Chapter 13
Staring down at the grassland that spread in front of the gate, Lucy felt her pulse quicken. She had nothing in her past to liken this situation to. Nothing that could prepare her for this rush of fear and even excitement.
There was a very real possibility that they wouldn’t win. That the onslaught of riders, when they came galloping toward them, would be too much for the few inside the walls to defend against the many who assailed them.
Waiting to engage the enemy, she was surprised to find Timothy walking along the platform toward her. He smiled. In his hand, he clutched a bow, and a quiver of arrows was slung across his back.
“Ready to shoot some bandits?” Timothy’s smile was filled with bravado, but beneath it, Lucy could see the young boy’s nerves twisting themselves into knots.
She nodded. “Are you?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Absolutely. These fellows have been harassing us for ages. They’re the reason we left our previous town.”
“They were bothering you then too?” Lucy asked.
Tim nodded. “Lizzy, my sister, was so convinced they would leave us alone once we got to Unity … but it didn’t happen.”
“I’m really sorry,” Lucy said, checking over her gun.
“Oh, you’ll never hit anything with that little peashooter,” Anita said on her other side. “Here, have a rifle.”
Luckily, Lucy had fired a rifle often when working with her father. She took it and checked it over to make sure it wouldn’t jam.
Robert came striding past, his mind clearly on the job of keeping them all safe. He barked some orders to some of the men and Lucy couldn’t help but smile, seeing him so easily in command.
A chittering noise drew her attention, and she found Critter staring up at her. She bent down and offered the little guy her hand. He sniffed it and then let her scratch behind his ears, apparently having forgiven her for her rude assault with coffee. He was surprisingly soft.
The noise of thudding hooves was loud now, and they could hear the bandits’ cries as they charged at the wall.
“Here we go!” Anita cried, raising her rifle and taking aim. There was a low wall that they were hiding behind, but it was only made of wood. A bullet fired from close enough could go through it. Still, it offered more protection than the bandits had.
Lucy wasn’t one to waste bullets. Her father had always told her that guns without bullets were useless, so she should make each one count. She planned to.
Sighting down the barrel of the gun, she took aim at a bandit with a black bandanna tied over the lower part of his face. He rode straight at the wall, not zigging, zagging, or trying to evade them at all.
Lucy drew in a breath and held it, her finger hovering over the trigger, then released the breath. Her gun fired, and the bandit fell backward off his horse into the press of bodies moving toward them.
“Holy cow!” Tim exclaimed, taking aim with his bow and arrows. “You killed him with one shot right between the eyes.” He sounded in awe.
Critter sat on Tim’s shoulder and handed the boy the arrows as he needed them.
“My father told me to make every shot count,” Lucy said flatly, taking aim at another bandit. “And better to use one bullet and make a man’s end swift, if it comes to that, rather than making him suffer.”
There was a drawn-in breath, a pause, and another bandit slumped in his saddle, blood oozing from his corpse.
Anita made a kind of surprised sound beside her. “Maybe you should teach us all to shoot,” she said. “Do you ever miss?”
“Not often,” Lucy said, taking aim again. There were so many of them. It was like picking apples. She could shake a branch and many of them would fall. What was the saying? Shooting fish in a barrel.
Down went a bandit, and then another, and then another. Lucy became absorbed in her work, and the comments from those around her drifted into the background, where she didn’t even hear them anymore.
All there was was her rifle, her breath, and the men who meant them harm, galloping toward them, firing their guns.
She was dimly aware of Robert moving up and down the line. He paused somewhere near her for a moment or two. She heard his voice, but she was so focused on hitting a bandit who had almost made it to the wall that she didn’t dare look away.
When she did, Robert was gone, having moved on to take care of something else that needed his attention.
Timothy’s arrows flew straight and true. He was a good shot, hitting some in the shoulders and others in the neck.
“They’re coming around the side!” someone cried.
“Which side?” someone else yelled.
Anita stopped firing and peered over the wall. “Ah, they’ve gone that way.” She pointed down the wall toward the town side of things. “Darn it! They’re splitting their forces. They’re going to hit both gates.”
Lucy nodded. “Come on, we can slow them down!” she said.
“Okay, you go straight through town,” Anita said. “I’ll go up here and pick up more bullets from the guard tower.”
Lucy nodded and headed to the ladder.
She slung the rifle over her shoulder and climbed down to the ground. When her feet touched dirt, she began to run. There were so few people on the ground. Everyone was up on the wall or in the medical area, where Julie was no doubt inundated with the injured.
