When 15-year-old female sniper Billie Jean Hardin was unwittingly pitted against the Thibodaux clan of hardcore hillbilly tush-hog meth cookers, blood flowed, body counts built, and maniacal mayhem ensued.

Nestled deep in the heart of the Ozark Mountains, Hardin Hollow is located in Northwest Arkansas in Newton County, off Highway 43, between Ponca and Compton, which in themselves are no more than wide spots in the road. It’s a 40-mile drive in any direction to get to a town large enough to have a grocery store. The same thing goes for booze, as Newt is a dry county.

Hardin Hollow and Hardin Creek were named for Hiram Hardin and his family who moved there from Eastern Tennessee and settled the area back in the 1850s. As Hiram’s kids grew up, married, and had kids of their own, four or five other Hardin homesteads sprang up along Hardin Creek. However, by the late sixties, all but one of the homesteads had been abandoned and reduced to ruin, and there was only one Hardin family living in the hollow: Jake Hardin, his wife Thelma, and son Henry John, commonly known as Hank, who eventually became Billie Jean’s father. Hank’s mother died from breast cancer while he was in high school, and his father was killed several years later when a mule he was shoeing kicked him in the head.

Upon graduating high school, Hank joined the Army and became a sniper. He was stationed in Bosnia in 1995, and while returning to base from a sniper mission, the Blackhawk helicopter transporting him and his spotter were shot down by an RPG. The spotter was killed and Hank lost his left leg just below the knee and the left side of his face was severely burned. Although he recovered from his injuries, his face was left scarred from the burns, and for the rest of his life, Hank suffered from debilitating PTSD and severe depression.

Hank hooked up with a fifteen-year-old runaway named Sally Jo Perkins as he passed through Clarksville, Arkansas on his way back to Hardin Hollow after being discharged from the Army. Sally Jo gave birth to Billie Jean in about a year, and then six months later hauled ass: never to be heard from again. Hank raised Billie Jean by himself the best he could, but in his continually depressed state, by the time she was ten or eleven, he was almost nonfunctional a good part of the time. She soon learned to do for herself: getting herself to school—where she excelled—doing the cooking and cleaning, paying the bills, and spending all of her free time out in the surrounding woods hiking and interacting with the wildlife.

Soon after Billie Jean’s fifteenth birthday, two vicious, degenerate meth addicts murdered her father in cold blood, leaving her alone in the world to fend for herself and seek retribution. Fortunately, she was well equipped to do so. From her first recollections, her only goal in life was to become an Army sniper like her father. Therefore, before his death, Hank taught Billy Jean the ways of the sniper and instilled in her a love for Hardin Hollow, the Ozark wilderness, and the ability to survive there.

An apt pupil, Billie Jean became an expert marksman skilled in martial arts, stealthy as a shadow at midnight. Every day without fail, she spent several hours running in the woods with a pack on her back and her grandfather’s M-1 Carbine slung on her shoulder, and working out in her gym in the barn hayloft.

By the time pretty blond Billie Jean was in her teens, she was nearly five feet seven inches tall and a real hard-body head turner. However, staring into her beautiful smiling face, in those cornflower-blue eyes lurked the chilling look of steely-eyed determination—normally found only in experienced snipers and seasoned fighter pilots—that gave the warning, “Danger. Danger! Danger! Billie Jean Hardin is a pretty girl that can totally kick your ass in a heartbeat!”

Billie Jean’s superb skill, animal cunning, strength of character, well-developed analytical mind, and overpowering resolve to do absolutely anything it takes to survive stood her in good stead. After witnessing the brutal murder of her father from the barn hayloft, she immediately grabbed her M-1 Carbine, shot and killed B.J. and Tase Thibodaux, the two meth-heads that had just murdered him, then dumped their bodies in an abandoned well and buried her father beside his favorite spot on Hardin Creek.

Left at age fifteen to survive in the hollow alone, a few months later when Gator and Dickie Bird Thibodaux came after her seeking revenge, hidden in her sniper’s nest high above Hardin Hollow, she took them out with her father’s suppressor (silencer) equipped M-24 sniper rifle—two bullets, two kills—the moment they entered Hardin Hollow and dumped them in the same well as the others.

A few weeks later, Billie Jean was placed in Foster Care when The Newton County Department of Human Resources discovered she was living by herself in Hardin Hollow without adult supervision. Fortunately, her aunt Rita Perkins, a combat veteran, and retired USAF Security Police Chief Master Sergeant, soon rescued her from that fate by moving to Hardin Hollow to live with her. Rita’s coked-up degenerate ex-husband Drew Sparks eventually tracked her down and attempted to rape her. Before that could happen, Billie Jean arrived on the scene and put a round from her 9mm Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol into his forehead, which added to the mounting body count in the well.

Finally, after many months of mayhem, Billie Jean and Rita were able to settle down to a happy, peaceful life in Hardin Hollow.

Upon Billie Jean graduating from High School two years later, Rita helped her gain an appointment to West Point. She entered her Plebe (freshman) year the following fall, determined to achieve her lifetime goal of becoming the first female Army sniper.