Written in Time (36 page)

The men rode in a single rank, Jess Fowler at their precise center, their horses—somehow very big-looking— walking forward slowly, easily.
 

Jess Fowler’s horse was tall and black, white stockinged with a white blaze in its face. Fowler and his mount looked like something out of a nightmare, Fowler’s dark colored duster fanning out behind him like Dracula’s cape, his broad-brimmed black hat low over a face that she remembered as skeletally well-defined, set with eyes that somehow didn’t seem to be there at all.
 

All of the other men had weapons drawn, a few with rifles, one or two with shotguns, the rest with handguns. Fowler—there were two handguns at his hips—held nothing in his hands but the reins to his horse.
 

As if Jess Fowler had a marvelously evil sense of horrific drama, he signaled his men to an abrupt halt. The next instant, he started forward alone. His hands—they seemed huge—were gloved in black leather, the color matching his boots, his gun belt and his clothes, rendering him all but invisible in the darkness. He held his hands out at his sides, not even holding the reins of his horse, merely guiding the animal with his knees. “I wanna parlay, women!”
 

Lizzie called back to him, “I love your French, Fowler! It sucks!” The crack was lost on him, she knew, but it made her feel better. “Try anything, and I’ll shoot you out of the saddle!”
 

Fowler laughed.
 

Lizzie shivered.
 

Fowler’s mount walked slowly forward.
 

About three or four car lengths away from the front porch—she couldn’t help herself; she still thought in the terms from the period in which she had been raised—Jess Fowler’s horse stopped and lowered its enormous head.
 

She could see Jess Fowler’s cadaverous face quite clearly, somehow.
 

“How many of you in there, girl? Talk up fast and true or it’ll go harder on ya’.”
 

“Would you believe a Swiss mountain battalion? How about seventeen highly motivated ice-cream salesmen?”
 

“What the hell you talkin’ all crazy about, girl?! Tell me now, dammit!”
 

“We are ladies, and we’ve never heard such foul language before, sir! I do declare!”
 

“I’m warnin’ ya!”
 

“Kiss my ass! But get off our property first, or guess who stops lead before anybody else!” Lizzie really regretted having worked the Winchester’s lever and already chambering a round. The dramatic effect would have been great. She was scared shitless, but pissed.
 

“Fair enough, women! Lord knows I tried bein’ civil!”
 

“The Lord knows you’re about to be judged by Him if you don’t haul ass and take your pansy buddies with you!”
 

Somehow, Lizzie knew that ticking off Jess Fowler couldn’t worsen their situation; maybe it was in her genes to be a smartass. Suddenly, Lizzie just wished that she were taller. She could afford to waste the round already chambered, so she worked the lever as rapidly as she could, hoping the noise would be loud enough that Fowler heard it.
 

He heard it, she realized.
 

“Suit yourself!”
 

He turned his horse and started back toward the line of his men. Lizzie fired the Winchester, a little too quickly. Jess Fowler’s horse went down, and she couldn’t tell if she’d hit him or the animal as Fowler tumbled from the saddle and the horse whinnied and foundered.
 

“You shot that man in the back!” Peggy nearly shrieked.
 

“God save us from liberals,” Lizzie muttered, racking the Winchester’s lever and firing again.
 

“Kill the bitches!” Fowler shouted, scrambling to his feet, his horse doing the same. Lizzie thought that she detected a limp, hoping that her second shot had connected with Fowler rather than his horse.
 

“I can’t stand this noise!” Peggy shouted.
 

“I can’t stand people who can’t stand stuff! Fire that damn rifle and complain later!”
 

As if on cue, the rain increased as Lizzie made to fire again. And, on the same cue, Fowler’s twelve range detectives opened fire and scattered for cover.
 

***

Jack raised the lean-to he’d constructed out of his slicker and peered out through the steadily falling rain. “Sleeping out under the stars! Shit! What stars?” With his booted right foot, he gave a sharp kick to the butt end of the log, pushing it deeper into the hissing flames of the campfire. A handful of crystallized pine resin from his saddlebags had helped the fire to get a rapid start, despite what was then only a modest drizzle. Since it hadn’t rained for a quite a while—Nevada got very little rain—the wood that he and Titus Blake had found was bone-dry below the surface.
 

