That was the key, I knew. That possibility of running into difficulties. We hadn’t, so far. We hadn’t seen any wild animals in the forest, hadn’t come across any places where huge snow drifts had put us off course. The forest had been a virtual ghost town, honestly, when it came to other life. And though Bob, Henry, and I had kept our eyes on the trail behind us almost as often as we were looking forward, we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Randall or any of his men.
It didn’t mean they weren’t back there, somewhere, following us. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t come after us. But so far, it looked like our escape had gone unnoticed—or that they’d decided to leave chasing us for another day.
I didn’t much care which one it was, if I was being honest. The fact that we didn’t have to deal with them right now was all I cared about. Because right now, we were in the midst of the forest with a bunch of women, children, and old people, and though we had a good amount of weapons and a good number of men—and women—to shoot them, right now was not the ideal time to find ourselves in a battle.
If someone came at us right now, shooting, we’d be too likely to lose a whole lot of people before we were able to scare them off. If we were able to scare them off.
But we’d been lucky, so far. No one had pulled up sick or hurt, and no one had complained much. Hell, even Angie had been able to keep up with the rest of the group, despite her injuries, and though I was still having one of the other men pull the litter I’d built for her, I was becoming more and more hopeful that we wouldn’t have to use it.
“How much longer are we going to give them?” Bob asked suddenly, gesturing out to the people sitting in front of us, in groups of five as they ate what had to account for lunch at this moment.
“Another half hour or so,” I said. “I want to give them enough time to rest, but not enough time to get tired or lazy. No naps or closing eyes or anything like that. If they get groggy, we’ll have a bear of a time getting them back on their feet and back into motion, and it might slow us down.”
I cast another look at the sky, measuring the sun’s position, and nodded.
“I think we’ve still got at least five hours of sunlight, and maybe half an hour of dusk. It should give us the time we need to get them into a structure of some sort at Marlon’s house. But we can’t afford to take longer than that. I don’t want them exposed to another night out here. It’s too dangerous.”
Bob gave me a nod and stood, then walked toward the first group of people and said something to them. He was telling them about the timeline, I thought. Preparing them to get up and get moving again soon. I could see him gesturing, taking some questions, and then nodding and replying, and a moment later he was moving on to the next group.
It made sense for him to be the one handling it, I thought. All the people knew that Marlon and I were the ones calling the shots, here. Hell, maybe they even knew that Marlon and I were going to be the ones to save their lives if anything went wrong. But Bob was the one they trusted, at the end of the day. He was the one who had been named head of their town—and he was the one they were going to listen to when it came to getting back on the road and giving everything they had for the next five hours. He was the one who was going to convince them to keep walking when they were already exhausted.
Five more hours, I thought. Five more hours and we should have them in a secure position. And then we’d decide what the hell we were going to do next.
I was just relaxing at that thought, at the idea that I could put that next step off for a bit longer, when the screaming started.
And shortly thereafter, the snarling and yapping.
I was on my feet in less than a second and sprinting toward where the noise was coming from, pulling my gun out, not bothering with the concealed knife I had in a sheath strapped to my calf. I could hear Marlon and Joe behind me, both of them moving almost as quickly as I was, and in the background, I heard Sean and Bob shouting for more reinforcements and for the people to stay where the hell they were.
I didn’t listen to anything else they had to say. My eyes were on the forest in front of me, trying to see through the trees and through the glare of the snow as I searched for the source of those sounds. The screaming was still going on, and I tried to cut through my gut reaction to the sound itself and try to filter it through the signs I’d learned as a younger man in the military.
And once I did that, I started to think again, my mind flying almost as quickly as my feet, my logic giving me the pieces I needed.
Those screams weren’t the screams of someone who was in mortal danger. They weren’t the screams of someone who was getting ripped apart. Not yet. They were screams of fear. Screams meant to bring help—and perhaps scare away whatever the person thought was attacking them.
They were also the screams of a young person. It was impossible to tell whether it was a girl or a boy, but whoever it was, they were definitely under fifteen. The clearness of their voice told me that they hadn’t been in this world for long enough to wear it down.
I jerked around a tree in my path, stumbled a bit at the deeper snow, cursed, and then swerved back onto the path I’d been following, telling my brain to give me more damn information. Something I could use. Something that would prepare me for what I was going to see before I got there.
The growling was easy to pinpoint. It was a pack of wolves, though they hadn’t started actually hunting the person. They’d come across them by accident, I thought—or by design, more likely, but without any big chase. They hadn’t had to communicate with each other. They hadn’t had to run after their quarry.
Which meant they weren’t tired. They were fresh. And they would be difficult to fight.
I jumped a log in my path, and then another, and went down to my knees on the landing, unprepared for the hard dirt I found on the other side. I was on my feet a moment later and tearing forward again. The clear spot didn’t belong here—this entire place was covered with snow, and there was no good reason for that one spot to be so clear of the stuff—but that didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered but getting to whoever was screaming. Before the wolves got them cornered and went after whoever it was.
The snarling and snapping was getting closer, now—as was the screaming—and I could hear that the wolves were still… well, playing with their prey, for lack of a better word. They were working the person into a corner, probably, snapping and snarling at them as they drove him or her back. They hadn’t jumped on the person yet.
When they did that, the whole tone of the battle would change. I was praying that wouldn’t happen before I got there.
I came suddenly into a clearing in the forest, about two hundred yards square, and then I was seeing the scene I’d been imagining in real life—and in all too real color.
There were five wolves, I saw, taking a quick count, and even that number came with an asterisk, because two of them were very young. Maybe six months old, if that. Young enough that they were still running with the pack they’d been born into—which meant their mother was one of the wolves attacking the person. Potentially even their father.
Which could come in handy.
“Small pack,” I said to myself, thinking out loud to give my brain something to hold onto. “Small family unit. Two young ones, potential hostages. Three adults. Not terrific odds, but—”
Then I saw who they had cornered.
Zoe. The girl that lived right next to us in town. She wasn’t Sarah’s best friend, and she wasn’t even particularly close to Sarah, but she was a kid I knew well. A kid I’d seen every single day for the last year or so. A kid I’d helped to shovel her parents’ walkway, a kid I’d pulled on a sled through the woods.