Free Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series by Franklin Horton Page B

house. She would have to deal with this alone.
    Dropping off the side of the front porch, she walked along the red mulch and foot-high shrubs toward the side of the house furthest from that of her sister’s or parents’. She chose this side because she assumed the men would be splitting their attention between studying her house and keeping watch toward the other houses. There was nothing on this end for them to be concerned with. No other houses, no other neighbors. They would not be expecting anything from this side. She was counting on that.
    She listened at the corner and heard nothing. Even so, she raised the shotgun to her shoulder, placed her finger on the safety and stepped around the corner. She’d been taught to do this in such a manner that you didn’t lead with the barrel, allowing an intruder to grab the barrel and take your weapon from you. She stepped away from the house, putting some distance between her body and the corner, but there was no one there. She released the breath she’d been holding and approached the back corner of the house.
    She knew this time would be different. She knew there was definitely someone around this corner. Three someones, in fact. She paused, keeping her body close to the wall. If they had handguns on them and opened fire, she would have to duck back quickly and hope that the house could absorb the bullets.
    She shouldered the weapon and leaned around the corner, glaring down the barrel at the men. The ghost ring sight lay on the chest of the middle man. At this distance, without the protection of her locked house around her, the masked men terrified her. She had never been so close to killing a man purely out of fear.
    They had not yet noticed her. She sucked down her fear and let her anger rise. How dare these men try to rob her home? What if her children had been there?
    “Don’t fucking move!” she shouted, her voice as loud and authoritative as she could make it.
    The men flinched, startled. She could see their eyes moving, their brains spinning for traction. With the masks on, only their eyes and close-cropped heads showed. She saw now that the masks were like those that SWAT teams wore on raids to conceal their identities.
    “What are you doing behind my house?”
    One of the men was whispering under his breath. She couldn’t make out what he was saying but she knew he was talking to the other men. She hoped they weren’t planning something crazy. She didn’t want to have to kill them, but she would. She snapped the safety off, wanting to be immediately ready to fire if she had to. This did not go unnoticed, the slight metallic click carrying loudly enough across the silence of the yard.
    As she drew a breath to tell them to leave while they still could, they all heard the sound of a lawnmower start up. While she didn’t take her eyes from the men, the sound distracted her for the briefest moment, delaying her reaction. The men took this opportunity to dive into the tall grass and scurry away. They were only visible for seconds before they disappeared into the thicker brush at the edge of the yard. She had no doubt that she could have put easily put buckshot pellets into painful locations as they crawled away but she couldn’t make herself do it. Instead, she raised the barrel just over their heads and fired into the trees. She pumped the action and fired again, then a third time. She hoped that the sound of pellets crashing over their heads and dropping leaves on them would make the men think twice about returning.
    What she hadn’t considered was the immediate effect that the shotgun blasts would have on everyone else in their neighborhood. As she retreated back to the front yard, she found that her father and Will had abandoned the mower and were running across the yards as fast as they could, pistols in hand. Beyond them, she could see her brother-in-law Dave sprinting toward them with an AR-15 in his arms. While she could barely make out their faces, she