Chapter 17
The front door opened, and the wizened, stooped old man sneered as he looked Clary and Mark up and down.
“Where the heck did you come from?” he asked. His speech was a little indistinct due to several missing teeth. The rest were deeply yellowed, and Clary suspected they would disappear from his mouth soon too.
“We appear to be lost,” Mark said with a convincing frown. “I was wondering if you could point us?—”
The old man moved, and suddenly there was a shotgun pointed at Mark. Clary tensed and in a second had both of her pistols out of the holster and pointed at Orville.
“Where are your horses?” Orville asked. “Ain’t no folks come here but by horse.”
“We left them up the street,” Mark said, raising his hands in the air. “Take it easy. We mean you no harm.”
Suddenly, a woman screamed. It was high-pitched and frantic.
“Clarice!” Orville yelled, turning his head. With his eye and the barrel of his gun pointing past Mark, Clary made her move. She stepped close to Orville and brought the butt of one of her pistols down on his temple.
Orville shuddered, his finger squeezed the trigger, and his shotgun fired into the night. Bang! It was so loud. This would no doubt bring others to the house. Their time was swiftly running out.
With an exaggerated buckling of his knees, Orville collapsed.
Mark stared at her. “Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Clary said, stepping over the recumbent form of the old man.
Mark bent down and picked up the shotgun. “He won’t be needing it.”
They made their way into the house. The entrance hall led to stairs up to the next floor. Mark hurried up them. Clary carried on down the passage, checking each room as she came to it.
The parlor was next and then a study. All of them were empty. The last room was the kitchen. All the noise, screams, shouts, and the sounds of things breaking came from there, but it would never do to have an enemy at their backs.
Clary stepped to the doorway and peered into the kitchen.
It was chaos.
A slug slammed into the wood just above her head, and she ducked down. Who had shot at her? It was hard to say. Four men were fighting. Two were trying to gain control of a pistol, waving the weapon this way and that as they tried to force the other to let go.
It took Clary a moment to recognize Jeff as one of the combatants.
The other fighting duo was Thomas and the blond man.
Neither seemed to have a weapon, and they were grabbing whatever they could find and hitting each other with it.
Plates shattered as the blond man threw them at Thomas.
But he held a large skillet and swatted the plates right out of the air.
Where was Evelyn? Had she been shot? Was she okay?
Movement in the doorway to outside drew Clary’s eye. Evelyn was crouched there, also trying to work out how to shoot the bandits battling with Thomas and Jeff.
Another bullet chipped the wall past her, and Clary suddenly didn’t think her current position was so grand.
At the far end of the kitchen, stuffed into the pantry, she spotted their targets.
A woman with auburn hair that was matted and dirty and three children, two boys and a girl, huddled in the doorway.
She was trying to keep them safe, but just as bullets slammed into the wall by Clary, they hit the wall by the woman too.
Clary knew that to win this fight, they needed to have those four out of the house and on their way to Unity. It was the only way.
Taking aim, she tried to shoot the bandits. They were moving too much, and there was too great a possibility that she would hit Thomas, Jeff, or the people they were there to save.
“You can’t shoot them,” Mark said from behind her. “But you can shoot these other people.”
Turning, Clary’s heart plummeted to her boots. Three more bandits came streaming into the house through the front door. Mark grabbed a table that stood in the entrance hall, flipped it on its side, and pulled her down behind it. From that position, he opened fire.
The shotgun wasn’t terribly accurate. He showered the intruders in chips of wood as the gun pulled to the left, hitting the wall.
Clary aimed and hit one bandit in the arm and then another in the leg. They went down, but more came streaming in through the door.
Soon, as the slugs dug themselves into the table, the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, Clary ventured an opinion on why these bandits had been left behind.
They were the ones that, despite careful recruiting, seemed to show up in every organization.
The incompetent, lazy, and ill-suited to their jobs.
“They can’t hit the side of a barn,” Mark commented, pulling his own pistol from his holster and firing it.
In minutes, he and Clary had incapacitated the bandits and turned their attention on the fight going on in the kitchen.
Stepping into the kitchen, Mark handed her a pan. He mimed smacking the bandit closest on the head. Clary shrugged her okay and stepped in.
