I jumped to my feet and saw that he’d already grabbed one of the ropes attached to the sled. I grabbed the other and we pushed forward, our feet churning for purchase in the snow as we increased our pace from walking to running. The sled jerked and stuttered behind us, and I could hear Angie saying something, but neither of us slowed—and neither of us looked behind us.
I had no idea what we were running from. But I had a good idea that Marlon did. And I didn’t think he was going to bother to explain it until we were in some sort of cover. Which meant we had to get to the woods ahead of us, in quick time. The woods were still about five hundred yards away, but at the rate we were moving forward we were going to be there in less than five minutes.
I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw smoke billowing up from what looked to be the direction of Marlon’s home. I frowned at that, wondering if Randall had done something there, but then nearly tripped on a downed branch.
“Eyes forward, soldier!” Marlon shouted. “This is no time for looking backward!”
Eyes forward. Of course. Stupid, John! You never, ever turn around and look behind you when you’re running for your life. Particularly not if you’re towing your wife on a child’s sled, and have no idea who—or what—might be after you.
I wrapped the rope twice around my body, leaned forward, and dug my feet into the snow, increasing my pace once more as I fought with everything I had to get my wife—and my new possibly friend, possibly something else—to the safety of the woods.
16
We reached the woods in what I thought had to be record time, but it had exhausted both Marlon and me, and we fell to the ground just inside the tree line, breathing heavily in the thin, cold air. Within seconds my lungs felt as though they were freezing from the inside, and I quickly covered my mouth with my mitten-clad hands, trying to warm the air before it entered my mouth.
I didn’t know if frostbite of the lungs was even possible, but this definitely wasn’t the time to find out.
As I fought to breathe, I turned my eyes back to the billowing smoke in the distance, trying to figure out how far away it was, and whether that had actually been Marlon’s house or not. Whether it was something we needed to concern ourselves with.
And then I realized that I was probably going about this the entirely wrong way.
I swiveled my eyes toward my possible friend and saw the knowledge in his own eyes that told me I was correct.
I took my hands away from my face. “What did you do?” I asked quietly.
He gave me a long, considering look, and then his face cracked into a tired grin.
“I set a booby trap for Randall and his men,” he told me casually. “I wanted to see if they were following us. Wanted to see if they’d search my property first. If they didn’t, I figured, it would mean that it had only been a coincidence, seeing them there. Property lines are fuzzy out here and Randall’s property borders mine, in a manner of speaking. With where they were, they could have told me that they’d wandered over the line without realizing it, and I would have believed them. I don’t know that I would have believed them entirely harmful, but I would have believed that they’d crossed the line without realizing it.”
He turned and looked at the smoke rising up in the distance in big black puffs and pressed his lips together.
“But that explosion means that someone was poking around in one of my out barns. More than poking around…they were in there violently searching for something. And you don’t do that on accident. You don’t even do that as a casual observer. You do that when you’re hellbent on trouble.”
“You set a…trap?” Angie breathed.
I could hear the shock—and admiration—in her voice, and I reminded myself once more that she was an outdoors woman through and through. She knew her way around the forest and through dangerous situations, and if she’d ever been called into the military, she would have done a bang-up job there, as well.
The woman might’ve looked relatively harmless but she had a spine of steel and veins that ran with ice-cold water. It made her a uniquely perfect companion for me—and made her very valuable out here in the cold of the forest. Particularly when it sounded like Marlon had just confirmed that Randall and his cousins were indeed pursuing us.
Marlon, meanwhile, was giving her a fairly bashful shrug, as if he was slightly ashamed of himself for it—or ashamed that he had to admit it to a lady. I thought the latter was probably far more likely than the former. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who second-guessed his decisions.
“We needed to know, Angie,” he told her quickly.
I noticed that he was already adjusting his clothing and getting ready to get back to his feet, and I began making the same preparations. No, I wasn’t ready yet. My breath was still coming fast, and I still felt as if I’d been iced down from the inside. But I estimated Marlon to be at least twenty—maybe thirty—years older than me. If he was ready to get started again, I wasn’t going to drag my feet.
No way I was going to let him be more prepared than I was.
Marlon got to his feet and looked back toward the smoke. “It wasn’t an important barn. I never stored anything in there because it was too far from the house to be convenient. But I know Randall and his kin, and I know they can’t pass a building without going in to see what they might be able to steal. If they were that close to the house, it means they came looking for trouble. And if they survived that blast, they’ll know that I left the bomb just for them—and they’ll be even angrier.”
He turned his eyes to me. “Now we know that they’re coming. Now we know that they’re coming now. Whatever head start we had just disappeared.”
I jerked my head in a nod. “And if we thought we could take the road, this just changed that. We can’t be out in the open. I don’t even know if the forest is going to keep us hidden enough. Not from them.”
“We have no choice,” Marlon answered. “If the bear is after us, we’ll have to hope that we can do one of two things. Either lose him the old-fashioned way, or get to town before he can get to us.”
