by T. W. Connor
“They’ll be lucky if they can stay the entire night without freezing,” I told him bluntly. “We have to find another place to go. Somewhere further from town. Further from Randall.”
“And that’s exactly what I came to talk to you about,” he answered grimly. “Come on, you and I have the first watch. It will be the ideal time to talk strategy.”
He turned and started walking before I truly had a chance to digest that information, and I shot forward to catch him.
“Watch?” I asked, knowing that I sounded stupid—but also knowing that I didn’t have all of the information. I’d gone out of the loop when I went to do recon at Randall’s camp, and Marlon had stepped in as planner and leader. For the moment, that meant he had more information than I did.
I needed to get up to speed with everything that had happened while I was gone. And asking questions was the only way I was going to do it.
“We expect Randall to come after us, at some point,” Marlon said quietly when I caught him. “This time, I don’t want to be taken by surprise. I’ve set up a system to have at least two people on the edge of town at all times, so that we see if Randall starts to move.”
“Why would he follow you?” I asked, confused for a moment. “I thought he was only after his weapons.” Then I realized my mistake. “And you took some of them. He’s going to know that they’re not all there. He’s going to know exactly what happened to them.”
Marlon threw the door of the barn open, and the cold air hit me like a hammer. I stepped out into it quickly, wanting to be able to close the door again before too much got into the barn.
Yes, half of the roof had fallen in and there were gaps in the walls. But the fewer openings, the better.
“That’s precisely it,” Marlon said as he stepped out after me. “We don’t think Randall wants anything more than the weapons he thinks he’s left behind. But I suspect that he has those weapons very carefully categorized in his head. And when he gets to that room in Town Hall…”
“He’ll find many of them gone,” I finished for him. “How many did you take?”
“About half of them. We needed them for our defense and to protect us out here.”
I’d been in that room, and I did some quick math, remembering how many weapons there were and matching those to townspeople. “We still won’t have enough guns,” I said quietly. “Not to defend ourselves, if it comes down to it.”
Marlon cast me a glance from the corner of his eye. “Which is why you’re exactly right to think that we can’t stay here. And that’s something that you and I are going to figure out while we’re on that first watch.”
“Two birds with one stone,” I muttered.
“Indeed. Two very, very large birds with one very small stone,” he replied.
We marched into the woods, silent, letting our minds work on the problem while we walked, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was: we didn’t need to discuss everything. Not yet. We needed our brains to work out some answers so that when we stopped, we could start talking about those.
Because we had two hundred people stored in that barn, and we needed to get them to much, much safer ground. Preferably before morning hit.
17
We went as far as the last row of trees in the forested part of the area before we started talking again, and when we did talk, it was now in whispers.
We did plenty of recon before we even did that. I walked the area, which was made up of a slight depression in the landscape that covered what had to be a little over a mile. As I strolled to the north—and then the south—I kept my eyes on the town, watching for any sign of movement there. Watching for anything that said they were coming after us.
It was dark in there and hard to see any movement beyond the enormous bonfire they’d built in the town square, using God knew what as kindling. But I had trained for this. Sure, in the desert I’d had night vision goggles and generally a team of equally well-trained men to back me up. But I’d also spent years working on my night vision specifically for situations like these, where I was stuck in the wilderness without adequate gear. And I put it to good use now, keeping my footsteps as quiet as possible on the snow and scanning the countryside for anything human.
There was nothing out there. Nothing that looked like it was coming our direction, anyhow. Hell, I didn’t even see lookouts around Randall’s new home.
So when I returned to where Marlon and I had agreed to meet—Marlon having taken a walk similar to mine, so that we had two sets of eyes on the place—and he shook his head, I wasn’t surprised.
“Are we sure this is where they’d come across?” he asked immediately. “There’s no other place they might enter the forest? You know this area better than I do.”
I looked at him, surprised, and tried to remember if I’d ever heard him admit to not knowing something before.
“This is where they’ll come across,” I confirmed. “It snowed a little since you left, so the tracks should be covered. But if they know we got into the forest, any local is going to suspect we headed for that ranch. It’s a good idea, but it’s also an obvious idea. The one big structure in the area that is still…well, mostly standing. And this is the best way to get there.”
“Then this is the best place to watch out for them, too,” he concluded.
He dropped to his haunches in front of a tree and made himself as comfortable as he could in the snow, and I almost laughed at him.
“You planning on sitting there in the snow for the next however long while we watch the town?”
He looked up at me, his eyebrows raised, and I could see the fatigue in his face. Marlon was an older man—he had at least fifteen years on me, if I was guessing correctly—and this had to be tough on him. Angie and I had taken him running from his comfortable, very warm house, and brought him dashing through the wilderness. Right into the middle of a battle, where he’d had to join the troops himself.
No matter what his background was, that had to be stressful. And for an older man…
“The pants I’m wearing are fully weatherproof,” he replied quietly. “Military-level tactical gear. I suspect I’ll be fine, but I’m open to ideas.”