But something went wrong. The blond man sensed her and moved, grabbing her and pinning her arms, gun and pan included, to her sides.
“Okay, enough!” he yelled.
There was a sinister click, and something cold pressed against the side of her head. Clary’s heart thudded in her throat. She gasped as her gun, her pan, and everything dropped from her hands.
“You don’t want to do that,” Jeff said. He had his bandit in a chokehold and held him up for the blond man to see.
The bandit sneered. “Nah, you don’t wanna do this,” he said. “You wanna be a good boy and step over there. You too,” he said to Mark, who was trying to move behind him.
“Carl, come on,” the other bandit pleaded.
Clary was dragged backward, still held against the man.
How did she keep ending up in this position?
It was crazy. She could get out of it. Couldn’t she?
The gun pointed at her temple was steady.
This man wasn’t worried. Jeff, Thomas, and Mark didn’t scare him.
How was she going to get out of this mess?
“I admire your gall,” the blond bandit said as people shuffled around. Jeff kept hold of the other bandit. “But really, this was a fool’s errand. I’m guessing the attack on Still Fountain was your friends, right? You’re the folks from Unity, aren’t you?”
“So what if we are?” Thomas asked.
Carl sighed and his breath stank. Clary gagged. He squeezed her tighter.
“Personally, I don’t care about your dinky town,” Carl said. “But I been hired to do a job and I’m gonna do it, okay? So, either you behave and we keep you alive, or you die. Simple.”
“I think you’ll find that it’s not that simple,” Jeff said. “I have no trouble killing your friend here.”
Carl pointed his pistol at the other bandit and before anyone could react, shot him in the head. The bullet went right through the man’s head and lodged in Jeff’s chest. With a cry, he let go of the bandit and staggered backward.
The bandit fell to the floor in a heap, blood pooling around him. Clary cried out, as did the others. The family in the pantry whimpered, and the high sobs of children filled the air.
“You shot your friend?” Thomas asked, sounding aghast.
“Not my friend,” Carl said. “Now, back to our conversation.” He seemed to be enjoying himself.
Clary was disgusted all over again by him.
What kind of a monster could shoot someone like that and not care?
All the men she’d shot were still alive.
They were in pain, incapacitated, but still breathing.
With some care and a couple of stitches, they were likely to make it.
Suddenly, there was a clang, a bang, and Carl collapsed, dragging Clary to the floor with him. Pain shot through her ear and her shoulder as she fell, not sure what had happened. There was a ringing in her right ear that was quite disturbing.
“Clary!” someone yelled. “Clary!”
“I’m okay,” she said, pulling herself free of Carl’s arms.
Looking down, she saw blood on her hands, on her shirt. Then she looked up at Thomas, who was kneeling in front of her. “Clary.”
“Oh darn!” Evelyn’s voice said from behind her.
Clary tried to turn to see her sister, but Thomas had his handkerchief out and was pressing it against her neck. She cried out in pain and blacked out for a moment. At least she must have because when she came to, she was being carried out of the house.
“Clary, hold on,” Thomas said. “We’re leaving now.”
Clary couldn’t understand. Why did she feel so cold? She was shivering all over. And the pain. It came in blasts of hot knives digging into her. What was going on?
Darkness swept over her again.
She woke and found herself on a hard surface. Evelyn was sitting beside her, pressing something against her neck. Clary tried to sit up, but Evelyn pushed her back down.
“No, sis, don’t move,” Evelyn said. She was crying. Clary could hear it in her voice. “I made a mess of things. I was only trying to help. I’m so sorry.”
A wave of emotion rose in Clary, and she tried to tell Evelyn it was okay, but the words never left her lips. They died in her throat as the night wheeled around her.
They were moving. The hard surface under her jolted and rocked. She could hear horses’ hooves thudding into the ground around her. Thomas’s voice. She could hear him speaking. Trying to sit up and look for him, she found that all she could do was lie still. Why was she so tired?
There was a picture in her head. It was possibly a memory; Clary wasn’t sure.
It was of a summer day in Indiana. It had rained the night before, and she and Evelyn were playing in the grass outside their house.
They were getting the hems of their dresses wet in the tall grass and their parents, both of them, were watching, laughing.