Page 3 of Moonshine Lullabies

“Well, I don’t suppose you’d mind us coming in and having a look ourselves now, would you?” he asked with an oily smile and a glance up and down of what he could see of me as I glared up at him.

“I said he ain’t fuckin’ here. Now you need to leave because you ain’t comin’ inside my home.”

I kicked the dude’s boot out of my doorway with my own steel-toed boot and slammed the door, throwing the bolt.

I backed off and turned. As I came even with the hall, the door shuddered in its frame with the first kick. I looked down the hall just in time to see my boy Tate pull the ladder up behind him and the hatch to the attic shut.

“Call your nuckie!” I ordered quietly, knowing you could hear everything in the damn house as I took several steps back, the door shuddering in its frame and bouncing in, a peek of the twilight coming around the top corner. I pressed my back to the wall by the archway into the kitchen.

“Get on outta here, now!” I shouted just before the door blew off its hinges, the frame shattering. The angry biker stalked into my living room. I pressed back, knowing there wasn’t time to grab for any guns nearby – I didn’t like ‘em anyway. I was a bow hunter when I hunted. I preferred the crossbow hanging up overhead, unfortunately, out of my reach, above the archway leading into my kitchen. I didn’t like it being out of reach – and Tate was honestly old enough now, but that hadn’t always been the way. And now? Well, it was a little too late now.

The biker grabbed me by my face, tilting my head way back, his eyes boring into mine as I gritted my teeth and stared up at him in defiance, as he painfully pressed me back into the wall behind me, his knee between my thighs.

He jerked his head down the hallway and the other two left him with me like I wasn’t a threat – which wasn’t that cute?

“Where’s your old man at, huh?”

I frowned and squeezed out through my mashed face, his thick fingers digging into my jaw painfully. “I ain’t got an old man. It’s just me, my brother, an’ my kid. They ain’t here.”

“Whatever, cunt. Where’s your brother at then?” he demanded.

“Behind you,” I lied. Predictably, he looked, and that’s when I unsheathed the knife on my belt, and without hesitation, I plunged it hilt deep into his side. I felt it glance off bone and go deep and he unsurprisingly dropped his hand from my face as I ripped the blade from his side and plunged it in a second time. The second time, it didn’t go as deep, glancing off a rib. He dropped his knee, and I slid an inch or two to where my boots were back on the floor.

While I had him distracted, worryin’ about the blood pourin’ between his fingers, I brought my knee around his leg and up in between ‘em. He dropped and howled. I slid out from between him and the wall as he bellowed like a wounded bull on the carpet. His buddies dropped what they were doing, tearing through the bedrooms in the back and spilled into the hallway.

I didn’t stick around.

I knew my boy was up in the attic and I needed these Neanderthal dumb fucks away from my kid. I took off out back through the kitchen and my workshop, stumbling out the back door an’ down the back steps, makin’ a run for my truck.

I jumped into my little pickup that I always parked out back, closer to the kitchen, and cranked on the key. It was so old and such a piece of shit, I didn’t bother taking the key to it in the house. I left it in the ignition when it was parked anywhere. Ain’t nobody took it yet. That’s the way it usually was out here. Didn’t hurt the Voodoo Bastards decal in the corner of the back window.

Unfortunately, I was pretty sure that fuckin’ sticker was what had me and my boy in this trouble right now. Damn my brother to hell.

I pressed the clutch to the floor and threw the shifter into reverse. Letting up with my left foot, I felt the gear catch and pulled back as my right foot finished crashing down on the gas. The two men that I hadn’t stuck piled out the back door, taking aim.

I ducked as the gun in the first one’s hand popped off. Ramming the clutch pedal to the floor again, I shoved the shifter into first and took off as bullets pinged against the faded red-orange of the oxidized paint of the bed of my truck. As I fishtailed on the grass, the back window shattered out.

I screamed and drove blind, bouncing over the rough grass and gravel of the side yard between the house and the garage, possibly clipping the edge of one of my garden beds as I tried to make it around the side of the house to the road. I made it, fishtailing on the pavement one more time as more booms and cracks emanated from the side of the house my way.

I sat up and risked a peek to make sure the men followed me, and sure enough…

My phone started going off in my apron pocket as I worked pedals, shifter, and wheel, picking up speed and tearing down the cracked and sun-bleached asphalt of our street that didn’t even have a center line.

When it was safe to do so, I pulled the phone out of my apron pocket, my hand slippery and I realized coated in blood. My kid’s face was on the screen as I tried to get it to answer and finally, “Mamma! Mamma, you alright?” came out of the speaker as I hit the symbol for speakerphone and it turned green.

“I’m alright, Tater – you get your nuckie on the line?”

“Yeah, he’s on his way,” he said and sniffed.

I told him, “Don’t you cry now, Tater – not yet. I’m leadin’ ‘em away, baby. You be strong. You be brave for me and stay in that attic, y’hear me, boy?”

“Yes ma’am – but Mamma, one of ‘em is still in the house. I hear him moanin’ and groanin’ down there.”

“You let him. You stay where you are. I stuck him good – shit!” I could hear the roar of the motorcycles catchin’ up to me and I short shifted my little truck and pushed it for all it was worth.

I shot forward and Tate hissed into the phone, “Mamma, you alright?”

“Yes, I’m fine!” I said, and I knew I sounded annoyed, but I couldn’t help it. I was.

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