Chapter 27 –
A quiet night would have been so nice
I was mostly asleep when the first big bangs sounded. I rolled over, pretty confused about who and what and where, but then the next bang hit the side door and I was awake enough to know someone was bashing in the door. The next bang threw the door open. It was a huge noise as it spun completely on its hinges and slammed against the wall. That’s when three shotguns fired and I was nearly deafened. I struggled to find my backpack in the dark and to find my pistol. By the time I got my hands around it, a burst of rifle fire came through the door, followed by shouted threats.
“If you fire those shotguns one more time, we will kill every one of you. This isn’t your stuff. Let us in and we will give you a share. Let the damn owner worry about the loss.”
“I’m the damn owner.” I shouted as I ran to the top of the stairs. “Come in and I’ll give you a share of my nine millimeter.” They responded with another burst of rifle fire, and we fired back. None of us was hit, but I think we got one or two of them. At least we kept them on the other side of the doorway. We stopped shooting, as did they. We could hear them whispering. I started to move down a couple stairs, but I felt a hand grab the back of my collar and stop me.
“Just wait.” LeClerk whispered in my ear. “If they come in, we kill them. If they leave, we let them.” That seemed like pretty good advice. I sat down, rested my elbows on my knees, and kept the doorway in my sights. We waited. A few minutes later we could hear the sounds of men struggling through the water and dropping rifles into their aluminum boat. Always quick to grasp the obvious, I determined they were leaving. We sat and waited a while longer, and then I could hear the men around me settling back, resting their shotguns.
“We need to close that door,” LeClerk explained, “or it will invite the next bunch.” He ordered a couple men to push one of the derelict forklifts down the ramp, while he and I went down and pushed the door closed. I took a second to look outside. The area looked clear. Good. We pushed the door closed and held it like that until the other men pushed the forklift up against it. They set the brake on the thing. Nothing was coming through that door now. Why hadn’t we thought of that before?
“When this thing is over,” I said as we waded back through the water to the stairs, “We’re taking a trip to the local sporting goods store. Every man gets the shot gun of his choice, on me.” That got the reaction you would expect.
LeClerk got a bigger reaction when he stopped walking and pointed down. “The water isn’t as deep. I couldn’t figure out how they could get that door open. They should have been pushing against a wall of water. And then to have it fly all the way back on its hinges and hit the wall? That doorway is only eight inches above the floor. The door moved free because…” At which point the rest of us were cheered, but also pretty embarrassed. The water had dropped a foot or more, and we hadn’t noticed? Well, yes there was the small matter of people shooting at us, but really, we hadn’t noticed the water drop over a foot? “Let’s get some sleep. Come morning we might be able to get some work done around here.”
We climbed the stairs back to our cardboard beds. LeClerk picked two men to sit up for the next watch, and the rest of us laid down and tried to get back to sleep. Fat chance. Not after that adrenaline rush. I sat up, pulled the water bottle out of my pack, and drank. “Anyone need any?” I asked. All the guys came over and took long pulls from the bottle, then they sat around on adjacent pallets. I pulled out some of the food in the pack and passed those packages around as well. All we needed now was a campfire.
“Dr. Murphy,” one of the guys said, his mouth full of freeze-dried something or other. “You know the line we will be using around here for the duration.”
“Want a share of my nine millimeter?” another one of the guys finished for him. The laughing went on far too long. The joke was fine, but not that funny. This was just guys laughing off the stress.
“It’s Shawn, okay?” I asked when the laughing subsided. “I wish I had thought of something more clever, but I was pissed, and that was the best I could do.”
“It was pretty good, Shawn” one of the guys replied.
“Yeah, it was good, but you should have gotten in something about their mothers.”
“Yeah, it should have been eat my nine millimeter, river rat.”
“No, I’ll share this nine millimeter with your mother.” And there were other suggestions. It was dumb guy stuff. But it passed the time and calmed us down. Gradually the guys ran out of suggested insults, and the silences got longer. LeClerk sort of wrapped the session up by telling two of the guys to replace the ones who stood guard. At that point all of us laid back on our cardboard and tried again to sleep. It took a while, but I finally managed.