Defiance (The Defending Home Series Book 1) (17 page)

Johnny turned to find him, a thin trail of blood running from his left nostril. He was a little slower now, his mouth open, gasping for air. The fat man was starting to tire. And yet on Johnny came, his fists down by his sides.

“Keep your hands up,” Zach said, as he landed another strong jab. Johnny’s head snapped back. He was a tank with one speed and direction, forward, and Zach was using his own momentum against him. Zach landed two more shots to the belly when he heard something in Johnny’s belly crack. The fat man let out a hail of wild punches, connecting a couple of shots on Zach’s body and face. The pain was searing, but somehow Zach enjoyed it. A primal reminder that he was still alive.

Now Johnny was really starting to slow down. He’d given up pursuing the elusive Zach, stopping to plant his hands on his hips, his chest heaving in and out. And that subtle wince whenever Johnny drew in a breath wasn’t lost on Zach.

Slowly, the roles were beginning to shift. Zach began moving in, going for the broken rib, winding his opponent even further. After a final devastating shot to his busted ribs, Johnny threw up a hand to call it, but Zach wasn’t done. And not even Johnny’s crew was ready to save their leader. He’d broken the golden rule, that you never ever surrendered, and Zach knew it was time to finish him.

With Johnny’s body shattered, Zach switched focus to the man’s face, pummeling it mercilessly. A few moments later, Johnny fell to the floor where Zach began kicking him.

That was when something extraordinary happened. The other bikers moved in. But not to help Johnny. One by one they each took turns stomping the man who had once been their leader and was now little more than a red pulp. Without a word spoken, Zach understood what had happened. There’d been a changing of the guard. Their new leader had just been elected.

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A
fter a short break for target practice, Dale and the others headed back to work. He was making some progress with the Remington, growing more at ease with operating the bolt and reloading it under pressure, all while landing rounds on target. As with anything else, becoming a good shooter had more to do with muscle memory and practice than it did any natural or innate talent.

When it was his turn to watch the others, he’d been impressed with Brooke’s speed at changing magazines on her pistol. Even Nicole and Shane, who tended to spend the least amount of time on their improvised range, had gotten better.

If there was another confrontation—Dale stopped himself.
When
there was another confrontation, he hoped all this time spent honing their skills would pay off.

Walter was beside him walking in his slow and deliberate way. The man’s energy and spirit was that of someone half his age and Dale was often left scratching his head that Walter was such a hard worker. Colton wasn’t too far behind him in that department. The kid was something of a racehorse, full of energy and firing off in all directions. Once his untamed and somewhat unpredictable nature was reined in, as it had been over these last few days, it was amazing what he could accomplish.

Dale glanced over. Next to him, Walter was deep in thought.

“Are you thinking about the defensive additions we’re making to the property?” Dale asked.

Walter shook his head. “No, I was a lot further away than that. Back at Chosin Reservoir.”

The name sounded somewhat familiar. “Where is that? New Mexico?”

The old man laughed. “No, it’s in Korea.”

“You were thinking about the war,” Dale said, not sure if he should press any further.

“Get to be my age and you can’t help but go there sometimes. Usually little things trigger it, like the look on someone’s face or a word they use.”

“What was it about Chosin Reservoir that sticks out the most?” Dale asked, eyeing the empty enclosure where his milking goats used to live.

“I remember our battalion was stationed at the top of a hill. There were so many in Korea, each named and numbered, that one tends to flow into the next. It was the night we were attacked by the Chinese. Outnumbered more than ten to one, we watched in awe as they streamed over the hills and through the valleys like ants. Anywhere you shot you were pretty much guaranteed to hit one, but there were so many it didn’t seem to matter. We were watching a tsunami rolling toward us with nothing but terror in our hearts.”

Dale felt terror in his own heart just listening. “What’d you do?”

“The only thing we could. We ran for our lives and nearly lost them in the process.”

“Is that what you think will happen here?” Dale asked. “That we’ll be overwhelmed and destroyed?”

