Free Falling (11 page)

“Sorry about this, Seamus,” David said. “Did you hear him bark at all last night?”

Seamus only smiled.

David looked at the cows, then back at the dog. He hadn’t heard anything himself, but he had been so exhausted that his sleep had been more like a light coma than a slumber. The dog, if he had barked, would not have awakened him.

“Dierdre will know,” the old man said.

David nodded and turned to head back to the house.

“I’ll get the shovel,” he said. It didn’t look like he would be going home early today after all. He felt a wave of weariness and disappointment.

Sarah pulled the roast chicken out of the oven and set it on top of the cook stove. She had enough potatoes and garlic and wild rosemary to make a proper feast of the dish. She was out of yeast but David seemed to prefer the simple flour biscuits anyway. The aroma from the chicken dish nearly brought tears to her eyes. Never had she been more proud of a simple roast chicken.

She looked out the kitchen window with the hope that she’d catch a glimpse of David coming down the main road on Rocky. She frowned. It was after three and she had expected him hours ago. Out in the courtyard, she watched John as he put his dogs through their paces. He made them both sit and stay and then released them with little bits of muffin he had saved from his lunch.

She tapped on the window and he looked up.

“Let me know when you see Dad, okay?” she shouted.

He gave a thumbs up to indicate he understood and turned back to his training.

Sarah sat down with a cup of tea. She noticed a single chicken feather wafting alone in the corner of the room. The plucking and gutting had been nearly as traumatic as the killing. But the thrill of her accomplishment blotted out the pain and horror of the day. She looked at her beautiful golden brown roast, shiny with herbs and basted with goat butter.

A perfect, celebratory meal for the returning husband, she thought, her anticipation back. She stood up to look out the window again.

Four hours later, she and John finished their dinner alone. The anxiety in the pit of her stomach had made it impossible to enjoy the meal. Even John looked worried.

“Do you think something happened to him on the road?” he asked.

“I’m sure Dierdre and Seamus just needed him tonight,” she said, not at all sure.

“It’s just that it’s not like Dierdre to keep him two nights in a row,” he said. He walked to the front door and looked out at the road. “They know we need him, too.”

Sarah knew he was right. Dierdre would insist that David come home tonight.

“He’s been this late before,” she said.

“No, he hasn’t. Not ever.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

“Based on what?”

“John, did you do last check on the animals?”

He turned back to her. “Not yet,” he said.

“Well, why don’t you? I’ll clean up here and we’ll play a game of chess before bed.”

“You’re terrible at chess,” he said, shrugging into his coat.

“Well, you can read a book at the same time,” she said with a grin.

He left the dogs with her. As docile as the puppies were, they were still too undisciplined to be around the horses for long without having to dodge a well-deserved kick.

Sarah now went to the front door herself, as if watching would make David come, then turned and put away the roast chicken and leftover potatoes. Even without electricity, the refrigerator served as a fairly successful icebox, better at least than leaving food sitting out on the counter. They kept milk bottles parked out on the porch all night but meat couldn’t be left out without attracting animals. She wiped down the counters and wrapped the biscuits in wax paper to put them away for their breakfast.

It occurred to her that she had stopped taking her anti-anxiety medicine weeks ago. Funny. She had dreaded the day when she would take her last pill. Probably got more worked up about that than was rational. And then, things got so busy, she actually forgot to take them. She must have a week’s supply left in her suitcase. The real shocker was that, as relentlessly afraid as she was these days—for herself, for her husband and son, and for her parents back in the States—Sarah realized she didn’t feel
that
different without the pills. The thought stopped her.
How could that be?
she wondered.

All at once, both dogs stopped playing with the rag they had been tugging on. They stood in the kitchen, the hackles on their backs rising, slow menacing growls emanating from them.

Sarah’s hand froze as she was wrapping the biscuits and stared at the dogs.

In the next second, a horse’s terrified scream punched the air outside the cottage. Sarah dropped the biscuits and bolted for the front door and the source of the noise.

