The Journal: Cracked Earth (31 page)

“
Nooooooo
!” I yelled, the guttural
sound escaping from my throat without me realizing it or
recognizing it. Within seconds, another shot was fired, and that
shooter’s head exploded like a ripe watermelon. Jason got him! The
other three now turned toward us, raising their weapons. There was
a barrage of gunfire. John got the next one, then Jason nailed his
second and John took out the final one. Somewhere in the back of my
mind I heard Jacob crying for us to stop the noise but I had to
ignore him. There was now silence and no movement. A distant double
tap shot followed more silence. David had taken out the fifth gang
member. Other than the fire at my brother and his wife, the gang
members never got off a shot.

I could hear Jason trampling across the roof.
He scrambled down the ladder and was back in the house within
moments. I stood, my knees shaking with fear and anger. I’m sure I
set my rifle down because it was no longer in my hands. When I
tried opening the door, John grabbed me from behind and held on,
stopping me from doing something perhaps very foolish.

“Wait for us! First, your coat and gloves.
Make sure your safety is off!” John yelled and reluctantly let me
go. I had to get across the road to my brother!

Jason was talking to Jacob quietly and he
stopped crying. Everything remained fuzzy and surreal. The three of
us went out of the door and cautiously moved toward the downed gang
members, our hand guns drawn. None of them appeared to be moving,
but my anger was now boiling over. Purely in a vindictive action, I
put a bullet in the head of the closest one.

We picked up our pace. John and Jason
finished making sure this scum wouldn’t move again. We came to the
last one; there was little of his head left.

“Nice shot,” John said, clapping Jason on the
shoulder. Then he viciously kicked the body. We are all capable of
extreme anger under the right circumstances.

“It wasn’t soon enough, though,” Jason
choked. He was close to his uncle.

When I reached the porch, I almost lost it.
There was the lifeless body of my only brother, lying half across
the picnic table. His wife’s body was by his side, a pool of
crimson blood forming beneath her where it didn’t drip through the
slats of the cedar decking. I reached out and brushed a lock of
gray hair away from Don’s empty eyes, a gesture he never would have
tolerated had he been alive. I sobbed while sinking to my knees,
checking for a non-existent pulse.

“We have to move them inside,” Jason said.
“Mom… Mom!!”

I turned to him, but didn’t really see
him.

“Mom. Focus! Go in the house and get us two
blankets or sheets.”

My world wasn’t functioning. We put Don and
Nancy each on a sheet, moving them one at a time, and laid them
side-by-side in the kitchen. Burial would have to wait.

We were back across the road and nearly to
the house when the FRS squawked again. “Here come more!”

We ran.

Jason, still in his insulated one-piece,
grabbed his rifle and headed once more for the roof. I opened my
window and took a deep breath. John came up behind me and said,
“Don’t hesitate, just shoot. There’s no one left to hurt except
those that deserve it.”

Five more Wheelers came roaring down our
quiet road. They slowed and drove their RV’s around the other
machines and the bodies on the ground then stopped. When the first
one dismounted his machine, Jason fired from the roof. A clean neck
shot nearly took his head off and the Wheeler crumpled where he
stood.

I felt an angry chill surge through me and I
fired, again and again. Although they shot back, they couldn’t see
us, but we sure could see them. I emptied my first clip and slammed
another one in place as glass shattered in front of me. One of the
Wheelers raised his hands in surrender. We weren’t taking
prisoners.

I lost a few windows, and it was over in a
matter of minutes. There were now nineteen dead Wheelers, two men
from town, and my brother and his wife.

* * *

Ken and Karen followed the four wheel tracks
down my road, and climbed out of their new scout car with weapons
drawn. The road was a mess with bodies and four wheelers. Some of
the machines were overturned, a few still running. Several of the
machines were riddled with bullet holes. One of those lying on the
ground moved, twitched. Ken walked over and silenced him
permanently.

* * *

“Allexa? Are you guys okay?” Karen called out
nervously while Ken continued walking among the dead.

