Dark of the Moon

out a long gun of some kind. In another flash of lightning, Virgil saw that it was an M-16-style rifle, and Stryker had loaded an extra-capacity magazine.
    “Is that semiauto? Or full?”
    Stryker racked a round into the chamber. “Semiauto’s for people who shoot prairie dogs.”
     
    U SING THE PENLIGHT, they walked back out to the road, and then single file along it. There was enough lightning that they could navigate by the flashes, and Stryker’s GPS homed them in on the Feur place. They were making noise, Virgil thought, crunching along on the gravel, and with the zzzzziitttt sound of their nylon rain suits, as their legs crossed and their arms worked, but it was nothing in the wind.
    Four hundred yards out, they crossed the ditch again, and eased over an old barbed-wire fence. Stryker was talking quietly, almost muttering: “Go slow and watch your footing. There’s a lot of rock around. This used to be pasturage; the plowing land was on the other side of the road.”
    And they stumbled a few times, closing in. The wind was coming up, not howling, exactly, but strong, and gusting. There were lights at the house—night-lights, Virgil thought—and a bright sodium vapor light above the loft door on the barn, and another on a pole in front of the machine shed. The pole light shook and trembled in the wind. They found a spot, a hundred yards out, in a cluster of thistles, and sat and watched, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. Nothing changed in the houses or outbuildings.
    Then the rain came, spattering through the weeds, and they could hear the change in pitch when the main front hit the road in front of Feur’s place, another note when it hit the steel buildings, and a few seconds later, it was on them. A minute after that, a second-floor light came on in the farmhouse, and then another, the second one from a small window directly below the peak of the house. “Taking a leak,” Virgil said to Stryker. Another minute, and the bathroom light went out, then the other. Back in bed.
    The rain was beating on them now and they sat on their feet, heads down, hands in their side pockets, dry, but not especially warm. Another half hour, and then Stryker nudged Virgil and said, “Might not be a bad time to look at the machine shed.”
    “Lead the way.”
    They crawled and duckwalked in, moving quickly between lightning strikes, freezing with every flash. Five minutes after they left their watch post, they came up behind the machine shed. At the side door, Virgil tried the knob. Locked: no give at all. They put their heads together to block as much light as they could, waited for a lightning flash, and then Stryker hit the button on the penlight.
    And Virgil said, “Uh-oh.” Medeco locks, and almost new. “I didn’t even know you could get these things out here.”
    “What?”
    “Medecos. Look at this door,” Virgil said. “This thing has got some heft to it; steel, I think.”
    “We’re not getting in?”
    “We’re not getting in,” Virgil said.
    “So…”
    “So let’s go sit some more.”
     
    T HEY MOVED BACK, slowly, a little of the stress leaking away; they couldn’t find their original spot, but found another just as wet. “So they got steel doors and great locks. That makes it a little more interesting,” Stryker said. Twenty minutes later, sputtering in the rain, he said, “I’m starting to feel like an asshole.”
    Another twenty minutes, and the main slab of thunderstorm had passed, and the wind had shifted, and they were able to sit with their backs to it.
    Stryker said, “We knew it’d probably be a waste of time.”
    “Yeah, but after you come out here…you kinda expect something to happen, because you made the effort.”
    “Don’t work that way, grasshopper,” Stryker said.
    “Sun comes up at five-thirty, more or less,” Virgil said.
    “We should be out of here twenty minutes before that.”
    Virgil looked at his watch: “Not yet three.”
    “So we sit for two hours. Maybe get some sleep.”
    “Not gonna sleep out here…”
     
    T HE RAIN STOPPED, the wind dropped, and the lightning rolled away to the east. Virgil had given up hope of getting anything useful when he saw headlights bouncing up the road to the south. As far as he knew, Feur’s was the only place out this way. He nudged Stryker, who was head down, and maybe sleeping. Stryker’s head popped up. He saw the lights and said, “Who’s this?”
    “Early riser,” Virgil said.
    They were