Cover of Night Read online

  “Why didn’t the shooter see you?” Creed asked.

  “I figure they have infrared instead of night vision; they lose their specific targets at about the effective range for infrared. So I got wet and cold.”

  Thereby losing his heat signature, Creed thought. Shafts of white-hot pain stabbed through his leg as Cal sliced off the boot, unavoidably jarring him. To distract himself Creed thought about the risk Cal had taken, gambling that the shooters didn’t have night-vision devices. What if he’d guessed wrong? “You lucky son of a bitch,” he said, and bit back a groan as Cal pulled off the ruined boot.

  “Not lucky,” Cal replied absently. “Good.” The same old smartass but inarguable reply that Creed had heard a hundred times before threw him years back in time, to when they’d run countless missions in the dark and got their asses in some tight jams, which they’d escaped by a combination of skill, discipline, training, and pure luck. Creed was almost surprised to see Neenah on her knees beside Cal, her expression worried but her hands steady as she held the light; for a moment, he’d expected to see some of his men gathered around.

  He glanced at his leg, and was genuinely surprised. He was bleeding like a son of a bitch, but the wound, while bad enough, didn’t look half as bad as he’d expected. “Must have ricocheted and shattered,” he said, meaning the bullet. He’d taken a partial instead of a full round.

  “Probably.” Cal turned his leg. “Here’s the exit wound. Looks like the fragment hit bone and went sideways.”

  “Just wrap it up so we can get the hell out of here.”

  Likely the bone had been fractured by the force of the bullet. Creed knew he wasn’t out of danger, because the bleeding still had to be stopped and there was the possibility of infection, problems from torn muscles, and so on; but overall, he wasn’t in bad shape compared with how bad he could have been. He’d seen men lose legs from being shot in the thigh. Hell, on reflection, he was feeling downright cheerful.

  “What will we wrap it with?” Neenah asked, an edge of panic beginning to show in her tone. So far she’d held up admirably, but the bad guys were still out there and could be getting closer to them by the minute, he was hurt, and Cal couldn’t run interference for them and help him all at the same time.

  Silently Cal peeled out of his wet jacket and shirt, his torso gleaming wetly in the slight reflection of light. Using Creed’s knife, he sliced one arm out of his shirt, then made a cut and tore the fabric almost to the end. He placed the untorn end over the exit wound, which was bleeding worse than the entry, and began wrapping the torn ends around and around Creed’s leg, crisscrossing the fabric and pulling it snug, then finally tying the ends in a knot with the knot placed firmly over the wound.

  “Best I can do right now,” he said, slipping back into what remained of his shirt. Cal should be taking his wet clothes off, Creed knew, to fight off hypothermia; the night was cold, and wearing wet clothes leeched the warmth from someone faster than wearing nothing. The only reason Cal wasn’t doing so was to keep those infrared devices from spotting him.

  “Did you get the shooter?” Creed asked.

  “If I didn’t, I scared ten years off his life.” Cal took the flashlight from Neenah and clicked it off, slipping it into his own pocket. “This is going to be tricky, at least the first part, because even if I got that one, the others still have some good angles on us when we start moving. We have to go that way,” he said, indicating the river. “Get more houses between us and them, plus distance.”

  Cal was shaking with cold as he helped Creed upright, positioning himself on Creed’s left to take the weight off the wounded leg, then picking up the shotgun with his left hand. Creed would have been worried if he hadn’t seen Cal shoot left-handed before. All of his men had cross-trained, for circumstances such as this.

  “He can’t walk!” Neenah said with alarm.

  “Sure he can,” Cal replied. “He still has one good leg. Neenah, put my wet jacket over your head. I know it’ll be uncomfortable, but it’ll block a lot of your heat signature.” Not all, but maybe enough to momentarily puzzle a shooter.

  “Come on, Marine,” Creed said, bracing himself for what he knew was going to be a long, cold, and painful trek. “Let’s get moving.”

  Cate and the others had made it to the Richardsons’ house without sustaining any injuries or losses, though several times the whine of bullets nearby had made them hit the dirt. Stumbling, running, falling, and immediately jumping up to run again, they were like panic-stricken refugees—which wasn’t far from the mark. They carried what they could, the blankets and coats Cate had grabbed, the first-aid box Cal had left behind. Cate carried that, despite its weight and despite how it banged against her legs. She hoped the kit didn’t make the difference between life and death for someone, but was painfully aware that it might, and she didn’t dare leave it behind.

  The Richardsons’ house was built on land that sloped down toward the river and, as a result, was the only house in Trail Stop that had a full basement. Some of the older houses had pits dug beneath them for storing vegetables, but the root cellars didn’t qualify as basements and, if push came to shove, would hold a handful of people but not the twenty or so who made their way to the Richardsons’. The house loomed before them in the night, all pale walls and dark windows.

  “Perry!” Walter called as loudly as he could as they approached the house. “It’s Walter! Are you and Maureen all right?”

  “Walter?” The voice came from the back of the house, and they turned in that direction. A flashlight shone across the rough ground, danced briefly across their faces as if Perry wanted to reassure himself of their identities. “We’re in the basement. What in thundering hell is going on? Who’s doing all that shooting, and why is the electricity off? I tried to call the sheriff’s department, but the phone’s dead, too.”

  The lines must be cut, Cate realized, shivering with horror as she realized the lengths to which Mellor and Huxley had gone in their quest for vengeance. This all seemed so unreal, so out of proportion to the provocation; those men couldn’t be sane.

  “Come on in with us,” Perry said, indicating the way with his flashlight. “Get in out of the cold. I lit the kerosene heater; it’s taking the chill off the air.”

  Gratefully the group stumbled forward, crowding through the basement’s outside door. Like most basements, this one was filled with a jumbled assortment of cast-off furniture, clothing, and outright junk. The smell was musty; the floor was bare concrete. But the kerosene heater was putting off wonderful heat, and the Richardsons also had an oil lamp lit. The yellow light was dim and threw enormous shadows into the corners, but after the cold darkness the light seemed miraculous. Maureen hurried forward, a short, plump, gray hen of a woman, clucking in sympathy.

  “My goodness, what do you make of this?” she asked of no one in particular. “I have some candles upstairs, and another lamp. I’ll get those and some more blankets—”

  “I’ll do it,” her husband interrupted. “You stay down here and help them get settled. Do you know where that old coffee kettle is? Might take some time, but we can make coffee on top of the kerosene heater.”

  “It’s under the sink. Wash it out good—no, wait, we don’t have water. We can’t make coffee.” Like everyone else in Trail Stop, the Richardsons had a well, and an electric motor pumped the water from it. No electricity, no pump. Walter Earl had a generator that he used when the electricity went off, and then he generously allowed his neighbors to get water from his well; but his house was on the side that was closest to the shooters and going there now for water was too dangerous.

  Perry Richardson wasn’t stymied for long. “We have a bucket,” he stated, “and there’s some rope around here somewhere. I reckon I still know how to draw water. If someone wants to help me, we’ll have that coffee going in no time.”

  He and Walter went off to accomplish that chore, and Maureen promptly took a flashlight and disappeared up the stairs. Cate hesitated