Of course he was wearing military-level tactical gear, I thought with a snort. How could I have expected anything less? Yes, you could get it in everyday life, order it right from the internet if you wanted to.
I just hadn’t thought any normal person did. That stuff wasn’t comfortable, and it sure as hell wasn’t stylish.
I gave him a smile and shook my head.
“The stuff I’m wearing is normal-person waterproof,” I noted. “But I don’t like sitting in the snow. It gets cold.”
I turned and let my eyes rove over the trees around us, looking for a likely target. When I found what looked like it would be a red maple if I could see it in the daylight, I knew I had my spot. It was one of the good ones, with branches that were low enough to the ground to be useful. No, it didn’t have much foliage left on it right now, so the cover would be minimal, but it would keep me out of the snow.
And that, I thought, was worth the jump.
I walked up to the trunk, found the lowest branch—about two feet above my head—steadied myself, and then jumped straight up, my arms extended above my head. My hands found the branch and grasped it, and I got my feet up against the trunk to push. Moments later, I was on the branch and reaching for the next one—another sturdy specimen that would not only hold me, but also get me to a spot where I could see better.
Once I was settled, I looked down at Marlon.
“Less snow,” I said. “Better view.”
He shook his head at me, but got up and followed my lead, taking a bit longer to get into the tree, but looking somehow smoother, doing it. Somehow more…sneaky. Like a snake.
Spy, I thought suddenly. He’d definitely been a spy. Only the intelligence community taught you how to move like that, and they didn’t do it with their office schmucks or number crunche
rs. They only did it with the men they were sending into the most dangerous situations you could possibly think of.
Situations where people didn’t even just use guns to kill you. They used things that were a whole lot worse. Which necessitated being able to move quickly and almost unnoticeably.
When Marlon joined me on the branch, I waited for him to get settled, then said, “Intelligence Community, eh?”
“CIA,” he agreed without hesitation. “Now, what do you see over there in town? Anything?”
Right. Well, it was more answer than I’d had before, and I marked that down as a win—and as a start. It also wasn’t the question most on my mind right now.
Right now, we had to figure out what the hell Randall was going to do. When he came against us next, I wanted to have a whole lot more warning. No more surprise attacks.
I turned my eyes back to the town and kept them carefully away from the flaring light of the fire. It was natural to want to look toward that, but I knew it would ruin the night vision I’d built and put me close to ground zero again.
The opposite of what I wanted.
Instead, I stared hard at the back of the Town Hall building, locating the door the townspeople had no doubt escaped out of, and then the path they’d taken right into the forest. I scanned the walk several times, but didn’t locate any movement, and then started looking along the wall of the building for anyone standing there, watching.
Or getting ready to move.
“Nothing at Town Hall,” I noted quietly.
Next up: the alleys that bordered the hall. Those were harder, since I couldn’t see into them. Hell, Randall could have had his entire army standing around in there, just waiting, and I wouldn’t have been able to see them. But that was the reason we were out here: to see them if they started coming. To be able to get a head start back toward our own encampment, to warn the people.
I didn’t want this to go that way, though. I wanted a better head start than that.
“I don’t see a damn thing,” Marlon noted quietly from beside me.
“I don’t think they’re moving. Yet… Maybe they haven’t bothered to look at the weapons room yet. Maybe they’re too busy getting drunk on whatever they could find in the houses.”
“That does sound like Randall’s cousins,” Marlon noted mildly. “They don’t have three IQ points between them. But Randall?”
“He would have gone right for the weapons,” I agreed. “Right to his target. The question is whether he would have been able to convince his men to do the same.”
“Depends almost entirely on who those men actually are,” Marlon answered. “Where the hell they came from, and how well they’ve been trained. By whom.”
And that was the question, right there. The question I’d been asking myself since we’d first spied on Randall’s camp earlier. Where the hell had he gotten so many men—and so many weapons? And from whom?
Unfortunately, I didn’t think we were going to get an answer to that anytime soon. And that answer wasn’t going to help us, regardless. We needed to figure out what to do with our people, who were probably close to freezing in the woods behind us, at this point. Figuring out what Randall was up to could come later. It had to come later.
“Whoever they are, we have to assume that they’ll be coming after us at some point,” I said, moving the conversation forward. “We can’t stay here. Not only because Randall and his men will be coming after us, but because the people will freeze to death. Almost none of them have clothing to stand up to this sort of cold.”
“Agreed. What do you suggest?”
I thought about it for a moment. I’d thought of the problem and repeated it many times in my head, but I hadn’t moved on from that to think about any solutions.
Stupid.
“Another town?” I finally asked. “It would be a long walk—maybe twenty miles—and it might take a while. But it’s the best shot we’ve got at warmth and shelter.”
It wasn’t a good suggestion. I knew that the moment I made it. But it was all I could think of. We needed a way to get those people inside, and the next town over—Foggerty—was going to give us the best shot at that.
