Rodeo Time! (Cumberland Saga)

...The woman was squinting and trying to look at Rosa. Due to the intensity of the weapons light she was totally blinded.

Gregor saw the elbow of her right arm start to straighten and her shoulder drop. She was plunging her hand between the edge of the cushion and the arm of the love-seat.

That is when Gregor shot her in squarely in her apple-dumpling face.

Rosa’s training kicked in and she instinctively fired twice into Billy. Her department's policy was to alternate 65 grain soft-points and 62 grain “enhanced penetration rounds” and they were directed to always have a soft-point staged first and to always fire two-rounds. Rosa never saw any reason to do anything any differently with her own, personal weapon and magazines.

 

The soft-point dumped most of its energy in Billy’s skull and although it didn’t “explode” it did blow his eyeballs out of their sockets and they were dangling by their optical nerves.

On the way out of his skull, the soft-point punched out a hole the size of a nickel and much of the hyper-pressurized and pureed brain-tissue chased the mushroomed slug out of the hole. The enhanced penetration round following a tenth of a second afterward needled through Billy’s partially vacated head and made a nice, neat hole through the back of his skull and was just starting to tumble as it hit the wallboard behind him.

Rosa stroked the trigger so quickly it was almost one, continuous concussive wave that hit Gregor.

If there was going to be a rodeo then she needed finish-off this bull and find the next one before it found her. She felt exposed with her back to the archway that connected the parlor to the rest of the house while Hell was coming to breakfast.

Samson started saying “Fuck, fuck, fuck….” as the three shots boomed through the structure in one rolling crash of thunder. He said it loudly enough for this team-mate to hear him. There was no element of surprise left. Their job just got 10 times harder.

 

Leadership is rarely easy but one of the greatest test is when everything in the environment screams "GO! GO!! GO!!!" and you and your men resist the urge to jump the tracks.

 

Each senior member of the two-man teams had "time-standards" based on Miss Shannon's reports of what was in each room. The team could go more slowly but going faster meant that they were missing hiding places. And that increased the chances of missing a goblin and having him pop up BEHIND the team, an event that would likely result in mass casualties and was to be avoided at all costs. The senior guys checked their stop-watches. The junior guys SAW them do it.

The guys posted at the outside got twitchy and one of them started to hyper-ventilate. But they both stayed on their post. Both remained vigilant and continued to scan their sectors.

 

Samson and his men passed the test. They didn't jump the tracks. They worked the plan.

Belatedly, Rosa stuck her arm and flashlight through the archway and “wrote” a circle on the ceiling and then yelled “CLEAR!”. Gregor saw her lips move but could not make out what she was saying. The team in the kitchen accepted the "Blue-coming-through signal even though it was on the ceiling rather than the floor.

Methodically, the teams cleared the rooms, one-by-one. They found no more goblins.

Reassembling in the kitchen, one of the men asked “Is it time to do the garage?”

The garage had been a topic of much debate. Interior rooms are relatively simple. A garage with a vehicle in it and with stacks of supplies (and loot from other heists) was was much larger than any interior room and it presented a lot more complications in terms of where goblins could be hiding.

Blain had been the one to propose the solution.

The door from the garage into the kitchen opened into the house since exposed hinges are a security risk. That meant that the door into the kitchen could be blocked with short 2-by-4s and a handfull of deck-screws, just like he had done to the front door of his house before “Lightning” and his thugs had shown up.

After barring the door high-and-low, a skeleton crew of 2 stayed in the house in a position that was away from the door. The rest of the men were deployed at 30 paces to cover the overhead garage door and the man-door on the side of the garage. Pains were taken to ensure that nobody was downrange of the other team.

Then Samson fished Miss Shannon’s key-fob from the pocket of his tactical backpack. First he locked the doors of the vehicle and then he started Miss Shannon’s CRV Honda. He had no way of knowing how much gas was in the tank and many of the men were skeptical about the carbon monoxide production of a vehicle with modern electronic controls and catalytic converters*.

Samson’s response was terse. “It doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is what the goblins think. Would you want to stay in a garage for very long if the motor was running and you couldn’t figure out how to stop it? No? That’s what I thought.”

Samson figured that if there were goblins in the garage they would PROBABLY make a break for one of the doors in the first five minutes. If they didn’t, he would leave the motor running and post guards but reassign most of the men to the next set of tasks.

***

Checking his plan, Samson pulled out his walkie-talkie and turned it on. It was preset to the channel Lliam and Eddie were using. “Team Blue to Observation Post, Team Blue to Observation Post: Do you have your ears on?”

“Ten-four. Pretty exciting down your way. What do you need from us?” Lliam responded.

“I am sending a couple-a-three guys over your way. They have a chainsaw and ropes. They might want ya to hold the light for them.” Samson said.

Then he slapped the three “lumberjacks” between their shoulder-blades to get them moving. They carried their weapons on slings and were loaded down like donkeys (a burden that had been passed around every 10 minutes while they humped in).

They trudged down the two-track, too tired to double-time.

The original plan for clean-up had been to put the bodies (if any) into the goblin’s vehicles (if any) and to write “Looters” on the vehicle with spray paint and to abandon the vehicle a mile-and-a-half up the road at the corner of Hendon and Chapel roads.

They had the bodies but no vehicles...yet.

Samson asked “How are you two doing?”, directing it to Rosa and Gregor.

Gregor held out his hand and it was shaking. There is a difference between shooting somebody in the dark and not seeing the trauma and shooting people at three feet and watching their brains paint the wall behind them.

“I don’t think you can count on me for any precision work” Gregor commented. “But I think dragging these two outside might take the edge off my adrenaline.”

Rosa nodded in agreement. Gregor out-massed her by 50% but he was going to really struggle moving Billy by himself.

"Drag them out through the front door. That will keep you out of the kitchen" Samson directed them. Samson would have bet money that there were no goblins in the garage but he wasn’t about to wager his men’s blood.

“If you run out of things to do, you might as well drag the love-seat out into the yard” Samson observed. It was drenched with human blood. “We might as well start a burn-pile.”

 

*Miss Shannon's CRV would produce virtually no CO if all of the sensors related to emissions were functioning. The most common sensor failure (one guaranteed to generate a Check Engine Light) is the O2 sensor in the exhaust. Loss of that sensor typically results in the engine running "rich" and CO is produced.

At idle, her vehicle produces about 6 pounds of CO2 an hour which will raise the CO2 content in a typical, 2-car garage 1% an hour. The CO2 content of the air in our lungs is one of the triggers that makes us breath more quickly. At about 2% CO2 (2 hours), that starts to become a factor. It feels like you are running out of air even though there is still plenty of oxygen to sustain life.

The "running the car" is primarily a psychological weapon intended to flush any goblins out of the garage. In actual terms, it is not very effective at disabling them.

Second Author note: Rosa and Samson would be likely to have electronic hearing protection. That is one reason why they were doing command-and-control. Price-points for entry-level models start at about $60.