Chapter 15
In the short time it had taken Robert to find Lucy and watch her get shot, the battle had changed. The bandits were moving around the walls at the very limit of the defenders’ shooting range, and it was causing trouble.
Firing at them was pointless, yet what else could the people of Unity do?
Still the battering ram boomed on and on.
Robert couldn’t bring himself to care about any of it. He just couldn’t seem to find anything inside his heart but loss, pain, fear, and above all, a deep-seated need to find Christopher and make him pay.
As he passed by them, folks called out, asking what they should do, but he ignored them.
“We’re working on a plan,” Jeff called. “Talk to Andrew and Michael or Troy.”
Heads nodded; faces lost their hopeless looks as Jeff gave them simple, solid instructions.
There was no way for Robert to do that. He was only just holding back tears, born of the shock of seeing Lucy shot right in front of him and the fear that, even now, he was losing her.
Where would Christopher go to get out of a besieged town?
Robert considered the options. The gates were out. With the army of bandits at them, they would be impossible to get out of without catching a bullet from one side or the other.
Okay, what did that leave as an option then?
“Robert!” Jeff called. “Where do you think he’ll go?”
“The creek?”
“You really think he’s that good a swimmer? That current is swift. Remember how Julie almost died in the creek when she first got here?” Jeff asked.
Robert nodded. They had almost lost their apothecary to the swift and treacherous currents. Luckily, she’d managed to find a branch to hold onto and washed up on a beach far downstream.
“Okay then, where?” Robert asked, turning on Jeff.
They were on the bridge and, from it, had a clear view of most of the town and the mine.
Jeff looked around. “I don’t know …”
Robert cast his gaze around and then smiled grimly as he realized the answer. “I do.”
With the walls crawling with people and limited options, there really was only one way that seemed like a possibility. He turned and looked up at the ridge.
Jeff followed his gaze. “Oh,” he said simply. “Right.”
The scramble up the ridge was never easy. In the fading light, it was even harder than usual, and Robert kept slipping on loose stones. He landed hard on one knee, scraping his right palm on the stones.
“You okay?” Jeff asked beside him.
“Yeah,” Robert grunted. The exertion was digging into his anger-fueled blind pursuit of Lucy’s attacker. He still wanted to get Christopher, but now he wanted answers as much as revenge. For a while, they struggled up the slope.
“Um … Robert,” Jeff said, uncertainty tinging his voice and making Robert stop and look around.
“What?” he asked, jarred from his thoughts.
“That’s a rope tied around that rock, isn’t it?” Jeff asked.
Robert looked to his right. A large conical boulder stood out from a mass of them, and yes, Jeff was right; there was a length of rope tied around it. Robert smiled.
“Gotcha!”
They moved quickly to the edge and, looking down, saw that Christopher was about halfway to the grassland below. Well, that wouldn’t do at all. He was the only one who could tell Robert what was going on, and he would have to pay for possibly killing Lucy.
But how to get him?
“Haul him up!” Robert said, and he moved to the rope where it was tied to the boulder.
Together, he and Jeff took hold of the rope and began to pull. They pulled and pulled, fighting the resistance they felt on the other end. Robert imagined Christopher trying to hold onto handholds and bracing his feet against the rock face, trying to stop the inevitable.
But bit by bit, they dragged him up until the top of his head crested the ridge.
Of course, this was a sticky situation. What could they do now? They both had handfuls of rope, and there was no guarantee that Christopher didn’t have a knife or a gun at the ready.
“Hold him,” Jeff said through gritted teeth. “I’ll wrap the rope around the boulder, then he won’t have any slack to move with.”
Jeff set to work, winding the rope around and around the boulder.
Robert held on. Christopher was heavy, and it was difficult not to drop him. It wasn’t long before Robert’s tired, stressed muscles began to fatigue. Holding the rope, braced with his legs, his fingers rubbing raw on the hemp, he gritted his teeth and thought of Lucy.
He thought of her smile, her laugh. The way holding her hand felt. He thought of how much she had enriched his life and how if she died, his whole world would crumble to dust.
