A Long December Read Online Free PDF Page B

to duck down an instant after the slugs started hitting the building. The rounds punched through the boards six feet to my left, but that was way too close for somebody as slow as I am. I stayed pressed up against the cold limestone for a few seconds after the firing stopped, my head down to protect my eyes from all the crud; then I very cautiously made my way to the holes to my left, took a deep breath, and looked through. The dumb one was gone, presumably back into the shed.
    “Everybody all right?” asked George.
    We all responded more or less affirmatively.
    “Next time,” I said, trying to slow my breathing, “we shoot first.”
    “You bet,” said George.
    I was getting a very bad feeling and stated the obvious, voicing what the rest of them probably already thought. “Hey. We lose sight of’em every time.” I put my face a bit closer to a hole to widen my field of view. Any closer, and I’d lose the cover of the interior shadow, and I sure didn’t want that. “We just
think
they go to ground in the same place. They could be anywhere out there. And they could be getting closer.” We needed a better view of the surrounding area. Unfortunately, it was not to be had from our location in the basement.
    “I could go up into the loft,” said Sally from behind George and me, where she was tending to Hester. “Great view from up there. I’m small. Harder to see me.”
    “Not with that red hair,” said George. “I’ll go up.”
    Being about six inches taller and seventy-five pounds heavier than George, I simply said, “I’ll cover you from the steps.” He was a lot faster than I was.
    The open stairs from the basement came through the first floor about ten feet inside the open barn doors, on the side that faced our shooters. George was going to have to emerge from the basement, run across the main floor about thirty feet to the right, and climb a vertical wooden ladder that went to the hayloft.
    “How’re you going to do that? Cover me, I mean.” George tends to get right to the point. With the main barn doors standing open, he’d be in full view from the shed for the entire distance.
    I looked up toward the main floor. “Why don’t you let me get about halfway up the steps. Then you go by, and I go, too. Just stick my head out of the opening. I should be able to fire at floor level at the same time you get upstairs.”
    He looked skeptical. “Sure.”
    “Trust me,” I said with a grin. “And rules or not, I’m gonna fire as soon as I get a shot at somebody. And screw it. If I don’t see the shooter, I’ll aim for where I think he is.” We weren’t allowed to fire unless we could see our target. A target that we could “demonstrate and elucidate” as a threat. An old machine shed that I just
thought
was occupied certainly wouldn’t qualify. Well, not on a normal day.
    “You got more than one magazine for that thing? “he asked, indicating my AR-15. He pointedly didn’t say anything about my intention to lay down some fire. His department’s rules were much stricter than mine.
    “Three. Plus the one that’s in it. That’s about a hundred and eight rounds.” I always carry twenty-seven or twenty-eight rounds in the thirty-round-capacity magazines. Easier on their springs.
    “Save some for later,” he advised. “Why does everybody always seem to leave those big barn doors open?” he asked. It was rhetorical. He took a deep breath, and as he exhaled I could see his breath against the sunlight upstairs. “Well, we might as well get started.”
    “You got a walkie?”
    “Not one you can hear me on,” he said. The feds use different frequencies than we do.
    “Sally, you better give him yours,” I said.
    “Sure,” she said, but I could tell she was reluctant. She was, after all, a dispatcher first and foremost.
    “Okay, never mind, I’ll give him mine,” I said, unclipping it and handing it to him. “This way,” I said to George, “you’ll have Sally on the other end