“Evacuation? Do you believe that nonsense?”
“I don’t know what to believe, Harland. I’m just telling you what the man told me.”
As the coop manager and Harland exchanged words, four others, including two women, scrambled out onto the headhouse floor. All shouldered arms and toted small boxes of ammunition stuffed into their garments. The new arrivals pressed close to listen to the conversation. Harland switched into command mode now that he had an audience.
“Okay, the plan wasn’t to confront them directly. I thought everyone would put up a front for a while. That’s over. But the plan is still intact. From here we can control what happens on the tracks down below and to the grain in these bins. If we have to fire on them to chase the crews from the tracks, we’ll get return fire, says Jim. Stay away from the steel walls. They’re not thick enough to stop anything. Get down on the floor. There’s heavy reinforced concrete in the elevator towers, and that should stop just about anything from reaching us. If they send up tear gas, it would be pretty tough to get it in here. But if they do, just run all the way down to the headhouse end down there and wait until the air clears on this side.”
For an hour, the little resistance force in the headhouse peered out the east end window to watch the proceedings below. A throaty rumble from a diesel locomotive some distance away reached the headhouse and the farmers watched as the train inched its way toward the elevator silos. Several figures below walked ahead of the train, as if inspecting the track. In short order, they came upon the gap in the rails and flagged the train to a stop.
In the old rail car behind the flatcar, a door opened in the side of the body and figures disgorged, nearly a dozen of them, hands laden with goods.
“Will you look at that,” stammered Harland. “They brought track tools with them. Damn, they’re going to knit that rail back together. That isn’t going to happen.”
The farmer hoisted a rifle off the floor and loaded rounds one by one into it. As the last bullet slipped into place, the man-lift motor whirred to life again.
“Percy, go over there, throw the lift breaker off and find out who the hell is trying to come up.”
Harland turned to the window again as his friend hustled over to the man-lift shaft. Bliss peered over the lip of the floor and flipped the breaker to an open setting to cut power to the lift. He could see little down the shaft, but he heard the mumble of voices rising up from far below. Whoever was below left the lift boarding area rapidly.
From the window, the little band of protesters observed several figures bolt from the coop office and out to the individuals at the train. Below, a hasty meeting convened then people vanished abruptly, dodging behind the train and boarding the work car.
“Why are they leaving?” a farmwoman in a red, white and blue NASCAR jacket asked.
“They’re not,” Harland said. “They’re taking cover.”
A loud male voice, projected from a bullhorn, rang through the corrugated metal enclosure: “Please leave your post in the tower. You have five minutes to exit the building and show yourself. Put any firearms down before you exit the building. You have five minutes. If you fail to leave, you will be driven out. You have five minutes.”
Eyes darted from face to face among the little group.
“What do we do?” asked Jim Bottomly.
Harland wiped a hand over his mouth. “If any of you want to leave, leave now. Get down the lift. I figure they are going to try to launch some tear gas up here. It could get mighty unpleasant if they do. So if you want to go, go.”
Without saying a word, Jim and one of the couples retreated along the headhouse floor and reached the man-lift. The coop manager threw the breaker, stepped onto one of the mobile platforms and disappeared. The couple followed shortly afterward. Harland looked at the three others who remained and thanked them for staying.
The threesome that dropped down the man-lift shaft soon walked from the front door of the coop. A figure at the train ran the tracks to meet them, stopped for a moment, and then hustled the trio away. Peering cautiously from the window, staying back from the light so that he stood in shadow, Harland strained to try to see if Guard members were taking up positions so they might have a shot at the headhouse window, but he could make out nothing to cause alarm. He turned and motioned for the others to retreat down the narrow headhouse floor to the other end of the complex. The three slipped away, ducking heavy suspended electric motors, distribution piping, mammoth valves and assorted headhouse machinery.
Harland stood alone to one side of the window, resuming his vigil. Cold prairie breeze moaned about the eves of the place, but the wind did nothing to move the seconds along. Spittle in the farmer’s mouth turned to stiff taffy.
Wham! The steel corrugation just above and to the left of the window opening buckled under the force of a blunt projectile. The instant it hit, an explosive pop thundered down the metal headhouse. The vista outside the building disappeared in a cloud of white.
The noise, the suddenness of it, made the farmer recoil violently from the window. Harland lost his footing and sprawled into the heavy grain dust in one corner of the long room. Above him, acrid smoke curled up into the steel superstructure, leaving the air at the floor clear.
A moment later an object sliced into the headhouse rafters and exploded. Harland filled his lungs to bursting with clear air, picked himself up and ran, eyes closed, through a whiteout of gases, feeling for obstructions with the barrel of his rifle. In a minute he stumbled into the company of Percy Bliss and the others huddled beneath a window at the far end of the loft. Harland turned to the wall, looking for an electrical switch. Steel conduit ran away from a switch nearby and up the wall into the peak of the headhouse. There, in the dim light, could be seen a huge ventilation fan, its louvers closed. The farmer slammed the switch with his free hand and the fan blades well above them began to turn.
“Praise Jesus, there’s still power,” Harland yelled.
Within seconds the big industrial fan blades were a blur, forcing the louvers open and pulling great volumes of air down the length of the headhouse.
Crouched beneath the window, the little band of dissidents watched as the white cloud of tear gas filling the opposite end of the headhouse coiled like rope and lifted into the rafters on a river of streaming air spawned by the roaring exhaust fan. It would take only minutes, Harland estimated, for the headhouse to cleanse itself of noxious fumes.
“We’ve won this round,” the Swede boasted.
Chapter One Hundred-Three
An antique railroad brakeman’s lantern, threaded with a wick and topped off with vegetable oil, barely illuminated the cavernous confines of one of the two fermentation rooms in the buildings of the defunct Sweet Spring Brewery. Abel set the lantern on the pitted concrete floor amid sections of piping resting between two twenty-foot-tall stainless steel fermentation tanks. The huge vessels, two of ten standing in the cold, unused sanctuary, lined the walls in parallel rows, each one tucked tight against its neighbor. Each one held thousands of gallons of beer, but there wasn’t a drop of drink anywhere.
In the weak light of the lamp, the great tanks seemed to Abel to be huge living beings standing in lines in the dark awaiting instructions. He would give them something to do, he, Max and Oleg.
The men retreated from the tank room, disappeared into the night, and ran to the lakeshore to haul a heavily-loaded canoe ashore. From the craft they pulled ropes and belt harnesses. Fastened into the slings, they put their weight into the ropes. The canoe slid forward, sliding easily on the ash and frozen sleet layers despite the great weight of clumsy metal cargo it carried.