Journal (34 page)

I
kept watch for maybe five or six minutes before I heard her say we needed to
get moving.  When I rejoined them, they were already walking south, Alan not
limping so badly now but still limping.  I could see that she had wrapped his
leg with another piece of cloth cut from one of our blankets.  The bandage laid
flat to his thigh, so I figured that mom had pulled whatever was stuck in him,
out.  I could also see that he had this very tight look to his face, which
could only be from the pain.

I
remember Mom looked at me and said, “You did good back there.”  That was it,
nothing more.

You
know something, right this minute, because I just thought it and wrote it, is
the very first time that I remembered about what she said to me.  It makes me
feel good.  It makes me feel like I’m sort of important.  It also makes me
realize that somewhere along the way, between our rescue and this point in our trip
back home, she stopped thinking of me as a little kid.  At the time she said it,
though, I didn’t think any of this stuff.  I was way too worried about the
trouble we were in and how we were going to get out of it.  I just wanted to
mention it is all.  You know what I mean?

Anyway,
there was a lot to be worried about.  For one thing, Alan was hurt, and it was
obvious that he was going to slow us down.  The other reason to worry was that
Eric now knew there was somebody trying to put a stop to his plan.  I didn’t
need to think out what he was going to do about that.  As soon as they picked
the metal out of their butts, they’d be after us with a real hate-on.

I
told mom and Alan I’d hang back a little to see if we were being followed; you
know, kind of watch the trail behind us.  When I said it, Mom got this look on
her face like she didn’t think much of the idea, but she didn’t say anything ex-wife and daughter y point . 
So I dropped back fifty yards or so; enough anyway that we were out of sight of
one another.

As
it turned out, Eric must have sent someone right off, or more likely several
someones, all in different directions, to locate us and cut us off.  That way,
I guess, the rest of them could catch up and finish us off.  They weren’t even
being quiet about it either.  They were coming on fast, making a lot of noise. 
If you think about it, it was a good plan, too.

I’ll
also bet you anything, he offered them something, a reward of some kind to do
it — sex, drugs, maybe a good weapon.  See, I know how he did things.  I also
know what the men who did his dirty little jobs talked about.  Other than food,
it was women, drugs or guns.  He’d play off that.  He’d done it before.

So
there I was, faced with a decision.  I could lay for them, in which case Eric
would get what he wanted.  He’d know where we were.  Or I could try to warn mom
and Alan, and we could hide out from them.  But if we let them go on past, we’d
just have to deal with them later.  The third choice, as I saw it, was to try
to take their guns and tie them up and gag them.  Taking their guns would be hard,
though.  It would mean we’d have to show ourselves at some point.  If we tied
them up, they could escape.  And if we tried to do away with them quietly, well
I could see problems with that as well.  How do you keep three people quiet
while you are killing them one by one?

I
can’t say that I thought these things out all logical, like one, two, three. 
It was really more a matter of having them in my head all at the same time, and
them bouncing around all mixed up.  See, I didn’t have all that much time to
think about it like I do now.  They were coming straight at me.  They were
close enough that I could hear them talking, too.  I just couldn’t make out what
they were saying.  So in deciding it, there was only one choice that seemed the
best, and I bet you can guess what that was.

First,
I ran back away from them to a tree growing at an angle next to a rock and
kneeled down behind it.  The ground was flat there, between them and me, dotted
with rocks of different sizes but none so big that it could hide a man all the
way.  There also was plenty of brush, mostly up to my hip but also some stuff
that was tall, along with an occasional tree running to maybe six, eight inches
thick.  All in all, it was pretty open and light enough to see.

I’ll
admit I was scared at this point, and I don’t know why.  I mean I wasn’t scared
back at the warehouse, at least I don’t remember feeling that way.  Now I found
myself breathing hard for no good reason.  My thoughts were a little jumbled
around at this point as well, fast like and jumpy.  Part of me said, ‘get the
hell out of there,’ while another part said ‘do what needs to be done.’  I took
several deep breaths, but that only seemed to help a little.

They
came into view, all three of them walking fast.  The one most in the front
wasn’t much older than me.  He was wearing camouflage, army type pants, the
ones with those big pockets on the legs, and a purple sweatshirt.  He was also
clean shaven and had his hair cut in a Mohawk type cut — shaved down to the
skin on the sides and long, from front to back, down the middle of his skull.  He
was holding a full ex-wife and daughter y point length rifle with a wood stock.  As soon as he came into
view, I saw him turn his head over one shoulder and say, “this way for sure.” 
His voice was high pitched and seemed like it should have come from someone
else’s mouth.

The
guy he was talking to was a little older and very dark skinned, wearing a black
or blue watch cap, a green ski jacket, and blue jeans.  He was carrying a gun
of the type I didn’t recognize.  It was shorter than a rifle and longer than a
pistol.  I figured it was probably a small machine gun of some type.  I decided
to shoot him first.

The
third one, the one with no weapon at all, was the oldest by maybe five or six
years.  He was big, both in height and weight.  He was wearing a dirty white
cowboy hat that lost its shape and a brown coat that was too short in the
sleeves.  I also noticed that he was huffing pretty hard, but seeing him
breathing like that made me take notice of the fact that my breathing had
completely settled down; weird huh?

I
still didn’t see much choice on what to do and don’t remember thinking about it
anymore than I already had.  I just straightened up and shot the guy with the smaller
gun, pumped another shell into mine and shot the second guy as well.  It
couldn’t have taken more than two seconds, but in the time between my first
shot and the second, the one with the full length rifle raised it up and fired
at me.  His bullet went right down the coat sleeve of my left arm, grooved my
elbow and exited.  Man that was close.  Of course I didn’t think about just how
close it was until later, after things calmed down so to speak.  I was one
lucky you know what.  A little up and a little over, and he would have shot me
right in my eye.  I’m still here, though, and I guess that’s the only thing
that counts.