I grabbed my jacket and stepped out the door,
glass crunching underfoot. “We’re all right, but my brother…he…
they’re both dead.” I choked on that word:
dead
. It didn’t
seem real.

“Karen!” Ken yelled. “We’ve got a problem.”
He made his way back to where we were standing. “I count nine here,
plus the ten in Midway. We’re missing five of these scumbags. We
need to get into Moose Creek, pronto.”

“I’m leaving two pickups here, plus Donnie
and Josh to help get these pieces of crap off the road,” he said to
me. “They’ll push the machines off to the side and we’ll deal with
them later.”

“Go take care of the town, Ken, we’ll finish
up here,” I said, gazing out at the road.

* * *

The Moose Creek Militia caught up to the
Wheelers at Fram’s, where they were attempting to steal gas. Fram’s
wasn’t open. Joe had already shut it down. The pumps didn’t work
without the generator running the power. The Wheelers were
frustrated and there was no one to bully or force to do their will.
Not until Marilyn Harris made the mistake of pulling into the
parking lot. The five outlaws, now grubby from days of travel and
wreaking havoc on unsuspecting locals, turned to the big blue
pick-up truck.

Marilyn got out of the driver’s door, much to
the dismay of Pastor Carolyn, who was riding in the shotgun
position. She took with her Bill’s twelve gauge shotgun. Marilyn
didn’t have the same reservations that Bill did about a loaded gun
in the car, and she didn’t see any reason to keep it in the
backseat either.

One of the prisoners smiled and walked toward
her, hands open.

“Lovely lady, perhaps you can help us. My
friends and I here are just trying to purchase some gas so we can
get back home, but the pumps don’t seem to be working,” he said,
walking with a slow and steady gait, maintaining eye contact with
Marilyn.

Marilyn raised her twelve-gauge to firing
position.

“You won’t need that, we mean you no harm,”
he said, continuing to advance. When he was ten feet away, Marilyn
fired, not only knocking him off his feet, but blasting him fifteen
feet backward. The Militia arrived in time to see Marilyn’s
shot.

The remaining four gang members surrendered.
Rising from behind their stalled machines, they raised their hands
in defeat. Karen raised her freshly loaded shotgun, while Ken
stepped closer. The various vehicles belonging to the other members
of the newly formed militia came to a stop. The men and women
emptied into the parking lot, creating a seemingly impenetrable
line of rifles, shotguns, and handguns. One at a time, the
prisoners dropped to their knees and assumed a well-rehearsed
position: face down, arms outspread, ankles crossed.

Ken stepped even closer. “We don’t have a
judge here in this little town, so you four are stuck with me. I
find you guilty.”

He shot each of them in the back of the
head.

The men and women of the Moose Creek Militia
were stunned. From in their midst, Buddy clapped. Soon, everyone
was applauding and cheering.

Karen pulled Marilyn aside and asked, “Why
did you wait so long to shoot, Marilyn? You let that guy get
awfully close to you!”

Marilyn cast her eyes down sheepishly and
replied, “I’m a terrible shot, and I didn’t want to miss!”

* * *

Ken sat in the passenger’s seat in the cab of
the flatbed truck, with Bob Lakeland behind the wheel. Their
gruesome cargo was covered with a tarp.

“Sheriff, I’m not asking
if
you will
take these criminals back, I’m asking you where you want them,” Ken
explained over the radio to Sheriff Lacey.

“No
you
don’t understand! We will not
keep these bodies.”

There was a short pause.

“Yes,
bodies
. Every last one of those
scum are dead. We lost four good people in Moose Creek, plus
whoever these guys killed along the way. It was unanimous that you
get them back. If you don’t tell me where to take them, Bill, I’m
going to dump them right here and right now.”

