I heard some rustling, and next thing I knew, Jerry had a mouthful of weed. He ate everything in the bag. I had to give him my Pepsi to keep him from choking on how dry it was. The cop got off the freeway two exits later.

Jerry's real sweet, but he's a lot to handle.

“THEY'RE COMIN' FOR THE damn chickens!” Jerry's eyes were all crazy, and he kept looking over his shoulder and waving his shotgun around. I have sometimes moaned about the plains, about no trees, no hills, no nothing but fields and ditches and short-grass prairie between me and the Rockies, the summer noon so hot I might melt, spread invisible-thin across the land, become tiny and helpless in the vast, big-sky world, but anyway the good part of it is the view is unobstructed. You can see deer rustling in a field five miles away. Behind Jerry, past the dry ditch, past the oil rigs, past Fran's house, I could see a line of red dirt plume rising, traffic on the road moving quick toward my farm.

I had the same feeling I got right before the first raid, like when I used to jump into the snowmelt rush of the South Platte in June. I couldn't fill my lungs. My arms were thrashing around but not doing anything specific. My blood felt thick and gummy, slowed way down while panic sped the rest of me up. The air, like the water, held me down, constrained me.

“Grace, this isn't a drill! Not a drill! Get to the bunker!” Jerry was shirtless again and barefoot, running across the corral all frantic, and then he must have stepped on a goathead or something because he started swearing and jumping up and down, staying in one spot but turning in a circle, holding the shotgun with one hand and grabbing at his foot with the other.

Jerry worked the goathead loose and started running toward me again. “Goddammit, Gracie, move!” he yelled. We had a plan for this contingency, and yes, we'd run a few drills. We'd built a chicken coop bunker out of pallets we stole from the feed store. We lined them with scraps of plywood and stuffed them with straw until we had real solid walls. We had ammo and jerky and bottled water and K-Y Jelly stored in there. We could hold off a raid for a good long time. I'm realistic, so I knew that if we drew guns on Extension, it probably wouldn't end well. Of course, I didn't really believe it would come to that.