Incursion

Incursion

The flock of geese rose into the air before the first gunshot had finished ricocheting through the quiet town.

Sadie Leavitt stopped with her hand on the Trade Mart’s front door, a large tote full of bread balanced on her hip, and tried to place the direction. Ever since the Western Front had rolled through Tiptonville, the sound of gunfire drew fear and anxiety through the town’s residents.

Could just be someone taking down a buck.

She walked on inside, bringing with her the warm, rich smell of the fresh-baked bread.

Inside, the murmur of voices and the clink of jars on wood didn’t falter at first. Old habits ran deep; and folks were far more familiar with gunfire than not, especially around hunting season. But this wasn’t the typical time of year to bag a deer. They were too skinny from the long winter. Then another shot rang out—and the room stiffened around her.

“That’s coming from the south,” Otis Liles said from behind the counter, his bony hands pausing over a crate of loose nails. The thick lenses of his glasses flashed as he squinted toward the door, as if he could see through wood and distance both.

“Could be someone hunting. Taking down a buck,” offered Jimmy Hurlbut, from his spot near the window. He didn’t sound like he believed it.

Sadie’s neighbor, Martin Dooley, reached slowly for the shotgun racked under the counter. He was an old man now, stooped and thin, but the way his hands moved—sure, unhurried—hadn’t changed since the stories about him and a deer stand in ’87.

“Nothing but gristle on deer after the winter we had,” he said. “That’s somethin’ else. Likely somethin’ we need to be checkin’ out before it comes for us.”

Sadie glanced past him, peering through the grimy, wavy glass. From Trade Mart’s front window, you could see most of what passed for Main Street: the gutted Regions bank, the old brick building that housed the town’s lone antiques store now half-burned and empty, and the boarded‑up cafe with its cracked coffee cup sign. Beyond that, the land fell away toward farmland and the river. She couldn’t see the farms that lay to the south, but at least a dozen of them remained outside of town.

A third gunshot echoed through the sky, and the tension in the room was immediate.

Otis cleared his throat. 

“One shot might be a hunter. Two if they miss the first time. But three? That’s not a hunter.”

Sadie’s belly tightened. Her memories of the Western Front’s incursion into their small town were indelibly etched into her heart. The townspeople had fought them off, but at a terrible cost. They’d left the burned truck and blackened bones inside as a warning and a promise. Mess with Tiptonville, and meet your end. She knew other folks pointed to them when they talked about how Tiptonville was still standing while other towns weren’t.

But that didn’t stop everyone.

Martin slid shells into the shotgun with a firm, familiar click. “We’re wastin’ time, sittin’ here jawin’.”

“We need to round up the kids,” Sadie said sharply. “Get them and anyone who can’t fight somewhere safe.”

Sadie felt everyone’s eyes flicker toward her and away again. She knew why. The Brown’s farm was that direction. Just a quick jog past the Perdue farm.

Rory and Helen Brown were hers in everything but blood. When her mother had died when she was just thirteen, and her daddy had found more comfort in a bottle than in keeping his job or caring for his only child, Rory and Helen had taken her in. Even after she grew up, her daddy long dead of liver failure, they stayed in her life, and she in theirs. Helen had been there by her side holding her hand as Sadie labored to bring her boys into the world after Harper and Eli’s daddy left her high and dry in her last trimester. And the world had fallen apart a few years later during The Collapse. Through it all, the Browns were there for her.

They passed her plates heaped with food at the church potlucks, invited her twins over to bottle‑feed lambs whenever she needed a moment of rest for herself, and slipped her extra eggs, flour and butter each week. Her kids had survived two hard winters thanks to Rory and Helen.

“They’re outside the line,” Hurlbut went on. “They knew the risk, stayin’ that far out. We can’t break the perimeter—”

“We don’t have a perimeter,” Martin snapped. “We’ve got two towers, a ditch, and folks who think hidin’ behind shelves will keep ‘em from gettin’ shot.” He stepped around the end of the counter with the shotgun held low. “Jimmy, you tell Alice Jennings to round up the kids, keep ‘em safe. Sadie, you’re with me.”

Sadie’s heart kicked.