Please, Lord. Have mercy and don’t take her from me. Not when we’ve only just started our lives together.
The weight on the rope disappeared in one second. Robert wasn’t prepared for it. He had been overbalanced, leaning back to keep the rope from slipping, to keep Christopher from heading down the rockface again and off into the wilderness where Robert would never find him.
With the weight removed from the rope, Robert lost his balance. He staggered backward before tripping over something and landing hard in the dirt.
“Robert!” Jeff called.
The wind was knocked from Robert’s lungs, and all he could do was croak as he watched Christopher rise like a leviathan from the deep, gun in hand and murder in his eyes.
“You just couldn’t let it go, could you?” Christopher demanded, pointing his gun at the prone Robert.
“Hey!” Jeff yelled. He had his gun pointed at Christopher, but the sight only seemed to make Christopher laugh. He grinned.
“Well, if this isn’t a sticky pickle,” he said. “I kill Robert, Jeff shoots me. Mmmm, what to do?”
Robert was breathing better now. His lungs filled and emptied like they were supposed to. But that was no help against the gun pointed at his head.
“Drop your weapon, Christopher!” Jeff ordered. “You can’t possibly hope to escape now. I’ve wound the rope around that boulder so tight. You’re not going anywhere.”
“That so?” Christopher asked. He shrugged as though the news was nothing to concern himself about. “Oh well. I think I’ll keep the gun pointed at our dear sheriff anyway.” He winked at Jeff.
“Why did you do it?” Robert asked. He didn’t care if he got shot now; all he wanted was answers. If he was shot, Jeff would shoot Christopher, and then he would never know.
Christopher sighed. “Really? That’s what you want to know? Fine. I was hired in Boston by one Tyler Knots, who was being a very naughty boy at the firm he was working for. He stole a whole lot of money from them, and some junior clerk figured it out. Knots hired me to shoot the boy.”
Robert frowned when Christopher seemed to be done with his story and yet none of the pieces fit. “So, why are you here?”
“You can’t work it out? Lucy did before I killed,” Christopher said. He waggled his gun in Robert’s direction. “Now, don’t get your bloomers in a twist. You’ll join her soon enough.”
“Why are you here?” Robert bellowed.
“Because she ran off,” Christopher said through gritted teeth.
“I had it all planned. She would be found with the body. She would be arrested for Simon’s murder, and I would be in the clear.
It’s what people pay me a lot of money for, to solve their problems for them.
By running off and setting that blasted family of hers on the case, she ruined everything.
I had to come out here and kill her. To teach her a lesson about messing with other people’s plans.
” He said it as though it made sense. It didn’t. It was madness.
Robert began to chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” Christopher asked. He was clearly emotionally unstable.
Robert just kept laughing.
Christopher stepped closer and jabbed the gun in Robert’s face. “STOP LAUGHING!”
Robert’s fist closed on a handful of dirt, and as Christopher leaned in close, he flung it into the madman’s eyes.
Christopher reeled back, trying to wipe his eyes, and stumbled backward. Robert quickly got to his feet and tried to grab Christopher’s gun. The madman held on to it as though he would never let go.
“Robert!” Jeff yelled. “Down!”
Robert let go of Christopher and fell to the ground. The bang of Jeff’s gun firing resounded off the rocks, making it seem to go on for a lot longer.
Christopher screamed. He clutched at his midsection, his hands coming away covered in blood, and then he slipped on the loose stones and collapsed to the ground.
He lifted his head and smiled at Robert as though there was a joke to share, and then the life went out of his eyes, and his chin slumped to his chest.
Robert stared at him. There was such a large pool of blood already formed around him. Jeff’s bullet must have severed an artery, and Christopher’s rapidly beating heart had quickened the flow of blood.
“Are you okay?” Jeff knelt beside Robert, his face a mask of concern.
Robert nodded. “I’m fine. That was an excellent shot.”
“It was pretty good, wasn’t it?” Jeff said with a proud smile.
