Susan Kiernan-Lewis - Free Falling

It was coming from the barn.

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.”