“I hit two, maybe three or four.” Dianne winced as the glass on the windows where she had been standing shattered under a barrage of bullets. “We need to get out of here; they’re focusing their fire upstairs!”
Both women dropped to the floor and crawled out as the gunfire from outside the house intensified. As Dianne followed Tina out into the hall, she glanced back at the bedroom, watching as more holes appeared in the walls, letting moonlight in to illuminate swirling masses of dust and particles of wood, drywall and insulation. The last three days had been filled with thoughts in the back of her mind about what might happen if the gang from the gas station were to find her home. Everything from minor structural damage to all of the buildings being burned to the ground along with the loss of all of their supplies and animals.
No matter what scenarios she came up with, though, they all ended with the same thought. We will win. Losing her friends and family was never an option, even in her darkest moments, and even while the bullets passed by and her home was slowly being torn apart, she did not waver in that thought. Fear, swirling deep within her gut, was quickly being replaced by another emotion that was far, far stronger.
Anger.
It was her home. It was her family. It was hers. And she would, without a doubt, ensure that everything stayed that way, come hell or high water.
“Tina?”
The older woman looked back at Dianne, the same fire burning in her eyes that Dianne had in her own. “What is it?”
“It’s time to punch some holes in their chests.”
Tina’s pearly teeth glinted in the moonlight streaming in from a nearby window as she smiled, her expression filled with glee. “You don’t have to tell me twice.”
***
While the three days in between Dianne’s return from the LTAC and the arrival of the two men attempting to loot one of the barns had been spent quietly watching and waiting, that wasn’t the only thing that they had done.
Once Jason had started to make his recovery, he and Dianne had spent several hours talking with Sarah, Tina and Mark about the ways in which the property was protected against possible attacks. While Jason agreed that the property was set up in the most defensive and defensible way possible, he pointed out that they were sorely lacking in offensive capabilities. In case of an attack they could defend the house easily enough or, if necessary, escape through the tunnel out into the woods, but he was incredibly unsatisfied with that given the dangers that were threatening to descend upon them.
On the afternoon of the second day, while everyone else was either outside patrolling, cleaning weapons or was otherwise engaged, Jason had worked with Mark and Jacob in the living room while he was propped up on the couch. A pile of shotgun shells, springs, nails, wooden blocks and other odds and ends were combined with a car battery and lengths of wire, and by the next morning Dianne had woken to the sound of a muffled shotgun blast. After a few minutes of panicked searching for the source, they had gone down into the basement to find Jason slowly walking up the stairs from the tunnel with a grin on his face and the smell of gunpowder heavy in the air.
The remotely triggered traps were crude, prone to accidental discharge and nothing to look at, but they worked. A simple spring mechanism held three nails in tension a short distance from the back of a trio of shotgun shells inside of a small wooden box. The simple press of a button released the nails, which punched into the primer of the shells and set them off. Jason’s first test with a single shell had been a success. While there were a few failures as he worked to set up the multi-shell devices, by the end of the nearly days-long tinkering process he was satisfied with the low failure rate of the traps and made his suggestion to Dianne that they rig as many as they could throughout the woods around the house.
Dianne had been hesitant to set traps in the woods, both out of fear for the safety of everyone at the house and because she wasn’t sure if that type of thing was where she wanted to go. Staging a rescue and fighting for medication to save the lives of family or friends was one thing, but setting traps in her backyard took everything to the next level. A frank talk from Tina had convinced her, though, and they soon rigged dozens of the devices in the trees, all wired in various groups that could be triggered in tandem. The dead leaves made it easy to conceal the wires and in the thick, overgrown woods, it was difficult to see the small boxes containing the shells during the day. At night, seeing them would be nigh-on impossible.
Jason had initially wanted to place them at chest level, but while Dianne, Tina and Mark were outside working, they decided that rigging the traps at staggered heights would be best for maximum coverage and dispersal. The three shells inside each small box were angled in slightly different directions, and that combined with the lack of a barrel to guide the projectiles meant that the field of fire of the traps was incredibly wide, but only deadly at a short distance. Two buckshot shells and one loaded with birdshot went into each trap, with the idea being that if the traps couldn’t necessarily kill someone, they could at
least give them a very, very bad day. That, combined with the fact that Jason had thousands of buckshot shells that they had brought over to Dianne’s house when he and Sarah moved in, meant that it was the best choice for the traps.
While Jason’s experiments and tinkering know-how had proven that the concept would work, the only way to know whether or not they would work on a large scale against an invading force would be to test them in battle.
***
“Jason!” Dianne stood on her toes to peek out through a crack in the boards covering the small windows above the front door. “Trigger the first group; right outside the front of the house!”
A moment’s pause followed Dianne’s cry, and she wondered if Jason had dropped his radio in the dash to get downstairs. Just as she was about to shout in the radio again, a sound like a thousand firecrackers exploded from the woods out in front of the house. Cries of pain accompanied the sounds, which came in bursts as Jason touched pairs of wires to the terminals on a car battery down in the basement. Each new pair of wires set off another group of traps, and even through the thick front door Dianne could hear what the men in the woods were saying.
“What the hell?! Somebody’s shooting!”
“Where are they? Where are they?!”
“Right in front of us! It came from there!”
“My eyes! They got me in my eyes!”
“It has to be coming from the house!”
“No, it’s—aagh!”
Another burst of explosions cut off what the man was saying, and Tina leapt past Dianne, bounding back up the stairs to peer out the window. “Nice work, Jason!” She called through the radio for both Jason and Dianne to hear. “They’re scattering out front!”
“Did it kill any of them?” Dianne asked.
“Looks like maybe one. Hard to tell in this light, but they’re scattering hard!”