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 crunchers. 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.