“They’re here! Get down!” he yelled to Claire. “Down!”
She ran across, diving beside Sarah, and the old man was still so worked up that it was all he could do to stand there, the knife in his hand, looking around.
The wind shrieked in through the shattered window, and then the right front window crashed in as well, bullets whacking into a wall.
“Get down!” he told the old man, tugging at his leg, and he finally had to yank the old man’s feet from under him, toppling him. He drew his handgun, aiming it toward the windows and the door. “They’ll come, they’ll be coming.”
The old man was shaking his head, blood trickling from his mouth from where he’d hit the floor.
“Draw your gun, you damned old fool. Those boulders didn’t stop them. The noise only told them where we were.”
“Maybe,” the old man said, or at least it sounded like that, the word was hard to tell, obscured by the crack of a rifle outside, the simultaneous whack of a bullet into the piano on the stage behind them, wires snapping, jangling, mallets striking in grotesque imitation of a chord.
“Out the back,” Claire urged.
“No. If they’re out front, they’ll be out back waiting for us too.”
“He’s right,” the old man said. “Our only chance is to go upstairs.”
“What kind of chance is that? They’d only have us trapped even worse.”
Thinking of the back door, he suddenly noticed that Claire had closed the kitchen door when she followed him out, how somebody could get in there from the back without his noticing. He thought he heard somebody out there and fired through the door. Sarah screamed. But the dog must have heard somebody out there too. It was standing, teeth bared, going over.
“Hush,” the old man said.
It stayed where it was.
“Hush,” the old man said again, and the dog returned. Because the old man must have smelled it even before he himself did, and now he was seeing it as well, the thick black smoke that was spewing out under the bottom of the kitchen door, rising, spreading from the cracks at the side and the top of the door. And glancing toward the front, he saw two bright lanterns arcing in with the snow through the broken windows, glass shattering as they hit the floor, the smell of kerosene gusting toward him a second before the flames caught, whooshing toward the ceiling in one great solid wall of flame between them and the windows and the door.
The smoke from the kitchen billowed thicker, wafting toward the ceiling. He heard Sarah coughing. He saw bright orange flames licking thinly through the smoke at the bottom of the door.
“Hold your shirt over your mouth. Breathe through it,” he told Sarah.
“Upstairs,” the old man said.
But the old man wasn’t moving that way. He was crawling across the floor toward the bar, grabbing the shotgun where Claire had leant it, disappearing into the smoke around the bar.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“This,” the old man told him, crawling back in sight, coughing, clutching a rifle along with the shotgun.
“Where did that come from?”
“I put it there last night while you were sleeping. Upstairs I said!”
The old man didn’t wait for a reply. He was already crawling past them, standing, charging up the stairs. The wall of flames spread toward them, crackling, eating at the floor and the ceiling. The door to the kitchen was almost burned through, flames dancing through the walls on either side. The heat singed his face.
“Let’s go,” he said, standing, dragging Claire to her feet, stooping to lift Sarah.
“I can walk now.”
“Do it then. Let’s go.”
As they ran to the stairs, swinging around, charging up, on impulse he grabbed Sarah’s sleeping bag and his knapsack, running after them, his footsteps pounding hollowly on the stairs. The heat was scorching his jacket. The room down there was totally in flames.
“This way,” the old man told them, waiting at the top.
“But the fire. It’ll catch us up here, too.”
Smoke came up through the floor. Flames showed through the cracks.
“I don’t have time to explain.” The old man was running down a hallway parallel to the street, reaching a door at the end, heaving against it.
“Help me.”
The fire roared in the room below them, heat swelling, the hallway filling with smoke, and they heaved, but the door wouldn’t give. They heaved again. It still wouldn’t give.
“The shotgun.” He reached for it.
“No, they’ll hear.” The old man heaved again, and then in one last desperate lunge they both cracked against the door, snapping it free like kindling, stumbling through into the next room.
“We’re in another building,” the old man explained. “The guy who ran the hotel owned this too. This was his office.”
