Chapter 14 #2
Grace found cover for the horses in a wooded draw a quarter mile short of the settlement — trees thick enough to hide them, ground low enough to keep them out of any stray line of fire.
They dismounted and tied off quick, one of the men staying a moment longer to settle the horses before catching up to the rest.
Grace looked at Luke one last time before they moved further. This was her last real chance to send him back, and she considered it for exactly as long as it took him to see the thought cross her face.
"Mom."
"Stay with Russ."
He started to say something else.
"That's not a suggestion."
He nodded, and Grace let that be enough. She was his mother, even now. That didn't mean she could keep him out of this, only that she could tell him where to stand inside it.
They moved through the tree line on foot, gunfire loud enough now that Grace could separate the directions of it — Harlan's people firing outward from the buildings, attackers firing back toward the barricade and whatever cover the settlement offered.
Danny moved quiet for a big man, rifle held low and ready, and the Bennett cousin behind him matched his pace without needing to be told. Grace kept Luke close on her other side, close enough to grab if she needed to.
They passed a fence chewed up by rounds, bark stripped white off a tree at chest height, a thin curl of smoke rising from somewhere near a shed that had taken a hit. Nothing burning out of control. Just damage, ordinary and ugly.
They reached a rise where the ground let them see down into the fight without exposing themselves, and Grace counted what she could — five attackers visible, others certainly hidden by the angle.
One crouched behind an old truck. Two more down in a shallow ditch.
Another moving low between two points of cover, rifle up, firing several quick shots toward the buildings.
All of them faced Harlan's settlement. None of them had any idea Grace's group stood behind them.
She understood immediately what that meant.
Grace kept her voice low. "They don't know we're here."
Russ saw the same thing she did and didn't need it explained twice. He suggested spreading out enough that they wouldn't bunch into one target — himself with Luke and one of the other men a little to the right, Grace with the last man center and left, close enough to keep each other in sight.
Nobody was to advance once shooting started unless it became necessary. Hit them from cover. Let Harlan's people keep the pressure coming from the front.
"How will they know we're not Harlan's people shooting at them?" Grace asked.
"They won't," Russ said. "That's the point."
Grace made sure everybody understood one thing before they moved into position. "Don't shoot unless you know what you're shooting at."
She looked at Luke longer than the others when she said it. He nodded, steady enough that she let herself believe he'd heard it the way she meant it.
Grace got behind a solid oak, thick enough to stop anything short of something heavier than what she expected to face, and settled her rifle across a low branch.
Thirty yards off, Luke had gone down behind a fallen log with Russ, rifle up, waiting. For one second Grace saw the boy who'd been dropping seed beside Billy Jean less than an hour ago, and made herself look away before the thought could finish forming into anything harder to carry.
One of the attackers rose partway from the ditch to fire several quick shots toward the buildings.
Russ looked across the distance at Grace.
Grace nodded.
She fired first, or close enough to it that she never sorted out afterward whose shot came a half-second ahead.
Then everyone opened up at once, and the world became noise.
The attackers reacted with the confusion of men who'd expected fire from only one direction and suddenly found it coming from behind them too. One dropped where he stood, and Grace had no idea whose round found him. Another dove for cover that hadn't existed a second before he needed it.
Harlan's people recognized the shift and pushed their own fire harder, and now the attackers were caught between two directions with nowhere that felt safe.
Grace fired again. She heard Luke's rifle from his position, a flat crack distinct enough from Russ's heavier round that she could tell the two apart without looking. He wasn't spraying wild. He aimed, fired, then waited until something gave him another target.
Whether anything he aimed at ever fell, Grace had no way of knowing. Neither did he.
The attackers found their new threat fast, and return fire came toward the tree line hard enough that bark snapped off the trunk beside Grace's head and dirt kicked up six feet to her left.
Her mouth went dry in a way she'd never experienced and hoped never to again. Her hands kept working anyway, because they had to, aiming and firing on something closer to instinct than thought. She lost count of her own shots somewhere in the first minute.
The noise itself became its own kind of weather, gunfire from three separate directions overlapping until individual shots blurred into one continuous roar broken only by the sharper crack of something closer.
Danny fired steadily from a few yards off, working the same rhythm Grace was — aim, fire, check, fire again.
The Bennett cousin had gone lower behind his cover than the others, firing less often but with obvious care each time he did.
Somebody shouted "Right!" and Grace turned to catch movement at the ditch's edge, fired, and watched the shape vanish behind cover without any way to know if she'd hit anything at all.
Luke fired again from his position.
"Stay down!" Russ shouted at him, and something in his voice — real fear, aimed at a sixteen-year-old boy rather than at the men trying to kill them — told Grace this had stopped being a controlled exercise for any of them.
A round snapped past close enough that Grace flattened harder against the oak without deciding to, every part of her narrowing down to the small patch of ground she could see and the rifle in her hands.
The attackers couldn't hold a position squeezed between two directions of fire, and it showed within another minute.
One tried to break sideways along the ditch.
Another bolted for the tree line beyond the settlement.
Harlan's people fired on the movement, and so did Grace's group, and a man went down in the open ground between cover and cover, and nobody afterward could say with certainty which side's round had taken him.
Another attacker made partial cover and stopped moving. The rest scattered toward escape rather than continuing the fight, which only made everything messier — more angles, more confusion, gunfire from three directions instead of two for a stretch of seconds that felt far longer than it measured.
Grace didn't order anyone to chase them. That wasn't why they'd come. Her only goal had been stopping the shooting aimed at Harlan's people, not hunting fleeing men through unfamiliar woods.
But Harlan's defenders had angles Grace's group didn't, and one or two of the fleeing men went down before they reached the trees.
By the time the gunfire tapered to nothing, no one remained standing in the open ground below them.
Grace's ears rang hard enough that Russ's voice, when it came, sounded like it traveled through water.
"Hold," he called, and nobody moved to stand yet. They waited, watching, rifles up. A single shot cracked once more from Harlan's side of the field, then no more followed.
Grace checked her own people first. Nobody hit, as far as she could tell — she'd take a fuller accounting once they were standing, but nobody was calling for help, which counted for something in the moment.
She found Luke behind the fallen log, rifle gripped tight in both hands.
"You hit?"
"No."
She checked him anyway, hands moving over his arms and chest despite his protest.
"Mom."
"Don't move."
No blood anywhere. Only once she'd confirmed it with her own hands did Grace let herself take a full breath.
His hands were shaking now, she noticed, though they hadn't been during the fight itself. She didn't say anything about it. She put a hand on his shoulder instead.
"Stay close."
Russ called out before they approached the settlement, loud and clear, giving Harlan's people every chance to recognize friendly voices rather than mistake them for a second wave of trouble.
Somebody near the barricade shouted back, recognizing Russ's voice or Grace's name, and they moved in slow and visible rather than risk a nervous trigger finger on either side.