Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy) (6 page)

“I’ll try
not to.”

A
minute passed. There was silence and then the sound of footsteps on the front steps.

Please God let them all come in the front
, he prayed silently.

The door opened
slowly. Two men entered and he waited until he had them side by side. He pulled the two triggers of the shotgun in succession and the two men flew out the door, bumping into the three men on the stairs behind them. Quickly he put down the shotgun and picked up the BAR. He had left it hot. All he had to do was squeeze the trigger.

He squeezed off
several three-round bursts at the men and then through the wooden walls of the house. He knew the metal jacketed rounds would go through wood as easily as butter.

There were screams and moans from outside. Will
went to the window to look. All five were down, but two were still moving. What to do? He couldn’t leave creatures like these alive to attack them later—kill them right in front of Mary? He still had half the BAR magazine, but only three others full in reserve. They might need them another day—

Obligingly, the last two men stopped moving. He motioned to Mary to stay down.

“I think I got them all.”

Her face looked white and pinched.

He went out. The first two he had hit with the twelve gauge buckshot had died almost immediately, their chests blown wide open, the whole front soaked in blood. On the ground at the foot of the steps lay the other three, holed neatly by the .30 .06 rounds of the BAR. He looked carefully at their faces. Their eyes were open but flat and lifeless, since without a heartbeat there was no pressure inside the eye. Their eyes were the deadest part of them.

He straightened up and blew out his breath.

“Well
--” he said. He saw no firearms, just the machetes and some nasty-looking fighting knives. Should he feel bad about that? They had been way overmatched by the firearms.

“Will, are you all right?”

“They’re all dead, Mary. Don’t come out.”

But she did come out.

“You can’t shelter me, Will. The world is full of dead people now. It’s something I will have to get used to seeing.”

In less than a week Fred and Samuel were back with the boy and the bikers had taken over two more small Amish Farms off the Stumptown Road. The Amish hadn’t really known how to deal with such a thing and were waiting for their bishop to return. They had set a watch, several men with loaded shotguns to try to keep the bikers from taking over more farms, but for the last few days, having found a store of bourbon whisky in a non Amish house on Stumptown, the bikers had been content with slaughtering the livestock for their daily barbecues. Their plans to actually work the farms had been forgotten.

When
Bishop Samuel heard about the takeover he was furious, but understood how his people had no knowledge of this kind of thing or how to react to violence of any kind.

“I think they did just fine,” Fred defended. “They set up a perimeter to contain these men and waited for their commander. You couldn’t expect them to mount a counterattack—even if they wanted to they have no idea how.”

“So how do we get rid of these men, preferably without harming them?” The bishop asked Fred.

Fred thought for a moment
, trying to become the man he had been fifteen years before, leading men in the arid hills of Afghanistan. But those had been trained men, even though they were just reservists who had wanted only to go home, they knew how to conduct themselves under fire as well as how to shoot and take cover, and if they had had any qualms about killing their fellow men, they kept it to themselves.

Now these Amish men with their antique shotguns and clunky rifles were looking to him to show them a way to free their land without bloodshed. How was he going to do that, with no sergeants to help him (every good officer learned quickly that the NCO’s were the soul of the Army and without them nothing got done right.)?

“I think we need to gain time. We could o
ffer to meet with them, show them we’re armed and ready to fight, but offer to let them keep those three farms if they will promise to leave the rest of the Community in peace.”

Fred was uncomfortably aware of how much that sounded like Neville Chamberlain leaving Munich in 1938, “Peace in our time,” he had declared, waving a piece of paper
-- his worthless treaty. But there had been no making peace with people like Hitler. But what to do here? These Amish men might be able to mount some sort of defense if they were attacked—he could work on that with them—but offensive operations? With men, most of whom could not bear to kill another human being and had no training in small unit tactics? How could that work? They could not take back the farms. Not now, maybe never.

The Bishop thought this over.
Fred was right. They needed time and perhaps these marauders could be contained. It was better than having to kill them. No matter what Fred had said the Bible said, he still believed in his heart it was wrong to kill a person under any circumstances. He knew most of the plainly dressed, hard-working men in the Amish Community felt much the same.

The next day both sides watched with raised eyebrows the arrival of Will and Mary on the now beat-up Honda.

Will’s back was still sore but several days of rest and hot packs had helped a lot and he was able to ride, though with more rest stops that he
had taken before.

The bikers were watching the Amish church where meeting took place from across the fields with binoculars and the Amish had various people with birding binoculars watching the bikers. The noise of the arriving Honda had caught the attention of all the viewing devices.
Tom and Jack thought it was a member of another motorcycle club that had been born here.  Bishop Samuel’s youngest son, Aaron, was shocked that the man circled in his binoculars looked so much like him.

Bishop Samuel, the Elders and Fred Goodman were all on the church steps when Will and Mary rode up on the Honda.
Will shut off the motor, got off and put down the kickstand. He helped Mary off and they stood together looking up at the gathering on the stairs.

Bishop Samuel could not have been more shocked if his oldest son had ridden in on an elephant and gotten down with a Hindu temple dancer.

“Hello, Papa, everyone. This is my friend, Mary.”

He could see things were much changed. There was
an English with the group, something never seen before. And almost all the men were armed, also most unusual. He looked into his father’s shocked face and waited for a reply.

“Who is that?” whispered Fred to one of the Elders.

