Well, that wasn’t going to be too hard. It was them keeping us pinned down, not vice versa.

“I think we can do that, Comm,” I said.

“The dumb one’s coming back out,” said George.

The “dumb one” was one of the group who was shooting at us off and on. This particular idiot wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and a gray sweatshirt. He’d step out of the old machine shed, half crouched, point his AK-47 either at our barn or the old chicken coop, and just blow out about thirty rounds in a couple of seconds. The first time he’d done it, George had said, “Look at that dumb son of a bitch!” It stuck.

So far, shooting from the hip the way he was, he’d not come very close to hitting the barn itself, let alone any of us inside. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. I thought it was pretty obvious he was trying to draw fire, and that was the other reason for “dumb one.” There was something about the jumpy way he did it that told me it wasn’t really his idea. The comfort was that it let us know they weren’t sure exactly where we were.

“Back in a minute, Hester,” I said. I crawled back toward my vantage point and pointed my AR-15 through a hole between the old foundation and the rotting boards of the barn wall. The elevated front sight just cleared the hole, but I had him dead to rights almost instantly. He was only about fifty yards away, and the upper two-thirds of him was in plain view. He’d be hard to miss. I squinted as I aimed at the white “NY” on his blue cap.

“Whadda ya think? Take him out?” I asked George. So far, we hadn’t returned fire since the first exchange about ten minutes back. We hadn’t because they had pretty much been shooting at the upper floor of the barn and into the loft, and we were down at the stone foundation. They were far enough off target; we’d been reluctant to reveal our actual position by shooting back. They had a lot more firepower than we did. But now Hester had been hurt. They were getting closer.