Bitter Cold Apocalypse 2 (A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller) Read online

  Marlon skidded around another corner and I followed him, wondering whether we should split up. Give them two targets that were moving in separate directions rather than two moving targets that they could take care of in almost the same movement.

  “We’ve got to split up,” I huffed. “If we’re together it gives them a better chance at getting both of us.”

  Marlon tossed a look over his shoulder at me, and I could see his eyes go beyond my face. Didn’t take much to guess that he was staring through the gaping holes in our cover and seeing that the river—and therefore Randall and his goons—were right there.

  “You’re right,” he said. “You go straight. I’ll turn right or left. When we get back to Town Hall, we decide what the hell we’re going to do about Randall and his heavy supplies.”

  I didn’t bother to answer him. I shot right past where he’d just turned right, and ran like hell for Town Hall, dodging into other streets and alleyways whenever they came up, and using my mental GPS to guide me on what I estimated to be the most direct route back to my people.

  I got there about thirty seconds after Marlon—which was strange, because this was my town, not his, and I would have thought that meant I knew it better than him. I’d also gone straight, while he’d turned.

  He should have been several minutes behind me. Hell, I wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d actually gotten lost before he got here. Yeah, he’d known about this town and I assumed he’d been here at least sometimes, to stock up on supplies and the like. But I lived here. I knew the streets like the back of my hand.

  How had he caught up to me?

  I put the question on the list of Suspicious Things About Marlon and dashed through the doors to Town Hall with him on my heels. I’d ask him how he’d gotten through the town so quickly later.

  Right now, I wanted to see how prepared the town was for Randall and whatever he was bringing with him.

  Bob, the mayor of the town—and my wife’s uncle—was right inside the door, talking to someone about food supplies. We skidded to a stop right next to him and bent over, each of us trying to catch our breath.

  Which shouldn’t have been an issue, I lectured myself. For God’s sake, I’d had special training in Afghanistan and had done two full tours over there—I’d come home so fit that my muscles had been like steel.

  Being this out of breath after a little jog through town was downright embarrassing.

  “I really need to get better about working out,” I said around a deep breath.

  Marlon’s hand clapped down on my back. “You and me both, kid.”

  I huffed out a laugh. “You’re what, ten years older than me? And I’m breathing twice as hard as you? Forgive me if I don’t take that as any comfort.”

  I got a smile from Marlon at that, but I could already see the seriousness taking over in his eyes, and I nodded. We weren’t here to joke.

  We needed to pass on what we’d just seen.

  Once Bob was finished talking about food stores, he turned in my direction, question in his eyes. He looked both Marlon and me up and down and then shook his head.

  “Do I even want to know?” he asked.

  “Whether you want to or not, I don’t think you have a choice,” I replied. “Randall is already better-armed and more staffed than he was this morning. I don’t know where he’s getting his supplies—or his men—or how they’re getting here so quickly, but if he keeps building up at that rate, he’s going to have a fully armed force of at least one hundred within the next hour or so.”

  I watched this register on Bob’s face, watched him go from thinking about the food stores to thinking about the actual safety of the townspeople—and the fact that there seemed to be a madman out in the woods, hellbent on attacking us. And I appreciated, once more, that Angie’s uncle might appear to be a jolly old man, but was actually a veteran. He’d had training in the military as well, and he knew how to handle people and keep them safe.

  He also knew enough to be able to see an impending invasion when it was building up. And, I thought, enough to realize that we were going to need to build some plans really quick if we wanted to keep this town in our hands, rather than seeing it fall to Randall.

  He turned around and started walking toward the largest room of Town Hall. The room where everyone was staying.

  “In that case, we need to get to our weapons stores. See what we have. Figure out who’s going to take what, and what they can do with it,” he said over his shoulder.

  I cast a quick glance at Marlon, whose face had already become stern and businesslike—his battle face, I thought—and then strode after Bob, my eyes on the people and supplies around us.

  There were 213 people in town—214 if we included Marlon, I supposed, and 223 if we included the people who had come in from around the town. And though the main room in Town Hall was enormous—for reasons that I had to assume had to do with emergency housing, because we didn’t exactly have a lot of conventions in this town—it couldn’t house that many. Not when they’d brought tents, sleeping bags, cribs, strollers, suitcases, and even, in many cases, their dogs and cats. When I’d been in the main room earlier, it had looked like a freaking campground, and an overcrowded one at that.

