Chapter 53
Ranger Pine was clearly not the spineless wimp I had thought him to be. And he certainly had not been coerced into helping the opium operation in the valley. He was as involved as the rest of them. He so easily shot the Sheriff in the back. Now there was no wavering in his gait or unsteadiness in the gun in his hand. He had killed before. He probably killed his own wife. Maybe she overheard something that spurred Pine to execute her. No matter now. I was looking at a cold-hearted killer.
“You wuss, Sheriff,” Pine taunted. “It’s time to finish this.” He started walking towards us, his gun swinging from the mortally wounded Sheriff toward me. Jeff was also bending down to retrieve his weapon. We were caught between the two of them with our only protection being the back end of the Sheriff’s vehicle.
“Jeff,” Allison pled. “This has to stop. Now.”
“Sorry, Sis,” Jeff crowed. “Now it’s gone too far to stop.”
We were trapped and unarmed.
“I’m sorry,” the Sheriff gurgled as blood sputtered out of his mouth. He shoved his gun down the roof of his vehicle. It stopped just inches from my face, spinning a half turn on the smooth metal surface. The Sheriff then crumpled down to the ground and lay still.
I lunged for the gun and got into a crouched position at the rear of the vehicle. I didn’t have time to aim. I fired once around the right rear of the car in the direction of Jeff. The shot missed, but Jeff went scrambling around to the front of his car. I swiveled quickly and fired a shot around the left rear of the Sheriff’s vehicle toward Pine. It also missed, but sent him scurrying toward cover in an alley.
As he ran, I took more careful aim and fired. Just at that same moment he turned partially sideways into the alley, reducing his size as a target. But as fast as he was running, he could not outrun a bullet. He yelped when it hit him high in the chest area, spinning him around to face me. I saw the left side of his shirt turning red. I aimed to fire again, to finish him off. Even though he was probably seriously wounded, he was not out of it yet. But he started shooting first, the thud of bullets peppering the back half of the car and shattering the brake light just inches from my face. Fragments of the red plastic light cover sprayed my face. That knocked me backward to the ground.
I instinctively brought my left hand up to my face where the plastic fragments had struck me. I could feel trails of blood trickling down my left cheek and between my fingers. But my eye was undamaged. I could still see to shoot.
I got back up and fired a shot toward Jeff. I heard the roar of Jeff’s gun at the same instant that something tore into my left arm. It spun me around, and I lost the grip on the gun. It clattered under the car.
Allison stared at me lying there on my back in a pool of my own blood. A look of anger came over her face, and she dove under the car to retrieve our only defense. She didn’t come back out. She stayed there. Since I was flat on the ground, I could see her lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, steadying the gun with both hands, and aiming at her brother.
She fired three evenly spaced shots. The first twanged off the hood of the car. The second hit the spotlight on Jeff’s car, shattering it in an explosion of glass and sparks. The third must have at least grazed Jeff because he fell backwards with a yelp of pain. He wasn’t out of it, though, since he soon fired back.
Bullets were then coming from Pine, plunking into the side of the car. Allison, still under the car, spun to her left and returned fire. Then we were greeted by a hail of bullets coming from both directions. We were in a hopeless crossfire. Still lying on her stomach, Allison inched her way out from under the car to escape the flying metal that pinged all around her. She emerged feet first and lay there prone, probably waiting for a lull in the barrage so she could rise up and fire.
By now, the entire population had to be awake, grabbing their guns, and heading this way to defend their town. Such a scene may have played out before, back when survival on the wild frontier meant taking such matters into one’s own hands, not waiting for the law to handle all the dirty work. And while gunfire in the streets of Willow Run had probably not been heard for more than a century, I was certain any response from the citizens would involve every gun they could lay their hands on.
I hadn’t counted how many shots Allison fired, so didn’t know how many rounds were left in the gun. There were more clips of ammunition on the Sheriff’s belt, but his body was too exposed to retrieve them. And we couldn’t stay here for long and survive.
I rolled onto my unwounded right side and grabbed Allison’s ankle with my right hand to get her attention. She turned into a seated position, her back up against the rear bumper, aiming the gun toward me. She seemed ready to fire until she realized it was me who had grabbed her. Even in this hail of bullets, she was completely in control of her emotions. Hot with anger, but cool under fire.
Long tendrils of her red hair dangled across her dirt-streaked face. The façade of neatness and tidiness was gone. Her eyes were unblinking, blazing with focus. This was a new side of her, a deadly serious and furious side. I just felt relief knowing she was on my side.
The hiss of her breathing came in bursts through clenched teeth. “What!” she spat out more as a statement than a question, as if wondering why I interrupted her life-or-death concentration.
“Allison, we have to get out of here!”
She stared unblinking at me for only a second, then nodded in agreement. I rolled over to get my legs under me. She got into a crouch, the gun still in her hand. I grabbed her other hand. We had to run across twenty feet of open ground to get to a narrow gap between two buildings. Twenty feet. Less than ten running strides. We could squeeze through there and disappear into the early morning darkness.
“Go!” I urged, and we both shot away from the car like two sprinters. Still holding Allison’s hand, I reached the gap first, just as another roar of a gun exploded behind us. Something thumped into my back, and I thought I’d been hit again. But there was a cry of pain from Allison. The impact of the bullet had propelled her into me, and she was draped over me like a blanket. She had her hands interlocked over my shoulder and around my neck for support.