Now
the third guy, the big one, he turned around while all this was going on and
started running the other way, so I took off after him.  As I passed by the
first one I shot, I could see that he was still alive.  His eyes were wide
open, big as my fist, his face and chest splattered with blood, and he was
panting like a dog in the hot sun.  Like I said, it could just as well have been
me laying there breathing like that, so I don’t now feel anything about him.

I
stayed right after the last one.  Almost right away, I tried to get a shot at
him but found that I hadn’t pumped another shotgun shell after shooting the
man, kid, whoever with the rifle, so ended up pulling the trigger with no
bang.  I guess I was a little excited about getting shot and forgot to reload. 
A mistake like that could get me killed, I’ll tell you that.

So
anyway, I kept after him and pumped the shotgun.  After that, though, it was
hard to get my barrel on him because he was zigzag running, and I was running as
well.  I also fell, face down into a bush.  I guess I must have tripped over a
rock or root or something, but whatever it was, I went down hard.  It knocked
the breath out of me and scratched the heck out of my face.  Despite all that,
I got up and kept after him, even though at that particular moment, I couldn’t
exactly see where he was at.

That’s
when I heard three rapid shots, bam-bam-bam, a pause and then a fourth.  It was
mom.  She got him.  She doesn’t miss too much.

She
later told me that she also heard our trackers coming for us and was already on
her way back to help me when I started shooting.  She saw the whole thing
happen. and when the third man took off running, she just ran right with him
until she got a clear shot.  She didn’t see me fall, though, and had no idea
how close that one bullet came to nailing me.  And you can bet I didn’t tell
her either.  Telling her would just give her another bad thing to think about.

At
that point, we were in bad trouble and we knew it well enough that we didn’t
even have to talk about it.  Eric would be coming for us with everything he
had.  He might not know exactly where we were, but he knew our general
direction and would spread everyone out going our way.  Those were my thoughts
anyway, and I’ll bet my boots that’s what he did.

As
mom and I got back to where the first two were, Alan was already going through
their pockets.  The one who had been alive had died I guess, or maybe Alan
finished him off, I don’t know, I didn’t ask, and the truth is it doesn’t much
matter now one way or the other.

The
rifle with the wood stock wasn’t much use to us, so I leaned it against a rock
and stomped it until the barrel bent enough that it couldn’t be fired.  The
other one, the short one, used the same type of ammunition that mom’s gun used,
so we took all his bullets for her.  As far as the gun itself went, we couldn’t
think of a way to wreck it.  We figured out how to take it apart, though, and
took the firing part with us to be got rid of later.  We were off again after
that, as fast as Alan’s leg would let us go.

We
moved along for another twenty minutes or so before we heard them again.  There
were three pretty quick shots fired off behind us.  Because of their distance,
I knew they weren’t directed at us; they were about us, however.  They were
most likely a signal the bodies had been found and for the others to gather up
and start out from there.  They were zeroing in.

In
my head, as soon as I heard those shots, I did some rough figuring on how much
time we had.

Here’s
how my thinking went:  I figured that we had, at the least, about twenty
minutes on them.  If we were lucky, though, the one or ones who found the dead
guys would wait until the others caught up to start out again.  I thought this
pretty likely because they’d be staring at what happened to the last of them
who came at us, and so they wouldn’t be too much in a hurry to start out on
their own.  That would give us more time.  So I gave us another ten minutes
before they started off.  That made thirty minutes between us.

But
at the same time they were walking, we would be walking, too, so it wasn’t like
they were thirty minutes away from catching us.  It would take longer than
that.  They might not even catch us at all if it wasn’t for the fact that Alan
was hurt and walking slower.  Anyway, slowly they’d eat away at our lead until
they finally caught us.  The soonest they’d catch us would be about an hour;
that’s if they sent someone running.  At the other end, I gave them three hours
tops.

I
also figured that we had come five miles from the warehouse and had another
fifteen or more to go before w have only
been my imagination6ite got to the outskirts of Woburn.  I knew there
was no way that we’d make fifteen miles in any two or three hours.  So I
thought that our best chance was to get as close to Woburn as possible and hope
that the people there would hear our shots and come to our rescue.  We moved on,
same as before, me hanging back.

Little
by little, Alan’s leg got worse.  He was limping more and getting slower.  A couple
of times I caught up with them, even moving as slow as I was, and so had to sit
a while to let them get ahead again.  At one point, I was close enough to hear
the two of them arguing and listened-in for a while.  Alan wanted her and me to
go on ahead and leave him.  He said he would find a place to hide, and we could
come back for him later.  She cut him off and told him it was out of the
question, they would find him, and she wasn’t leaving him behind to face Eric
on his own.

Talk
about a change in people.  It wasn’t that long ago that she would have left him
without any discussion at all.  In fact, it would have been her idea.  This
whole experience has sure made her a different person.

Back
in Woburn, there were men who came sniffing up to her all the time.  I guess
you couldn’t blame them.  Husbands had lost wives, wives had lost husbands, so
there were a lot of people looking for new match ups, and she had a lot to
offer — smart, pretty, a hard worker, and still young enough to have babies. 
But she just wasn’t interested in any of that or any of them.  Oh no, her and
me, that’s all she cared about, and she was pretty mean about it, too.  Read
back to some of Alan’s thoughts on her in those first few days after he rescued
us to see how she came off to men in particular.  That’s pretty much how it was
all the time.  They even had a name for her back then, Iceberg Annie, though
nobody dared say it to her face …or mine.  She’s not like that now, at least
not with Alan she isn’t.