  I wasn’t surprised to see that many of the townspeople had moved out here to the foyer, where there was more room for them to spread out. I suspected that eventually, some of them would move into the other smaller rooms in the building as well. There were a few offices that had enough room for a tent or two, if memory served, and at least three meeting rooms.

  I’d never really thought about the fact that this building was way bigger than a town of 213 people actually needed. But now I was definitely thinking that it had been built that way on purpose. It had also been built with enough insulation to protect an entire fortress.

  Which was, in effect, what this building was going to become.

  The generators in the basement, each of which had an old-fashioned gasoline engine, were chugging away underneath us, and the entire building was toasty and warm. There were lamps in the corners to make sure the place was well lit, and from what I could see around me, Ellis Woods had prepared well for this exact sort of disaster, and its people were going to be just fine.

  As long as we could keep Randall Smith and his army at bay.

  “What exactly do they want, anyhow?” I asked, jogging forward a bit to catch up to Bob. “Why is Randall so set on getting into town? In fact…” I remembered what he and his cousins had said in the cabin in the woods, about having been kicked out of town and wanting revenge. Wanting to finish their plan. Bob had told me a little bit about what had happened, but he’d never finished his story. “What did they do in the first place? And why do they hate you so much?”

  Bob took a sharp right-hand turn, motioning for me to follow him.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  We were in the thick of what I would have considered a residential area, now. They didn’t keep the guns somewhere like this, did they? Somewhere where kids could find them?

  “Figured you’d want to see your wife,” he said. “And I’d like to see her, myself. Check on how she’s doing.”

  Oh. Right. Of course. I hadn’t forgotten Angie, per se, but I hadn’t been thinking about going to see her first. I’d been more concerned with trying to keep her safe by heading Randall off at the pass, so to speak.

  Probably better to go check on her before I started doing that, though.

  We slowed to a stop moments later, and I saw Angie sitting on the floor in front of a tent that I recognized as mine.

  And the doctor was with her. Again.

  I dropped quickly to the floor next to her and grabbed her hand, then looked at Dr. Williams—and then down to his hands.

  “Doc,” I said by way of greeting. “What’s going on? I thought we were through with the surgery?”

  “We are,” Angie gritted out, her jaw clenched. “But I busted through a set of stitch
es, so Doc is kindly putting more in for me.” She’d put emphasis on “kindly.” If anything, I thought she wanted to hit the doctor for what he was doing. She probably didn’t think of it as anything but horrible.

  That didn’t stop me from paying attention to her first statement.

  “You busted through a set of stitches?” I asked suspiciously. “Already? What were you doing, practicing flexing your quads?”

  I knew she hadn’t been. I knew she’d probably gotten up way earlier than she should have, to try to do something. But I wanted her to have to admit it.

  She gave me a bashful look, then flashed a look at Dr. Williams as if begging him not to say anything to me.

  He gave her a stern look, shook his head, and then opened his mouth to tell me exactly what had happened.

  “You know your wife,” he said, his tone disapproving. “The moment I had her patched up, she got up and started trying to put the tent together. By herself.”

  “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.”

  3

  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.”

  At that, I saw a glance pass between the two of them—twin to the look Bob had given Marlon when we first appeared—and I wondered anew at what their history was. Marlon had found Angie and me in the woods and taken us to his house, where he’d had a convenient array of medical supplies, and had treated Angie as best he could. He’d given me a story about being a retired doctor who had taken up veterinary practice on the outskirts of the town.

  He’d also said that Randall wanted to kill him because Marlon had treated Randall’s wife, who’d died later.

  And he’d had an exoskeleton for Angie’s leg. An exoskeleton that wasn’t exactly common issue for the public—or everyday doctors. It had been military, I was sure of it.

  When it came to suspicious history, Marlon was nearly as bad as Randall. The difference being that Marlon had actively saved our lives—several times. As far as I was concerned, he’d proven himself to be a very valuable and true ally. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to demand an explanation for who—and what—he was.

  Not yet, though. We had bigger fish to fry.

  “What exactly did Randall want to do?” I asked.

  “Make the town into a fortress,” Bob replied quickly, without any hesitation. “He wanted to go far, far beyond the standard prepping—food stores, making sure we would have energy, water, that sort of thing—and actually turn this place into a fully armed base. He and his cousins were convinced that the end of the world was coming, and that it was their job to prepare for that. To protect the town, even—though I suspect that was less about the people and more about the buildings and food. He never seemed to me like he cared, particularly, about the people. Though I suppose he would have at least tried to keep the women, if he thought it was going to be his job to repopulate the world or something.”