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Back Lullaby Town Save as PDF
Chapters (49)
  1. From Wikipedia
  2. Other Books by This Author
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. Contents
  7. Chapter One
  8. Chapter Two
  9. Chapter Three
  10. Chapter Four
  11. Chapter Five
  12. Chapter Six
  13. Chapter Seven
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-one
  28. Chapter Twenty-two
  29. Chapter Twenty-three
  30. Chapter Twenty-four
  31. Chapter Twenty-five
  32. Chapter Twenty-six
  33. Chapter Twenty-seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-one
  38. Chapter Thirty-two
  39. Chapter Thirty-three
  40. Chapter Thirty-four
  41. Chapter Thirty-five
  42. Chapter Thirty-six
  43. Chapter Thirty-seven
  44. Chapter Thirty-eight
  45. Chapter Thirty-nine
  46. Chapter Forty
  47. Chapter Forty-one
  48. About the Author
  49. Cover

The snow was a glistening powder across the field, piling up in little mounds that scattered without sound as I moved. Charlie DeLuca saw us break, and the three guys with him opened up, firing with the shotguns and their pistols, still better than two hundred yards out. Panic shots. I guess they hadn’t expected us to try to outflank the flankers. Charlie yelled something at the guys who had gone into the woods, but with the snow and the wind and the distance you couldn’t make out what he was saying. Pellets rained on the field around me and a great orange pumpkin exploded, but I didn’t stop and I didn’t look back. I stayed low and moved hard and wondered if the guys in the woods were making better time coming my way than I was making going theirs. Then I didn’t think about it anymore and pretty soon I was in the trees.

I moved twenty yards into the tree line and stopped between two white birch to listen. If the flankers had moved fast, maybe they were already behind me. They weren’t. Thirty yards upwind toward the road, limbs snapped and dead leaves crunched and it sounded like the Fifth Marines were on the march. City kids come out to play. This deep in the trees, you couldn’t see the field. They didn’t know Karen and Peter and Toby were falling back and they didn’t know Pike and I had moved into the tree line. Out in the field, the pistols and the shotguns had stopped firing and Charlie was yelling, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. If I couldn’t hear, the flankers couldn’t hear. They were making so much noise that even if Charlie had been understandable, they wouldn’t have heard.

I moved deeper into the trees and found a place beside a fallen elm and waited. In the woods the snow fell only slightiy, caught higher in the tree canopy by dead leaves and vines and branches. Some of the earlier snow had melted and the water had leached down the trees, making their bark feel velvety and damp and enhancing their good smell. Except for the coming of the flankers, it was quiet. Calm. The natural state of the woods.