Hurlbut eyed Sadie, then clearly dismissed her. “You sure ‘bout that Martin?”

Martin gave Hurlbut a sideways glance. “Girl shoots straighter than half the men in this town. She’d beat your ass in marksmanship any old day.”

Hurlbut’s thick eyebrows knitted in surprise, and then he shrugged.

Martin turned to Otis, “Mr. Liles, can you hold down the fort here?”

The centenarian nodded and reached for his silver revolver. His white hair was so thin his pink scalp showed, but the old man still shot straight.

Hurlbut swore under his breath, but he didn’t try to block the door. “You go out there, you keep ‘em headed back this way,” he said. “I’ll roust the Ellis brothers and Wes Perkins and see if they can bring some additional fire to the fight. If the Browns are still alive, we pull ‘em inside the line. We don’t stand and die at the edge of their pond.”

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all morning,” Martin replied.

They stepped into the gray light together: Martin with his shotgun, Sadie with the small carbine she kept belted to her waist. Ever since the first attack, everyone who owned a weapon, wore it. Owning a gun and keeping it locked away in a gun safe was an outdated concept in this new and brutal world. The air smelled like cold earth and distant rain. Under it, faint but growing, came another scent.

Smoke.

Not the green, wet smell of a leaf pile. This carried the bitter edge of oil and old wood.

The geese were silent now; the sky was empty.

They took the back way out of town, skirting behind the boarded cafe and cutting along the drainage ditch that paralleled the road. Years of half‑hearted militia drills had worn a faint path there, boots flattening the ragweed. The road itself was lined with ghosts: the burned Western Front truck, rust streaking down its scorched sides, and the skeletal shapes still wired to its frame.

Martin’s lips moved, but no words came out. Sadie figured he was sending up a prayer for everyone.

A brief prayer hurt no one. So long as they aren’t so busy praying that they forget to take cover when the shooting starts.

Martin’s strides were long, and Sadie two-timed it to return to his side.

“Stay low,” he said. “We don’t need to give ‘em easy targets.”

Sadie nodded, watching the treeline ahead. The gravel drive that led to the Perdue farm ran along a gentle curve between fields, then dropped behind a rise. Beyond that lay the pond, the barn, and a white farmhouse with a wide covered porch.

“Western Front?” Martin shrugged. “Men like that, they don’t forget a loss. They wait and they pick a day when they think you’ve stopped expectin’ it.”

“And you haven’t,” Sadie said quietly.

Martin’s mouth twitched. “Sleep’s overrated.”

They left the ditch where the hedgerow began, cutting into the field. Last summer, Milo Baines had planted soybeans here; now it was winter‑bare, the dark soil showing in cracked strips. On the far side, the line of poplars that marked Perdue land swayed in a light wind.

Sadie’s chest tightened at the sight.

Even before the war, the Brown farm had looked a little worn—paint flaking, gutters sagging, the barn’s metal roof patched with whatever they could find.

Now smoke feathered up from behind the barn, too thick and dark to be a cooking fire.

A gunshot cracked the air, sharp and close.

Sadie flinched. Another followed, then a third, the sound bouncing between the scattered trees. Then nothing but the slow hiss of the wind and the faint groan of the distant water tower’s bent metal.

“Damn,” Martin breathed. “I hope to God we aren’t too late.”

He quickened his pace. Sadie matched it, heart pounding, fingers numb on the carbine’s grip.

At the property line, they dropped into the shallow ditch and crawled the last yards to the fence. The Brown’s barn loomed in the distance to their left, red paint peeling in long curls. To the right sat their farmhouse, front door hanging open, one window broken out from the inside.

Between the house and barn, the yard was a scatter of overturned buckets, a dropped laundry basket, and a small boot that could only be Helen’s lay abandoned in the mud amid other larger prints and drag marks.

Sadie couldn’t see any people.

She could hear something, though—faint and wrong. Not the rhythm of hammer and saw, or Rory’s rough laugh, or Helen singing under her breath as she hung laundry. It was a rough, male voice, too loud, flavored with a drawl that didn’t belong to anyone she knew. Another voice answered, thinner, strained.It sounded like Helen’s.

