He reached where the fire had spread along the stores opposite him. Squinting, he made out the intersection ahead of him and up across from him on his right the whole block of burning buildings with the hotel in the middle of them. He slowed as he neared the intersection, then stopped as he heard gunshots. Three of them. Down at the next intersection. So muffled by the roar of the fires and the storm that he couldn’t tell if they were from a rifle or a handgun. The old man, he thought, and in spite of everything, he wanted to hurry down and help, but he felt paralyzed, and that second’s hesitation was what saved him. Because the white figure that rose up before him out of the snow in the middle of the intersection seemed to grow larger and larger, and the guy shouldn’t have been that big, but he was, and he kept looming larger and larger, wearing a white camouflage suit.
He himself dropped from crouching to kneeling and then dove face forward into the snow. It clogged his mouth and filled his nostrils coldly. He fought to breathe, his heart thumping, his chest constricting. The figure abruptly ran down the street toward the sound of two more shots. They were closer. From a handgun. The old man was using all his ammunition. He wouldn’t have time to reload the handgun, and he didn’t have the shotgun anymore, he’d given it to Claire, which left the rifle, but in the storm he wouldn’t be able to see to shoot until somebody was almost onto him, and in those close quarters aiming with the rifle would be difficult.
Another shot, this time louder, fuller, from a rifle, but he couldn’t tell from where and he couldn’t take the chance of stumbling across another white-suited figure huddling hidden in the snow. He had to stay low, crawling through the snow the rest of the way across the intersection toward the buildings opposite the fire, glancing continually ahead of him for any sign of anybody, stopping, listening, crawling again.
He reached the sidewalk, squirming along the edge of it, using it for cover against anybody who might see him from inside one of the stores. That was the only place they could be. The storm was too bad for them to want to stay out in it. They would have judged by now that nobody could have survived the fire, waiting in the stores until the storm lifted and the fires died and they could go over to make sure.
No, that was wrong. If one guy had been waiting at the intersection, there’d be more outside as well. But there might be some in the stores all the same, and he found himself glancing everywhere as he crawled, wiping the snow from his eyes, groping, slowly.
Another shot. Another after that. Rifles again. And now someone screamed. It wasn’t the old man, he was sure of that. The old man had hit one of them. Or had he? Maybe the old man had been the one screaming after all.
And he finally couldn’t take anymore, had to get on his feet, out of the snow, away from them, his hand freezing to the metal of his gun as he lunged up, charging across the sidewalk, shoulder heaving against a door, crashing through into shelter. He swung low, checking the place. A dry goods store, or what had once been a dry goods store, a counter down each side, empty shelves behind them, cobwebs and dust and dirt all over the snow on his clothes as he dodged behind a counter, checking it, across to the other counter, checking it, whirling toward the door in case someone had heard him crashing in.
No one, and he backed off, working into the shadows in a corner, stumbling over a box as the back door flew open, and out of the wind and the snow a figure burst in, gun ready, and they almost shot each other before he realized it was the old man.
The old man barely stopped to notice him. He was lurching white-faced over to the opposite counter, setting something on it, and at first he thought the old man had been shot, he was moving so awkwardly. Then he realized this was the way the old man had looked when he’d stopped before in the middle of the street, holding himself. Cramp nothing. The old man had broken something inside him. He couldn’t hide it anymore. And then he saw what he was fumbling with on the counter. A lantern. And the old man was shaking it to hear that it was full, lifting the glass top, lighting the wick, snapping down the top, and reaching back to throw it.
“What are you doing?”
“Shut up,” the old man said. “Leave me be.” He twisted to the side, whipping the lantern against the row of shelves, glass cracking, the fire catching almost immediately, spreading, rushing up the wall of shelves.
“They’ve nested in the stores along here. I’m giving them the same chance they gave me.” The old man headed awkwardly toward the front door. “They’ll be coming out and I’ll be ready for them.”