“Too many problems,” Marlon argued. “That’s too far for most of those people to walk—especially the kids—and we don’t have the supplies to get them there. Besides, we have to assume that the next town will have experienced the same thing we have, and that they’ll be in survival mode. They’re not exactly going to be welcoming to a huge group coming right toward them.”
I snorted. “We have kids. It’s not like we can be seen as an invading force.”
“In wartime,” he answered quietly, “anything can be an invading force.”
“Right. Okay, good point. So what do you suggest, then? We can’t just leave them out in the open.”
Marlon pressed his lips together, his eyes on the town. Then he turned toward me. “My compound,” he said. “It’s only ten miles from here—a relatively easy walk, if the men help with the children. I have enough outbuildings—whole ones, with their roofs and everything—to shelter the people. It will give us shelter and a chance to regroup. Figure out our next…move.”
He hesitated at the last word, but I didn’t ask him about that. I knew exactly what he was talking about.
We were going to have to figure out how to retake the town. Get our people back into their homes. And we needed shelter—and food, and time—if we were going to do that.
“Your compound,” I answered, my voice just as quiet as his had been. I thought through the possibility.
It would be a long walk, yes, but presumably Marlon knew how to get there in the easiest manner possible. And the place had seemed gigantic. The house alone had been far too big for one single man, with room after room prepared for guests. I had seen his barn, and it had looked just as well-built as the house itself. If he said he had other outbuildings… Well, I knew enough about Marlon to believe him. And he’d had generators, because he’d had electricity running when we were there, even after the EMP.
He’d had heat.
And food, and I assumed plenty of weapons. Hell, he even had an operating theater.
“We’ll need more weapons if we’re going to retake the town,” I said.
“I’ve got more weapons than you could dream of,” he answered quickly.
Of course he did. Because that was what you needed sitting around in the countryside in Northern Michigan: a full weapons store.
Still.
“Done,” I said. It was the best plan we had, and the best shot at getting these people to safety. Away from Randall.
Marlon nodded once. “We’ll tell the others when we get back to camp.”
We spent the next two hours staring at the town without speaking, and though I didn’t know about Marlon, I thought he was probably doing the same thing I was: running through the logistics of moving our people and trying to figure out how early we could start the march.
“We leave at daybreak,” I told Bob.
We were back at the barn, and it was just as cold in there as I’d remembered. Colder, perhaps, since I was now standing still rather than slogging through the snow in the forest. At least there I’d been working up a sweat. Here, the constant, steady fall of snow had already started wreaking havoc on the tiny encampments, courtesy of the lack of a proper roof. Yes, the snow had been light, but it had still been falling since we’d arrived, and I could see that some of the tents had collapsed with it, while others were leaning precariously—and definitely not safe for people to be inside of. Some of the residents had built up fires big enough for many people to huddle around them, and people were gathering there instead of staying inside their tents, their hands out and faces turned toward the warmth as they tried to make it through the night.
Most of the people, I saw, were also wearing several different layers of clothing. Some of the younger kids couldn’t put their arms down at all, they were so bundled up.
And they w
ere all still freezing. All still getting as close to the fires as they possibly could.
“Hell, I don’t even know if we can wait that long,” I added. “Bob, are we doing everything we can to keep them warm?”
“The fires are the best we can do, unfortunately, and we’ve gathered as much firewood from the immediate area as we can,” he said, jumping right to business as he always did. “We don’t want to send people out too much further into the wilderness. Too risky.”
“Wolves,” I agreed quickly. “And Randall.”
I wouldn’t want to run into either of them on a dark night in the forest. Up to each man to decide which of them was actually worse.
“Can they hang on until daybreak?” I asked.
It didn’t look like it to me. Hell, I was bouncing on my toes already, anxious to go find Angie and Sarah to see how they were holding up. And the second that was done, I was tempted to get people into line and marching through the forest toward a safer location. At least that way they’d be walking. Working up a sweat.
“It’s not safe to move so many people at night,” Marlon said firmly. “Even worse when there are kids involved. We’re going to have one hell of a time keeping our eyes on all of them during the day. Can you imagine trying to do it at night?”
“And I don’t think we can keep them moving quickly enough to fight the cold,” Bob agreed. “At least in here, they’ve got blocks up against the wind.”
Both very good points—which I hadn’t bothered to think about because I was too busy panicking about the state of my family.
I gave myself a good shake. I had to get that under control. I couldn’t be falling apart the moment Angie or Sarah was involved.
Do that, and I’d never get them out of this alive.
18
We had the townspeople up and ready to march far before daybreak the next morning—partially because none of us had been able to sleep a wink. I’d spent the entire night huddling as close to a fire as I could get with Angie and Sarah tucked under my arms. I was sufficiently bigger than them that I could at least protect them, and I had done everything I could to share my warmth with them—helped in large part by the blanket we’d had wrapped around us the entire time.
