Around 8 a.m., his men back up in Montana radioed. Best as they could tell, the entire attack had been carried out by two men on bicycles. Bicycles? Perhaps their heat signals had mimicked those of deer. Were his men that stupid? It seemed one man had been perched up on a ledge while the other had done the ground level fighting. There were two bullet holes through each windshield from the Americans’ guns, and one of the trucks had a shattered driver-side window from a larger caliber gun. In all, they found twenty-two American shell casings. So they are capable of missing. The attack seemed to be over quick.
Eddie ordered them to get down here fast and meet him and the rest of the men in Deadwood.
Around 10 a.m., the other two companies departed Spearfish towards the neighboring towns of Deadwood and Lead with Eddie, Lazzo, and fifty-four of their men accompanying them. When they drove into Deadwood, it was already burning, as was Lead. Drones had been flying over Spearfish and Rapid City all morning, and troops that had reached the Wyoming state line last night had passed back through this area already. Figuring those troops must have set the fires and moved on, the other two companies continued south towards Custer. Eddie told the other officers that he was waiting for some of his men and he’d be heading back across the state when they arrived. He thanked them for allowing him to tag along and wished them luck.
His four trailing men arrived a little before noon. But instead of heading east, Eddie and his men broke off west towards Newcastle, Wyoming.
Outside Newcastle, minutes before 1 p.m., Eddie swerved his jeep to the side of the road. Something had been bothering him since they’d left Deadwood, and he finally figured out what it was. For those fires to have been raging as they were around noon and to still have so much fuel to burn, they would have had to been set to burn in stages and to have only recently been lit, or to just have been bombed by the drones. The drones wouldn’t have bombed a town troops would be passing through in a few hours. None of these military companies presumably had ever set a staged fire, nor would they have known how or wanted to. They wouldn’t have been intent on salvaging anything. They would have simply fueled and torched it all. Seeing no one else there, the officers had made incorrect assumptions and moved on. They didn’t care who had done it. It was done.
Eddie, on the other hand, had been so eager for an excuse to break off from those troops he’d only been thinking about his own cover. The Americans couldn’t have known what Eddie was up to, but they could have anticipated the other troops moving on. That fire was controlled, built, and staged to direct the other companies the fastest possible way out of town. The faster they cleared out, the faster the Americans could follow them out.
The arsonists had been hiding in plain sight. “Damn it!” Eddie screamed, pounding the dashboard. Not again.
When that truck drove past the cemetery, we knew it was too late to run. The sun was coming up, and the drones would start flying soon. We couldn’t get out of town fast enough, and we couldn’t stay here in the open. In Wes’s opinion, there was only one thing we could do. Burn the city, our way, before the soldiers came and did it. Blake had plenty of experience staging fires. It sounded like a plan.
We pulled the trucks through the huge front doors of the Gold Rush Casino directly into the main lobby. We searched the manager’s office and found the combination for the vault. Given its enormous size, we were able to pull the trucks directly into the vault as well. (This was the perfect opportunity for a “better safe than sorry” line, but I held my tongue.) We unloaded the millions in bills now worth more as toilet paper, and set it up to burn once we saw the first troops. Danny, Cameron, and Wes headed out around the town to start fires in the main buildings lining the major streets. They started them on the top floors so the fire would burn down slower, and we parked and torched cars on as many side streets as possible to direct passing troops on through. We waited to set the casino fire until Cameron came racing into town from the north, informing us a ton of troops were coming from Spearfish. We set the money and furniture in the lobby on fire, and crammed into the vault together. We hid as the casino burnt down around us, causing a chain reaction fire down both sides of the street. These fires, as intended, burnt much more quickly. As the troops came through town, it was pretty obvious there was nothing left to find here, so they kept moving. The drones had passed overhead a few times as well, but the fires gave them no reason to bomb the town and largely blotted out our thermal existence. It was a brilliant plan in concept, and as we headed south out of town shortly after noon, we knew it would be equally brilliant in reality, if no one were looking for us behind them.
The risk in this plan, of course, was the chance we’d be wrong, that someone would figure it out and we’d get caught in the middle of a ton of enemy troops. Given that they could likely communicate with the drones and with each other via radio, we knew that would mean the end for us.
We followed the troops all the way down to Hill City, and then Tara guided us through the back roads to her farm in the canyon behind Horse Thief Lake, two and a half miles from Mount Rushmore. We had never intended to go all the way there, but none of us would have settled for anything less at this point. Tara and Emily wouldn’t be safe traveling on their own. They’d never make it. Besides, I was still hoping she’d change her mind and stay with us. Of course, I wasn’t going to say that aloud.
If her husband wasn’t there though, we all asserted that we couldn’t just leave her. She had to come with us then. Strangely that seemed to make her even more uncomfortable. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t want to stay with us at that point, and clearly Danny couldn’t either. Tara said, “That wasn’t it” but that didn’t answer the question for me. So what was it then? Why not stay with us?
Outside of Hayley, Cameron, and Kate, Danny didn’t trust people much, and there was something about Tara I knew had gained his attention, something he wasn’t quite comfortable with. But he’d never say a word until he was certain, in any case, so for right now he just watched.
TWENTY-SEVEN: (Ryan) “Death is Taxing”
Danny was named after his grandfather. Obviously. Their full names are the same, although my Daniel James has gone by Danny since birth. As our firstborn, he was our pride and joy.
He’d tell you he was our guinea pig, as first children tend to be. Parents learn how and how not to parent through their first child. We’re all amateurs then, especially us guys. Okay, especially me. For instance, I’ve learned Halloween candy should not be stored in a child’s bedroom, or in the backseat with an unsupervised child on a long car ride. Mountain Dew, as much as it might work to calm down Sophie, never calmed a five year old. Slingshots in the house near the big-screen TV are a terrible idea. Even the Nerf ones. Grandparents are always eager to dole out advice, buy awful clothes, give disapproving looks when you allow something they never would have, and, as soon as you’re gone, question whether you have any idea what you’re doing. No, we don’t. But as a parent, ultimately, your children are yours, and for better or worse, they are stuck with you.
Danny was an easy baby. While he never seemed to sleep, he also never seemed to cry. He was the spitting image of Sophie, and the two of them had a bond he and I never were able to replicate. But Sophie would have told you he idolized me, and I could do no wrong by him until, of course, I did. Eight years after Hayley was born, when Danny was ten, we had another child, a boy named Logan. Logan died in his sleep of a form of SIDS days before his second birthday. It was our greatest loss as parents, and neither of us handled it well. Sophie went into a shell and since I wasn’t home when it happened I blamed her for not saving Logan. How could she have let this happen? Like it was in any way her choice. I insisted she had to have done something wrong. Daily fights and blame games gradually became weekly ones as I withdrew more and more from the home, from the kids, and from Sophie. In a screaming fight a year after he died, she broke down completely. She admitted the night he died she’d had a few glasses of wine and fell asleep on the couch downstairs with the monitor upstairs in our bedroom. He could have cried, and she’d have never heard him. She blamed herself for his death. “Does that make you feel better?” she’d screamed.