I watched Henry’s face fall—for the third time—and felt a little bit bad for him. He’d obviously thought that he and Randall were friends. Or if not friends, at least acquaintances who were on friendly terms. People who didn’t try to shoot each other.
It was hard hearing that someone like that was going to kill you. Hard knowing that you were now on opposite sides of the line. I knew. I’d experienced that myself.
But I’d also learned the next step, and I’d learned it the hard way. Once you were on opposite sides of the line, you had to settle down and do your job. You couldn’t play the “what if” game and wonder whether the other guy would actually shoot at you.
Believe me, he will. If he doesn’t, you have to let it be a happy surprise. Because if you’re expecting him not to shoot, and then he does, you’re dead.
I reached out, grasped Henry’s arm, and gave it a slight shake.
“Don’t worry about it, Henry. You’ve got me. I’m not going to let you get hurt, okay? I need you with me. You’re my partner on this particular mission. My backup.”
His face cleared and took on a stronger expression, and he nodded firmly.
I turned around and kept walking, trying to get down the hill as quickly as possible, and trusting Henry to come down right after me and keep from hurting himself in the process. The poor guy had been a friend of Randall’s and had actually been summoned to the camp we were going to visit, but had refused, not wanting the trouble, and had come to town instead.
He was the reason we’d originally known anything about Randall’s camp at all.
And now I was leading him right back toward the place that he’d tried to avoid.
You might be wondering why the hell I would have chosen someone like him. Someone who didn’t have any military experience and definitely wasn’t going to be the most dependable backup if—or when—I needed it. Marlon would have been the better choice. Hell, Sean Slatten, the police chief, would have been a better choice. Anyone with any sort of real experience with crime or firearms used against people rather than animals you were hunting.
The thing was, Henry O’Connor had been Randall’s friend. They had both lived outside of town, and as such had been part of that peculiar brotherhood that made their living off the land, and depending on each other for things like shelter and partnership. He’d been our first source when it came to Randall, arriving at Town Hall shortly after we did with news that not only had Randall sent a call out to his friends to join him, but was also set up outside of town. With guns. Intent on invasion.
I still didn’t understand how Randall had gotten the word out to all his friends so quickly—particularly when there was no electricity and nearly all small electronics were fried, and therefore nothing like phones or walkie-talkies were working. How the hell had he accessed his network so quickly?
Putting that aside for the moment, I stopped up against one of the trees toward the edge of this bit of woods and motioned for Henry to slow down. We were getting into sparser coverage here, and I wanted to see whether we were at risk for actually being seen. We were about a mile north of where Randall and his men had set up camp, and I was hoping that was enough to keep us safe.
I was, however, also hoping that they weren’t looking in this direction at all. If they weren’t looking at us, there was a whole lot less chance of them noticing us when we crossed the bridge. Because once we were out over that water, we were going to be easily visible. If they started shooting at us, we weren’t going to have much hope of escape.
I put the binocs up to my face and ducked around the tree, crouching down and scanning the horizon. A quick look back in town showed me the car that Marlon was almost inevitably hiding behind—with the man we’d decided was the best sharpshooter in town, who we’d chosen to use one of the sniper rifles we found in Randall’s stash—and I turned my gaze directly across the river from where he was, to Randall’s encampment.
There were still an awful lot of men milling around over there, I saw. More activity than there had been when Henry and I first made our way into the forest. I wasn’t going to take the time to count, but it looked like a whole lot more than sixty men to me, now, and that brought me right to the question I’d been mulling over since the first time we’d observed his camp.
Where the hell had all those men come from? How was he finding them? And the same question went for the weapons.
Something was fishy here. There were definitely details that we didn’t yet know. And that was exactly why Henry and I were on our way into their camp—to try to overhear what they were doing.
Which was also why I had Henry with me. If the worst happened, and they saw us—or captured us—I was hoping like hell that Henry could lean on his relationship with Randall to get us out of that jam.
I didn’t know if it would work. It definitely wasn’t a solid plan. But that just meant, I supposed, that we had to do our absolute best not to get caught.
“It’s time to get to the bridge,” I said, dropping the binocs to my side. I glanced at my watch. “Marlon should be in place by now, with Joe. They’ll have eyes on the camp, and they’ll be giving us cover while we cross. If they see anyone getting ready to shoot, they’ll do their best to distract them.” I turned to Henry and looked him up and down once. “Are you ready?”
Henry didn’t look ready. He looked terrified.
But he nodded quickly. “Ready as I’m ever going to be,” he answered. “Let’s get this done.”
We didn’t try to be subtle. I took one quick glance at the camp through the binoculars—just enough to make sure there wasn’t a lookout on this side of the camp, watching for us—and told Henry to run.
We dashed across the fifty-yard open space between us and the river, slipping and sliding on the slight slope and heading for the bridge a whole lot faster than I had anticipated we would be going. I tried to get a good idea of the bridge’s construction on my way down the slope, but it was difficult when I was not only trying to stay on my own feet but trying to keep Henry on his as well—while worrying that someone in camp was going to see us and start shooting—while hoping that Marlon and Joe were in place and ready to distract anyone who might have seen us. From what I could see, there were more boards missing from the bridge than there were intact, and some of the stabilizers looked like they were rotting. The thing was barely wide enough for one man at a time, and though I couldn’t exactly see it swaying in the wind, it looked like it was anything but solid.
God, I thought, it was going to be a miracle if we managed to get across that thing without either being shot or going down into the river.
We pressed forward, though, our decision already made. It was far too late to turn back now. Or rather, it wasn’t, but that would have defeated the purpose of us exposing ourselves like this in the first place.
When we hit the start of the bridge, we slowed a bit, but not by much. We just didn’t have time to play it safe. I flew across the bridge, trying to jump as lightly as possible over the missing planks, and counting on my momentum to keep me going straight instead of sending me over the side. I could hear Henry banging along behind me and prayed that he was taking as much care with the rickety old structure. I could feel the thing shaking behind us—and cast a quick thought toward whether it was still going to be standing when we tried to come back—and then my feet were suddenly on snow again and I was racing all-out for the forest beyond the clear patch, my heart pounding in my ears, all my senses attuned to the camp in the distance—and the lack of gunfire.