The log had been a stroke of good fortune, a half-rotted piece of deadfall pine about four feet long and six inches in diameter. Using some forked twigs, Jack Naile had constructed a shelter over his saddle and blankets, keeping most of his body and his gear dry.
 

He and Blake had consumed some of the sandwiches Ellen had packed for them. Then Blake promptly rolled over and appeared to sleep. Jack had lit a cigarette and taken his hip flask from one of the saddlebags. The Suburban had contained a single case of a luxury item Jack Naile had not wanted to be without: Myers’s Rum, the dark kind that looked like a fine whiskey and heated the body on a cold night with enough warmth to resuscitate the cryogenically frozen. He’d sipped at the rum several times, but made it appear that he’d drunk nearly the entire contents of the flask. This was for two reasons. First, he had no wish to share the single flask of rum with Titus Blake; secondly, it might be advantageous for Titus Blake to think that his campmate was less than sober.
 

Jack Naile kicked at the log again. When Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, as Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, had camped out awaiting an ambush in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the weather had been decidedly better—a greens set on a soundstage, to be precise. Yet the most important difference between their experience and his own was that Wyatt and Doc had each trusted implicitly the man in the other bedroll.
 

Jack Naile’s rifle was secure and dry, his gun belt well up under the shelter, the long-barreled Colt .45 conspicuously holstered. But underneath his blanket was the extra Colt with a four-and-three-quarter-inch barrel that Ellen had insisted he hide in his saddle bags. Intentionally, rather than leaving just the charging hole under the hammer empty, he’d left the next one empty as well. If he awakened from a deep sleep and didn’t come instantly alert, loading the revolver that way could avert an accidental discharge. And if it was grabbed from his saddlebags and not checked, the first time someone went to fire it, nothing would happen. That could buy a precious second or two, which could mean the difference between life and death.
 

The hem of her nightgown bunched in her left hand, Lizzie crawled across the porch floor, toward the open front door. Peggy was just ahead of her. Lizzie’s bare knees ached against the pressure of the hardwood floor. The holsters at her hips slapped lightly against her as she moved. The Winchester 94’s buttstock regularly tapped against the floor with each movement. All in all, crossing from the porch to the central room with their late-twentieth-century conveniences was arduous in the extreme, but she dared not stand and make a run for it. Jess Fowler’s men were dismounted, had taken what cover they could, and so far their indiscriminate gunfire had shattered windows at the front of the house, ventilated furniture and pockmarked the wall over the large mantle against which her father had leaned when he’d spoken with Titus Blake.
 

But neither Peggy nor she had been hit, and Lizzie intended things to remain that way.
 

At last, after what seemed an eternity, they reached the doorway leading into the hidden room. Beneath a rug was the trapdoor entrance to a tunnel. The tunnel’s main purpose was to obscure from view the water pipes leading from the stream and the electrical cable leading from the waterwheel that served as their generator. But the tunnel led to the stream, and there was a means of egress before actually reaching the water. Her mother had put it best. “I don’t think your father is expecting an Indian raid or anything, but it would be silly to have this perfectly nice tunnel and not be able to take advantage of it, just in case something happened.” Knowing her father, Elizabeth Naile figured that he might very well have fantasized a group of “renegades jumping the reservation and out looking for scalps” or something like that but now, she was quite thankful for the tunnel.
 

As soon as both she and Peggy were inside the secret room, they were able to stand. Once the seriously heavy door was closed and bolted behind them, she put down her rifle and the boxes of ammunition she’d carried basket-fashion within the fabric of her bunched up nightgown. She set to work pulling the rug out of the way and prying up the trapdoor.
 

***

Lizzie crouched in the down-pouring cold rain beside the tunnel’s escape hatch. Bricked around to form a frame, the actual door was crafted of teakwood, so as to be resistant to weather. The doorway was about twenty yards from the stream, well below the level of the house, out of sight of the men Jess Fowler had brought with him. Peggy crept out next, proclaiming the obvious in a loud stage whisper. “It’s raining!”
 

