But then the world exploded.
I threw myself forward and crawled toward Angie, to cover her with my own body, but Marlon grabbed my foot and hauled me backward.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he hissed. “We need cover, and we need it now. I don’t want anyone to catch us out in the open like this.”
It took me about three nanoseconds to realize that he was right. We were obviously still there, so that meant the entire world hadn’t exploded. Just something in the distance. And if something in the distance was exploding, then it made sense that we wanted to run away from it rather than sheltering in place and waiting for whatever it was to get to us.
I jumped to my feet and saw that he’d already grabbed one of the ropes attached to the sled. I grabbed the other and we pushed forward, our feet churning for purchase in the snow as we increased our pace from walking to running. The sled jerked and stuttered behind us, and I could hear Angie saying something, but neither of us slowed—and neither of us looked behind us.
I had no idea what we were running from. But I had a good idea that Marlon did. And I didn’t think he was going to bother to explain it until we were in some sort of cover. Which meant we had to get to the woods ahead of us, in quick time. The woods were still about five hundred yards away, but at the rate we were moving forward we were going to be there in less than five minutes.
I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw smoke billowing up from what looked to be the direction of Marlon’s home. I frowned at that, wondering if Randall had done something there, but then nearly tripped on a downed branch.
“Eyes forward, soldier!” Marlon shouted. “This is no time for looking backward!”
Eyes forward. Of course. Stupid, John! You never, ever turn around and look behind you when you’re running for your life. Particularly not if you’re towing your wife on a child’s sled, and have no idea who—or what—might be after you.
I wrapped the rope twice around my body, leaned forward, and dug my feet into the snow, increasing my pace once more as I fought with everything I had to get my wife—and my new possibly friend, possibly something else—to the safety of the woods.
16
We reached the woods in what I thought had to be record time, but it had exhausted both Marlon and me, and we fell to the ground just inside the tree line, breathing heavily in the thin, cold air. Within seconds my lungs felt as though they were freezing from the inside, and I quickly covered my mouth with my mitten-clad hands, trying to warm the air before it entered my mouth.
I didn’t know if frostbite of the lungs was even possible, but this definitely wasn’t the time to find out.
As I fought to breathe, I turned my eyes back to the billowing smoke in the distance, trying to figure out how far away it was, and whether that had actually been Marlon’s house or not. Whether it was something we needed to concern ourselves with.
And then I realized that I was probably going about this the entirely wrong way.
I swiveled my eyes toward my possible friend and saw the knowledge in his own eyes that told me I was correct.
I took my hands away from my face. “What did you do?” I asked quietly.
He gave me a long, considering look, and then his face cracked into a tired grin.
“I set a booby trap for Randall and his men,” he told me casually. “I wanted to see if they were following us. Wanted to see if they’d search my property first. If they didn’t, I figured, it would mean that it had only been a coincidence, seeing them there. Property lines are fuzzy out here and Randall’s property borders mine, in a manner of speaking. With where they were, they could have told me that they’d wandered over the line without realizing it, and I would have believed them. I don’t know that I would have believed them entirely harmful, but I would have believed that they’d crossed the line without realizing it.”
He turned and looked at the smoke rising up in the distance in big black puffs and pressed his lips together.
“But that explosion means that someone was poking around in one of my out barns. More than poking around… they were in there violently searching for something. And you don’t do that on accident. You don’t even do that as a casual observer. You do that when you’re hellbent on trouble.”
“You set a… trap?” Angie breathed.
I could hear the shock—and admiration—in her voice, and I reminded myself once more that she was an outdoors woman through and through. She knew her way around the forest and through dangerous situations, and if she’d ever been called into the military, she would have done a bang-up job there, as well.
The woman might’ve looked relatively harmless but she had a spine of steel and veins that ran with ice-cold water. It made her a uniquely perfect companion for me—and made her very valuable out here in the cold of the forest. Particularly when it sounded like Marlon had just confirmed that Randall and his cousins were indeed pursuing us.
Marlon, meanwhile, was giving her a fairly bashful shrug, as if he was slightly ashamed of himself for it—or ashamed that he had to admit it to a lady. I thought the latter was probably far more likely than the former. He didn’t seem like the kind of man who second-guessed his decisions.
“We needed to know, Angie,” he told her quickly.
I noticed that he was already adjusting his clothing and getting ready to get back to his feet, and I began making the same preparations. No, I wasn’t ready yet. My breath was still coming fast, and I still felt as if I’d been iced down from the inside. But I estimated Marlon to be at least twenty—maybe thirty—years older than me. If he was ready to get started again, I wasn’t going to drag my feet.
No way I was going to let him be more prepared than I was.
Marlon got to his feet and looked back toward the smoke. “It wasn’t an important barn. I never stored anything in there because it was too far from the house to be convenient. But I know Randall and his kin, and I know they can’t pass a building without going in to see what they might be able to steal. If they were that close to the house, it means they came looking for trouble. And if they survived that blast, they’ll know that I left the bomb just for them—and they’ll be even angrier.”
He turned his eyes to me. “Now we know that they’re coming. Now we know that they’re coming now. Whatever head start we had just disappeared.”
I jerked my head in a nod. “And if we thought we could take the road, this just changed that. We can’t be out in the open. I don’t even know if the forest is going to keep us hidden enough. Not from them.”
“We have no choice,” Marlon answered. “If the bear is after us, we’ll have to hope that we can do one of two things. Either lose him the old-fashioned way, or get to town before he can get to us.”
Well. Neither of those were good choices—not when we were dragging a human, several packs, and a weighty exoskeleton across deep snow, and we were just on foot, fueled by an anger I didn’t even pretend to understand. Still, my mind started to work on the problem, trying to get to the bottom of it, trying to find the best way to escape. If I were in Afghanistan, setting up a mission where I couldn’t use any tech, was weighed down by extra baggage, and had to lose a tail…
“We’ll have to cross any river we come to,” I said by way of answer. “Use the river if we can, to make forward progress. They might be following our footprints, but if they get to a river and lose them, they’ll have absolutely no way of knowing where we’ve gone.”
Marlon gave me a pleased grin. “I’m glad to see we’re thinking along the same lines, John. They’ll assume that we’re headed toward Ellis Woods. They know that Angie is related to the mayor there, and I assume they know that you’ve come from the area. They’ll realize you’re trying to head home. Even if you weren’t, it’s the closest town and would be the obvious answer for our problem. But if we can throw them off in terms of our route…”