It didn’t take me long to find them. Several men were walking up and down the main street on either side of the town square, guns resting on their shoulders in the stereotypical “guarding” stance, their eyes swiveling back and forth as they watched out for anything suspicious. Considering the fact that they were the sole occupants of the town at the moment, I found it ridiculous and pretentious.
Considering, though, that they had to know I’d be leading some attempt at taking the town back, I supposed it was understandable.
Because Randall had to know I was coming. He just wouldn’t know when… or how.
Speaking of which.
“Guards in front of Town Hall,” I said, bringing the binocs down from my face. “I’m guessing they’re still holed up in the building, seeing as that’s the only one big enough to hold all of them. Easiest answer, and that feels like Randall to me. I don’t think it’ll be hard to get them cornered in there. But how are we going to get into the town in the first place? We won’t be able to go in the same way you all got out. They’ll have that door guarded.”
Marlon put his own set of binoculars up to my face, but to my surprise, he turned away from Town Hall—and its guards—and looked three doors down, instead… at the town’s tiny library.
“We’ll be getting into town through the library,” he responded quietly.
I looked from the library to him, and then back again, completely confused.
“Come again?” I finally asked. “Why the hell would we get in through the library?”
He turned to me. “We have to assume they’ll have guards posted around the borders of the town,” he said blandly. “So we can’t just walk in and catch them by surprise. But I know something Randall doesn’t. I know something no one else does. And I think that tonight’s the right time to let you in on my secret.”
29
The sun was long gone by the time we crept through the woods as a larger group, and even this group wasn’t that large. We’d realized very quickly that we couldn’t all go tromping through the woods together—not if we wanted to get to our goal in one piece and without being detected.
We might be outdoorsmen, and we might think that we were trying to be quiet, but the truth was that eighty people could never be completely silent. Not in a forest that was only partially lit and full of things that might trip us up. Our natural noisiness—our natural humanity—would virtually guarantee that anyone who happened to be keeping a lookout on the back side of town would either see or hear something.
And we just couldn’t afford that. We already knew we were going to be badly outnumbered. No, we were no longer out-armed, thanks to the stockpile of weapons at Marlon’s house. But even if we each managed to shoot both of our weapons at the same time, eighty men against a force that we estimated to be twice that size would almost always lose.
We couldn’t take the chance of being discovered before we were in position. Which was why we’d broken down into smaller groups of ten. We’d decided that ten men could travel more quickly—and more quietly—than a large group of eighty.
I was at the head of the first group. Which meant that my group was… well the guinea pig, more or less.
I heard the sound of an owl taking off from a tree in front of us, then, and motioned violently for my men to get down or melt into the shadows. Although owls are some of the most deadly hunters in the sky, they’re also extremely large birds, and can make an awful lot of noise when they first decide to get out of a tree.
Enough noise to attract the attention of anyone keeping an eye on the back side of town. Enough noise to potentially make someone come check on things. And if I didn’t want to get caught by Randall in a group of eighty, I wanted even less to get caught in a group of just ten.
Around me, the men dropped down or backed quickly into the shadows thrown by the moonlight, and I slipped behind a tree trunk, leaving one eye out to keep the town in sight. I had to give it to the men, they were quick to follow orders when I gave them—and they didn’t even know exactly what we were doing.
Come to that, of course, neither did I.
Go to the edge of town, Marlon had said. Right outside the schoolhouse, he’d said. Stay there, and I’ll show you something you won’t believe.
If it had been anyone other than Marlon, I would have thought it was some sort of joke. But I’d seen enough magic from him over the last few days to take him at his word when he said he held information that no one else had. I still didn’t know how it was going to get us into town—or how it was going to help us defeat Randall and his men—but when it came to Marlon, I was willing to bet on him knowing what he was talking about.
I cast my gaze back toward the direction of the barn, scanning the forest for any sign of Marlon and his group, who had been right behind us, but I couldn’t see any sign of them. I didn’t see any sign of anyone else, either, and I was grateful for that.
I’d spent years in Afghanistan, building up my loyalty to the men around me and risking my life time and again for them. Leading them into the most impossible situations anyone could think of, and then fighting with every ounce of my being to bring them back out again. But since I’d been home, I’d been changing my allegiances.
The people of the town were my company, now. They were the ones I would risk my life for, and that meant the men on this outing with me were some of the most important people in my life.
I didn’t want to see a single damn one of them hurt.
I turned my gaze quickly toward the town at the thought, and let my eyes rove along the row of buildings that backed up to the forest. Then I searched the alleys between them, straining my eyes in the semi-darkness for shapes or flashlights. Movement where there shouldn’t be movement. Shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows. The lighting made it damned hard to see anything, particularly when it started bouncing off the snow, and everything looked flat and artificial.
But I didn’t see any movement in there. I didn’t even think Randall had bothered with sentries. There were men walking the streets of the town, but not the outskirts—which didn’t make one damn bit of sense.
Unless Randall had decided that we were too afraid to come after him.
I stifled a grin at that, because it fit so perfectly that I wasn’t sure how I could have missed it. Randall was an odd duck, there was no mistake about that, but he was also one of the cockiest, most overconfident people I’d ever met. And him deciding that we were too afraid of him to come after him?
Well, it fit his personality perfectly.
And at that thought, I started creeping forward again. If there weren’t any guards back here, it would make our journey quicker. And the quicker we could get through the journey, the quicker we could get into town—or whatever it was Marlon had in mind—and get this thing over with.
The men crowded into the clearing right outside of the edge of town, their eyes on Marlon, their mouths hanging open in outright shock—and doubt.
“What do you mean there’s a tunnel into town?” Bob finally asked, finally taking his eyes off Marlon and looking at his town like it somehow betrayed him. “A tunnel that none of us has ever heard of or even suspected?”
Marlon rolled his eyes. This was the third time he’d been through this, and I could see that he was getting just as frustrated as I was. True, we didn’t have an exact timetable for this attack, but we also couldn’t stand here all night convincing the townspeople that Marlon was telling the truth.