away. It wasn’t close enough, not nearly close enough. Even if she could reach it, she wouldn’t have a chance in a close gunfight with Lawrence and his hunting rifle, which he was already aiming at her. Bullets went through walls. If he started shooting, the women in Carol’s bedroom would be in the line of fire. There had to be another way. She didn’t see it, but there had to be, if she could just keep calm and stay alive.
Lawrence kept the barrel pointed at Sela as he went to the back door and opened it, letting his brother Jeremy inside. While the door was open, she caught a glimpse of a still shoe. Darren was down, too. Dead or injured she couldn’t know, not from that one shoe. At least Jeremy wasn’t covered in blood.
At his brother’s direction, Jeremy collected both .22s and placed them even farther away from Sela, propping them near the front door, while Lawrence edged around so that his back was to Carol’s bedroom. Through the open door Sela caught sight of Meredith easing forward furtively. Good Lord, was that a vase in her hand? Meredith had guts, but—a vase? Sela caught Meredith’s eye and shook her head slightly, warning her to stay back. This could go sideways fast, with one wrong move.
“I guess you heard those gunshots,” Lawrence said. “I wonder what it means? Who survived? Your guys or mine? If it was mine, which I ’spect it was because I thought something like that might happen and we were ready, then your ass is in a sling. Oh, wait. Your ass is in a sling anyway because I’ve got this”—he lifted the rifle a little—“and you don’t. Boo-hoo. Too bad for you I didn’t trust Parsons. Wish I could have, I’ve always been a fan of doing things the easy way, but this time . . . this time it was a mistake.”
He swung his rifle to the side and, for a moment, pointed it toward the front door before again taking aim at Sela. “I hope that son of a bitch Jernigan comes running to the rescue, any minute now.”
Sela lifted a stilling hand, as if she could ward off a bullet. “Why?” she asked. Talk. Get him to talk, keep him talking. She needed to buy some time.
“So he can watch me blow your face off before I take him out,” Lawrence answered with a sly grin. “We were going to have to do something about him ASAP, anyway. Once he got involved I knew he’d be a huge pain in my ass.”
“No, why do any of this? You and your friends were all going to get a share of the gas. We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that everyone will get by. It won’t be easy, but if we stick together we can all survive this.” She tried to sound merely bewildered, not angry, not threatening in any way.
She had just lied. Not everyone would survive. Even in the before world, with electricity and modern medicine and conveniences, not everyone survived. Now their existence was much more precarious.
But Ben was a survivor. In any halfway even fight, she’d put her money on him. Lawrence thought his guys had won, but she didn’t. Ben was on his way, she knew it. If she could just stall Lawrence long enough . . .
Dietrich laughed. “Your pissy little five-gallon limit of gasoline was going to work magic? We need more gasoline than you were going to give us. We need to be able to make short trips into other areas, and we’d like to be able to get home again.”
“Trips?” Raids, more likely.
He made a mocking half dip of his head. “Some of us need more than canned beans. My wife, Zoe, she needs her pills. She’s a nervous wreck without them. There’s a basement weed farm in Maryville I’d like to visit. And who knows what kind of stash some of the folks right here in Wears Valley have? With all the trauma and stress, why, we can make a small fortune in the weed business, and there’s a fortune in meth—but I needed that gas, and you fucked up everything. Why couldn’t you have stayed your ass at home, instead of sitting in the store in the dark? Now I’ll have to go from house to house to get it. Some people are going to get hurt, and it’s all your fault, but you’re just a