Walter grew quiet and finally said, “I sure hope not.”

They reached the garage where they had already started piling the sandbags they would use for the second-story firing positions. Next to them were pieces from dismantled bed frames. After the most recent attack, Dale had decided that mattresses in each bedroom should be laid directly on the floor. The metal from the frames would be cut up and sharpened into points for use in the booby traps they’d begun setting around the property.

These last few days, Brooke and Nicole had dug holes at key points around the house.

Dale had asked Walter to lay out what he felt was a likely plan of attack should Randy and his deputies decide to hit them again. It was a strategy often overlooked when setting up home defense, but one that might turn out to be vital. As Walter explained it, when you understood where your enemy would take cover, you knew where to place your traps and lines of fire.

The three they employed were pitfalls, Apache foot traps and gun traps. The pitfalls were each about three to four feet deep and lined along the bottom with sharpened metal or wooden spikes. A flimsy cover resting on a simple hinge would swing away under the slightest pressure. The resulting fall and impalement might not be enough to kill a man, but it would certainly knock the fight out of him and leave him with a gushing foot wound.

The Apache foot traps operated along similar lines. A cylindrical hole was burrowed into the ground and wooden or metal stakes placed at a downward angle around the edges. Acting like a set of curved carnivorous teeth, they would keep an attacker’s foot impaled in place until one of the good guys finished them off.

And finally there were the gun traps. Take an old weathered shotgun or rifle that had been sawed down to its smallest possible size and attach it to a wooden or metal plate next to a firing pin. Loaded with a single shot and activated by a tripwire, it was sure to incapacitate anyone who crossed its path.

As for the barbed wire, Dale quickly realized there wouldn’t be enough time to encircle the two-acre area around the immediate house. Instead, they decided to focus on the front yard, reinforcing what they had in order to push raiders toward predesignated kill zones.

Other pieces of wire were strung between pinion trees on the outskirts of the property along ATV routes attackers might use if approaching the house from the rear. The more they kept the bad guys off balance and kept them questioning their every step, the less time the bad guys would be focused on shooting at the defenders—in this case, Dale’s family.

The house itself was also coming along, perhaps a little more slowly than Dale would have liked. More than half of the overhanging porch had been pulled down with much of the wood reused as shuttering for the windows.

This wasn’t accomplished by simply hammering sheets of plywood up against the window frames. The first step meant venting the window sashes. Holes drilled into three quarter inch thick plywood were then fitted with twelve inch carriage bolts. Inside the house, the set up was braced by 2 by 4s, drilled with holes. The bolts were then fed through the plywood outside and mated with nuts and two three-inch flat washers inside. The end result was that even someone with a chainsaw would have a real tough time cutting through, providing the defenders several valuable moments to deal with the threat.

Windows and doorways had turned out to be one of their major vulnerabilities and Dale wanted to ensure the problem was eliminated as soon as possible. With so much to do and so little time in which to do it, the challenge was seeing projects through to completion.

Dale left the garage and found Colton and Walter working on the retractable stairs. When it was installed, this would be the main way in and out of the house. On the ground at their feet was rope and two pulleys Colton had found in the barn. The system would need to be both sturdy and dependable.

“How’s it coming along?” Dale asked them. They had only just restarted after the short break to sharpen their firing skills.

“If you want the stairs to lower over the garage and sit parallel to the pumphouse,” Colton said, “then we’re gonna need to tear out the wall beneath your bedroom window.”

Dale scratched at the hair on his chin. “That window’s served me mighty well so far as a shooting position. I’d hate to lose it.”

“We can always attach it somewhere along the back of the house instead if you prefer,” Walter said as he sawed a thick piece of board. “Either way, someone’s bedroom is about to become the new front door.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Dale told them. He got himself some water from a nearby bucket. “We can always have some people place their beds somewhere on the first floor.”

“There’s something else I’ve been meaning to mention,” Walter said.

“I’m all ears.”

“It’s the one contingency we haven’t planned for at all: fire.”

