting the gun safe, she ran to the window of Lana’s room and peered out the curtains without disturbing them. The men had come closer and were at the edge of her straw-covered lawn. They had crouched down and continued to study the house. She wondered if they were trying to figure out if anyone was home or not. They were clearly on her property now. They were trespassing and were not well-intentioned or they wouldn’t be lurking in the weeds behind the house. They wouldn’t be wearing masks. She had to make it clear that this was the wrong house to mess with.

She returned to the front door, unlocked it, and slipped out. She looked back toward her parents’ house one more time and still saw no one. Though two weeks ago she could have called over there, or even called 911 for help, now there were fewer options. As she’d considered before, she could run, but that would not send a message of strength. That would not be a deterrent. Panic resurfaced and she had a brief thought that she should run to her sister’s house for help, then she remembered Charlotte and her husband were not there because they were at her dad’s house looking after all the kids, waiting on their turn to empty their own house. She would have to deal with this alone.

Dropping off the side of the front porch, she walked along the red mulch and foot-high shrubs toward the side of the house furthest from that of her sister’s or parents’. She chose this side because she assumed the men would be splitting their attention between studying her house and keeping watch toward the other houses. There was nothing on this end for them to be concerned with. No other houses, no other neighbors. They would not be expecting anything from this side. She was counting on that.

She listened at the corner and heard nothing. Even so, she raised the shotgun to her shoulder, placed her finger on the safety and stepped around the corner. She’d been taught to do this in such a manner that you didn’t lead with the barrel, allowing an intruder to grab the barrel and take your weapon from you. She stepped away from the house, putting some distance between her body and the corner, but there was no one there. She released the breath she’d been holding and approached the back corner of the house.

She knew this time would be different. She knew there was definitely someone around this corner. Three someones, in fact. She paused, keeping her body close to the wall. If they had handguns on them and opened fire, she would have to duck back quickly and hope that the house could absorb the bullets.

She shouldered the weapon and leaned around the corner, glaring down the barrel at the men. The ghost ring sight lay on the chest of the middle man. At this distance, without the protection of her locked house around her, the masked men terrified her. She had never been so close to killing a man purely out of fear.

They had not yet noticed her. She sucked down her fear and let her anger rise. How dare these men try to rob her home? What if her children had been there?

“Don’t fucking move!” she shouted, her voice as loud and authoritative as she could make it.

The men flinched, startled. She could see their eyes moving, their brains spinning for traction. With the masks on, only their eyes and close-cropped heads showed. She saw now that the masks were like those that SWAT teams wore on raids to conceal their identities.

“What are you doing behind my house?”

One of the men was whispering under his breath. She couldn’t make out what he was saying but she knew he was talking to the other men. She hoped they weren’t planning something crazy. She didn’t want to have to kill them, but she would. She snapped the safety off, wanting to be immediately ready to fire if she had to. This did not go unnoticed, the slight metallic click carrying loudly enough across the silence of the yard.

As she drew a breath to tell them to leave while they still could, they all heard the sound of a lawnmower start up. While she didn’t take her eyes from the men, the sound distracted her for the briefest moment, delaying her reaction. The men took this opportunity to dive into the tall grass and scurry away. They were only visible for seconds before they disappeared into the thicker brush at the edge of the yard. She had no doubt that she could have put easily put buckshot pellets into painful locations as they crawled away but she couldn’t make herself do it. Instead, she raised the barrel just over their heads and fired into the trees. She pumped the action and fired again, then a third time. She hoped that the sound of pellets crashing over their heads and dropping leaves on them would make the men think twice about returning.

What she hadn’t considered was the immediate effect that the shotgun blasts would have on everyone else in their neighborhood. As she retreated back to the front yard, she found that her father and Will had abandoned the mower and were running across the yards as fast as they could, pistols in hand. Beyond them, she could see her brother-in-law Dave sprinting toward them with an AR-15 in his arms. While she could barely make out their faces, she could see their eyes wide with fear.