The four of them hurried past the big desk and the long-since-rotted, mouse-eaten padded leather chair toward the opposite wall, the dog running with them. They stooped to squeeze sideways through a shoulder-high hole that had been chopped through the wall. The roar was behind him. The air was pure and cool.
“I did this all through town,” the old man told them. “So I could get around unseen if anybody came.”
They reached a room stacked with wooden boxes. One of the boxes was near the next wall, hiding the next hole. They squirmed around it, rushing down a corridor of boxes, past a stairway, through another hole, into a jail cell.
He recoiled from the bars and the metal bunks stacked against the wall, thinking, We’re trapped again, before the old man leaned against the door,, and it was squeaking open.
“We’re almost there,” the old man said.
They ran out past a desk and slots built into the wall for rifles and pegs driven into the wall for keys and gun belts, and this time there wasn’t any hole in the wall, just a hatch that closed off the way downstairs.
“I’ll lift. You aim,” the old man said, prying his finger through the ring in the hatch, lifting abruptly, but there wasn’t anybody below them.
“Good,” the old man said. “That’s all I was worried about. Now we’ve got them.”
“What are you talking about?”
But the old man was going down, stopping halfway to check the room, continuing down, and the rest of them were coming after him. The sheriff’s office. Another row of cells, a desk, an empty rifle case, a wooden file cabinet in the front corner, a map nailed to the wall, wanted posters all around it, no pictures, just names and charges and reward money, murder, arson, rape, and he just had time to glance at everything once before the old man ran over to a back door under the stairs, opening it, peering out toward the snow. Even in the middle of the room, the wind was chilling
He glanced toward the small windows on each side of the front door, straining to see through the gusting snow out there. He glanced back at the old man, and the old man was gone. Then the old man was back.
“There’s nobody out there. Now’s our chance.”
For a moment, he felt his excitement rising, thinking they might get away after all, before he stopped himself. “They might have somebody watching the stable.”
“Stable? What are you talking about? We’re going after them.”
“What?”
“Two in front, one for each lantern they heaved in through the windows. One in back to start the fire in the kitchen. We’ll take the one in back first.”
“But that’s crazy. There might not be three. There might be a dozen.”
“It doesn’t matter. In this snowstorm there might as well be three. We’ll be onto them before they know it.”
“Maybe
you
will. I’m getting us out of here.”
“Are you? Listen. You run now and they’ll just keep after you. There’ll never be another chance like this. You know where they are. You’ve got the storm for cover, and they don’t know where you are.”
“You’re not doing this for me. It’s for you, and I’m not going to risk my family to help you do it.”
“You’re damn right it’s for me. This is my town they’re burning. No, not just my town—my home. And I’m not going to let them get away with it.”
“For what? The town is finished. When they’re done with this side, they’ll start on the other. There won’t be a wall standing by the time they’re through. It’d be different if there was a chance of saving anything. But just to get even with them? No way. We’re leaving.”
“I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
They had come full circle, the old man holding the shotgun on him while he aimed the revolver at the old man, and this time
he
was the one who would need to back down. The old man would shoot. He was sure of it. And he himself wouldn’t because he was too afraid of the others out there hearing the shot and coming for them. It wasn’t a standoff. It was suicide.
He smelled smoke.
The old man cocked both hammers on the shotgun.
“All right. Tell me how you want to do it.”
The old man smiled. “You just watch me.”
“The fire,” Claire said.
The flames roared close. Smoke crept through the wall.
“We’ll need to hide them in the grass outside,” the old man said, pointing toward Claire and Sarah, and there was a moment as the old man turned to lead them out that he could have cracked the old man’s skull with his gun and gotten to the horses. But he didn’t. It was as if a choice had been made for him and he was going with it, grateful to be doing something at last, telling himself that maybe the old man was right—there might never be a better chance. In a half hour or so, one way or another, all of this might be finished. They might never be forced to run again.
