“What are you saying?” Henry asked from right next to me. “Why would the pep talk be important?”
I didn’t answer, for a moment. I just watched as the group tightened up around Randall, screaming, and then turned. Right for the river. Right for the town. Within moments, they were running again—right toward where I could still see Marlon and Joe’s muzzle fire.
“He was getting them worked up and ready to attack,” I answered quickly.
I jumped to my feet, grabbed the back of Henry’s jacket, and tugged him up as well. In the distance, I could see the men rushing for the embankment that would lead them right down to the river. They weren’t even going to bother with the bridge. They were going to risk crossing the ice.
Yeah, it was the quickest way to the town. But it was also the most dangerous. If that ice was as thin as I thought it was, it would never support that many men. Not unless they had something to somehow shore it up. Some other magic from the same bag of tricks that had produced the sheds and all those weapons.
Whatever they were doing, I wasn’t willing to follow them. I wasn’t willing to risk going into the water—or being seen by those men.
“Let’s go.”
I turned around and started running through the woods, back the way we’d come. Back toward the bridge—which would be the only way across the river if Randall and his men broke through the ice. Because once that ice cracked, it was going to become truly unstable. I hadn’t wanted to cross it before, and I wanted to cross it even less with cracks in it.
“Where’re we going?” Henry shouted, working to catch up with me.
“Back to the bridge!” I shouted behind me. “We’ve got to get back across the river and to the town, as quickly as possible.”
“And we can’t just go across the ice?” Henry asked. “Wouldn’t that be faster?”
“It would be faster, but it’s no safer now than it was this afternoon, when we came across the first time,” I answered. “And if my guess is right, then Randall and his men are going to go right across the ice—which isn’t thick enough to support three men, let alone one hundred. None of whom are going to be stepping lightly, if you get my drift.”
“You think they’re going to go through,” Henry guessed.
“I sure do,” I agreed. “And I don’t want to be anywhere near the ice when and if that happens. Once it cracks, it’s going to be so unstable that anyone near the banks is going to be in danger of going in.”
“Think we’ll get to the town before they can?”
“I sure hope so,” I muttered.
Yes, I’d left Marlon there so he could lead the town in case this very thing happened. But those weren’t his people. Those were my people. And I didn’t have any intention of leaving them there to fight on their own.
12
Marlon watched the crowd of Randall’s men turn suddenly toward the river, and cringed.
He hadn’t seen that one coming. Hadn’t even thought about it. And that right there was a problem.
The men rushed toward the river, some of them running faster than others, and within ten minutes they were at the ice, milling around like dogs who didn’t want to enter a lake.
“They’re not going to go out on the ice, are they?” Joe asked from beside Marlon. “Surely even Randall knows how dangerous that would be.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past Randall. He’s insane. I’m guessing he’s willing to risk every one of those men if it means he gets across the river to cause trouble.”
Then Marlon saw what he’d missed up to that point. About ten feet back from the river, in a deeper spot caused by the wind, some of the men were starting to tug and pull at something. They weren’t having much luck, but then Randall arrived and started shouting orders, and the men actually began to work together. They were tugging at what appeared to be a tarp.
A white tarp. A white tarp that had been hiding something up until that very moment.
Then, one by one, the men started running toward the river, each of them holding something roughly sled-shaped in front of them. When they got to the river, they each flung themselves forward, onto the ice… and started sledding across.
Those were sleds. And they were going to use them to try to get across the river safely—the same way John and Marlon had used the canoe to come down the river with Angie.
Which meant the town of Ellis Woods was out of time. Marlon hadn’t thought they’d actually be able to get across that river so easily. Now he saw that he’d been wrong.
Marlon was on his feet and running before he even bothered to shout back to Joe. They had to get out of there. Had to get back to Town Hall and prepare the people of Ellis Woods. Because they were about to have trouble.
13
We flew through the forest, skimming over and through the snow as quickly as we could, the sound of the men behind us growing fainter and fainter as they stopped chasing us and made for the river. I didn’t have the first clue about why they were heading that way, or how Randall thought he was going to get them across the ice without sending them through it instead, but that didn’t matter right now. How he did it didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that he was going to try it. And they had to have over one hundred men by now—with loads of weapons, some of them bigger than anything we had in the town. Given that the town was made up of mostly families—men with children and wives, who would be trying to protect their loved ones—it didn’t take a genius to realize that the fight was going to be unbalanced.
The townspeople weren’t fighters. They were hunters, but most of them only did that on occasion. For the most part, they went grocery shopping like any person in the big city, and though they kept guns in their houses, I could guarantee that almost none of them had ever expected to use those guns for self-defense. Many of them probably hadn’t been trained for it.
And shooting another human being was completely different from shooting a deer for meat, or even sport. Actually holding a gun up, sighting on a human, and pulling the trigger…
I shuddered as I ran, and then increased my pace. I’d done that exact thing far more times than I cared to count, and it had never gotten easier. It had never stopped wounding me in a way I’d never figured out how to explain. And most days, I thought that the ghosts of every man I’d ever killed were still following me around.
And I had the training to get it done. The training to put my emotions to the side and pull that trigger when it needed to be pulled. Most of those people in town didn’t have that.
The men that Randall had gathered, though… I wasn’t going to put it past them. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Randall and his cousins, but I’d spent enough time with them to know that they hadn’t hesitated when they’d decided they needed to kill me. They’d barely even thought twice about it. And if that was the kind of people Randall and his cousins were, then it made sense to think that most of his friends were the same way.
Most of his friends.
I slowed down a bit and let Henry catch up to me, trying to gather my thoughts into enough clarity to form questions.
“What are they going to do to the townspeople?” I huffed, once he drew even with me.
“What?” he gasped, throwing me a glance that said he thought I was actually going crazy right here in the middle of the forest.
“What do Randall and his men want with the townspeople?” I was almost shouting now in my panic and desperation to get him to understand. I needed to know how much danger those people were in.