Founders by James Wesley Rawles

bruised his ribs on the Hurst floor shifter lever as he rapidly bent down to avoid the gunfire.
    Also prone on the front seat of the Mustang, Terry flipped the selector lever of the car’s automatic transmission into reverse. She stepped on the gas, trying to back out of the roadblock. The back end of the Mustang collided with the front of the Bronco with a sickening crunch.
    Ken shouted over his TRC headset walkie-talkie: “If you can, bail !”
    The gunfire continued, though less rapidly. Ken and Terry bothgrabbed their rifles and backpacks. They then almost simultaneously crawled out of their cars and hastily shouldered their packs.
    Without even thinking about it, Terry’s field training under the tutelage of Jeff Trasel from Todd Gray’s group kicked in. She keyed her TRC-500 and said, “By bounds, follow me. I’ll fire, you move.”
    She thumbed her AR’s selector switch, and aimed at the muzzle flashes of their attackers, firing five rounds.
    Ken scrambled to the side of the street and squatted down behind a parked car. He radioed: “Okay, Joe, I’ll fire, you move.” (In their “bounding by pairs” training, all the participants referred to each other as “Joe,” and that stuck.) Just before Terry started her bound, Ken started firing. Compared to his wife’s AR-15, his larger-caliber HK clone made a much louder boom, and had a larger muzzle flash.
    She replied in a singsong, again from their training. “Okay, Joe, I’ll fire, you move.”
    Taking turns, they made five bounding rushes, using parked cars for cover. After the fourth bound, all return fire had ceased. At the end of the block, they knelt down behind a raised brick hedge and checked each other over for wounds. They found only that Ken had one bullet hole through the armpit of his shirt and jacket. The bullet hadn’t touched his skin. Terry had scratches on her right hand and right cheek from broken glass, but they weren’t bleeding. They reloaded their rifles with fresh magazines. Altogether, they had fired ninety rounds while executing their withdrawal.
    Terry had accidentally dropped the magazine that she had expended between her bounding rushes, but Ken still had an empty magazine that he’d tucked into one of the cargo pockets on his trouser leg.
    Ken whispered, “Not bad for ‘withdraw by fire.’”
    “Yeah, Jeff Trasel would be proud.”
    A moment later, a road flare was ignited near the Bronco and Mustang. The night was so dark that the flare seemed quite bright. Ken and Terry watched with a mixture of fascination and horror a bonfire of wooden pallets, accelerated by a small bucket of gasoline.
    By the light of the bonfire, the dozen gang members who had ambushed the Laytons began pillaging the contents of their car and truck. There were loud exclamations as each item was extracted from the vehicles. There were repeated shouts of “Oh yeah!” and “Check it out!” and “This is sick!” One of them hoisted Ken’s Remington riotgun in the air and gave a “Woot-woot” shout.
    Seeing and hearing this, Ken and Terry were seething. “Those heathen bastards! They’re taking all our stuff,” Terry muttered.
    Ken suggested, “What do you say we make ’em pay for it?”
    “I don’t know. Do you think that’s right?”
    Ken nodded and answered, “It’s as right as anything could be. Hey, they just did their best to kill us, and they’re taking almost everything in the world we have that’s worth anything. I say make ’em pay for it, with interest .”
    Terry reached out to tightly grasp Ken’s hand, in affirmation.
    They dropped down on the sidewalk to the right of a hedge, and got into good prone shooting positions, side by side.
    Terry said, “I’ve got the guys to the right of the bonfire, you take the ones on the left.”
    “Give me a sec,” Ken answered. He shifted his position slightly, and thumbed the HK’s safety to the “E” position.
    His first target was the man who held the Remington riotgun. By