“That’s the kitchen,” Sadie murmured, peering through a gap in the boards.

Martin nodded once. “We come in from the pond side. Sadie, you stick to me like a tick. Anyone comes out, you drop ‘em.”

They slipped along the inside of the fence until the ground sloped down toward the pond. The geese shuffled back and forth in a huddle on the far bank, a gray, undulating and uneasy knot. A damp trail of trampled grass ran from the barn to the water, then back toward the house, marked here and there with dark stains that hadn’t come from the earth.

“Somebody tried to drag someone,” Martin said under his breath. “Didn’t get far.”

At the rear corner of the house, Sadie could finally see into the kitchen through a clouded window. She flattened herself against the siding and inched up just enough to look.

The scene hit her like a fist.

Helen Perdue kneeled on the scuffed linoleum, hands tied behind her back, a dark bruise blossoming along her cheekbone, a trickle of blood leaking from one nostril, and mud caking the front of her. One boot on, just a mud-encrusted sock over the other foot. Rory lay against the far wall, shoulder and shirt soaked with blood, face gray, eyes half‑closed. A chair lay on its side nearby, a shattered wooden leg sticking out at a sharp angle.

Three men in Western Front uniforms were in the room: one by the pantry, rummaging through the couple’s food stores, another near the back door keeping an eye to the north, where Sadie and Martin had just come from. The third stood in front of Helen with a pistol held almost lazily at his side. Their gear was ragged, insignia half‑stripped, but the cut of the jackets and the scarred rifles were as familiar as the shape of the trucks on the road.

“Family farm,” the one in front of Helen said. His voice carried the slick ease of someone used to people listening, or else. “Look at you, rollin’ in provisions. Town’s fat and happy, sittin’ on theirs. You think the townsfolk gonna come save you all the way out here?”

Helen spat blood onto his boot. “The town sticks together” she said hoarsely. “I think you should’ve learned your lesson the first time.”

The man’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “We think you folks needed remindin’ who’s in charge, who holds the real power here. Nobody’s coming. Now give me the key to that padlocked door over there.”

Sadie felt Martin’s hand close around her wrist, steady and strong.

“You see the one in charge?” he murmured in her ear. “The talker. You take him.”

Her mouth was dry as dust. “And the others?”

“They’re close enough to each other, I’ll take ‘em both. I’ll get in position. Eyes on me and then we go on the count of three.”

The man at the back door shifted, checking the yard. He turned his head, giving Sadie a clear view of the sharp, hungry lines of his face, the way his fingers drummed against the rifle stock. The one at the sink scratched at the stubble along his jaw, bored. Neither looked worried.

None of the intruders seemed to think anyone was coming for the old couple on the floor.

Sadie braced the carbine on the sill, breath shallow, sight clamped on the center of the talker’s chest. Martin crept closer to the back door while still keeping his other target in view. Sadie watched as Martin turned toward her, his lips moving—three, two, one.

She squeezed the trigger.

The shot blew out the glass window in a burst of shards. Sadie’s bullet shot true, just as Martin had known it would. It hit the man in the sternum, jerking him backward into the table. The rifle flew from his hand, skidding across the floor. He gasped once and crumpled, legs folding under him.

A heartbeat later, Martin’s shotgun roared, blasting through the back door’s thin wood. The man posted there staggered, dropped his rifle, and fell in the doorway, clutching at the ruin of his thigh. His second shot thundered an instant later, the round punching through the glass of the rear porch and into the third man’s shoulder as he lunged for his weapon.

“Down!” Sadie shouted, though Helen had already thrown herself sideways, huddling under the kitchen table as the guns roared.

Rory tried to sit up and failed, teeth bared in a soundless groan.

“Go, girl!” Martin barked. “In!”

Sadie didn’t bother with the door. She hauled herself through the window, landing hard on the counter. Her hands stung as she caught herself on the chipped laminate and slid down beside the stove.

The kitchen smelled like gunpowder, blood, and remnants of last night’s meal.

The man by the sink, wounded but not down, grabbed for his fallen rifle one‑handed. Sadie put another round into him before he could lift it. He spun, hitting the tiled wall with a wet sound, then sagged sideways. He left a smear on the handwritten calendar that still read APRIL in bright letters.