I didn’t stop, just kept on running down the alley, though my pace was slowed by Allison’s weight. We went out of the alley and across a gravel parking lot. We continued on past another building that looked like a garage. I leaned her up against the back wall of the building.
“Allison, are you OK?” I asked with concern. “Where are you hit?”
“Nathan, it hurts,” she grimaced. “My leg.”
I looked down and saw the trail of blood down her left leg, onto her shoe, and on the ground. The wound was not pumping blood, so the bullet probably had not hit a major artery. But she needed treatment soon.
“Allison, we have to keep moving.” I pulled her left arm around my neck, wrapped my right arm around her waist, and started moving again. She could still walk on her right leg, using me as a crutch to support her wounded left leg. We were both bleeding and desperately in need of help.
But we weren’t going to find help in this town. I was a fugitive. Now they would probably say that I killed the Sheriff. Every armed resident would be out gunning for me.
We pushed on. We stayed in the dark shadows of bushes, fences, and parked cars. But our pace was slowing. Allison’s wounded leg was dragging behind. And I also felt weak-kneed from my wounds. We came to a small cemetery. I pulled her down behind a headstone. She doubled over, collapsing onto her right side, retching. It had to be the first time she had seen someone get killed. I had seen plenty of bodies in my former life as a cop. That provided me a certain amount of immunity. I rubbed her neck gently as she continued to vomit on the ground, but we couldn’t wait long. We needed to get to safety.
A vehicle approached, its searchlight scanning the roadside. Jeff, no doubt, looking for us. We stayed hunkered down
. The car stopped, and the glare from the light swung like the beam from a lighthouse across the cemetery, from left to right and then back from right to left. The light danced across the tops of the tombstones and stopped, highlighting the stones around us. I was certain that we’d been spotted and waited for the shots. But then the light moved on and so did the vehicle.
I silently cursed myself for stupidity. I came back to Willow Run looking for help. Yet here I was again running for my life, and I had dragged Allison into it. Now I had to get her to a safe place.
Screw it. It was time to stop looking for help. It was time to be my own help. I knew then what I had to do. I had to take the fight to them.
“Allison, I have to get you to a safe place. It can be in town or elsewhere. Either way, I have to end this. I know what to do.”
She had regained her composure now and stared hard at me. “Then end it. But I’m not staying in this town.”
I smiled, kissed her on the forehead, and said, “Let’s go.”
The courthouse and jail were not far away. And there I would find what I needed. We hobbled in that direction. Allison used me as a crutch again, but her energy level was greater now. Resolve had returned to both of us. We limped across the road and through yards, staying in shadows as much as we could. We stopped just before reaching the courthouse, looking both directions to make sure Jeff wasn’t near. I could hear commotion in front of the building. It was probably the citizens of Willow Run viewing the scene of the shooting on Main Street. But there seemed to be no one in site of the police department parking lot. And there I spied our method of escape, parked right where I’d last seen it.
When Enid had brought me to the courthouse in handcuffs, I recalled he had left the keys to the off-road vehicle in the ignition. The keys were still there. There was no need to even take the cursory precaution of hiding them under the floor mat. This was a small town. Everyone trusts everyone. Well, probably not anymore.
We grunted with the strain, but succeeded in pushing the vehicle off the trailer. I boosted Allison in. “Please start,” I begged quietly. I turned the key, and it fired up immediately. I gunned the engine, flipped on the lights, and we shot out of the parking lot, spitting gravel.
We came out from behind the building. I saw the townspeople gathered in two small groups, one near where the Sheriff had fallen and the other at the front of the alley where Ranger Pine had fired at us. That meant that Pine must be badly hurt, or maybe dead, from our exchange of gunfire. I felt no remorse for that.
I turned right and gunned the engine. We zoomed down Main Street away from the gathering crowd. They shouted and some ran after us, and a few shots rang out. But soon they all faded away far behind us as we left town and headed into the tree-draped road leading west. We passed the Welcome to Willow Run sign and then the access road to the National Forest. We were in the clear.
But not for long. The bright lights of a car approached from behind, dimly at first, then more brightly as it narrowed the gap between us. The car bore down on us and gained ground quickly. Jeff or a zealous citizen. It didn’t matter. We had to get off the road soon. Whoever was chasing us would quickly overtake us.
Allison must have read my mind. She pointed to the right. “Take the path there,” she shouted over the whine of the engine.
So I swerved to the left and then turned hard right, leaving the road. We flew over the sloping berm and landed with a hard bounce as we sped into the forest. Allison groaned with the shock on her wounded leg, and I winced with the strain on my bleeding left arm. Bushes and downed limbs crunched under the tires. Tree branches thwacked on the sides of the vehicle and our exposed arms and cheeks. I slowed to avoid hitting trees, but kept the vehicle at as high a speed as I could manage to put some distance between our pursuers and us.
The path pummeled both of us, but that couldn’t be helped. Though I had not been on this particular path, I was certain I knew the way to our destination. Once I got over the ridge ahead, I simply had to turn left and follow it. It paralleled the road we had just abandoned. That road ran in approximately the direction I wanted to go. Being over the ridge would shield us from the road so that no one would see us from there.
It wouldn’t be long before Jeff or others in town would mount off-road vehicles of their own and pursue us. But since it was dark, I hoped they would not be able to readily track us. They might just follow the path we had been on, which continued north. We were now going west. And if Gates’ troops were called out to intercept us, they would head south on that same path. I hoped.
Yes, they were all out there somewhere searching for us. But soon I would be searching for them. That is what happens when you take the fight to them.