20
The snow whipped at him. Even with the light from the block-long string of fires, it was hard to see, smoke mingling with the blizzard, four o’clock more like night, and after hiding Claire and Sarah, the two of them struggled into the storm, their arms up shielding their faces from the sharp lashing sting. They came around a shed, angling toward the burning almost-gutted hotel, nearly onto a man huddled against the side of the shed watching the back of the hotel before they spotted him. Or at least the old man spotted him, stopping abruptly, then motioning urgently for the two of them to go back around the corner of the shed. The old man put his hand cold and hard and bony over his mouth to keep him from saying anything. Then he stooped, drawing his knife, disappearing around the corner of the shed.
In the roar from the storm and the fires, he never heard the sentry watching the hotel scream when the old man knifed him. If the sentry made a sound at all. The way the old man handled himself, the sentry probably didn’t have a chance to react. The old man was just suddenly returning around the corner of the shed, wiping his knife on his pants, saying “Come and help me.”
As if in a trance, he followed.
The sentry was lying face down in the snow. Even with the drifts piling up quickly against the shed, there was still a lot of blood, turning from red to the faintest shade of pink in the snow, and the way the top of the sentry’s head looked from where the old man had gripped his hair, cutting, broke the trance. He gaped at the mass of bloody hair hanging from the old man’s belt, stumbling back, saying “My God, you scalped him,” and the old man waved the knife at him, saying, “Shut up and help. I’ll give you the same if you don’t help. I can’t afford to have you out here getting in my way.”
The old man was pulling the sentry’s legs, dragging him toward the fire, leaving a swath of blood in the snow.
“Damn it, help I said.”
Once again he obeyed, stumbling forward, grabbing the sentry’s hands, lifting him half off the ground, dragging him sideways toward the fire, the swath of blood wider, thicker. The heat melted the snow on his jacket. They couldn’t get any closer. Lifting, they swung the man back and forth, letting him fly toward the fire. He flopped into the flames.
The sharp, stomach-turning stench of burning hair and flesh overpowered him. He turned quickly to protect his face from the flames, staggering away, sinking to his knees, holding himself, gagging.
“Get up,” the old man told him.
But he couldn’t. He was far enough away from the fire now that his hands and face were numb again, but he was breaking out in a cold sweat, and he was holding himself harder, heaving dryly.
“Get up,” the old man repeated, pulling at him, dragging him up. “We don’t have time for this. I’m going this way.” He pointed toward the back of the sheriff’s office. ‘‘I’ll work around across the main street to the buildings on the other side. You go this way and do the same.” He pointed in the opposite direction, toward the entrance to the town. “We’ll catch them between us.”
He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what, and it wasn’t any use. The old man was suddenly gone, running into the storm, and he was standing there, sweating, staring at the fast-drifting swath of blood in the snow, smelling scorched hair and clothing and flesh, racing abruptly in the direction he’d been told, hurrying along the line of burning buildings, reaching a side street that led toward the main road, almost taking it.
But the flames had spread to the buildings on the next block, filling the side street so that there was only a narrow corridor to run down, and he knew he couldn’t go through there without getting burned. Running farther along the backs of the buildings, he reached where the fire had not yet spread, rushing on, coming to the next side street before he knew it.
He stopped without thinking, pressing himself against the back of the last building, peering around the corner, gun ready, staring up between the buildings toward the main road.
Nobody.
He raced up, pressing himself against the wall again, staring around the corner again, this time down the main road and the sidewalks and the fronts of stores, grateful that the snow wasn’t driving into his eyes now but against the back of his head, squinting all the same as he strained to see through the snow and the smoke down there and the gloom.
He didn’t see anyone and bolted across the street to the corner on the other side. Still no one, and he worked his way along the edge of the sidewalk, checking the windows of stores that he passed, checking the snow-shrouded sidewalk opposite him, hurrying on.
He didn’t expect anyone on this block. Chances were they were waiting across from the hotel on the next block down, taking their time, making sure nobody left the burning hotel before the place collapsed and they could be sure that none of them had survived. All the same, if there were more than three, they might have stationed themselves along the street just in case, and he had to make certain, checking all the storefronts as he moved along.