K Nilsen - The Yellowstone Traps

Hours after sundown, the first sounds of activity swept by on the cold prairie breeze. A grunt fired up one of the pieces of heavy equipment. Others roared to life. Harland’s heart rate soared. Maybe the Guard was going to move out of Sweetly after all. Straining to see, he noticed a big mechanical form move and disappear behind the edge of the coop office. Suddenly it appeared again, running down along one of the tall ash windrows in the direction where Harland was posted. When the machine cleared the end of the windrow, it turned abruptly and came to a halt. The driver left the unit where it stood.

“Shit!” Harland swore to himself. The machine blocked his view completely. He decided to leave his perch and move forward. The farmer scrambled to his feet and, as he took his first steps, heard the clamor of voices, the clank of tools, and the ring of metal on metal. Just as he expected, a Guard crew was moving up the tracks with gear to mend the missing rail.

The piled ash was unstable, like sand in a beach dune beneath the farmer’s feet. Harland stumbled, regained his feet and stumbled some more. More noises tumbled down the tracks, the rap of heavy hammers and the groan of metal, too. The farmer was alarmed now. He needed to do something.

Harland sank to his knees in the ash, steadied himself and raised the rifle to his chin. Eye sighting along the barrel, he decided to aim at the cab of the big bucket loader and blow out the glass. That would get someone’s attention. If Percy answered with a shot, then the Guard would know they had an enemy force to contend with.

Harland took a deep breath and held it. He closed his eyes and pulled back on his trigger finger. A flash of light and a loud report sent the bullet hurtling down the tracks. Instantly the glass in the cab disintegrated and rained atomized splinters of glitter into the night.

There was a second of frozen silence, pure nothingness. The next moment the atmosphere roared with automatic weapon fire. Percy had not wavered from his post. He would not disappoint. When he heard Harland’s rifle shot, he leaped from behind the wall into the window frame. Bullets cascaded into space, the shots echoing loudly in the headhouse superstructure.

Commander Hampstead had spent the evening calculating, just as Harland had. All he needed, he decided, was one well-placed projectile from one grenade launcher. The trajectory had to be steep so that once the explosive device detonated in the headhouse it would do so at the very end of the structure. That would silence the antagonists there but leave the critical equipment in the headhouse intact so the train could be loaded.

The officer had stationed a single man with a shoulder-held launcher at the southwest corner of the coop office. The sharpshooter had been given a simple order. Should there be any gunfire from above, he was to step into the clear, take aim at the headhouse window on high and fire. Even if the launched grenade missed the opening, it would surely slam into the eaves of the building and explode. The job would be done.

When Harland fired the first shot, several armed Guard members ran forward to take positions at the crippled bucket loader. The shot was the cue for the grenade launcher specialist to react. As the soldier stepped out of the building’s shadow, he could see gun barrel flashes as the rifleman in the headhouse unloaded a volley of bullets into the darkness.

Percy ducked away from the window. He did not see a flash of propellant from the lot below as a grenade swept aloft. At the periphery of his vision, Harland sensed a light trail streak toward the heavens.

The night ripped open and let the sun out. A pulse of incandescence lit up the environment as if an emergency rocket had been launched. In the light pulse, fragments of structure somersaulted away into the darkness. The concussive sound wave of the explosion slammed down on everyone below.

The man who fired the grenade knew in a moment he had hit his mark. Hampstead managed a little nod as the initial flash began to fade.

In the headhouse, white hot metal fragments sliced into steel and wood and the heavy coating of ultra dry grain dust that infested every nook and cranny of the structure. The hot fragments in the dust were as a spark to a munitions dump.

An unholy light swallowed the dying strobe of the grenade whole. The streets of Sweetly, South Dakota flared bright as midday. The little 40mm grenade unleashed a monster. The headhouse roof peeled up and disappeared into the night sky. Panels of corrugated steel from the walls scissored through the air, some traveling a thousand of feet.

The superstructure buckled and tons of heavy machinery, suspended in the disintegrating headhouse, fell, sheering away the spidery run of grain distribution tubes running to each of the coop silos. The falling equipment slammed into the elevator tower roof caps and breached several, and white heat raced into the interiors of the half empty spaces.

The steel-reinforced concrete walls of the silos managed to contain much of the force of the detonations that followed the breach of the towers. To those at ground level, it appeared as if intercontinental ballistic missiles were launching from underground bunkers. Prodigious forces vomited columns of roaring inferno into the heavens. With each thunderous blast, other towers were breached and each, in turn, erupted in an orgy of fire.

The forces tore apart smaller distribution bins in the complex and grain cascaded out of the building and smothered the tracks. Chunks of concrete and flaming debris rained down off the structures and slammed into the ground and onto equipment.

The Sweetly coop complex was reduced to hollowed-out concrete chambers, each belching acrid smoke from flames now consuming the dry grain remaining in the mammoth bins.

Jim Bottomly, at his home on the far side of the community, heard staccato explosions and raced out his front door. He knew before he reached his steps what had happened. Catastrophic grain elevator explosions were the things of legend on the Plains. Such events were revered and feared at the same time and were fodder for barroom embellishment one generation to the next. On the edge of town, he watched Sweetly’s newborn monstrous roman candles launch hellfire into the sky.

Harland, knocked down into the ash by a shower of small debris, watched the horror above while lying windless on his back. He sensed he was at the center of a nuclear firestorm. As he bore witness to the conflagration, pieces of building landed with a thump on all sides. Somehow he was not impaled by the larger pieces, but the intense heat of the blasts forced him to roll off the top of the ash berm and down the far side.

The Sweetly grain war was over in a single minute. Its tarnished souvenir was a tortured hulk of concrete and tons of smoldering grain. With no possible way to fight such a fire, the grain would likely burn for weeks, even months.

Harland stumbled to his feet and stood unsteady in the flame-flickering dark. He idled emotionless. There had been a purpose to all this, right? He had come to safeguard the grain supply, to save it for the citizens of Sweetly and to keep the federal boys from getting their hands on it. He had meant to do well by the local citizens, but what had he done? He had destroyed the very thing he came to save, and likely his old friend’s life. Now there was ruin, corruption on all sides.

Harland raised his rifle before his eyes and held it at arm’s length, studying the thing. It was useless now. Best to toss it away. It had been folly to use it, after all.

Down the tracks at the bucket loader, a Guard solider, protected from the violence by the equipment’s steel, noticed something moving in the distance. He raised his weapon and took a look through the mounted scope. The troop saw a human form hoist a rifle toward its shoulders.