“Then let’s go,” he said, walking forward and counting on those men to follow him.
Within five minutes, the thirty men—plus he, Sean, Joe, and Bob—were grouped together in the front room of Town Hall, listening to the shouts of the men outside. They were getting closer—but they weren’t there yet.
They were just making one hell of a racket about arriving.
“What are they shouting about?” Joe asked, his voice hushed.
“They’re not shouting about anything,” Marlon said. “They’re shouting to make themselves sound bigger. Scarier. They’re shouting for the same reason men shout when they’re going into war. They do it to get themselves worked up, and to scare the people on the other side of the line. Anyone here scared?”
Many voices told him that they weren’t, not even a little bit, and he nodded.
“Good. I want a man at every window and every door. Wherever you can get the muzzle of the gun out into the open, and protect yourselves. Stay behind the walls. Shoot whatever moves out there. Watch for men trying to sneak around the building, and shout if you see them. Randall knows the weapons will be in this building, and that’s what he’s after. He’s going to hit it with everything he’s got. Our job is to hit back, hard as we can, and then get the hell out of here with our lives.”
It wasn’t a sophisticated plan. Hell, he didn’t even know if it was a good one. They would have no idea whether it was working or not until later, when—if—they made it into the forest and found the rest of the townspeople. Their goal was simple: shoot it out with Randall and his men. Keep them busy while the families escaped into the woods. And then get the hell out of there before the militia outside figured out that they were running, too.
Yes, it meant leaving important things behind. Things that he knew they would have to come back for. Things that he would have to come back for. Almost immediately. But this was their best option for now.
Really, it was their only option.
Without another word, the men around him started to fan out, each finding a window for themselves and variously crouching down or standing to the side of it. Some of them broke out the glass in the windows. Others started familiarizing themselves with their weapons.
They all wore the stiff, tense expressions of men who were about to put their lives on the line.
With luck, none of them would have to give those lives up.
Marlon ducked toward a window himself, holding his gun by his side, and glanced through the glass, narrowing his eyes. Beyond the building, he could see the large square that served as the gathering place for the town. And beyond that, building after building, none of them more than two stories, none of them standing too close together. Plenty of places for men to hide. Plenty of places for them to duck into alleys and shoot from cover.
He didn’t think Randall would be smart enough to tell his men to look for cover. No, given what he knew of Randall, he thought it far more likely that they would come walking right up the main street, their chests puffed out in their arrogance, certain that they were absolutely invincible.
So he wasn’t surprised when he saw the group turn the corner, about ten blocks down, and start walking right toward them.
15
We heard the shooting start the moment our feet touched the snowbanks on the other side of the river, and without even thinking about it, I increased my pace until I felt as though I was actually flying. All I could think about was that my wife and daughter were there, in that town, and that Randall was in there, too, trying to take what wasn’t his. Trying to hurt my family—and the rest of the town that I cared about.
I couldn’t stand the thought, and my body seemed to understand that, pushing itself to greater and greater lengths as I raced up the embankment and through the first buildings on the outskirts of town.
Ahead of me, I could hear the roar of gunfire, and men, and the random explosions of glass shattering, which meant that someone was firing on a building—and hitting the windows. I didn’t know what the hell that meant, since I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I increased my pace again, flat out desperate to get there in time to do something. I was guessing that Randall and his men were attacking Town Hall, which meant, I supposed, that the townspeople had gotten it secured against them, but the amount of gunfire I was hearing seemed like it was far too much to be one-sided. It sounded…
It sounded like the townspeople were actually firing back. Like they were actively defending the building. And that seemed completely insane, to me. Why would they be bothering? Why would they put their lives at risk to defend a building when Randall was so intent on getting into it?
My feet flew over the pavement, taking me quickly through the outskirts of the town and into the more densely populated area, as my mind flew through the problem at hand, trying to find a solution. What was going on up there? And what was I going to do about it when I arrived?
I yanked my gun out of its holster and fitted it into my hand as I ran. I knew it wouldn’t do much damage. It was just a handgun, in what seemed to be an all-out battle up ahead. But it was all that I had, and dammit, I was going to make good use of it. I wasn’t willing to be left out of this thing. Not when I had so much at stake.
Not when my people sounded like they needed me.
“Get your rifle ready!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Whatever’s going on up there, we’re going to be running right into the middle of it, and I want us prepared!”
I heard a muttered response, but I wasn’t paying much attention to it. I was trying to figure out how we could get to Town Hall fastest from here. Trying to figure out the most direct route—and the best way to do it without getting shot when we went shooting out into the square.
And with that thought came the realization that we were probably going to come up right behind Randall and his men. Because yeah, they’d come up to the town a different way than us. But this town didn’t have more than three streets that led toward the square. Randall knew that. He would have found Main Street and taken it, as the most direct route to the building that was presumably holding his precious hoard of weapons.
He would have taken the exact same street that we were now on. And if he’d done what I assumed he’d done, then he’d walked right up the center of the street, gotten to the square, and started shooting.
Which meant that we were going to come up behind them. And they weren’t going to have any idea we were there.
Henry and I only had two guns between us, and a finite number of bullets, but if we could take Randall’s attention off Town Hall long enough for the people inside to escape, then it would be worth it to make as much ruckus as we could.
I didn’t bother to discuss the idea with Henry. It didn’t matter what he thought of it, and I knew he’d want to argue about it. Instead, I charged forward, my mind made up, my adrenaline high as a kite.
And then, just as we were about to cross the street that would have put us a mere block from the square, and just as I started to make out the figures of men in the dusky dimness of the afternoon, someone stepped out of the alleyway right in front of me and hit me with something, sending me into complete darkness.
16
When I finally came back around—I couldn’t tell how long it had taken me—I was… in the forest. I could see the trees reaching up toward the dark sky above me, the stars speckling the darkness beyond that. I could feel the ice coldness of the snow beneath me, though I could also feel that there was some layer between me and the snow. Something keeping me dry, if not warm.