“You’re okay,” I muttered into her hair.
Angie drew back and gave me a lopsided grin. “Well, in the last few days I’ve been attacked by a bear, gone sledding down a river, gone into the water and almost drowned, and then been operated on without anesthesia. If you think that makes me okay, I’d say you have a very strange idea of the word.”
I laughed and held her to me again, relieved beyond measure to see her safe and whole—and making jokes. And right there, in that moment, everything else faded away, and I let myself be nothing but relieved that Angie and I had somehow made it this far, and arrived here to hold each other once again.
The moment was short-lived, though, because Marlon arrived shortly after me and gave me a look that told me we had things to talk about—and they couldn’t wait.
“Off to work already, I see,” Angie said with a bit of snark.
“I’m afraid so,” Marlon said. “I don’t think it’s hard to see that we can’t stay here, and we need his brain if we’re going to figure out what to do.”
She gave a firm nod, then squeezed my hand. “Go save the day, John. Sarah and I are going to be here digging through our things to find our heaviest clothes and seeing what we can do about a fire.”
She gave me a quick grin and a peck on the cheek, and then turned and hobbled back toward her supplies, her bad leg slowing her down but still not enough to stop her. I watched her go for a moment, made sure she got back to her supplies safely, and then turned to Marlon.
“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.