a way to board up our back door…They busted it in. Ahh…and…a couple of other things…”
“Did you shoot someone?” Corinne asked, her tone warning him not to lie.
“Yes. They tried to ambush me.” Daniel’s fury reminded him what that had gotten the father and his sons, his shame screamed out to not vocalize it. “They would have killed me and…found…you guys,” he said at last in self-compromise.
Corinne remained mute in her understanding of what “found” meant. “You said ‘they’. How many of them were there?” Corinne asked quickly, her voice a little louder, but somehow softer despite it.
“Three,” Daniel said, holding up fingers for a brief and unnecessary visual aide.
“Did they have guns?” Corinne inquired, empathy for her husband slowly returning.
Daniel slouched his shoulders slightly, a posture filled with shame. “One of them did…the others…the others had bats,” he hissed.
‘Baseball bats’ his mind interjected with the oddly timed information.
“What are you going to do? Are they dead? Did they run off?” Corinne asked, foot creeping closer to the bottom stair, worried that there might still be a threat looming somewhere outside in the dark.
“I killed them all. I wouldn’t leave them alive,” Daniel replied, a little too angrily, and far too sincerely.
Corinne’s fear bubbled up again. Not wanting to push any further, she tried to soothe him instead. “We will be alright for a little while. Do…do what you have to. Just be safe,” she cooed, shooting him a quick smile before slinking further back into the murky depths of the basement.
He called back down to her, “I’ll try to hurry. I love you.”
She did not respond.
Unsure of whether she had heard him or not, Daniel hurried out into the garage. He unlocked the rolling door, raised it up about four feet and stared out into the night. After a few seconds, he was fairly certain that there were no further dangers present within the impenetrable shadows. He pulled his daughter’s green and yellow plastic wagon around to the back of the house, and struggled rolling the dead weight of the bearded father into a position that his appendages would not drag along on the ground. He gave a cursory pat-down of the cooling body, which yielded sixteen .22 caliber bullets and an almost rusted-shut buck knife. A small sweep with the flashlight found a small revolver tucked up against the tree. Daniel shoved all of these items tightly together in his back right pocket.
He was half expecting the police patrols to start showing up as he struggled to pull the burdened wagon along the roller-coaster of the concrete pathway. The D.o.C. had installed two acoustic sensor arrays atop City Hall when the work was nearly finished. This system could locate the origin of a gunshot anywhere within a mile or more of the arrays. The Police’s response teams could rush out when a system alert happened, getting to any place inside of the safe zone within minutes. Those patrols should have been here already, though, and Daniel now knew they would never come.
Heading down the driveway, he carefully pulled the wagon between the car and truck before making it to the street. Daniel scanned up and down the desolate road. He saw no lights in any of the houses, and he heard no sirens or engines running. No one had even seemed to notice Daniel’s gunfight, or his screaming fit afterwards.
Daniel pulled his burden down the road about fifty yards from the driveway. Not knowing of any occupied houses nearby, or if there were even any left at all, he unceremoniously dumped the body along the curb; downstream in the flow of the rain gutters. As he completed this unwelcomed task two more times with the son’s bodies, Daniel decided that unless someone showed up to investigate the atrocious racket soon, he would burn the three exposed cadavers tomorrow night.
Daniel nailed two thin sheets of Masonite over the door-wall frames, then, by using screw-in hooks, stretched pieces of safety netting from a trampoline overtop. Someone would have a tough time getting through both layers quickly. Covering both the shattered and whole panes of glass limited the doors functionality; it would only open about fourteen inches now, and it killed the last of the ambient light inside the house. It was a temporary fix at best.
Daniel fought the urge to vomit the entire time he scrubbed the congealed blood and curdled brain matter soiling the patio and wagon. When Daniel stripped off his wet, stained clothes, he had planned on