Sadie’s target lay splayed at the base of the table, eyes staring at the ceiling, mouth half open as if he’d meant to finish his sentence and never quite got there.

Sadie realized she was shaking.

Martin moved first, crossing the kitchen in three limping strides to drop beside Rory. He reached for a kitchen towel and pressed it firmly into the bloody wound on Rory’s shoulder, applying pressure. “Stay with me, brother,” he said, voice low, thick with emotion. “You done worse fallin’ out of the hayloft.”

Rory’s lips twitched. “That was your hayloft,” he rasped. “You still owe me a new rib.”

Helen was already twisting her wrists, working at the knot with numb fingers. Sadie dropped to her knees behind her and sliced the rope with a shaky hand. The fibers parted under the blade.

“Kids?” Helen demanded at once, springing forward toward the hall. “Harper! Eli!”

“My boys are here?” Sadie asked, terror slicing through her.

“Yes,” Helen choked back a sob. “Harper said he wanted to give a late birthday present to Rory. I told them to hide.”

Martin’s head snapped up. “Sadie, go find ‘em. These three are done for. Go get your boys.”

Sadie scrambled after Helen down the narrow hallway, walls hung with crooked school photos and a quilted wall hanging that read BLESS THIS MESS in fading thread. Halfway down, the bedroom door stood half‑open, the frame splintered where a boot had met wood.

Inside, her boys Harper and Eli clung together, pale and terrified. Behind them, another intruder had wrapped a filthy arm around her boys, a sharp knife at Harper’s side.

Sadie didn’t think. She lifted the carbine, sighting on the sliver of chest she could see between Harper’s shoulder and the man’s throat. The crosshairs bounced with her pulse.

“Easy now,” the man grinned even as his eyes showed his fear, “You don’t want to do somethin’ stu…”

Sadie fired.

The raider jerked, air leaving him in a shocked grunt. He toppled sideways; the knife skittering across the floor and landing to one side. His lips worked, but blood surged from his mouth then. His eyes dulled instantly, the light of life vanishing until there was nothing left. Sadie’s boys leaped away in tandem, screaming as they ran to her side, clutching her shirt and shaking with fear.

Sadie clutched them against her. Her carbine was still pointing firmly at the dead man, daring life to return so she could kill him all over again. The bastard. Threatening her boys.

When it was clear the man would not be moving again, she dropped the gun, hands shaking as they ran over her boys’ bodies, checking for wounds. Except for a scratch on Harper’s hand and a darkening bruise on Eli’s cheek, they were physically unharmed. She pulled them close, kissing and hugging them as they shook. Sadie hummed wordlessly, as much to comfort herself as them.

Her boys. Here in her arms was everything she had to live for.

“It’s over, boys. You hear me? I got you.”

Sadie stared at the corpse in front of her. She’d never put a bullet into a man from ten feet away and watched his life leak out onto a bedroom carpet. He’d messed with the wrong town, however. Damned if he hadn’t gotten exactly what he deserved.

“Come on, boys, Rory needs our help.”

Rory would live, though his shoulder would never be the same. He’d joke about it on hot days, claiming he could predict the weather better than anyone else’s aches and pains.

Sadie and Martin dug shallow pits at the back fence line for the four raiders, unmarked on the edge of town.

In town, Hurlbut doubled the watch rotations and finally agreed to extend the line: small lean‑to’s and patched trailers dragged closer from the edges, a ring tightening around the Trade Mart and the old bank.

Sadie went back to her baking. On quiet afternoons, she would catch herself glancing toward the door, listening for the geese.

Sometimes she swore she still heard them, honking in panic over Rory and Helen’s pond even on clear, calm days. Each time, she’d feel her fingers twitch toward the carbine hanging on the peg behind her, the memories of that day rising like smoke.

Tiptonville had always pretended the war was something that happened out there—on interstates and in cities with more stoplights than they had crossroads. And the blackened skeletons wired to the overturned trucks at the town’s edge had been proof that they would fight anyone who violated the town’s borders.

The day the geese screamed and the Brown’s kitchen filled with guns and strangers proved something else: the war could find you anywhere.