T Connor: Bitter Cold Apocalypse 2

He should have been several minutes behind me. Hell, I wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d actually gotten lost before he got here. Yeah, he’d known about this town and I assumed he’d been here at least sometimes, to stock up on supplies and the like. But I lived here. I knew the streets like the back of my hand.

How had he caught up to me?

I put the question on the list of Suspicious Things About Marlon and dashed through the doors to Town Hall with him on my heels. I’d ask him how he’d gotten through the town so quickly later.

Right now, I wanted to see how prepared the town was for Randall and whatever he was bringing with him.

Bob, the mayor of the town—and my wife’s uncle—was right inside the door, talking to someone about food supplies. We skidded to a stop right next to him and bent over, each of us trying to catch our breath.

Which shouldn’t have been an issue, I lectured myself. For God’s sake, I’d had special training in Afghanistan and had done two full tours over there—I’d come home so fit that my muscles had been like steel.

Being this out of breath after a little jog through town was downright embarrassing.

“I really need to get better about working out,” I said around a deep breath.

Marlon’s hand clapped down on my back. “You and me both, kid.”

I huffed out a laugh. “You’re what, ten years older than me? And I’m breathing twice as hard as you? Forgive me if I don’t take that as any comfort.”

I got a smile from Marlon at that, but I could already see the seriousness taking over in his eyes, and I nodded. We weren’t here to joke.

We needed to pass on what we’d just seen.

Once Bob was finished talking about food stores, he turned in my direction, question in his eyes. He looked both Marlon and me up and down and then shook his head.

“Do I even want to know?” he asked.

“Whether you want to or not, I don’t think you have a choice,” I replied. “Randall is already better-armed and more staffed than he was this morning. I don’t know where he’s getting his supplies—or his men—or how they’re getting here so quickly, but if he keeps building up at that rate, he’s going to have a fully armed force of at least one hundred within the next hour or so.”

I watched this register on Bob’s face, watched him go from thinking about the food stores to thinking about the actual safety of the townspeople—and the fact that there seemed to be a madman out in the woods, hellbent on attacking us. And I appreciated, once more, that Angie’s uncle might appear to be a jolly old man, but was actually a veteran. He’d had training in the military as well, and he knew how to handle people and keep them safe.

He also knew enough to be able to see an impending invasion when it was building up. And, I thought, enough to realize that we were going to need to build some plans really quick if we wanted to keep this town in our hands, rather than seeing it fall to Randall.

He turned around and started walking toward the largest room of Town Hall. The room where everyone was staying.

“In that case, we need to get to our weapons stores. See what we have. Figure out who’s going to take what, and what they can do with it,” he said over his shoulder.

I cast a quick glance at Marlon, whose face had already become stern and businesslike—his battle face, I thought—and then strode after Bob, my eyes on the people and supplies around us.

There were 213 people in town—214 if we included Marlon, I supposed, and 223 if we included the people who had come in from around the town. And though the main room in Town Hall was enormous—for reasons that I had to assume had to do with emergency housing, because we didn’t exactly have a lot of conventions in this town—it couldn’t house that many. Not when they’d brought tents, sleeping bags, cribs, strollers, suitcases, and even, in many cases, their dogs and cats. When I’d been in the main room earlier, it had looked like a freaking campground, and an overcrowded one at that.

I wasn’t surprised to see that many of the townspeople had moved out here to the foyer, where there was more room for them to spread out. I suspected that eventually, some of them would move into the other smaller rooms in the building as well. There were a few offices that had enough room for a tent or two, if memory served, and at least three meeting rooms.

I’d never really thought about the fact that this building was way bigger than a town of 213 people actually needed. But now I was definitely thinking that it had been built that way on purpose. It had also been built with enough insulation to protect an entire fortress.

Which was, in effect, what this building was going to become.

The generators in the basement, each of which had an old-fashioned gasoline engine, were chugging away underneath us, and the entire building was toasty and warm. There were lamps in the corners to make sure the place was well lit, and from what I could see around me, Ellis Woods had prepared well for this exact sort of disaster, and its people were going to be just fine.

As long as we could keep Randall Smith and his army at bay.

“What exactly do they want, anyhow?” I asked, jogging forward a bit to catch up to Bob. “Why is Randall so set on getting into town? In fact…” I remembered what he and his cousins had said in the cabin in the woods, about having been kicked out of town and wanting revenge. Wanting to finish their plan. Bob had told me a little bit about what had happened, but he’d never finished his story. “What did they do in the first place? And why do they hate you so much?”

Bob took a sharp right-hand turn, motioning for me to follow him.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

We were in the thick of what I would have considered a residential area, now. They didn’t keep the guns somewhere like this, did they? Somewhere where kids could find them?

“Figured you’d want to see your wife,” he said. “And I’d like to see her, myself. Check on how she’s doing.”

Oh. Right. Of course. I hadn’t forgotten Angie, per se, but I hadn’t been thinking about going to see her first. I’d been more concerned with trying to keep her safe by heading Randall off at the pass, so to speak.

Probably better to go check on her before I started doing that, though.

We slowed to a stop moments later, and I saw Angie sitting on the floor in front of a tent that I recognized as mine.

And the doctor was with her. Again.

I dropped quickly to the floor next to her and grabbed her hand, then looked at Dr. Williams—and then down to his hands.

“Doc,” I said by way of greeting. “What’s going on? I thought we were through with the surgery?”

“We are,” Angie gritted out, her jaw clenched. “But I busted through a set of stitches, so Doc is kindly putting more in for me.” She’d put emphasis on “kindly.” If anything, I thought she wanted to hit the doctor for what he was doing. She probably didn’t think of it as anything but horrible.

That didn’t stop me from paying attention to her first statement.

“You busted through a set of stitches?” I asked suspiciously. “Already? What were you doing, practicing flexing your quads?”

I knew she hadn’t been. I knew she’d probably gotten up way earlier than she should have, to try to do something. But I wanted her to have to admit it.

She gave me a bashful look, then flashed a look at Dr. Williams as if begging him not to say anything to me.

He gave her a stern look, shook his head, and then opened his mouth to tell me exactly what had happened.

“You know your wife,” he said, his tone disapproving. “The moment I had her patched up, she got up and started trying to put the tent together. By herself.”