It was coming from the barn.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

            Three men stood with their backs to her in the courtyard between the house and the barn facing the barn front. One boy, her own child, stood between them and the barn. One of the horses in the barn screamed again. Sarah could barely hear what the men were saying over the pounding in her own ears and the sounds of the horse. As she approached, she saw John’s eyes flick to her and then back at them, but it was enough to alert the men. They turned, almost as one. As soon as they turned, John disappeared into the barn.

            She stood with the rifle to her shoulder and aimed at them.

            “We’re just hungry, missus,”

           
Three men, two rounds
, she thought.
No warning shots
.

            “Leave us,” she said hoarsely. “Go away.”

            They looked like what she would expect men to look like who’d roamed the countryside, slept in ditches and stolen or killed to keep themselves fed. They looked dangerous, desperate and aggressive. Their faces were filthy and bearded, their eyes glazed. One took a step toward her and she shifted her aim toward him.

            “Give us the horses and we’ll let you be,” the man behind him said. Sarah dared not take her eyes off the man in her sights. She knew she should be taking the measure of the speaker. Clearly, he was the leader. She felt a tinge of gratitude that John had disappeared.

            “You’d better get out of here,” Sarah said, aware that her voice was coming from a place she didn’t recognize.

            The speaker laughed. “American?” he said. “I’ve seen the telly. She’s American,” he said to his companions.

            Another man laughed. The one who’d stepped forward had not come any closer. He watched her eyes carefully and grinned at her through broken teeth.

            Not caring that they could see what she was doing, Sarah dug into her pocket and fished out a third round. Her eyes never left the man in front of her.

            “Oh, so you’ll be needing to reload to dispatch the lot, eh?” The speaker laughed and slapped the man next to him. “She’s got two chances then she’s done,” he said. “You take ‘er, I’ll get the boy—”

            The words weren’t out of his mouth before Sarah shot him.

            He screamed and grabbed his upper arm which instantly mushroomed red.

            Sarah recovered quickly from the recoil and turned the gun on the nearest man to her when he suddenly made a strangling noise and pitched forward. When he went down, Sarah saw John standing behind him with a large manure shovel in his hands. She didn’t waste the moment he’d given her. She swiveled the gun barrel to the third man and, without taking her eyes off him, shoved another round into the rifle and slid the action forward. She repeated it with a third round. One man lay stunned at her feet, another stood hopping up and down and cursing while he clutched at his shoulder.

            “I got one for each of you now,” she said.

The unharmed man slowly raised his hands in surrender.  

            Now what?     

            Sarah took a deep breath and felt the arm that held the gun begin to shake.

            John approached with the shovel.

            “Keep ‘em covered, Mom,” he said.

            Sarah nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She took another deep breath. John turned to look at her and she gave him what she hoped he would interpret as a meaningful look. Then she spoke:

            “John, you remember why we had to kill that dog that was savaging our sheep?”

            John looked at the men. “It was because we couldn’t trust it wouldn’t return and kill more sheep,” he said.

            “Sure, you’re not thinking of killing us in cold blood, missus?” The man with his arms upraised looked from Sarah to the man who was bleeding. “Mack, you hear this maniac?”

            “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Sarah said. “It’s not personal.”

            The wounded man looked at Sarah, his face contorted with loathing. “You can’t just shoot us,” he said.

            “I’m protecting my family,” Sarah said, feeling stronger every second. “I’ll need you to stand away from the barn a bit. I don’t want to have to drag bodies any further than I need to…”

            The stunned man began to stir on the ground.

            “You better get your buddy there to connect with the program, Gilligan,” Sarah said, indicating the groaning man on the ground. “He makes me nervous.”

            “Michael, wake up. Wake up, you stupid sod!”

            “Yeah, Michael, wake up, you stupid sod,” John said, nudging the man with the shovel.

            “Language, please, John,” Sarah said.