It didn’t make any sense. The old man had come after them because they were burning his town, and now he was burning the town himself, and he wasn’t out to get them for what they’d done, he just wanted somebody to get no matter what the reason, worked up into such a frenzy that he couldn’t keep himself from laughing as he stumbled out the door. And this was why the old man had stopped them from running, and this was why Claire and Sarah were huddled freezing in drifts in the long grass, hiding, and he couldn’t hold it in anymore, shouting at him, screaming at him, “You crazy bastard! You dumb—”
But it didn’t matter. Because the sidewalk was only as far as the old man got. He was dropping his rifle, clutching both arms around his stomach as he sank to his knees, his laugh broken into a groan, and the shot that followed from out there lifted him to his feet, slamming him back through the door. He made a liquid noise just before he twitched and died.
He couldn’t move. He knew he ought to dive for cover and shoot back at whoever was out there. He knew he ought to try to make it out the back before they came. But all he could do was stand there, staring at the old man spread out ahead of him, screaming, “You bastard! You dumb bastard!” He shot three times into the old man’s body as the flames from the shelves spread across the floor toward the old man’s fingers. A bullet whacked crashing through the window, slamming into a counter. He shot once more into the old man’s body, then shot through the open doorway, and ran.
21
He was never sure how he made it back to Claire and Sarah. The storm was worse as he lunged out the back door, the snow driving hard against him, and he didn’t look around to see if any of them were out there waiting for him, didn’t try to crouch and make himself a smaller target or dive for cover or hide in one of the sheds or in a drift beside a barrel by the corner of a building—he just ran. He knew without thinking that with the storm as bad as it was they wouldn’t be able to see him if he cut directly across the main road and down a side street toward the field where he’d hidden Claire and Sarah, but running became an uncontrollable impulse, and he just kept on, stumbling, lurching to his feet, running again, thinking, “You crazy bastard! You dumb crazy bastard!”
Or maybe he shouted it. He never knew. He just kept running blindly, past the stores and the sheds that he sensed were all around him, across side streets, down alleys, stumbling, falling, and he was never sure either when he realized that he wasn’t in the town anymore but out in the fields and that he was going to freeze to death, die out there. It was only later that he reconstructed what had happened and understood that the slash of the grass across his face when he fell must have told him, but at the time he was too far out of himself to register that, and all he could think was that without the town for bearings he was going to wander out there, freeze to death and die, and that finally was what brought him to himself, that Claire and Sarah were going to wait and freeze and die the same.
The town on fire became a beacon, leading him back, guiding him. He stumbled around the edge of the buildings, across the main road where they had first come in, around the edge of more buildings, letting the fire guide him, staggering through the grass, coming upon Claire and Sarah before he knew it, them huddling under the sleeping bag he had taken from the hotel, crouching in a hollow in the grass, the snow drifting up around them, and he had told Claire to use the shotgun for anybody who came and didn’t use his name, so she almost shot him before she realized.
“My God, I didn’t know what was happening,” she said. “I heard all those shots and the fire was spreading and I didn’t think I’d ever see—”
“I know,” he said. “It’s fine. Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right now,” hoping she believed him.
They were half frozen and there wasn’t time to rub their hands and feet or work out the stiffness from the cold, they had to get moving again, and his first thought was to try making it through the snow across the fields into the trees, but he knew they’d get lost and their feet would freeze and they’d never make it, they had to try for the horses. He knew the chances were that some of the attackers would be watching the stable, but he had to try for the horses anyhow, at least try, and if when they came close they saw that some of the others were watching the stable after all, well they’d have done their best. They would be able to head off walking through the storm toward the trees, knowing that there’d been no other choice.
They swung around, approaching the stable from the far end of town. Sarah was so cold that he had to carry her now, stumbling through the drifts, and then as he felt her settling against him, nodding, he realized that he was going to have to make her walk anyhow, that she would fall asleep if he didn’t and her metabolism would slow and she would freeze. He set her down, forcing her to walk, urging her through the snow, bracing her as she faltered, hands on her shoulders, working her ahead of him, and then they came to a corner on the main road where the stable was in the middle of the block to the left across from them, and even with the snow lacing against his face, he could make out where the fire had spread to the first buildings on both sides of the street down there.
