K Nilsen - The Yellowstone Traps

A tiny flash of light erupted from the equipment steel.

Harland held his rifle up before his eyes, as if to inspect it. Misery engulfed him. Despite meticulous planning, he failed his neighbors and friends terribly. He hefted the gun to toss it away into the ash.

Someone unseen fired a shot. A blunt force rammed his left flank. Harland hurtled from the ash mound through the air. No chance to break his fall, the farmer landed heavily on his back in the shadow of the grain elevator towers. His cranium pounded down into the ash, the concussion stunning him. Struggling for a breath, something pounced on his chest, a black creature. It was inhuman, the thing, grabbing at his clothing with four arms. It pulled at him, dragged him on rough ground until sensation left him.

Dim light from a kerosene lantern was all Harland could make out when he opened his eyes. Dead silence permeated the formless space he occupied. His head throbbed abominably.

“Here, take these. Pain killers,” someone said.

A cup of water and several tablets were offered. Harland accepted the pills into his mouth and took a swig of water. Someone cradled his head and placed a jacket under his skull to keep it off a cold concrete surface.

Five minutes elapsed.

“What is this place?” Harland whispered.

“You’re in the old Sweet Spring Brewery.”

“Brewery?” Harland could manage nothing else.

“We brought you here. We thought you’d be killed or captured.”

“Killed? Uhh. What happened to Percy?”

“Who?”

“Percy. He was in the headhouse over the silos.”

“The coop silos blew up, Harland. Grain dust explosion.”

“What?”

“If you had a man up there, you’ve lost him.”

Images of the night rushed back to the Swede. Suddenly the grain elevators were alight, launching columns of fierce flames into the night. Harland pushed himself up to a sitting position and discovered three dark figures weakly illuminated by the single light source.

“What is this? You Reserve boys?”

One of the figures laughed. “No, Harland. We’re not the Guard. We’ve got nothing to do with them.”

“What do you want with me?”

“We wanted to be sure you didn’t die out there.”

The farmer sat speechless for ten seconds. “Who are you people?”

A figure reached for and clutched the kerosene lamp. He brought it over to Harland, just to one side of him, and set it down. The farmer could now see the faces of the three men before him. He recognized one.

“God in heaven, you Whittemore?”

“That’s right, Harland. The man on your right is Max Zimmerman, on your left, Oleg Knudsen. We’re all from the bluffs.”

“Holy sweet savior, you stay away from me.”

Harland scrambled to his knees, his head vibrating with pulsing pain. Abel placed a hand to the farmer’s chest.

“Be at ease, sir. We’re not here to cause you harm. Sit. Sit. Have some more water.”

Harland scowled, but sat back down wearily on the jacket. A look of defeat made the rounds of his face. Abel noticed the farmer’s cheeks still displayed the angry red rash, the same one the farmer had sported on the porch of the family homestead several weeks earlier.

“It’s over, isn’t it? You saw the silos go up, eh?”

“Yes, Harland, most of them are burning.”

The farmer covered his face with his hands. “That’s not what I wanted. I thought sure we could protect the grain, get the Guard out of here and leave us be.”

“They’ll be going, Mr. Sven,” said Oleg, “empty-handed.”

“It’s all gone, then, isn’t it? All burning up.”

“That’s what the Guard’s thinking out there as we speak,” Abel said. “I imagine they’ll assess things in the morning, then pull the train out of here sometime tomorrow if the ash dust isn’t too terribly bad.”

“So they’ll have nothing. Do you know what that means?”

The three men around Harland remained silent.

“That means….” Harland’s demeanor turned surly suddenly. “What in Christ’s name do you care? You don’t know shit about these things.”

“Quiet yourself about this, Harland,” Abel remarked in a calm, parental tone. “The Guard will be leaving without your grain. But it’s not ruined. It’s safe.”

Harland squinted in the dim light and grimaced. “It’s out there burning. It’s going to burn forever and ever and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“Some of it will burn, that’s a certainty, Harland. Some of it, though, can’t burn. It can’t burn because it isn’t in the silos.”

The farmer didn’t know what to make of Abel’s jargon. He couldn’t decipher what the man meant.

“Ah, I don’t follow you,” murmured Harland. “The grain’s on fire. You said yourself the Guard is going to pull out of here tomorrow with nothing.”

“That’s right, Harland.” Abel stood up and paced by the farmer. He went over to a heavy wooden crate and shoved it under one of the fermentation tanks, below a cleanout door.

For the first time, the Swede took a good look at the interior space around him. Huge steel tanks towered over him.

Abel revolved to face the farmer seated on the cold floor. “Tomorrow, the Guard will be gone, but the grain is most assuredly not gone, Harland.”

Abel nodded to his companions and pointed to Harland. He gestured to have them pick the farmer up off the floor and deposit him before the wooden crate. Max and Oleg grabbed the farmer’s arms and hoisted him to his feet.

“What are you doing with me?” Harland protested loudly and lashed out with one arm. Max caught the flying appendage and expertly yanked it behind Harland’s back and pushed upward causing the man some pain.

“Sorry, Mr. Sven,” Max apologized, “I’ll let you free in a minute.”

Max and Oleg pushed the farmer to the edge of the crate and pinned him there. Abel focused on the Sweetly citizen and brought his face close to that of the farmer.

“Harland, what you did in Sweetly tonight doesn’t matter.”

“All of it matters,” screamed Harland. “What the hell could you freaks possibly know, eh?”

“What matters,” Abel uttered, “is this!”

The man from Independency village wrapped both hands about a steel lever on the cleanout trap at the base of the huge fermentation tank. He pulled back, straining.

Teeth clenched, Abel instructed, “I need you to watch, Harland. You need to see this.”

Abel pitched his full weight back and yanked the lever on the door. It sprung free and the door burst open. A landslide of yellow color cascaded before Harland, rattling down into the crate. In seconds the wooden vessel filled to the top and a dome of gold built up before the opening. Soon the brightly-colored material stopped moving and the room pitched to silence.

Max let Harland’s arm go; the farmer did not notice. Harland placed both hands on the gold nuggets of corn before him. He seemed fixed in trance, jaw slack, scarcely breathing.

Harland studied Abel, eyeing him coldly for five seconds. “You moved it here?”

“Moved it, yes.”

Harland scanned the hulking fermentation vessels around him.

“You filled these tanks? Harland nodded at the rows of mammoth containers.

“Many of them. There are two rooms, twenty tanks in all.

“I’ll be damned.”

“We figure we moved a good percentage of the corn that remained in the silos. We moved some soybeans, too.”

“You did all that?” Harland huffed as if suffering anaphylaxis.

“The three of us, Harland. Others helped with the logistics. We used a vacuum pump and lots of pipe. That’s all. It did the job.”