If she could find Robert, she could tell him that there was trouble at the other end of the compound, but he was nowhere to be seen.
A loud, resounding boom rang through the town, stopping Lucy in her tracks.
She was on the bridge, about halfway across.
Turning, she looked back the way she had come.
What was that noise?
There was a pause, a long inhalation of breath, and then the noise came again.
Boom!
Lucy looked up in the air. It was like thunder or an explosion. No, it wasn’t an explosion. It was like knocking on a really big door.
The bandits must have reached the gate. If they got the gates open, there would be nothing stopping them from just riding in and taking over. That couldn’t be allowed to happen.
Lucy began to run again.
She came to the guard tower and climbed up the ladder. Reaching the top, she stepped onto the platform and found a man there. He had his hat pulled down low over his face, and he was turned from her.
“Have they reached the gate?” Lucy asked, unslinging her rifle.
“No,” the man said. She knew his voice, but she couldn’t place it.
Then he turned to face her, and Lucy drew in a sharp breath.
“You!”
“Me,” he said with a cold smile. She didn’t see what he hit her with, only felt the pain just before blackness came to overwhelm her.
It was like a dream.
Lucy was back in Boston. It was raining. She recalled the patter of the drops hitting the leaves in the park as she made her way to her rendezvous. Simon was waiting for her.
He had information for her that they couldn’t discuss at the office.
That was why he had chosen the park down the road from the office. It wasn’t a big park, but it had a secluded spot, a bench under an oak tree, which afforded a smidge of privacy to two people who didn’t want to be overheard.
Why he couldn’t just have come to her house, she had no idea. He said it wasn’t safe. As though meeting in a park in a downpour was. But that was Simon. Always thinking things through to the point where he tied his thoughts into knots.
Wrapped in her oilskin coat with the hood down over her face and hair, Lucy guessed that neither of them would be recognizable as two employees of the firm.
As part of her undercover position at the firm, Lucy and Simon pretended not to know one another well.
Just well enough to greet each other in passing as colleagues would do.
Luckily, it wasn’t too much further to their meeting spot, and hopefully, the tree’s leaves and branches would cut out a lot of the rain. Hurrying, she broke through the trees into a clearing and came to a dead stop. Where was the oak tree? Where were the bench and Simon?
Oh, not again! I must have gotten turned around.
Lucy would be very late now. She backtracked to where she had taken the wrong track and headed off in the other direction. Thunder boomed overhead and lightning rent the sky. She would be happy to be out of the rain.
The track was narrow, and as she was hurrying along it, she bumped into someone coming the other way.
He was hunched over, wearing an oilskin coat like she was. She looked up into cold brown eyes that looked so dark they seemed to be all pupil. Then she noticed a flash of metal disappearing under the coat.
“Pardon me,” the man said, stepping around her.
Lucy hurried on her way.
Running across the open grass, she came to the bench. Simon was sitting there, his head bowed forward, his body slumped. Had she taken so long to find him that he had fallen asleep? No, that wasn’t possible. She’d seen him only an hour earlier. Surely he hadn’t been that tired.
The rain was less under the foliage, and Lucy pulled her hood back.
“Simon!” She reached out and shook him.
Nothing. He didn’t move, didn’t react.
Her heart began to pound in her chest.
“Simon!”
Nothing.
She sat beside him on the bench. “Simon, this is no time to be playing jokes.”
Her hands touched something sticky. She lifted them and they came away red.
Red.
That was when things began to unravel. That was when Lucy’s recall of the events got terribly hazy. She knew she had opened his coat and tried to cover the hole in his chest. Nothing she did worked.
Before she knew how it happened, she was smeared with his blood. It was on her hands and in her hair. She tried to wipe her tears away and got the blood all over her face.
And then she heard the police coming.
Running from them was stupid. She knew it the moment she set off, but the fright, the pain, the loss and terrible grief overwhelmed her, and all she could think of was to get as far from that heartbreaking moment as possible. Lucy didn’t care where she went; she just had to go.
It was only later, once she had calmed down, sitting on the train, clean and composed, that she remembered the man in the coat. She remembered his cold brown eyes so dark they were almost all black.
She had looked into those eyes recently. She had seen them only a few days ago.
Opening her eyes, Lucy came back to reality with a name on her lips. Sitting up, she stared at the man who clearly meant to end her.
“Christopher,” she said. “You killed Simon.”
He shrugged and smiled. “Well done. It took you long enough.” He raised his gun and pointed it at her. “And now I’ll kill you too.”