No Mercy (Cumberland Saga)

 

Alice could hear muttering through the door and based by the sounds of the shifting of feet and groaning of the porch, knew there were at least two men on her porch, and big men at that.

Lightning shook his head in frustration. Time was wasting.

“My car broke down. I need to use your phone” Lightning demanded.

“I am sorry your car broke down” the elderly voice quavered.

Alice could tell the men were restless, the sound fidgeting on the other side of the door increased.

After a count of two, Alice asked “Don’t you have one of those smartie-phone things?”

“My battery is dead” Lightning snapped out.

“Why don’t you go back to your car and wait in it. I’m sure somebody will see you. We got friendly neighbors. I’m sure somebody will stop and help” Alice advised.

Lightning said “That won’t work. I am parked off the road. Nobody gonna see the car.”

Lightning changed tactics. “I gotta pee. Lemme in so I can use your bathroom!”

“You musta passed a thousand trees walking up here from the road. You can use any one a’ them when you walk back” Alice helpfully suggested.

Davey snickered. Lightning gave him an elbow. It was like thumping a blubber covered refrigerator.

Lightning was frustrated. He was used to people bending and caving to avoid confrontation. That was the norm, certainly when confronted by a big, angry man covered in prison tatts. The old biddy on the other side of the door wasn’t going with the flow.

Time to stop playing games.

“Listen, lady. Either you let me in or I am going to smash this door to pieces and let myself in” Lightning said, voice filled with menace.

Alice laid a hand on the door and reinforced it with a quick, silent prayer. The door was made from 2" tongue-and-groove planks of native, Shortleaf pine but it HAD been faithfully deflecting the Tennessee sun and weather for almost fifty years. A prayer would not be amiss.

“That would not be a good idea” Alice told him, although she did not specify whether she was referring to her opening the door or Lightning’s threat to break the door.

Then she clarified “As a good Christian woman, I have to tell you that you will not come to a good end if you don’t repent and change your ways.”  Her voice was not quavering as she dropped her "helpless" act.

“Fuck you, bitch” Lightning sneered and threw his weight against the door. He was going to shoot the bitch as soon as he broke in. He figured it would be mistaken for the sound of thunder.

To his surprise, Lightning bounced off the door. Roger, in fact all of the men, had taken the precaution of bracing their front doors with lengths of 2-by-4s with the ends secured not in the door frame but in the studs to either side of the door frames. Twelve, 3” deck-screws sunk into full-dimension studs, two lengths (on high, one low) for each door of knot-free two-by-fours.

Upstairs, Lliam could feel the entire front of the house breath in-and-out like the head of a drum.

Roger depressed the switch that Gregor had wired into the 200,000 lumen spot-light fifty feet to his left and illuminated the front of his house.

Dropping the pendant, Roger started shooting the man on his porch from a distance of ten yards away. The man was easily larger than any black bear Roger had ever seen.

Lightning reacted instinctively at the sudden, blinding brightness and the sound of the shotgun reports coming from Davey's side of the porch. He vaulted over the porch railing and dashed for the two-track that led to the SUV.

Sig saw Lightning’s exit and started banging away from a distance of 40 yards...and rapidly increasing. He got off three shots.

The huge man was still standing when Roger’s 1100 ran dry. Backing away from the porch and then deeper into the shadows, Roger dropped to one knee, flipped his shotgun over and started jamming shells into the magazine.
 

Roger looked up from his task as the “bear” crashed through the railing of the porch and started toward him.

Without turning over his shotgun or aiming, Roger hooked the bolt-handle of his shotgun with the pinkie of his right hand and pulled it back and and then released it. Still holding his shotgun upside-down with his left hand gripping the barrel and forearm and braced against the outside of his left thigh, he emptied it into the giant’s center-of-mass.

The giant collapsed.

Five shots. Roger’s ears were ringing from the blast reflected by the side of the house.

Lliam was blinded by the light.

Sig was looking for somebody to shoot but there were no targets.

Blain stayed where he was and scanning for threats. Nothing!

After what seemed like a minute, Roger turned off the spotlight. Then he picked it up and pointed it where the drive broke through the trees and turned it back on. He slowly scanned the clearing.

Down the hill, two shots fired in quick succession. Then two more….a slight pause...another shot….and then another.

Sig called out “Blain, I think they are gone. Come out so we can make a plan.”

Then the two men walked over to Roger. Roger pointed to the slumped over giant who was barely visible in the light pollution caused by the spotlight.

“We gonna need the tractor to move that one” Lliam said as he joined the group.

***

Sig detailed Blain with going down the foot-path to make contact with Gregor.

Every fifty yards or so, Blain made a hoot-owl call with three hoots. It was a quirk that the local owls either hooted twice or many times more than twice, nearly always in even numbers. Only humans hooted three times.

Fifty yards out from where Gregor was expected to be, Blain got a return call of three hoots. Blain walked over to where Gregor was standing. He had not walked down to inspect his targets. There was no point. It was still dark and turning on a light when there were still enemies around didn’t seem like a good idea.

“How many?” Blain asked quietly.

“Two” Gregor responded.

“We got one still unaccounted for” Blain informed Gregor. “Sig said we’ll go looking for him a half-hour after sunrise.”

Blain could barely make out Gregor’s nodding confirming that he had heard.

“I’ll stay here” Gregor said. “Somebody’s gotta be the cork in the bottle.”

“OK” Blain said. “I’ll let the others know.”

***

They found Lightning’s body below the first hair-pin curve. Three or four pellets of buckshot from Sig had tagged him. In his pain or panic or diminished mental capacity from lack of blood, that tall man with the Nazi tattoos had not seen or had been unable to make the sharp turn. His momentum had carried him down the steep slope until his tumble was arrested by the dense brush.

The leaf-cover on the ground around was torn up. There was not much blood on the ground. Sig surmised that the attacker had bled-out internally.

He had not been dead very long. His face was warm and his limbs had not stiffened up.

***

The pockets of the men were checked. The bodies were stuffed into the SUV. The tires were repaired and Gregor drove them four miles closer to the Tennessee River before parking the SUV beside the road. He took the precaution of turning the vehicle around so it would look like it had been driven from town rather than from the Cumberland Plateau.

Then Gregor walked back home following foot-trails.

He ditched Lightning’s phone in a spring freshet, pinning the phone to the bottom of a temporary pool with a twenty-pound rock.