Well. Neither of those were good choices—not when we were dragging a human, several packs, and a weighty exoskeleton across deep snow, and we were just on foot, fueled by an anger I didn’t even pretend to understand. Still, my mind started to work on the problem, trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to find the best way to escape. If I were in Afghanistan, setting up a mission where I couldn’t use any tech, was weighed down by extra baggage, and had to lose a tail…
“We’ll have to cross any river we come to,” I said by way of answer. “Use the river if we can, to make forward progress. They might be following our footprints, but if they get to a river and lose them, they’ll have absolutely no way of knowing where we’ve gone.”
Marlon gave me a pleased grin. “I’m glad to see we’re thinking along the same lines, John. They’ll assume that we’re headed toward Ellis Woods. They know that Angie is related to the mayor there, and I assume they know that you’ve come from the area. They’ll realize you’re trying to head home. Even if you weren’t, it’s the closest town and would be the obvious answer for our problem. But if we can throw them off in terms of our route…”
“It might be all we need,” I finished for him. “I’m with you, Marlon.”
I pulled out the map Angie and I had been using before we left his house and scanned it, trying to pinpoint where I thought we were and where I knew we were heading. Then I held it up for him to see, my finger on a spot about two miles in front of us.
“And it looks like we’ve got a river due east of us by about two miles. Right between us and Ellis Woods.”
He crawled over and gazed at the map, then shook his head slightly. “I know the river you’re talking about, but you’ve given us better position than we actually have. It’s more like four miles east of here.” Looking up, he met my eyes. “I don’t think we’ll get there before nightfall, and we’ll be asking for trouble if we try t
o do it at night. We’re going to have to shelter in the woods for the night. Try the river in the morning.”
I stared at him without answering, digesting that bit of news. Four miles away wasn’t the end of the world, but he was right; we weren’t going to make it there by nightfall. Not at the rate we were taking to move through the snow.
Which meant we’d be spending the night out here in the woods. With a wounded woman and a vengeful outlaw after us.
Two hours later, my watch—which was tracking our steps—told me that we’d traveled another 1.2 miles. We were heading due east, courtesy of the compass Marlon carried with him, and we’d found the journey more difficult than it had been in the flat prairie, but not impossible. The trail we’d followed had wound through the woods with enough variety to keep us hidden from most anyone unless they were directly behind us. Thank God.
Unfortunately, the snow had also been deep enough in the woods that it had made pulling the sled even more difficult. The occasional branch across the trail, and the underbrush we had to break through, had made it even more difficult.
And I could see through the spaces in the canopy above us that the sun had reached well beyond the peak of its journey and was moving quickly toward its sleeping place below the horizon. A glance at my watch told me that it was two in the afternoon, and a quick check of my own personal knowledge told me that sunset would be at five. Three hours. Three hours to travel three more miles and try to cross a river with a wounded wife.
It wasn’t going to happen. We would have been absolutely insane to have tried it. Suicidal. Not even the idea of Randall showing up in the middle of the night was more dangerous than trying to cross a river—which may or may not be frozen, this early in the season—with a wounded woman, in failing daylight.
Marlon, who had been taking a turn at pulling the sled, stopped then and turned toward me, unwrapping the ropes from around his chest.
“Your turn,” he said, huffing. “I’m getting too close to exhaustion to keep pulling.”
I didn’t argue with him. He’d already done more than his fair share. When I moved to take the ropes, though, he put a hand on my arm.
“Nightfall is going to be on us within three hours,” he said, his voice quiet enough that I didn’t think Angie would be able to hear it.
She’d spent most of the journey quiet, and though I hoped that it meant she was resting, I thought it far more likely that she was coming up with Plans A, B, and C—which she would no doubt present to us the moment Marlon and I ran out of ideas for how to get us safely into Ellis Woods.
“I don’t think we can go on much longer,” Marlon continued. “Night is going to fall more quickly down here under the trees than it does out in the open.”
“And we only have two flashlights,” I continued. “Those aren’t going to do us much good against the darkness. Or anything that comes after us.”
He jerked his head in a nod. “Best we start looking for shelter now, rather than later,” he replied.
That was fine by me. “Spend the next three hours with our eyes open so we don’t have to do something in a hurry in Hour Four.”
He squeezed my arm, his eyes flashing his appreciation. “In another world, another life, John, I would think you were my son.”
His words hit me right in the stomach. My own father had been gone so long that I barely even remembered him—except for the night he left, leaving my mother sobbing on the floor as I hid in my room, watching him stride through the door, suitcase in hand, never to return.
I’d never known a real father, but if I’d had one…
“I would have been lucky to call you Dad,” I told him, giving him a rough grin. “But let’s leave the imaginary life for later, eh? We have miles to go and shelter to find.”
