They turned off the road and kept to the safety of the trees, cutting wide around the outermost mine buildings before reaching the hills and starting to climb. They topped out on the first hill and Coe led the way onto a curling footpath up the next rise that only a kid would know about, just wide enough to admit their sleds.
The shack they came to was windowless and leaning, built tree-to-tree on a guarded plateau under the grizzled chin of a sloping stone cliff. The roof was off-kilter, like a bad hat worn roguishly, and the buckled front porch gave the shack a goofy grin. A thick clump of trees sheltered the plateau from the mine and the rest of the town.
They cut their engines and stood off the sleds, shedding their helmets in the sudden, ringing silence. Kells stayed near his sled, as did Coe.
“Chimney,” Kells said.
Smoke dawdled out of the roof pipe. Footpaths were shoveled from the warped porch, and recent footprints led from the door to the trees.
Kells was unzipping his parka when a tubby old man in a lumberjack coat stepped out of the trees with a gun in his hand. He wore boots with dirty fur halfway up the calves and moved as slowly as he spoke, seemingly made up of equal parts granite, grit, and wood.
“I thought someone’d come,” he said, pushing his plaid hunting cap off his forehead and pointing the gun in their direction.
Kells’s hands were empty and open. “Easy with that,” he said.
“Easy yourself.” The old man paid careful attention to where he planted each boot as he sized up Kells. “Got the ground wired for booby traps but the whole shebang’s buried under this snow. Funny way of sneaking up on a man. I heard your engines running a mile off.”
Kells glanced at Coe and the kid gave him a nervous nod.
“Marshall Polk?” asked Kells.
“Seventy-three years now.”
“We came from the inn. Do you know what’s happened in town?”
“I know a gunshot when I hear one. Know a gunfight when I hear more. I warned them. I did my part. But all they saw was tax breaks and more streetlights. Now I got a black man standing in my front yard.”
Kells had dealt with the Polks of the world before. “If you thought I was a prisoner you’d have fired that thing by now.”
“Don’t try and out-think me,” he said, cocking his head.
“My name is Kells. Do you recognize the boy?”
Polk came a few steps closer, scrutinized Coe. “Looks like the Provost fella, Matthew Provost.”
Coe seemed surprised. “That’s my dad.”
“Except for the hair. Your dad’s was longer, girly. Always got hippie magazines in the mail. How you mixed up in this?”
“We came here to... I brought Mr. Kells to see you.”
“The rest of the residents are gone,” said Kells. “Do you know what has happened?”
“I got two radios but no batteries. Same could be said for my ears. But I know enough.”
Kells noticed a second set of footprints, leading out of the trees. “Someone come to you an hour or two before we did?”
The old man called, “Come on out, Tom.”
A man in a long black overcoat opened the front door of the shack. His face was long and the shins and the tails of his coat were soaked through. He held a revolver in his hand as though he hadn’t held many.
“Mr. Duggan?” said Coe.
“Look here, Tom,” said Polk. “The Provost kid brought a friend around.”
It was anger, not nerves, making his weapon shake. Kells faced him. “There’s a group of us holed up at the golf course. Fern Iredale, the innkeeper, and some of her guests.”
“Fern?” said Tom Duggan.
Polk said, “Tom stumbled in like that two hours ago — frozen solid. No boots or gloves or hat. Could barely see the black of his coat under the snow. He told me what he could.”
Tom Duggan’s gun hand had fallen, and he was leaning against the skewed door frame, looking away.
Kells briefed them on the takeover and the ricin threat. At the end, Polk was squinting up into the falling snow.
“It’s funny,” Polk said, with satisfaction. “You can wait for a thing to happen, anticipate it, plan and prepare, but when it comes it still packs a punch.”
“We came up here looking for help,” Kells said.
“Seven years and no visitors. Now three in one day. They remember you when they need you. Let’s take this inside. My manners are rusty.”
The porch was a row of wooden pallets nailed together. Inside, the shack was warm, dim, airless. Like the old man, it was arranged around a potbelly, a sizzling black stove. The sagging army cot must have been hell on Polk’s back, and there were a desk table and two chairs lifted from the abandoned mine. Half of the table was a workshop, cluttered with rags and twine and radio parts. The other half was cleared for eating. Jars of preserved fruit and boxes of Quaker Oats and other dry foods were stacked on slanting shelves, no toilet or bathtub in sight.
Tom Duggan had taken a seat in a wooden folding chair near the stove, a puddle of melted water beneath him. The revolver rested in his hands in his lap.
Kells ducked to keep from butting one of the rafters and bringing down the roof. Coe’s face was screwed up at the smell.
Polk pulled the door shut and came around near the cot. “Never thought I’d see the ditchdigger visit me in my own house, at least not with me on two feet to greet him. Tom’s the town’s favorite son. That’d make me its poorest relation. He brought in the prison and the money. Now his mother’s dead.”
“Mrs. Duggan?” said Coe.
Tom Duggan’s head turned a bit at the mention of her name.
“It’s the riot that killed her,” Polk said. He had given up on his .38, no longer aiming it at Kells. “Terrible thing. It’s the government behind it all. They’ve wanted this town from the start.”
“I work for the government,” said Kells.
Polk’s gun came back up. “That’s two strikes against you.”
“The other being that I am black?”
“The other being that you’re a flatlander. Not from the Kingdom. Don’t be so race-sensitive. I hate everybody.”
Kells said, “We were hoping you might have some guns.”
“Guns. What do you want them for?”
“To fight.”
“Fight the prisoners?” Polk was constantly reevaluating Kells. “Say I did have some guns. If I gave them to you, how would I get by?”
“You could join us.”
“I’ve been fighting this fight for seven years. Way I see it, you’d be joining me. You got a plan?”
“Our plan is to find some weapons and fight.”
Polk nodded. “I must say I like your plan.”
The old man went to his cot and got down on one knee and pulled out an old army blanket. He carried the bundle to the cleared end of the table and unrolled it ceremoniously, like an ancient scroll.
Inside was one long rifle, a shotgun, a revolver, a pistol, and a greasy paper bag.
“All cleaned and oiled,” Polk pronounced.
Kells studied the bounty. “Where’s the rest?”
“Well, there’s my thirty-eight. But I keep that on my person. And Tom has the other revolver.”
Kells nodded. “And?”
“That’s about it.”
Kells looked again at the mouse-chewed blanket and the four measly weapons. “And you call yourself a militia?”
“Guns cost money. I gave that up when they started putting them metal stripes in the bills. Microchips. Your government trying to control our purchases.”