Boom!
That strike of the battering ram against the gate was followed by a loud, screeching sound that couldn’t mean anything good. Robert and Jeff exchanged looks before getting to their feet. Robert retrieved his gun from the ground, and they hurried to the mine gate.
When they got there, Robert found his worst fear had become a reality. The gate, which had withstood so much, had finally reached its breaking point and bandits were streaming into Unity.
Jeff and Robert took up stations on one side of the entryway and, hiding behind any cover they could find, opened fire on the bandits.
More townsfolk arrived with their weapons at the ready, but it all seemed futile. There were too many bandits. Robert began to think that there was no way to win this fight. Perhaps they should be evacuating anyone they could through the other gate.
Already some of the buildings, newly built, were starting to smolder as the bandits that got through set fire to everything they could.
Seeing his town burn, Robert threw himself into the fray with little to no concern for his safety. With wild abandon, he shot bandits until he ran out of bullets, and then he fought them with whatever he could lay his hands on. He was ferocity. He was vengeance. He was grief.
Suddenly, something changed.
Something outside the walls drew the bandits back out again and they began to withdraw.
“What’s going on?” Jeff asked. He had kept pace with Robert, becoming bloodied and bruised himself in the process.
Taking in Jeff’s disheveled, broken appearance, he wondered if he too looked like that. There was no time now to wonder. All he could do was force his tired limbs to the nearest ladder and climb up.
From the platform on the wall, Robert looked out at the grassland dotted with the dead. The living were fleeing, chased by men on horseback. There were several of them riding beside a cart, and others were still coming. A crazy army of ragtag men fired at the bandits.
“Well, look at that,” Jeff said. “It seems that the bandits do have a limit.”
“It would seem so,” Robert said with a sigh. He was bone weary now, and all he could think of was Lucy. Yet, he didn’t have the strength to go to her. He couldn’t stand the thought of finding out that she had passed on and he would never see her again or hear her laugh.
Jeff put a hand on his shoulder as Robert slumped to the platform, his back to the parapet. “Come on; we’ll go together.”
“She could be dead,” Robert choked out.
“She could be, but Julie is really amazing at patching folks up,” Jeff said. “Have a little faith. Come on! Get up!”
Robert knew he had to. Not knowing was going to drive him crazy now with nothing and no one to fight.
So, he got up and, with Jeff by his side, made his way to the hospital tent that Julie and her helpers had set up. It was away from the fighting and seemed not to have been a target of the bandits.
There were so many people there. Some sat with bandages on various body parts, their eyes glassy with pain and confusion. Others lay on cots or on blankets on the ground. The smell in the air was of strong alcohol and blood, herbs and medications, sweat and despair.
“I don’t see her,” Robert said in desperation. “I don’t see Lucy.”
But then he did. She was lying on a cot at the far end of the tent. Robert had to wend his way through so much suffering and pain to reach her, but he saw none of it. Not until he had slumped down beside her.
She was awake and smiled weakly at him. Alive. “There you are.”
Thank you, Lord!
Robert was so overcome at hearing her voice speaking to him despite everything she’d gone through that he couldn’t even choke out a single word. All he could do was take her hand in his and let his tears come. She was okay. She was alive, and so was he.
“Robert Hayes!” a voice called sternly. “You need medical attention!”
It was Anita. She bustled over to him, shaking her head.
Robert dazedly let her lead him away to get cleaned up. When he was clean and bandaged and had changed his clothes, he was allowed back at Lucy’s bedside.
“Will she make it?” he asked Julie, who was doing her rounds.
Julie looked very tired, but she smiled.
“It turns out the bullet missed everything vital. It was a clean wound, and the bullet went right through. After we took out the bits of fabric and debris left behind, we could sew her up with no problem. She’s just weak because she lost so much blood. But yes, she should be fine.”
That was what Robert needed to hear. He could sit quietly beside Lucy now without fretting that if he dozed off, he would wake to find her gone. Propped up in a chair, Robert held Lucy’s hand and quietly drifted off to sleep.