“I’ve got three or four fire extinguishers in the house,” Dale told him.

“That’s fine,” Walter replied. “But it won’t be enough if they come at us with Molotov cocktails.”

Such a prospect was concerning, to say the least. “What do you suggest?”

Walter buried his forehead into the crook of his elbow to wipe away the sweat. “I say we use the two things we got plenty of: water and sand. Place buckets of each throughout the house. May not be much, but it’s the best we can do.”

Dale offered the hint of a smile. “Yet another thing to add to our list.”

Shane passed by just then, pushing a wheelbarrow with a thick roll of barbed wire. Dale grabbed a pair of gloves and went to give him a hand. The fence line in the front of the house would eventually need four or five horizontal rows of barbed wire if it was to prove an adequate enough deterrent. At the moment it only had two. It wouldn’t be long before the wire they had would run out, a complication Dale had seen coming, but one he’d thought he could overcome by trading with a neighbor for a few gallons of well water. Now that Sheriff Gaines and his deputies were working hard to discredit him, the ranks of traders coming every day had been reduced to little more than a trickle. While someone like Billy might be flush with bathroom accessories, others specialized in a range of useful items. A large pool of traders was the key and thanks to Randy, that was exactly what Dale was missing.

Cruising along that same train of thought, Dale couldn’t help wondering whether Sandy had had something to do with helping to spread those lies. It seemed hard to believe, given that false accusations had led to their breakup. But who knew what kind of pressure she was under nowadays, with Randy breathing down her neck, dangling their past over her head like a noose.

Dale removed the wire and tossed it on the ground.

“You pissed about something?” Shane asked indelicately.

Apart from Sandy and his diminishing reputation, there was plenty Dale had to be angry about. Foremost among them were the deaths of his two milking goats and seven of his ten chickens. They’d relied on each of those animals to keep them strong and healthy. Working nearly fifteen- to eighteen-hour days, they burned a lot of calories that needed to be replaced. It had meant breaking into some of the canned food set aside as a last resort. Why eat out of a tin when you had access to fresh eggs, milk and vegetables? 

“I came home yesterday and you were gone,” Dale said. He left out the part about finding the livestock dead, although the loss and mystery of who had done it was weighing on all of them.

“I went to get more four-inch nails,” Shane replied. He was wearing a tight-fitting white t-shirt which showed off his muscles, but was also starting to brown from the dust and the muck.

“Nails? I thought we had plenty left.”

Shane shook his head. “Not four-inch ones.” He held one up as if to prove his point. “Why, what’s the big deal?”

Dale grabbed the end of the wire and walked backwards, pulling it lengthwise. “No big deal, I just don’t understand where you went. It isn’t as if you can make a trip to Sal’s Hardware anymore and there isn’t a Home Depot for fifty miles, not that it would help if there was.”

“I got them from someone’s house,” Shane admitted, rushing through the explanation, as though Dale wouldn’t be able to follow.

“You know I’m not crazy about you breaking into people’s houses.”

Shane pulled hard on his end of the wire. It straightened out, bowing and vibrating between them. From a certain angle, it might have appeared as though they were having a tug of war.

“I hope you’re not bringing up any ancient history,” Shane said, growing upset. “’Cause those two aren’t related in any way, shape or form.”

During high school, Shane and two of his friends had been caught by Joe Wilcox breaking into an elderly couple’s home. Their father had been furious, but more than that, he’d been crushed. He was an upright, honorable man and the thought of his son acting like a thief, well, it had just about killed him. Shane had gotten a whooping, of course, as he should have. But the old man had never forgotten what had happened and neither had Shane.

“Our reputation’s already under attack,” Dale said, “we shouldn’t be doing anything that puts it further at risk.”

Shane tied his end around the wooden post while Dale did the same. “The only one with a reputation problem around here seems to be you.”

Dale stopped long enough to glare at his brother. “You believe the crap Sheriff Gaines is spreading?”

Shane grew quiet.

“Because it’s complete hogwash. He’s saying whatever he can to turn folks away from us.”