The Mossberg had a sling and she threw it across her back, raising both arms to wave toward the approaching men that she was okay.

Will was the first to reach her. “Are you okay?” he practically shouted. “What happened?”

“I’m okay,” Sara said.

Gary took in Sara’s appearance, seeing no blood and no obvious injury. “What’s wrong?” he gasped. “Why were you shooting?”

Sara felt a change in her body chemistry when she opened her mouth to speak. A second ago she’d been completely calm, cool, and collected. Now, she felt like she was going to pass out and burst into tears all at the same time.

“Do you need to sit down?” Gary asked, his father’s intuition going off. “It’s the nerves baby. You’ll be okay.”

Will led Sara to the front steps and she sat down. As she did, she noticed that her legs were shaking uncontrollably.

“Tell us what happened, Sara,” Gary said.

“I saw three men out the kitchen window,” Sara said, fighting to keep her voice from quavering. “They were in black and wearing these creepy skull masks.”

“Did they hurt you?” Gary asked.

Sara shook her head. “After you all left, they came out of the woods and were watching the house. They came down into the yard and were looking like they were going to break in. I got the shotgun and surprised them.”

“Did they have guns, baby?” Will asked, rubbing Sara’s back reassuringly.

“Not that I saw. They were just crouched there in the backyard watching the house. When I got around back, they came a little closer. I had the shotgun on them but they took off running when you all started the mower.”

“Did you hit any of them?” Gary asked.

“No, I…I tried not to. I shot over their heads. I just wanted to scare them. Make them think twice about coming back.”

“Good girl,” Gary said. “I’m going to take a look and make sure I don’t see any blood.”

“I’ll go with you,” Will said.

Gary shook his head. “No, you stay with Sara. She needs you right now. Dave can go with me.”

Dave trotted up about that time, panting and heaving, the AR dangling from the single-point sling over his shoulder.

“Dave, come with me,” Gary said.

Too winded to speak, Dave bobbed his red face in a nod.

“Take this, Dad,” Sara said, extending the shotgun toward him. “There should still be four or five rounds in there.”

Gary leaned over to kiss his daughter on the head. Then he turned to Dave. “Let’s go.”

Gary led the way back to the corner of the house where Sara had confronted the intruders. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he advanced through the scattered straw and sparse grass to the weeded perimeter of the yard. Keeping the shotgun in a ready position, he scanned the brush carefully but didn’t see anyone. What he did see, though, was what looked like a well-worn trail leading away from their property. Where the trail ended at the edge of Will and Sara’s yard, there was an area of flattened weeds where several people had obviously sat. There were beer cans and crushed cigarette butts. Some of the cigarette butts were stained from having sat there through rain. Gary knew it meant that people had been watching them for a while. It was an unsettling feeling.

“Stay here, Dave,” Gary said. “I think I know where this trail comes out but I need to make sure.”

“Are you sure?” Dave asked. “What if they’re waiting on you?”

“I’ll be fine,” Gary assured him. “You just stay here in case something happens.”

While Dave was thinking that over, Gary trotted off down the trail. His intention was not to catch up with the men who’d been lurking here but to verify where the trail came out. He walked the rough trail, finding himself concerned that there was even a trail at all. Trails required frequent travel to stay beaten down. He knew that there had once been a shortcut from the public housing development to a nearby convenience store that had cut through their property. When their neighbor Scott first bought this hillside to build his home, he’d had a few encounters with trespassers who’d been intent on continuing the practice of cutting across the hillside.

Eventually, though, folks realized that dealing with Scott was more trouble than it was worth and found another way to get there. With that, the trail should have grown back over and merged with the forest but that was clearly not the case. Some folks were apparently still using it. It made Gary think back carefully to things that had turned up missing over the years: a shovel, a water hose, some toys. While he’d always assumed that he or the kids just misplaced them, had people been stealing from him all along?