“Come on, Peggy.” Lizzie was no more enthused about getting soaked to the skin than was the girl she considered a sister-in-law, her cousin’s wife. But there was work to be done before they could come in out of the rain. Liz had already decided that if they survived, Peggy could have the first hot shower, but she promised herself she’d beat Peggy to death if she used up all the hot water. “Keep the muzzle of your rifle out of the dirt so you don’t get a bore obstruction.” Her father would have been so proud of her, she thought.
 

Liz had appropriated a linen tablecloth from the large round table on which incriminating late-twentieth-century framed family photographs were displayed in the secret room. Tying the ends together, she’d formed a sack in which she could more easily carry the spare ammunition for the rifles.
 

Creeping along the base of the drop-off that paralleled the stream, Lizzie issued orders sotto voce. “I want you to find a good spot and stay there. I’ll be moving. All you need to be able to do is keep firing in the general direction of the bad guys. Don’t expose yourself trying to get an accurate shot. I want them firing toward you. They’ll have to expose themselves in order to do that with us being behind them. As they do, I’ll pick them off and keep moving. You’ll be the only fixed target, so you have to stay well within cover. Just shove the muzzle of the rifle around or over whatever it is you’re hiding behind and keep firing. That’s all you have to do. I’ll do the rest.” As a whisper only she herself could hear, Lizzie added, “God willing I don’t get shot.”
 

The volume of gunfire pouring toward the front porch had largely subsided, which meant Fowler’s men would soon plan on advancing against the house.
 

That would make things even better—maybe.
 

Peggy was well hidden behind an outcropping of rock above the embankment leading up from the bank of the stream. Only the most impossibly ricocheting shot could have a chance of hitting her if she stayed down and fired from one side of the outcropping or the other, but not from over it.
 

Leaving Peggy with an extra fifty or so rounds of .3030 Winchester, Liz went farther along the base of the embankment in order to come up well behind and to the side of Fowler’s men. Her father’s pet rifle with the pretty walnut stock and the gleaming Metalife finish was just inside the front door of the house, unceremoniously stuffed under a chair. The wiser move had been the one she’d chosen—take the rifle that fired a rifle cartridge rather than a revolver cartridge. One of the ordinary blue steel Model 94s in her hands in what her father would have called an “assault position,” she slogged her way onward through the increasingly sticky mud. Water was washing down over the embankment, the rain so heavy that she could barely see.
 

But that was also good.
 

If she was able to shoot a few of Fowler’s men, considering the cold, the rain and the darkness, only the most dedicated of Fowler’s minions would elect to continue shooting it out.
 

The toe of her shoe caught in the hem of her ruined, soaked-through nightgown, and Liz nearly fell. She stopped, stood, caught her breath and told herself that it was time to get up the embankment and get to work.
 

With visibility as limited as it was, the darkness nearly absolute in the downpour, Liz more carefully inspected the embankment as she walked slowly onward. After another minute or two, she found a spot less steep and with outcroppings of rock that might provide some sort of purchase for her hands and feet.
 

The rifle had no sling, and she could not hold it and climb at the same time. But the pistols she wore would be useless at any true distance, at least in her hands. “Think,” Liz exhorted herself. She had to make a sling. There was a ruffle at the hem of her nightgown. Unsheathing the knife from her gun belt, she cut into the ruffle where it was sewn to the gown, found the seam and tore.
 

The ruffle came away relatively cleanly. The knife resheathed, Lizzie tied one end of the ruffle to the muzzle end of the rifle just forward of the handguard, the other to the butt just behind the lever. If she had to, before removing the improvised sling, the rifle could still be fired.
 

Adjusting the sling to be a tight fit across her back, Liz Naile attacked the embankment. With the first step, she fell, slid, soaked her upper body in mud. On her feet once more, pulling the shawl more closely around her, she tried again. By almost digging the toes of her shoes into the mud, she was able to reach the first outcropping, clinging to the cold, wet, slippery rock for an instant before going on.