T Connor: Bitter Cold Apocalypse 2

“Angie,” I muttered, shaking my head.

She turned her enormous eyes on me, all innocence. “What was I supposed to do? We needed the tent set up, and you and Marlon had taken off. It wasn’t as if I could have Sarah help me, either. She’s way too short. And everyone else was busy. I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think that in the last couple days, you’d been attacked by a bear, nearly been kidnapped, worn a splint that was made of metal, fallen through the ice and nearly drowned, then nearly froze to death, and gone sledding on a freak river, all with a broken leg that had been ripped to shreds?” I filled in for her. Then I kissed her on the forehead and shook my head. “Of course you didn’t.”

I kissed her again, more deeply again, and gave her a stern look. “But I’m here now, and there are plenty of people around you to help. I don’t want to see you doing anything like that again, you hear me? I won’t watch you hurt yourself again.”

“I didn’t hurt myself the first time,” she said. “It was the bear, your honor.”

At that, I grinned, and then looked around, noticing that someone was missing. “Where’s Sarah?”

Angie gestured vaguely to the right. “I sent her off to play with Emily,” she said. “I knew Doc wasn’t going to give me much in the way of anesthesia, and I didn’t want her sitting here and watching this sort of thing.”

I took a deep breath, trying not to think about what she’d just gone through. Dr. Williams had been very straightforward with me. He hadn’t been able to give Angie much anesthesia, because he hadn’t had the equipment to monitor it. No way to monitor her heartbeat.

So he’d set her leg and stitched her up using nothing more than a local numbing agent. And then he’d done stitches on her a second time. She must have been able to feel most of it—and she hadn’t wanted Sarah to see her in pain.

I pulled my wife into my arms and held her up against me, barely breathing. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I need a drink,” she grumbled.

I pulled back. “Have someone get you some gin,” I joked. “I’ve got some stuff I have to do. I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Where are you going?” she asked quickly. “What happened out there? Did you find Randall? Did you see his camp?”

I decided to give her the short version. “Yes, we saw him. His camp has doubled in the last two hours. And he’s got guns. Lots of them. More than he should have. More men than he should have. We don’t know where he’s getting his supplies from, but we need to figure out how we’re going to defend ourselves against him.”

“You’re going to see the weapons room,” she guessed.

I nodded firmly. “We are. I need to know what we’re packing, and who can use it.” I turned back toward Bob and got to my feet. “Bob, the armory, if you please. I need to see what we have by way of defense.”

The rest of the main hall in the building showed exactly the same things we’d already seen: rows and rows of tents and small family encampments, with people and animals milling around. The lighting in the building was low, of course, but people had brought battery-powered lamps and had small kerosene heaters and the like to increase the warmth and light of the place. Someone a whole lot smarter than me had imposed a grid of some sort—probably at the very start of bringing people in—so that there were actual streets through the place, and it kept it more orderly than it would have been if the people had designed the whole thing themselves.

As Marlon and I walked through, following Bob, I was both amazed at and appreciative of the plans the town had already had in place for just this sort of thing. They’d been so well-prepared that one would have assumed that they’d been expecting this very thing to happen.

And that brought me right back to something that Bob had said to me when we’d first arrived. Something about Randall wanting to take the town’s prepping to a whole other level.

“Do you know what exactly Randall’s doing?” I asked, catching up to Bob. “Why he wants this town so bad?”

Bob gave me a wry look, and waited for a moment as Marlon caught up to us as well, so that he wouldn’t have to repeat the information.

“Sure I do. He and his cousins used to live in this town, though that was a year before you arrived. Never really fit in here, though, if you know what I mean. They were always causing trouble. Always getting in fights with the other locals, making like they were the big men around town when they didn’t matter any more than anyone else. Trying to impose their will on the rest of our people—as if they knew better than the rest of us what the world was about. Hell, I don’t even think that boy has a high school diploma, and he still acted like the rest of us should listen to him.”

He ended this diatribe on a deep grumble, and though I could have laughed at his tone, I didn’t.

I’d met Randall. I’d tangled with him on extremely personal terms when he and his cousins tried to kill me so they could kidnap my wife and use her to bribe—or threaten—Bob and the rest of the town.

He’d tried to kidnap my wife. Suddenly, I realized that I’d been missing something, and frowned. If Randall had lived here, then it would mean that Angie had known him. Why the hell hadn’t she recognized him in that shack in the woods?

Because she was out of her mind with delirium and fear, the more rational side of my brain supplied quickly. She wouldn’t have known her own father if he’d happened into that shack.

I almost discounted it, but then I realized the voice was right. Angie had been dealing with a broken and shredded leg at the time—with absolutely nothing in the way of painkillers. I’d been lucky she was small enough for me to carry out of there, because she hadn’t been able to walk, much less think straight.

I’d have been a fool to expect her to recognize anyone.

That hadn’t changed the fact that Randall had done his damnedest to keep her, and I pulled my mind back around to what Bob and I were discussing. Randall, and the danger he posed to all of us. I knew what Randall was capable of, and I didn’t find anything about him amusing. Not even his lack of education.

“He’s not smart, but I haven’t found that to stop him from trying to take what he wants,” I said, remembering the chase through the forest as he and his cousins attempted to capture us. They’d been singleminded—and very, very persistent.

Bob gave me a nod, then turned down another row of tents, heading roughly for the other side of Town Hall.

“He is most certainly stubborn,” he said. “When he decides he wants something, it’s nearly impossible to dissuade him. Talking to him is completely useless, and he’s reckless enough that he’ll hurt anyone who might get in between him and his target.”

Yes, I had firsthand experience of that as well. I’d been on the being-hurt end of things. They’d failed, but only because I’d had military training they hadn’t known about that had allowed me to take all three of Randall’s cousins out before they could kill me.

“You said he wanted to force the town into some sort of extreme prepping, right?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation moving. Randall was out in the forest, and I had no idea how quickly he was going to move. I needed to know exactly what he’d be coming into town for—and how we could either protect it or get away from it, to keep the people safe.

Marlon snorted at that, as if he already knew the answer to the question, and I looked at him with both eyebrows raised. “You want to add something?”

He shook his head, though. “I know Randall well enough, but I wasn’t in town for that particular situation. Better to get the answer from Bob, here.”