“They left,” she said blankly, her voice loud.
“What?” Olivia asked just as loudly.
“They left!”
Side by side, they stood looking through the shattered windows. The pale, colorless moonlight glittered on the broken glass as if on water. And here and there the darkness was punctured by headlights heading their way; finally, finally, people were coming to help—or at least to see what was happening, and that amounted to the same thing.
Carefully she laid her rifle on the counter, then took Olivia’s rifle and placed it beside hers. She wrapped her arms around the girl and held her tight, felt her shaking but that was okay because Sela was shaking just as hard.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, still talking too loudly.
“No. You?”
“I don’t think so. No.” She continued to hold on tight. Maybe she had a few minor cuts, but her thick winter coat had protected her from a lot. Cuts didn’t seem important when compared to expecting to be shot.
“We did it,” Olivia said, her voice thin but touched with pride. “We scared them off.”
“We did.” Technically the approaching vehicles had done the scaring, but Sela wasn’t in the mood to be technical.
“Girls rule, boys drool,” Olivia said, and then she burst into tears.
Sela comforted her as best she could while getting them both outside. She yawned, trying to ease the ringing in her ears, and released Olivia long enough to press hard on both her ears, which seemed to help some. The .22s hadn’t been that loud, but the other rifles had been a different matter. The cold air was sharp with the smell of burnt gunpowder, and a light haze of smoke seemed to hang in the air.
A vehicle was coming down the road toward them, and Sela stepped forward so she could be seen in the sweep of the headlights, waving her arms. The truck stopped and Mike Kilgore ran forward. “I heard shooting,” he said urgently.
“Some men tried to steal the gas.” Sela sucked in a breath, because everything that had happened during the past . . . fifteen minutes—maybe?—seemed so unreal she could barely put it into words. “Olivia and I were keeping watch, in the store. We have our .22s.”
Gaping, he stared at the damage he could see behind her, and Olivia fiercely wiping her eyes.
“They shot at you?”
Considering the store had every window shot out, Sela thought the question was unnecessary. She didn’t answer, because more vehicles were coming toward them. One, bigger than the others, was driving on the wrong side of the road and passing everyone else, not that it mattered which lane anyone was in because they were all heading in the same direction—at least ten vehicles, speeding their way. She moved toward Olivia, warily herding the girl back toward the store. The last thing she wanted was for them to get run over now, after surviving a gunfight.
A gunfight!
The sense of unreality was overwhelming. She didn’t know whether to join Olivia in crying, or . . . sit down. Yes. She desperately needed to sit down.
Why not? “My legs are shaky,” she told Olivia. “Let’s sit down.”
“Here?” Olivia blinked owlishly at her, and swiped her hand under her nose.
“Why not?”
They both sank down on the cold, dirty pavement, littered with grit, pieces of trash, and dead leaves that had blown across the parking lot. Here and there spent brass casings shone dully in Mike’s headlights. Olivia leaned against her shoulder, burrowing in like a child; Sela hugged her tight, thankful beyond words that they’d come through unscathed, though she couldn’t say the same about her store.
The racing cavalcade of vehicles reached them and the big truck in the lead slid to a stop with screeching tires and Ben jumped out before it had rocked back on its suspension. He held a big rifle in his hand, and he looked big and mean as he zeroed in on her, sitting there on the ground. Backlit by the harsh light of all the headlights, he strode across the parking lot toward her, his gaze so focused and intent that everyone else might as well have been invisible.
Energy shot through her and instantly she scrambled to her feet, momentarily unable to see anything other than him. Beside her Olivia also stood, perhaps wondering at their jack-in-the-box movements, but she, too, stared at Ben, her eyes big.
He reached them, not touching her but standing so close that even on this cold night she could feel the blast field of his heat—though perhaps that was her own reaction to his nearness, her body heating and responding. She couldn’t see the color of his eyes but she could definitely see the savage fire in their expression. “You’re bleeding,” he said flatly.
“I am?” she asked, her tone bewildered.
Very lightly he touched a fingertip to her face, then dropped his hand as if the slight contact stung him.
“From the glass,” Olivia said helpfully. “When they shot out the windows.”
Ben said only one word: “Who?”
Sela swallowed. In that instant she knew beyond any doubt that if she could put a name to any of the men who had attacked them, Ben would hunt them down and deal out his own version of due process. “I don’t know. There were six of them, as far as I could tell, but no one I could recognize. They wore hoods pulled up, baseball caps . . . and it’s dark. Everything happened fast.”
It hadn’t felt fast at the time. Every second had felt as if it were mired in molasses.
Beside her, Olivia shook her head. “I didn’t recognize anyone, either.” She turned to watch all the other belated rescuers arrive, vehicle after vehicle pulling into the parking lot or onto the side of the road, while a few simply parked in the road where they were; it wasn’t as if they had to worry about any through traffic.
“I’m thinking it was likely some of the meth heads from over Townsend way,” Mike said, joining them. “The word will have spread that you have gas.”
With an effort Sela wrenched her attention away from Ben. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “That’s why I was here, in case anyone tried anything. Not that it had to be meth heads. I imagine there are a lot of regular people who’d like to have as much gas as they could get.”
Ben made a noise, rumbling low in his throat, that sounded suspiciously like a growl. She’d never before been around anyone who she thought might be growling. Rather than be alarmed, she began getting warm again. It took all of her concentration to remain standing where she was, rather than taking a step forward and simply resting against him, her head on his chest, her arms around him.
More than anything, that was what she wanted to do.
“I have a first-aid kit in the truck,” he said, wheeling away to stride to his vehicle, and breaking the connective circle that had surrounded them and kept everyone else at a distance. Mike watched him for a minute, his eyebrows lifted, then turned back to Sela.
“Damn, I wish I’d gotten here sooner,” he said, abashed. “I’m sorry. And what the he—heck is Ben Jernigan doing here?” Nimbly he changed hell to heck in deference to Olivia’s tender ears, completely ignoring the fact that a lot of teenagers swore like sailors and Sela was sure Olivia did her share of swearing when she was with her friends. Nevertheless, Mike was an old-fashioned Southern guy, and he held to his mode of behavior.