“That is William, Samuel’s oldest son, who left our community many years ago. We have not seen him for a long time.”

The awkward silence continued. Samuel’s eyes were full but he couldn’t think what to say. He should shun this rebel deserter but his sudden appearance had filled him with feeling he thought he had gotten over. What should he do?

Seeing his distress, Fred said, “Well, I heard Jesus told of a prodigal son who finally came home. Aren’t we supposed to kill a fat calf and have a barbecue or something?”

No one laughed at Fred’s joke, but Samuel went down the few steps and embraced Will, saying, “Yes, yes. My long lost son is home. Let us welcome him. Let us have a feast today in his honor as was told in Jesus’ story.”

The son and the father and most of the onlookers were weeping at this biblical scene of reconciliation. Only Aaron, the youngest son, did not weep, and watched his older brother with hooded eyes.

For his part, Fred saw the BAR in the boot on the Honda and thought, well, maybe now between our own biker
Will and the BAR we have the gear to negotiate from strength with the bikers.

The bikers were watching the Amish have their fatted calf cookout that night and were very surprised to be invited. Or a few of them were anyway. A “delegation” as it was called in the note which Bishop Samuel sent with his younger son, Aaron.

“
You really want us to come?” Jack queried the nervous Aaron.

“Actually
we do. You need not fear. We are not people of violence, even though we have many new guns, and we would never harm a guest.”

“It’s not so much that,” Jack said. “We just wouldn’t want to be the skunk at the garden party, so to speak.”

Aaron had never been to a garden party or any other kind of party except weddings, but knowing for sure what a skunk was, he got Jack’s meaning.

“Well,” he said, sniffing th
e aroma of the bikers, “Maybe you could bathe before you come over. The feast is just starting. The meat is not even done yet.”

The other bikers hooted and laughed.

“Jack, the boy thinks you stink! He thinks we all stink! There will be two skunks at the garden party!”

“Well, we do kind of have a pungent
aspect to us,” Jack grinned. We have plenty of well water. Why not take a quick bath?”

How they all stared—a bath—

“Jack,” Tom said, “Maybe you’ve noticed the world crisis? Most folks don’t have water for drinking let alone bathing!”

“That’s true, Tom. Not that we were ever that much for baths when there was plenty of water. But the wells on the farms here give plenty of water. I’ll just pull up a bucket, soap up, and whoosh!
  By the way, you said y’all had new guns. Did that fellow on the Honda bring them?”

“The English, Frederick, he brought some, and my brother, William brought a special one for making war. My father wanted him to get rid of it but—“

“But what?” Jack asked.

Aaron became flustered and said nothing more. He was too naïve to know what he should say and what not.

“They think they might need it, that’s why,” answered Tom.

“They called it a ‘
bee aye are
,’” blurted Aaron.

The Bikers looked at each other.

“If they have a BAR now,” Jack said to Tom, “Maybe we ought to go talk things over. A gun like that in the right hands could really mess us up.”

The smell of the fatted calf wafted over early in the evening and Tom and Jack washed their faces and took off their shirts to take at least half a bath. Jack put on a clean white shirt that had been in his saddle bag since forever and put it on. The rest of the group looked on in astonishment as Jack was transformed into a real person.

“What?” Jack snarled at their slack-jawed faces.

No one answered. What was happening here? What was actually going to be negotiated over there?

They walked across the fields to the fire blazing near the church. All the Amish Community was there and they watched them approach with open curiosity.

As an Old Order Amish Community, Samuel’s people would have a glass of
schnapps
or even beer or wine from time to time. But this celebration brought out all the good stuff from all the cabinets. There was a table full of bottles and clean glasses, and after tense introductions Tom and Jack headed to familiar territory.

Fred was there with his wife and children and Will and Mary as well.

Bishop Samuel, Will and Fred and several of the elders joined them there. The bikers were suprised to hear what the Bishop had to say.

“There is no desire on our part to harm you or to expel you from the farms you already occupy. Will has told us of some experiences he had getting here and we are concerned that something
may be coming far worse than you.”

Jack and Tom looked at each other.

“Worse than us?” Jack quipped. “Is such a thing even possible?”

They all smiled, the whisky making them a little more amiable.

Will told him about the five men who had attacked the house.

“
So, you killed them?” Tom asked.

“Yes. There’s no reasoning with such –“

He didn’t really want to say “people” as he had convinced himself they were something less than that.

“And you think there may be more
of them—?” Tom asked.

15.

Many in the cities had died of hunger and thirst after all the food was gone from the stores, all the hoarded supplies exhausted, and all the bottles of mineral water drunk. All institutions had failed the people. Without any communications, neither the police nor the army had any command and control infrastructure, and after all the meals-ready-to-eat were gone the soldiers were no better off than anyone else. After a month there were groups quarreling over the scraps of civilization but no one knew what was going on even a few miles from where he was, or what might happen tomorrow.

After looking and not finding, many
people went to bed and stayed there to conserve energy, but ended up dying there. It didn’t matter much that the electrical storm had abated to the point that the
aurora borealis
now was only seen as far south as Boston or that you could now shake hands or touch another person without grounding yourself first to avoid a shock. Some vehicles might run if repaired properly but who could do that and where would you get parts? Everything was closed now, all supplies of everything gone, hidden, disappeared. Even the black market stopped working when it became clear that government issued paper money no longer had any value. You could buy with gold or silver, but who had enough of that to buy bread and potatoes every day?