Glen Tate: 299 Days: The Visitors

Grant used the time to catch his breath. And to think. What would he do if someone came into the bedroom? If no one came into the bedroom, then what should he do next? Get medical attention to the woman? Were Bobby and Scotty capturing the girl and woman who ran into the backyard? Were there any more dogs?

When he was sure absolutely nothing was moving and he had a spare second or two, Grant did a press check of his AR and Glock. Of course he had a round in each one. He looked at the clear plastic window in the Magpul magazine in his AR. He had a full magazine, of course, since he hadn’t fired a shot. The press check was a nervous habit; something to calm him.

After a few more seconds of no one moving and silence, Grant felt it was OK to put the safety on his AR. He kept his right thumb on the safety, as he had done a thousand times before at the range, to remind himself it was on and to be able to instantly click it off, if necessary. He could feel himself coming down. It was like he had been on a drug and now it was wearing off.

Duh. He was on a drug: adrenaline. The superhuman strength and heightened senses the adrenaline provided were slowly dissipating. Grant’s mouth got dry – so dry his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Just like when he shot the looters.

Grant heard someone coming toward the bedroom he was in. The adrenaline surged back.

He assumed it was Ryan since he only heard one person moving and Ryan was clearing the other rooms. Should he tell the person coming that he was in the bedroom? What if it was a bad guy? Then again, what if he didn’t announce himself and either he or Ryan shot each other. The odds of a bad guy walking around this house right now with Ryan out there were pretty slim.

“Bedroom cleared!” Grant yelled. He aimed his AR at the doorway and was ready to click off the safety. He figured it was Ryan walking by so he kept the safety on, though he was prepared to click it off in a split second.

“Roger that!” Ryan yelled. Ryan could tell from the direction of Grant’s voice where the room was that Grant was in. He didn’t want to go past that doorway and be mistaken for a bad guy. It was amazing how much thought went into preventing friendly fire; about as much thought as taking down the bad guys in the first place.

“Moving past you!” Ryan yelled.

“Move!” Grant responded as he swung the muzzle of his rifle to a safe direction away from where Ryan was. Ryan moved past the open door. Ryan kept going down the hall toward the bathroom and the kitchen.

Soon Ryan yelled, “Bathroom clear!”

Then Ryan yelled “Wounded woman in the kitchen,” and then “Kitchen clear!” Then he yelled, “Moving out the back door,” and Bobby yelled back, “Move!”

A few seconds later Ryan yelled, “House clear!”

Grant could relax. Kind of. He headed for the room Wes was in. “Moving toward you, Wes!” He yelled.

“Move!” Wes yelled. “I got a prisoner in here!” Then he heard a man arguing with Wes.

Grant heard Wes yelling, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

Grant came into the room, which looked like another bedroom, but there was so much crap strewn all over the place it was hard to tell. There was Wes near the doorway aiming his AR at a guy on his knees with his hands out to the sides. The guy was in his underwear. It was the man who had run out the back door, but had turned around and gone back inside.

Grant aimed his AR at the man and said, “Got him covered.”

Wes nodded. Wes slowly lowered his AR. He was in great shape and an AR is a light rifle, but his arms were getting tired from holding it up all that time at the guy. Wes could feel the adrenaline level lowering. He was starting to relax. He kept his AR in the general direction of the man, but didn’t have it shouldered.

Grant saw himself and Wes in the mirror in the bedroom. They both had about a week’s worth of beard. They looked like fighters, not the nice guys who went shooting together just a few months ago. They had a hardness, a seriousness to them. They were deadly serious and taking care of business. Those carefree nice guys were gone. They’d been replaced by fighters. Reluctant fighters.

Grant heard some people moving around. Ryan announced, “Getting a corpsman to the woman in the kitchen.” Ryan, the Marine, called a medic by the Marine term of “corpsman.” The woman was moaning and Tim was talking to her.

The man Grant was covering was interested in the woman’s condition.

“Josie!” the man yelled out. “You OK? Baby? Baby?”

Grant yelled, “Shut up!” He didn’t want them to be using some kind of code. He thought that was pretty unlikely, but still.

“Josie? Hey, baby!” the man yelled.

Wes was close to the man and said, “He said to shut up.”

The man looked up at Wes and said, “Fuck you.”

Wes kicked him in the face, hard, with his big boots. It knocked the man down, and Wes nearly lost his balance. The man started screaming. The situation was deteriorating rapidly.

“He said shut up! Now shut the hell up.” Wes reared his foot back to kick the man again, and he stopped screaming immediately.

“What’s going on?” Rich yelled from down the hall.

“Nothin’. Don’t worry,” Grant yelled back. He didn’t want Rich to be distracted.

Grant thought about the jeans on the floor in the little girl’s bedroom, the naked little girl who ran out, and this man in his underwear. He became furious and sick to his stomach. The man in Grant’s red-dot sight wasn’t a person. He was someone who needed to be shot. He was a piece of shit who had done an unspeakable thing and needed to pay.

Don’t do it , the outside thought said. OK, Grant thought. He started to think about proving this man did what Grant thought he’d done. Grant went into fact-finding mode. He thought for a second about how he’d get this dumbass to incriminate himself.

To try to be conversational and get an incriminating admission, Grant decided to talk to the man in street lingo. “Why don’t you got no pants on, bro?” Grant asked.

The man laughed. It was a frightening, almost demonic laugh.

“Read him his rights,” Rich said behind Grant. Hearing Rich startled Grant and Wes. Rich must have come into the room without them knowing. That was bad. Someone had snuck up on them, albeit a good guy. But still, someone had snuck up on them.

Wes asked, “What? His rights?” That sounded completely foreign: civilians don’t read people their rights.

Then Grant realized that Rich was right. “Yep,” Grant said. He remembered that he’d told everyone at the Grange that they’d handle crime control the constitutional way. Suspects, even this piece of shit, had a right against self-incrimination. Grant wanted to beat this child rapist to death, but he needed to be a good example for the rest of Pierce Point; an example of how the sheepdogs would be civilized when they got the wolves, and how the wolves would be dealt with in public after a fair trial. This was the first test of whether Pierce Point would be a mini-republic or a vigilante gang.

The man was lying on the floor, but started to rise. He got on his knees with his hands out. He had blood pouring out of his nose. It was crooked, presumably broken from that kick to the face from Wes.

“You guys cops?” the man asked, spitting the flowing blood out of his mouth. The man looked puzzled. No cops he knew of had a week’s worth of beard and wore civilian clothes. Besides, there were no more cops. That’s why the man had been having such a good time for the past couple weeks. It had been a party. The party of a lifetime. A party, the man knew, that had now come to an end.