            “We’re begging you, Missus. We never woulda hurt you and the lad. We’re just hungry and—”

            “You can’t let ‘em go, Mom,” John said. “Maybe if you kill two of ‘em, the third one will have learned a lesson.”

            Shrieks of horror burst from two of the men. The one John had crowned with the manure shovel howled the loudest. The wounded leader stared at her with an intense expression.

            “That is a good idea, John,” Sarah said, wondering from where he got his acting talent. “But which ones?” She pointed with the rifle barrel at the one in the dirt.  

            “Yeah, that’s good,” John said. “And the one you wounded will probably die anyway so he’s a good second choice.”

            “It’s a minor wound,” the man blurted, his eyes darting back and forth from Sarah to John. 

            “So are you saying she should kill
me
then, Mack?” The unharmed man snarled.

            “Well, it’s me that’s led the band up to now,” the other man reasoned in a high-pitched voice.

            “And got us in this mess, too, I’ll be thinking,” the other man said. Suddenly, without warning, he wheeled on John who had walked too close to him and snatched him up. John never let go of the shovel and swung it in a wide arc, banging it into the head of the man with the wounded shoulder who screamed.

            Sarah watched it as if she were watching a movie with the sound turned off. She saw the shovel smash into the man’s head and then drop uselessly from John’s grip. She saw the wounded man’s mouth open in a large cavernous but mute oval. She watched the man who held her son hesitate for a split second to react to his leader’s screams of pain and in doing so dropped John to waist level. That was her moment. She squeezed the trigger and shot the man, straight and true, through the head. She never even felt the recoil. 

            Afterward, she would remember John lurching away from the falling corpse, blood sprayed across the back of his jacket. He retrieved the shovel and stood, panting with excitement, next to Sarah.

            She licked her lips, ignoring the body on the ground. “I have two bullets left,” she said, pointing the gun at the man with the bloody arm wound. “You and your buddy leave now before I change my mind.”

David threw a tarp over the body and returned to the kitchen. He had ridden home, determined not to be separated another night from his family. On the road, he had seen two men stumbling in the dark. There was something about them that worried him and he reached down to touch the small hatchet he carried in his saddlebag. They passed him without a word but he cantered Rocky the rest of the way home.

“I didn’t take time to think,” she said to David as he ate a late supper of cold chicken and John slept in the next room with a puppy on either side of him.  “I just knew that at that range I couldn’t miss.”

David shook his head. “You didn’t worry about hitting John?” he asked.

 “I didn’t have time to worry about that,” she said. “I just knew I had to stop it
now
.”

David looked over his shoulder to the other room.

“Do you think he’s okay?”

“I don’t know. We were joking about shooting them to try to scare them. And then all of a sudden it just happened. So I don’t know.”

“You were
joking
about killing them?”

“I didn’t decide to execute that man out there, David,” she said in a loud whisper. “He grabbed our son. He…he—” All of a sudden, Sarah got an image of the chicken in the burlap bag. She thought of how easy it had been to break its neck, all things considered. “He could’ve killed him with his bare hands in just a moment,” she said quietly. “He had John.  No, I…I didn’t think twice.”

Finn’s pain mirrored his anger, climbing in arcs of intensity higher and higher, until he felt nearly incapable of speech. As he lay thrashing in his cot, his arm blazing in agony although the women had successfully staunched the blood, he thought for a moment he might literally lose his mind.

By the time he and Georgie had limped back to camp, he was delirious with pain and thoughts of revenge.
That bitch! He would kill her and the lad before breakfast and torch their miserable hut with their bodies inside
!

After three months of steady, unfailing obedience from his followers, the disaster at the American’s farm had shocked and destabilized him. He was so beside himself when he entered camp that one of the stupid bitches who rushed forward to attend him actually tried to wipe his face before looking at his arm. He had been literally frothing in a wild fury and she hadn’t noticed the red, sodden flag heralding his gunshot wound.