“We’ve got to go in front and back at the same time,” he told Claire. “If there’s anybody in there, we need to distract them from both directions.”
“But we don’t know how to go in at the same time,” Claire said.
And she was right. It wasn’t any good. They would all need to go in together, him first. If they separated again, they might never find each other. This was either going to work or it wasn’t. There just wasn’t any way to take the risk from it. Pushing Sarah, running with her, he crossed the street, ran down the side street and around to the alley on the left, stopping just far enough away from the back door of the stable to give him a chance to check it. He motioned for them to stay behind him while he worked forward, crouching, studying the drifts in front of the door to see if there were footprints. There weren’t. And the drifts were deep enough that they looked as if the door hadn’t been opened since the storm began. He glanced down the alley, blinking in the snow, toward the fire. He glanced behind him at Claire and Sarah coming carefully. Taking a long breath, grabbing the wooden handle on the door to the stable, he kicked away the drifts and yanked it open, running in, diving toward the stall on his right. He came up rolling, aiming along the stalls, the horses scudding back and forth from the smell of the smoke and the sudden noise of his entrance. He glanced up at the loft and began working his way along the stalls, glancing up at the opposite loft, and if there’d been anybody, he would have been dead by now.
“Come on,” he said, hurrying to saddle the pinto. “We don’t have much time.”
They rushed across to the other horses, Claire saddling the bay, Sarah rubbing her hands by the ladder to the loft, stamping her feet to get them warm. His own hands were numb from the cold, and it was taking him too long to cinch the pinto’s saddle, slapping his hands against his thigh, slapping them again before he went back to working the straps through the buckles, tightening them, securing them.
He was just swinging around to the next stall where the buckskin was when Claire screamed, and looking up he saw the man standing up there in the opposite loft. He had a rifle pointed at them, and he must have been hiding back in a corner up there, waiting for the noise of them working with the horses to mute the sound of him walking over. He was young and dressed in white the same as the other guy, his hood thrown back, grinning, aiming.
He dove over the side of the stall, fumbling to draw his gun, but his hand was so numb that he dropped it, and looking helplessly up he saw the guy grinning even more as he snuggled the stock of his rifle in close to his shoulder and lowered his cheek to get the sights lined up perfectly, and the roar of the twin explosions was deafening as the man disintegrated up there, his face going one way, an arm flying another, his chest caving in, his rifle dropping as the man rose up toward the ceiling almost as if he’d been hoisted and then slammed down out of sight up there in the corner where he must have been hiding.
He didn’t know what had happened. He didn’t think Sarah would ever stop screaming. He looked, and Claire still had the shotgun in her arms, aiming it up toward the loft where the man had been. She wasn’t moving or blinking or breathing, just standing there aiming, and it was all he could do to pry her hands away before she started crying. He didn’t have time to comfort her, didn’t even know how he could be moving so efficiently, leading the bay and the pinto out of their stalls, forcing Claire and Sarah to take the horses out the back door, cursing, anything to get them moving. He rushed back to the buckskin, no time to saddle it properly, just cinch it and slip on a bridle and hope he wouldn’t fall off as he led it out the door and swung on, kicking it, flailing at the other horses as he rode past, yelling at Claire and Sarah to get moving. They galloped out of the alley, swinging to head down the side street across the main road toward the fields of grass and snow on the other side of town. There was a shot behind them from the main road, but he didn’t hear the bullet anywhere near them, kicking at his horse, clutching the reins and the saddle horn to keep from falling. Claire was now on one side of him, Sarah on the other as the storm cleared enough for him to see the fields ahead, and then they were into the long grass, crossing, when he heard the second shot behind him and heard it hit, and it was a good thing Sarah was on the other side of him because she never had a chance to turn and see as he did, already knowing what he would see but looking all the same, the last look he would ever have of her as Claire toppled forward, her gaping face leading her body down off the horse, the hole in the back of her head obscured by the several flopping tumbles her body took as it landed.