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.
He reached where the fire had spread along the sto
res 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.