Ellen's Arc

Chapter 20 of 45

The bar held. Ellen pressed her ear to the door and listened to Brennan's riders wheel back from the road. Walls or not, she had no bullets. Cade's shotgun held two shells. His pistols held twelve rounds between them. Fourteen shots for six floors and one road. She turned from the door and faced the dark lobby. Somewhere in this old hotel, travelers had come and gone for years. Travelers left things behind. "We need guns," she told Cade. "Search the rooms. People leave gear when they run." Cade counted the exits first, the way he always did. Then he nodded and took the stairs. Ellen went with two of the women through the ground floor. They pried open closets and dragged out mattresses. Dust choked the air. In a back office she found a locked steel cabinet built into the wall. The knife would not turn the lock. She called for Cade. He came down, looked at the seam, and put a boot to it twice. The door sprang. Inside sat a long wooden case and three ammunition boxes stacked in the corner. Ellen lifted the lid of the case. Two rifles lay on cloth, oiled and clean. The boxes held rounds, hundreds of them, sorted by caliber. Some fit the rifles. Some fit Cade's Colts. A traveler had built a stash here and never returned for it. Ellen laughed, short and rough. "Now we can hold the door." "Load fast," Cade said. He was already thumbing shells into his shotgun. Then a voice came from the top of the stairs. Quiet. Cold. "You brought me a room with one door." A man stood on the landing in a black coat, pale as bone, red at the collar. He had come down from the upper floors, not in from the road. He was already inside. His eyes were not on Ellen. They fixed on Cade. "Eleven years," the man said. He did not raise his voice. "I have cornered you three times. You will not slip me here." Cade went still. His hand hovered near his hip. "I don't know you." "You knew my daughter." The man came down one step. "She was seven." Ellen looked between them. This stranger had been in the hotel before her group ever arrived. He wanted Cade, not the women. That much she read in his face. She raised a rifle from the case, but the man ignored it, as if lead meant nothing to him. "Sit," the man told Cade. "You will listen. Every word. Then I finish it." Outside, Brennan waited on the road. Inside, this man waited on the stairs. Ellen had walls now, and bullets, and a killer already past the door she thought would save her people. She had solved the ammunition. She had not solved the threat standing between her and the stairs.