Journal (33 page)

When
I finally got back here to Woburn and told them about it, a man, who said he
was an engineer, told me that it was probably a canon that used the propane to
launch the cans.  He explained that when the propane was ignited inside the
shorter, wider pipe, the gases from the explosion propelled the cans loaded in
the longer, narrower pipe and, at the same time, ignited the steel wool on the
bottom of the cans.  The burning steel wool fired-up the gasoline when the can
landed and the bag broke open.  He said it was crude and inaccurate, but
effective if all you wanted to do is set things on fire.  It was kind of like
shooting a Molotov Cocktail from a canon.  He also said that when he was a kid,
he made a smaller version of something like I described to launch potatoes. 
Instead of propane, he used something else, but the idea was the same.  That’s
how he knew what it was, from just me telling him.

I
know this last part I wrote kind of got away from what happened to Alan, mom,
and me.  I just thought it’s real interesting how some people can always think
up all kinds of special ways to kill other people just so they can take their
belongings, so I thought I’d just mention it here.  It also tells you a little
bit about the kind of people we were dealing with.  Hurting others and stealing
things was a way of life for them.

So
now getting back to what happened; I was laying there, just waiting for things
to quiet down so we could get on with it, when Alan crawled up beside me with a
big smile on his face.  He said that he’d just left my mother and she’d fallen
asleep on him right in the middle of his explanation of the plan he’d come up
with for destroying the truck.  He commented that he’d have to remember to work
on his delivery in the future.  I laughed along with him but thought it kind of
strange of her to do that.  She’d never before fallen asleep while on watch, at
least that I knew of.  We were all pretty tired, though.

About
the plan, he said that after the people we were watching were asleep, he’d sneak
up to the truck while I watched out for him from nearby.  Mom, in the mean time,
would move to a position south of us, which would be our direction of escape,
to protect us just in case somebody chased us afterwards.

About
this point in our whispered out conversation, we heard some loud talk at the end
of the warehouse.  It was two men, and they were in an argument with a lot of
others sort of just standing around watching and making an occasional comment meant
to keep them going at each other.

From
what I could understand, one of these men, a little have only
been my imagination6itskinny guy with a long
pointy beard and a hat with ear flaps, was accusing the other guy of stealing
his spare socks.  The other man, who was much bigger and had his hair in a
single braid that must have hung at least two feet down his back, was straight
out denying it.  It went back and forth like that for a couple of minutes with the
little guy getting more and more mad about it.  Finally, the bigger man pushed the
smaller one away, told him that next time he should be more careful with his
stuff, and turned back to the card game he’d been playing.  I guess that was
the last straw for the little guy because he jumped on the big man’s back and
stuck a knife right in the side of his neck.

Well
everyone jumped back at that point, and blood was squirting out all over the
place.  But the little guy didn’t let up any; he stuck the big guy again, this
time in the chest and maybe another time as well.  Just at that moment, the
little half circle of men, who were standing around watching all this, parted
as if a giant hand reached in and shoved everyone to one side or the other, and
in stepped none other than Eric (Mr. Ponytail).  He was carrying a three or
four foot, two by four in his hands, which he swung hard at the little guy,
cracking him a good one in the head.  That put the little guy down on the
ground, just like that, dead out of it.

I
could tell, even from where I was, that that knock to the head messed the
little guy up good.  He was kind of lying part on his left shoulder and part on
his back, with his hands curled up like a boxer, but down near his chest, and
his body was jerking real bad.

Of
course the show wasn’t over with, not by a long shot.  Eric continued to swing
away at the skinny guy, three, four, maybe half-a-dozen or more times, real
fast like, as if he was killing a snake or something.  It was all over after
that.  The little guy just laid there on the ground, deader than an electric
clock, right next to the big guy, who was bleeding out while everyone stared at
him doing it.

That
tells you exactly how Eric keeps people in line.  No wonder when he says be at
a certain place, at a certain time, because we’re going to murder a town full
of people and steal their things, they do what he says.

After
all that, Eric threw the two by four on the ground, it actually landed on the
big guy’s chest, pointed a finger at the people standing around, moving it back
and forth like he was hosing them down or something, and told them to “get rid
of em’.”  He just walked off then, like he was late for an appointment.

Well,
after that, nobody moved.  They just stood around looking at each other,
looking at the ground, looking at the sky, looking at the fire, stuck on stupid. 
Finally, this one man with a scarf wrapped around his neck, walked over to the
skinny dead guy and kicked him in the ribs a couple of times.  I guess scarf
guy was making sure skinny guy was really dead and not just faking it.  He
could have also been kicking him just for the fun of it, though.  You just
can’t tell with these people.

I
wonder if you had to do stuff like that to join up with them — kick a dead body
or knife someone.  Otherwise, how would you know if a good person wasn’t just
pretending to be a bad person to keep from getting killed? to stay where with t

Scarf
guy kind of nodded to someone else in the group to help him, and the two of
them together half carried and half dragged the skinny guy off.  Only thing
was, they brought him right toward us.

Coming
at us like that kind of got me going a little bit, but I should have figured
these two lumps weren’t going to carry a dead body any farther than they had to,
and so dumped him just inside the junk yard area next to a white porcelain toilet
that was laying on its side.  They started back after that, but the first guy
stopped and returned to the body and cleaned out the skinny guy’s pockets. 
That must have prompted the second man to join in the fun because he took the
skinny dead guy’s shoes and belt.  He might have taken the hat as well, but it
was pretty ragged after being whacked so many times by that two by four.

The
bigger dead guy got pretty much the same treatment, except that they dragged
him by his legs the entire way.  Nobody went through his pockets, either.  My
guess is, it was because he was such a bloody mess, but someone did take his
boots and socks.

