Sue fired one shot at a time again, twisting in her seat to draw a bouncing bead on each rider. They were surprised she had more ammo or another gun and attempted to pull back. With her third shot, one bike fell to the side, slid along the pavement with the howl of metal on concrete. The rider rolled over and over a dozen times, it seemed to me. The other pulled up and went back to his friend.
There was nobody to stop us at the Interstate ramp. We roared through the intersection at sixty and then we left the city behind. We had an open road ahead, even if there were a couple of turns that scared me. Within a minute or two, we were on a two-lane road that twisted and wound along the shoreline of the bay, a hundred yards or more from the water.
Three miles later, I slowed and turned down a driveway to the left. A mailbox had a name printed in sloppy black paint on rust, so there was a house down there—or had been one. We couldn’t see it. We rolled slowly down the rutted driveway. Before the house came into view, I ran the bike into a thick stand of underbrush that hid us. We raced back to within a few yards of the main road.
I grabbed my gun from Sue, motioned for her to stay put. I used my foot to smudge the telltale tire tracks in the dirt. It was taking too long, so I dropped to my knees and used both hands to smooth the dirt, working backward. The motorcycle’s tire track almost disappeared.
As I entered the foliage, the sounds of at least four dirt bikes came down the road from the direction we’d come. The engines roared, but the bikes came at a slow pace as they searched for us. The riders raced their engines with the clutches pulled to make all the noise. They sounded mean. Angry. Probably their intent was to scare us.
I couldn’t tell if any of them was the survivor of their encounter with Sue. She was at my side, reloading her weapon and mine. Her fumbling fingers had dropped several rounds, but we ignored them.
“What do we do?” She asked.
I held up my twenty-two. “Nothing, until one of them comes down the driveway. They think we went on ahead but they could come back and make a more careful search.”
They had continued on past us until the sounds of their bikes nearly faded to nothing. Then, shots rang out. Rifles and pistols. A dozen or more shots in all. A small war had broken out.
The motorcycle engines again grew louder, but they didn’t return as fast as they had gone—and that reinforced my thoughts. The pitch of the bikes had changed, too. The time to return seemed twice as long. Then longer. Only three of them came into sight far down the road. There were three, not four, and I assumed one had been shot and left behind. At each driveway, which was not many, one motorcycle left the main road while the others took turns waiting.
They were looking for signs of us, often two driveways or small access roads at the same time, always leaving one man on the pavement to prevent us from fleeing. A fleeting thought of trying to escape on our motorcycle occurred and was quickly vanquished for one reason. I was not a good rider.
“Three against one,” Sue said from my side, so close she was pushing me into the open. Her trembling was a vibration of fear.
They were still a few hundred yards away when I turned to her and took her by the shoulders. “No, three against two. And those are much better odds. But if one of them comes down this driveway alone, we’ll be here waiting. That will make it two against two.”
“You’ll shoot him without warning? In cold blood?”
I gave her a stiff nod. That was another new rule we lived by. I’d give him the same chance that he gave us. I said in a voice so lacking in humanity it chilled me. “A good man a few weeks ago would never do what I’m about to. If that makes me less, so be it.”
“What are you going to do?”
With my heart deadened, I pointed to a place across the driveway and nearer the road. Vines and briars tangled in a mass as tall as a person. Around that grew various weeds and grasses, almost waist-high. “You go over there. Lie down. They’ll never see you. Wait until I shoot, then come up firing at the one waiting up on the road. No warning shouts. Just shoot. Don’t hesitate.”
“We could order them away.”
“The second they see you, or what I’m going to do, they will begin shooting. But even if a warning would send them away, they’d return with a dozen more. If it makes you feel better, wait until one of them shoots me dead, then start defending yourself.”
She stood as if her feet had grown roots, her face paler than its normal tan. Just as I was about to speak again, to apologize for my abruptness, she spun and sprinted across the driveway to where I’d told her to wait.
I knew depending on a fourteen-year-old to defend my life was crazy in the best of circumstances. I planned for the worst when I slipped closer to the driveway near an old stone planter in the shape of a wishing well. Round rocks had been cemented in a ring a few feet in diameter, a sagging decorative wood roof was almost hidden by vines and creepers.
From there, the driveway was about twenty feet away, the road fifty. I got down to my left knee and bent lower. Not because I was going to watch them approach, but because when I stood, it needed to be quick, so quick the nearest rider would have no chance to react.
One bike was investigating a side road and was out of sight. Two of them rode together directly at us. From the peek at the road I’d chanced, only the two were in sight. Their bikes growled as if trying to wake the dead. At the top of the driveway where we hid, one ordered the other to search it for signs of us, at least that was the way I interpreted the body language and the pointed finger.
One wearing a jean jacket and black, shiny boots that rose almost to his knees turned into the driveway. I double-checked my little twenty-two again. The safety was off. The PVC silencer in place.
The rider came down the road slowly. The bike pulled to a halt, the driver bent to examine something in the dirt, probably a footprint one of us had left, or a partial imprint from our motorcycle tire. The rider planted both feet beside his bike and started to turn and call to his friend that he had found something.
My shot traveled only twenty feet and struck his helmet near the earhole. The sound was a bit like a quiet clap of the hands. My mind registered that the silencer worked.
No matter, the twenty-two fell from my hands into the dirt as I pulled the nine-millimeter free from my holster. My finger was on the trigger to shoot the rider on the road in his chest as it came to bear on the other rider.
Sue’s gun fired first. Her bullet struck his head. We’d have to talk about the certainty of firing at the center of mass later. Headshots are for zombie video games. Then I remembered I’d just made one too.
With the sounds of the shots, the third motorcycle was coming our way. We couldn’t see him yet but heard the roar of his engine. He would come at us at full speed.
The first biker to fall, had a rifle in a scabbard probably originally intended for a horse saddle. It was attached to the bike’s frame with white zip-ties. I darted out and pulled the rifle free. The wooden stock was heavy, old, and in my impression was that it was well-used. It had a scope.
The rifle was bolt-action. Not knowing if a shell was in the chamber, I worked the slide. From the corner of my eye, I saw one shell ejected in a blur of brass. Another loaded as I worked the slide forward. As the rifle butt hit my shoulder, the scope revealed the man on the oncoming bike, leaning low over the handlebars. A quick glance over the top of the scope told me he was about a hundred yards away, a doable shot for a rifleman.
Doable and certain are totally different values when my life is depending on it. As excited and revolted as I felt, I’d never hit him at that distance. I lifted the rifle again. The rider came back into view on the scope, closer already, a handgun clearly visible. He was not looking at me, but at Sue.