I tore my gaze away from the wolf and looked down at where Zoe was laying on the ground, crunched into the fetal position, with her arms around her head. She was still screaming, and I could see that the wolves had torn apart her clothes and gotten into her skin as well. She was bleeding from several different locations—but she was alive.
I was going to have to keep her that way.
“As soon as they make a run for me, you shoot!” I screamed at the men in the woods. “I don’t care if you hit them or not. Just scare them away so I can get that girl!”
A second later, the wolves were turning as one, eerily in tune with each other, as if this was a choreographed dance. And then, so quickly that I hardly saw the change, they were sprinting right for me.
I dropped the wolf I’d been holding, crouched, and jumped for the nearest tree, which I’d marked when I first realized that the adults were going to give me more trouble than I’d realized. I grabbed for the bottom branch and hauled myself up, feeling the snap of teeth just to the side of my right calf. And then the shooting started.
I’d give this to Marlon and the others, they shot to scare them rather than kill them—and after what those wolves had done, it was more than I would have given them. Snow exploded up from the ground below me as bullet after bullet hit the white powder, the roar of the guns deafening and finally drowning out Zoe’s screaming.
The wolves paused for only a moment, and then they were suddenly gone, like ghosts into the night, their exit nearly as quiet as their appearance must have been. The only reason I saw them go was because I’d been actively watching them, praying for that very thing. And the moment the last tail went darting into the bush, startled by the gunfire, I dropped out of the tree.
My legs were moving almost before I hit the snow, and it took me about half a second to go sliding on my knees toward the shaking, still screaming little girl. The snow around her was stained with pink and red, and once I reached her, I could see why.
The wolves had torn into one of her arms, which she must have put up to protect herself, and had also mauled one of her legs. I didn’t see any bone, so I didn’t think they’d gotten too deep, and if she had broken bones, they weren’t sticking out anywhere.
But those hadn’t exactly been sterile animals, and she had to be in an awful lot of pain.
I held her gently up to my chest, my own chest tightening with emotion at her whimpers, and whispered, “Zoe, girl, I’ve got you now. I’ve got you, girl. We’re going to make it stop hurting real soon, okay? I’m going to get you some medicine real soon.”
“J-J-John?” she moaned. “John, it hurts.”
I held her tighter, part of my brain screeching that I had to be careful of broken bones, and the other part telling the first part to go to hell. If I could have magically taken her pain away, I would have. I would have done anything to heal her at that moment. Anything to make it better.
“We’re going to make it feel better soon,” I whispered. “You just try to rest right now. And tell me if anything suddenly starts hurting worse, okay?”
When Marlon, Bob, and Joe came skidding up next to me, I stood with Zoe in my arms.
“She’s been mauled pretty bad; lost a lot of blood. We have to get her to someplace where we can disinfect the wounds and get her stitches, at the very least. Infection won’t set in as fast here as it would in warm weather, but it’s still going to be a risk.”
I glanced at Marlon, and saw that his expression matched my own. He looked as if he’d just seen his own daughter being attacked by wolves—and like he knew exactly what my next words were going to be.
“We have to get to your house. I need your surgical instruments and your knowledge, now.”
“We don’t have time to wait for the rest of the group,” Marlon agreed with a nod. He turned to Bob and Joe, already taking control of the situation. “You two, take over the march. Keep the people in line, keep them moving. You’re not going to have a lot of leeway in terms of getting there before dark, after this, but you’re going to have to get it done. Stay in the forest in the dark and you’re sure to get lost. Keep everyone together. Keep them safe. And dammit, make sure you don’t lose any more kids. This one could have been left behind if she didn’t start screaming.”
“And her mom?” Bob asked quickly. “What do we tell her?”
“Tell her mom…” I stopped, pressing my lips together in thought. No matter what they told her, she was going to worry. No matter what they told her, we were still leaving her behind when her little girl was hurt. But I didn’t see any way around it. We couldn’t afford to take her with us, because I knew the woman and didn’t think she’d be able to keep up with us. She also had four other kids—two of them younger than Zoe—that she needed to take care of.
I also thought there was a good chance that she would be too distraught to be of any real help. And I wasn’t willing to take the time to support both her and Zoe.
Zoe couldn’t afford for me to take that time.
“Tell her that Zoe’s been hurt, but that we’re going to help her. Tell her that it’s not a mortal wound but that we have to get her to a place where we can sterilize it and stitch it up. And tell her that I can’t have her playing hero right now. I can only afford to worry about one girl at a time. She needs to stay here and take care of her other kids, and let me take care of Zoe.”
Bob nodded and Marlon took several moments to give them rough directions toward his house, then promised them that we would see Zoe settled and then come out into the forest to find them and guide them the rest of the way.
Bob reached out and grasped my arm, careful not to touch the girl, who was quiet but still trembling against my body.
“You take care of that little girl, John,” he said, his voice breaking. “You fix her, you hear me?”
I met his gaze, my own gaze steady as a rock. “I’m not willing to lose her, Bob,” I answered. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Then Marlon and I were running through the forest, leaving the other two behind and plowing through the snow like our lives depended on it. It was going to be an extremely long run, I knew. And it was going to be hard. We weren’t able to get out onto a road or even a more well-trod path, because there was a good chance that Randall and his men would be watching those sorts of things—or that they would take them if they were coming to look for us.
And we absolutely couldn’t afford to be caught by Randall and his men. Not now. Not when I had a wounded little girl in my arms and no way to grab the gun and knife I was carrying. We would be two men against who knew how many, and we’d be overwhelmed immediately.
So our best shot—our only shot—was to stay hidden while moving as quickly as we possibly could.
“Is there a more direct route to your house than we were taking?” I huffed, hoping for an answer in the affirmative.
“There is,” he answered quickly, as if he’d already been thinking about it. “It won’t cut a lot of time off, and it’s more dangerous. Takes us through thicker forest. I didn’t want to take such a large group that way, if I didn’t have to. But given the situation…”
“We take it,” I told him firmly. “Get this little girl to your house the quickest way possible, Marlon, and then fix her. I don’t care what it takes.”
We shot forward into the glare of midday snow, and I had only one thing on my mind: I was going to do whatever I needed to do to make sure Zoe was okay.
22
I was right about the journey being difficult. And long. As we took off into the forest, in a direction that roughly echoed where the rest of the group was but wasn’t going to cross them exactly, I quickly went through what I knew of the local geography and decided that we must have around five miles left between us and Marlon’s house.