* * *

What we didn’t know when all this started,
was
who
the gang was comprised of. Marquette has a maximum
security prison where the worst of the offenders are kept. With
limited resources in the county, some of the prisoners were out on
a work crew, clearing snow, freeing up fire-hydrants and shoveling
roofs for seniors. They killed the single guard who was assigned to
watch them, buried him in a snow bank and took off. Approximately
two dozen of them raided an RV store, leaving with winter gear,
helmets and eighteen four-wheelers and snow-mobiles after killing
the entire staff. From there, they overwhelmed the two armed guards
at the sporting goods store and cleaned out the stock of high
powered rifles, filling knapsacks with all the ammo that would fit.
Two of the younger prisoners took turns raping the young girl
behind the counter before beating her and leaving her for dead. She
survived, barely, and will need reconstructive surgery that just
isn’t available anymore.

The prisoners had cut across to the loop that
bypasses downtown, avoiding the local police. When they came to the
National Guard roadblock, they must have figured something up that
road was worth protecting and started their unopposed rampage.
There was no way for them to know the roadblock wasn’t to protect
anything, it was meant to keep people on the other side
out
not in. Because these prisoners were from lower Michigan, they
didn’t know that once they started their northward trek of
destruction, there was no place to go once they got here—no place
except to go back to the waiting law enforcement. Clearly they
hadn’t counted on the resistance they were to encounter. Had they
turned south instead of north, they might have been
unstoppable.

JOURNAL ENTRY: February 7

It’s been eight days since The Wheelers
attacked us and we defeated them. The defeat was good and
necessary, but it came at a great cost. Not only the four lives,
two of them very close to me, but part of the cost was our
innocence as a town, as a community.

I’m still sweeping up glass. Thankfully the
glass door-wall was not one of the casualties, though the dining
room window was and now we are lacking in natural light. The other
window was in the hall and it was dark there anyway. Someday I hope
that we can replace the glass. Jason and John scavenged some
plywood from the barn to cover the outside and there was enough of
the roll of metallic insulation to piece together a covering for
the inside to keep out the drafts and cold. It’s still only
February, and March is and always has been our heaviest snowfall
month.

Over the past several days, we’ve had another
six inches of purifying snow. It’s cleaned up the mess on the road.
The ATVs that were left by the wayside are now mounds and formless
humps and have taken on shapes that Jacob thinks look like giant
turtles. At some point I’m sure the dealership will be out to
reclaim them. Meanwhile they are a reminder to me of some horrible
times.

* * *

We buried Don and Nancy in a single grave in
the Moose Creek Cemetery last Monday. I would rather have buried
them in one of her flower beds, but because of the deep frost line
there is no digging in February here and Pete already had several
graves pre-dug. Immediately after the burial, Jason went into Don’s
house to secure it. I knew why he waited. He loved his uncle and it
would have been impossible for him to be there with them still in
the middle of the kitchen. He got the woodstove fired up and then
drained all the pipes of water. Don always kept a couple gallons of
RV antifreeze, which Jason found in the basement after a great deal
of searching. Don wasn’t always the most organized person. With the
pipes drained and the traps full of antifreeze, Jason stoked up the
fire, and then dampened it down for a slow burn.

Jason is now considering moving into Don’s
house. There is a two-year supply of wood for the woodstove so they
would have heat. One of the freezers is still full of food, partly
with jugs of ice that have been frozen outside. My brother did an
excellent job keeping the freezer intact. What canned goods were
left he had brought out of the basement and lined the bookshelves
to keep them from freezing. Pork & beans, soups and pasta
sauces now took the place of the encyclopedia, novels and
cookbooks. When I asked Jason why he wanted to move, he said it
might be better if John and I had more privacy. They would still
come over for dinner though, and I would bake for them. John
grumbled about taking on Jason’s chores, but Jason just
laughed.

I’m still not sure the move is a good
idea.

On the bright side, we were delightfully
surprised yesterday by the arrival of another food warehouse truck
at the township hall. When I questioned the driver about it, he
looked at the paperwork and pointed out that our shipment was
classified to be recurring. Recurring, meaning every month we would
be getting food now! The relief flooded through me and we quickly
refilled our near empty tables with fresh supplies.