I
wonder if they were the skinny guy’s socks.

About
all this, I don’t know exactly how I felt; two guys murdered in a blink over a
pair of socks.  I do know I didn’t feel bad for either one of them, though, the
skinny guy or the one who was stabbed.  They both were no good and both a
threat to the three of us, so on second thought, I guess I was glad they were
out of the way.  Maybe I’d feel differently if I thought about it some more,
but I won’t waste the time.

After
the killing, it got pretty hushed up around the warehouse.  I suppose nothing
like a little death to quiet things down.  It wasn’t so silent and sad that
there were any tears or anything.  Everyone pretty much just went back to what
they were doing before, only quieter at it.  They probably just didn’t want to
draw any more attention from Eric.  That would be my guess.  One thing the lull
did allow, though, was for Alan to finish telling me his plan.

So
what he told me was, after he got to the truck, he’d set one of the bombs off
in the bed and try to destroy their gun or canon or whatever it was.  He’d set
the second one off inside the cab area just to make sure it couldn’t possibly
be repaired.  He worried, though, that the fuse from the first one would burn
too fast and it would go off before he could put the second one in place and
escape, so he might decide not to set off the second one.

I
pointed out to him the propane tank in the back of the truck and suggested that
before setting off the first bomb, he cut the hose coming from the tank.  That
way, when the bomb went off, it might ignite the propane and cause a fire.  (At
this point, I didn’t know about the gasoline bombs in the back.  Alan told me
about that later.)  I also suggested that he knife the tires as he was
leaving.  I figured that they wouldn’t likely have the stuff handy to repair
them.

He
thought both my ideas were good ones and so left to update Anna.  We agreed
that when everyone was asleep, I’d let him know and we’d put the plan to
business.

Anna
interrupted at with t center" style="text-align:center;text-indent:.5in" aid="2BG">
___________

The
last guy went inside the warehouse when the last fire burned itself out, maybe
a couple of hours later, on April 18th.  I waited a few more minutes just to
make sure and crawled back to mom and Alan to let them know it was time.

Mom
hugged the both of us and gave us a little smile before taking off.  We gave her
a few minutes to get set up where she’d have a good view of us making our
escape, and then Alan and I crawled our way back toward the truck.  Not too
much went right after that.

We
snuck up on the truck together, Alan and me, except that when we got there, I
moved off to one side, behind a dump pile of cement chunks, where I could watch
the doors to the warehouse.  I guess at this point, I was maybe twenty yards or
so from the nearest door.  I still had the shotgun, maybe not the best gun for
that distance, but good enough with the double aught buck it was loaded with.

Alan
hopped up into the back of the truck.  Instead of cutting the hose coming from
the propane tank, though, I saw him poke around inside one of the boxes on the
bed of the truck.  A few seconds later, he smelled his fingers and after that
started stabbing away at the contents of the boxes.  Of course I later learned
he was poking holes in the bags filled with the gasoline, but I didn’t
understand what he was doing at the time.  As he moved from one box to another,
he kind of raised up.  His head must have popped up above the wood slat sides
on the truck bed because I heard someone shout, “Hey, get out of there.”  Out
from the darkness, behind the closest roll up door, I saw this guy step out.

I
shot him right out and didn’t have another thought about it.  I saw him react
to the pellets hitting him, a little twisting motion, but he didn’t go down
right away, so I shot him a second time and reloaded.  There was a moment after
that when nothing more happened, except that I saw Alan light the fuse on our
bomb and jump out of the truck.

He
told me to watch out for him and moved back the way we’d come.

So
that’s what I did.  I stayed there and shot a second man who came out the same
door and saw him drag himself back inside, obviously hurt, and fired a second
shot into the darkness just for good measure.  As before, I fed more shells
into the magazine.

It
didn’t come to mind at the time, but now it does, that was the first time I
ever really shot anyone.  Maybe I’ll feel different later, but it wasn’t a
moment or anything.  It’s nothing to brag about and nothing to cry about
either.

Alan
called out for me to move back.  I did, running past him I don’t know how far. 
As I ran, I heard his rifle go off two or three times.  I wasn’t counting.  I
think I heard a couple of gunshots coming back at us, too.  I set myself up a
few steps later, and it was Alan’s turn again.

Just
as he was standing up to run toward me, it seemed as if the whole world
exploded behind him.  The pressure from the bomb, and the ignition of the
gasoline wash have only
been my imagination6ited me in heat and shook up my insides like marbles in a cup. 
Alan, who was closer to the truck, was knocked over, face down.  But I saw him
get up and come my way.  Nothing was going to come after us now, not for a while
anyway, so I just turned and ran for the concealment of the brush.

As
soon as I was there, I turned around but didn’t see Alan.  I wondered if maybe
he was looking for me, thinking I was still in position.  I finally saw him come
into view, only thing, he was limping pretty badly.  I started toward him, but
he waved me on.

I
kept moving in mom’s direction but also kept looking back and checking on
Alan.  When I heard a second explosion and saw this huge fireball, which I
figured was the propane tank going up, I knew there was enough time to wait for
him.

It
was his right thigh.  There was blood starting about midway and dripping down. 
On looking closer, I saw something sticking out.  It definitely was a piece of jagged
metal, maybe from our bomb or one of the cans filled with gasoline, I don’t
know, but it sure looked ugly.  I put Alan’s arm around my shoulder and
together we walked to mom’s hiding place.

She
took over from there, in that calm way she does in times when things aren’t
going so well.  She told me to take her place watching until she was through and
helped Alan sit down.