T Connor: Bitter Cold Apocalypse 2

So the people had been safe. And the doctor had been in residence. I’d spent an hour holding Angie’s hand as she went through surgery with almost no anesthesia—and then another hour holding her while she recovered.

Marlon had been with me. But he hadn’t been helping an ailing wife at the time.

He was, however, giving me a shifty look that told me that he’d had other business to attend to—and that he wasn’t going to let me in on that secret. I added this to the list of things he’d kept secret for the past two days—things I absolutely meant to make him tell me about sometime soon—and looked back toward Randall’s encampment.

The camp had changed since the last time I’d looked at it, and I did a double-take, frowning at the new view. Where it had been empty of anything but tents and those suspicious shacks before, there were now men out there. Lots and lots of men. They were across the river from us, and about five hundred yards from where we were standing, but I could still see them well enough to see that there had to be at least fifty men milling around over there.

“How many men do you see?” I asked sharply.

Marlon was quiet for a moment, his lips moving as he no doubt counted the men in the distance.

“Sixty-three,” he said a second later.

I blew out a slow breath. “Where the hell did he get sixty-three men so quickly? How many did he have when we first saw him, like ten?”

“Fifteen at the most,” Marlon agreed.

He dropped the binoculars away from his face and stared hard at the camp, and though my fingers itched to reach out and take the field glasses from him and look through them again, I stopped myself and kept my eyes on the camp instead. Field glasses were great when you needed to see details.

Looking with your own two eyes and getting the larger view was better when you were looking at a larger picture. The size of a camp. The number of men.

“He shouldn’t have that many people,” I continued. “There’s just no way. Where the hell would they all come from? There are a lot of people living in the woods around here. There aren’t sixty-three of them. Particularly when so many of them have taken up residence here in town.”

I’d lived here for long enough know the people who lived within walking distance of the town by first name. No, I didn’t know all of them personally, but I knew who they were. And I estimated that there were ten, maybe fifteen families, total. True, there were some bachelors out there—and some families that were made up of only brothers or cousins.

But there weren’t enough people to supply Randall’s camp with that sort of crowd.

Hell, five of the families that lived close enough were already in Town Hall with the rest of the town. And I had it on good authority that two of the other outlying families were on their way here. They were just moving more slowly because they had young kids.

“He’s getting them from somewhere else, obviously,” Marlon replied drily.

I gave him a look that would have told him exactly what he could do with that attitude—if he’d actually been looking at me. Which he wasn’t. His eyes were still glued to the camp in front of us. He handed me the binoculars again, without changing the direction of his gaze.

“You see any weapons, though?”

I frowned, because it was a good question—and something I should have already thought of.

After all, numbers were one thing. But a bunch of men without weapons? Every single person in this town had at least one gun in the family, and most of them had several. And they all knew how to use them. If Randall and his band of misfits thought they were going to try to attack the town without any weapons, they were going to have another damn thing coming.

I put the binocs to my face and scanned the camp quickly, looking for something that appeared to be a storage space for weaponry. Once I got to the outskirts of the town, I looked back through it, slowing down. The problem was that there were so many men now that it was hard to see anything else. Hard to see through any doorways or tent flaps.

Then I saw a man emerging from one of the shacks. And he had three guns in his hands. Nothing too fancy, I didn’t think. Rifles with some aggressive scopes on them. But they were the first guns I’d seen.

I swiveled my view back to the doorway from which he’d just emerged, and squinted then refocused the glasses and held my breath, standing as still as I could. Unlike the other shacks, this one had only three sides, making it more of a lean-to than anything else. The good news was that it gave me a much better view of what was inside it. The bad news was that it was completely shielded right now by the crowds in front of it. When the men in front of the shack finally moved away, I was rewarded by a clear view. And though it only lasted for about three seconds, it gave me everything I needed.

The shack was chock full of weapons. Rifles of both the hunting and the automatic variety, handguns, and even what looked to be a bazooka or two. It looked like they’d stopped short of having actual cannons.

But they had a much bigger stash than I’d have expected them to have, in such a short time and in the middle of freaking nowhere.

“Good God,” I whispered.

I swiveled my view to the left, looking through the other sheds and wondering if there were more weapons in there. Then I stopped short.

At the end of the row of shacks, I saw a man I recognized. A man who looked like he could have been a bear with how shaggy and unkempt he was.

Randall. And he was looking through binoculars as well. Right at me.

We ran through the streets of the town, neither of us looking back to see whether we were out of danger yet or not. We were dashing up and down the streets, turning as often as we could to make sure there were corners between Randall and us, but the buildings were sparse out here at the edge of town, and I knew that our cover wasn’t what it should have been.

And they had rifles with scopes on them. For all I knew, they had sniper rifles back there in that shack of theirs.

I hadn’t yet started guessing at where they might have gotten them, but one thing was clear: until we were inside again, or had at least five streets between us and them, I didn’t think we could count on any sort of safety. And I just didn’t want to get hit by a bullet today.

Hell, I didn’t want to get hit by a bullet any day. But today would have been even worse than usual.

Marlon skidded around another corner and I followed him, wondering whether we should split up. Give them two targets that were moving in separate directions rather than two moving targets that they could take care of in almost the same movement.

“We’ve got to split up,” I huffed. “If we’re together it gives them a better chance at getting both of us.”

Marlon tossed a look over his shoulder at me, and I could see his eyes go beyond my face. Didn’t take much to guess that he was staring through the gaping holes in our cover and seeing that the river—and therefore Randall and his goons—were right there.

“You’re right,” he said. “You go straight. I’ll turn right or left. When we get back to Town Hall, we decide what the hell we’re going to do about Randall and his heavy supplies.”

I didn’t bother to answer him. I shot right past where he’d just turned right, and ran like hell for Town Hall, dodging into other streets and alleyways whenever they came up, and using my mental GPS to guide me on what I estimated to be the most direct route back to my people.

I got there about thirty seconds after Marlon—which was strange, because this was my town, not his, and I would have thought that meant I knew it better than him. I’d also gone straight, while he’d turned.