He barked out a laugh at that, then tossed me the ropes to the sled and turned back to the trail, his eyes scanning it for ideas. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head already as he searched his memory banks for anything that could be of use to us here.
I hoped he came up with something good. I’d lost several steps since my time in the military, and I was starting to reach exhaustion more quickly than I liked. And the last thing I wanted was to be completely tapped out when Randall and his cousins found us.
We found shelter about an hour later. Dusk was just starting to fall under the trees, their shadows stretching longer and longer into the snow, and we were reaching that time of day when everything started to look distinctly flat. Things that you’d thought were many feet away were actually underfoot, and things that you thought were close—like the next tree—ended up being some distance from you.
It was both my most favorite time of day and my least favorite time. When we were out in the open, this part of the day, when the sun was starting to slip quietly toward the horizon and the light started to grow dim, was when I felt I could finally start to breathe again. The day was finishing, along with all its pressures, and it felt like the entire world was taking a breath before it went to sleep. It was the point I’d always looked forward to when I was in Afghanistan—that moment when everything was still and quiet, after all the action of the day and before night missions began—and that had never truly left me.
Out here in the wilds, though, with an unknown man after us and an array of dangerous situations ahead of us, I didn’t feel any of that relief. Instead, I felt only the pressure of needing to find shelter as quickly as possible.
When Marlon suddenly put his finger up in the air and muttered an “Aha!” I was therefore immediately relieved.
He made a sharp turn to the left and took us forward about one hundred feet. It was off our path and was taking us away from our goal of the river, but it didn’t take long before I saw what he’d realized. We crept quickly through the woods, thinner here than they had been, and within minutes we were looking up at a steep rock face, rising suddenly from the ground of the forest.
And in that rock face, I could already see, were a number of caves and crevices.
“Marlon, you genius,” I breathed.
He gave me a glance from the corner of his eye, and I could see how pleased he was with the praise.
“Hardly. But observant. And I tend to plan ahead. I marked this area in my mind some time ago, purely because it offered so much shelter. I’m ashamed that I didn’t think of it sooner. But you know what they say…”
“Better late than never,” I finished. “At least most of the time. And in this case, it’s very well done. These will be perfect for the night. And in the morning—”
“In the morning, we put the robo-suit to the test,” Angie interrupted. “We find the river, and we get across it or down it. Because no psychotic bear man is going to keep me from my daughter. I want to go home. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get there.”
17
Marlon and I searched until we found a cave that was mid-sized rather than too large, which would make it impossible to heat or protect, or too small, which would give us very little room for maneuvering if someone or something came after us. I dragged Angie into the cave and parked the sled up against one of the walls, then turned to help Marlon with collecting firewood.
Our first and most important mission was to get warm again. Marlon and I had both been very active during the day and had kept our circulation up, but Angie had been sitting still for hours. I wanted to get her warm and on her feet as quickly as possible. I didn’t think we were facing any frostbite, given how many blankets we’d had around her, but sitting still for too long was dangerous as well. She needed to be up and moving.
And like she’d said, we needed to test that exoskeleton out. If we were going to be fording a river tomorrow, I wanted to know how steady she was going to be on her feet—and how much I was going to have to watch out for her. If she could manage herself, it would make it easier for me to take care of all the other things we’d be facing. But we wouldn’t know how stable she was until we tested things.
Marlon
and I walked quickly through the forest, grabbing as much wood as we could from the surface of the snow. Neither of us reached down into the snow for branches, as those would be too wet, and we both worked efficiently to test the wood we gathered to make sure it was as dry as possible.
Wet wood didn’t burn. And it smoked. A lot.
“A fire’s going to attract some animals, you know,” Angie said when we returned.
“Not as quickly as smoke would,” Marlon replied.
“And not as quickly as our dead bodies might,” I reminded her. “Which is exactly what might happen if we don’t have heat through the night. Besides, I need to get you warm enough to get you up and walking around. Or as close to walking as you can do with that robotic leg of yours.”
I gave her a grin and a kiss, softening the contradiction to her opinion as much as I could. Angie was a hunter, and doing something that might attract animals—particularly bears—went against her nature. But she’d never been in battle. She didn’t realize that sometimes you had to do the things that kept you alive, even if it meant attracting the beasts.
“If they come, we’ll deal with them,” I told her, patting the gun next to her.
“And what if the guns don’t work?” she asked.
“I don’t know about the guns you brought with you, but my guns are purely mechanical, Angie,” Marlon told her from across the cave, where he was setting up the fire. “And I don’t use electronic sights or lasers. Too much room for error—or a rogue EMP getting in the way, though I highly doubt they’d be affected.”
She gave him a wry grin. “I know that. Ours are the same, actually. We have old-fashioned scopes, nothing fancy. Just not thinking clearly, I guess.”
“And no wonder,” I told her. “We never stopped for food today. Your brain is hungry.”
Bitter Cold Apocalypse | Book 1 | Bitter Cold Apocalypse Page 11
