Kevin McLaughlin
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Chapter 162 - Shadows on the March
🕑 Added 2025-05-15 01:03:57 +0000 UTCWe’d gone straight back to the Farm from the Guard base, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work. There was too much that needed doing, so much that I barely even knew where to start. Fortunately, I had friends who could help me out with that.
Alfred was a rock. He took over handling everything for our fortifications. With him driving things forward, I watched the inner walls grow stronger by the hour. Zombies hauled and placed chunks of concrete day and night, working tirelessly to build up our protections.
On top of that, he’d borrowed a trick from Eddings. One of the crystals dropped during our raid on the goblins was a brown stone for Siege Weapon Construction. It was precisely what we needed, and Alfred found a volunteer to take the stone on, a man named Griffin. Grif, as he preferred to be called, was a grizzled older man who’d served in the military back when he was younger. Turned out, Grif used to be an artillery guy, and while making ballistas was wildly different from firing howitzers, it appealed to him enough that he wanted the job.
I gave it to him, and two days later we had our first ballista. He started working on a second right away. We needed as many of the things as we could get our hands on. If Peter came calling with that dragon of his, we needed to be ready. Even having a few ballistas wasn’t a sure bet, but it was something.
Kara and Clay got busy training our people. We’d gotten them some crystals, and I intend to get them more. But we’d seen time and again that magic alone wasn’t always enough. Disciplined troops working closely together could overcome much stronger foes. We needed to leverage that sort of training to build our people up.
Kara had some past military training, and Clay of course had buckets of experience turning newbies into soldiers. Together, they were slowly building a true army out of our rag-tag group of warriors.
I seemed to be spending about half of my time putting out fires. The avians weren’t getting along with the ratkin. Seems the avians had a history of scooping up young ratkin and bringing them home for dinner—and not in a nice, friendly way! We had a lot more ratkin here than avians, and they were feeling pretty good about getting a little of their own back, at first.
It took everything Patches and I could do to keep the two groups from coming to blows. Finally, I gave up on diplomacy and went with the nuclear option. I called all the troublemakers out into the central yard.
“You’re all giving me headaches,” I told them. “You want to leave?”
Nope, they definitely did not want to leave. They liked it here and wanted to stay.
“Awesome. Since you all want to stay, and you all have enough energy to pick fights with each other,” I said. We’d had several actual fistfights break out, and one of them caused some serious damage. “I’m going to give you somewhere to direct that energy. Starting tomorrow, you’re all part of a new unit. You will drill together, eat together, and do everything but sleep together. You are now all buddies, and if any of you get hurt because one of you was stupid, I will come down on all of you like a pile of bricks. Get me?”
Oh, they got me. They were super double plus unhappy about it, but they got me.
Two days went by since we’d returned from the Guard base, and we’d accomplished a lot.
The walls were done. The inner ones, anyway. The outer walls were simply going to have to wait. It would take months to get them built, and they were only there to protect the fields we wouldn’t be using until springtime anyway. If we survived until the winter, then we could worry about the outer walls. If Peter came at us with the dragon intending to wipe us out, the outer walls wouldn’t make much difference anyway.
I wasn’t sure if that was a serious risk or not. After all, Peter had been nothing but friendly with me. If anything, I was fairly sure he wanted to get into my pants. There was a good chance I was simply over-reacting to all of this, and if so I’d be happily embarrassed later.
I went over what he’d done so far in my head, over and over, trying to figure out what his endgame looked like. First, Peter captured the dragon. Then he joined our alliance and pitched in during the fighting at Camp Johnson. After the fighting, he’d spent a chunk of the evening hitting on me. Then he’d trained the dragon to fight for him somehow, gone to Turner to offer help against the avians—who’d been a known threat for a while, so I couldn’t really blame them—and got Turner firmly under his thumb in the process.
All told, that was a lot of investment in all of us. He’d put a lot of effort into ingratiating himself with the alliance members and building up some trust and goodwill. I couldn’t help but think maybe I was blowing some other things out of proportion.
But then I remembered Delores. Turner said she’d died in the fighting, but why would she have been anywhere near combat? She had some crystals, but most of her spells and stats were of the non-combat variety. She shouldn’t have been anywhere that the avians could attack her. Plus, she was smart enough to know that, and old enough to know better than to rush into danger, too.
The whole thing stank. My bet was Turner had her killed so that he could seize power again. But was that murder Turner’s call?
Or Peter’s?
At the end of the second day after our return, I headed upstairs to my room, exhausted. Which meant that I was less than thrilled to find Kara waiting for me when I got there.
“What’s up?” I asked. Was I a little short? Yes. Was I wiped out from the day’s work? Also yes.
“Don’t get snippy with me,” Kara replied, smiling. “I just wanted to check in with our fearless leader. How are you holding up with all of this?”
I shrugged and sat down on my bed. “I wish I knew. That, there—that’s how I’m feeling right now. I wish I knew more. I wish I knew what was going on with Peter, who killed Delores and why, what Peter’s longterm plans are, and probably a bunch of other things. I feel like I need the answers to questions and I don’t even know all the questions yet.”
Kara nodded. “Yeah, I get that. It sucks, huh?”
“A lot.”
“So what’s the plan? What are we going to do about it?”
I thought for a moment before answering. The truth was, I didn’t know, but that wasn’t a great answer. Kara wasn’t expecting me to be all-knowing or anything dumb like that, but she deserved at least a considered reply.
“Some days, I just want to pack it in and run east,” I confessed.
“Tell me more.”
“My parents are out there. Did I tell you that?” I asked.
She nodded. “You mentioned them, but it was a while ago. They’re in northeast Vermont, right?”
“The Northeast Kingdom, yeah. That’s what we called it, back before all this mess. They were tough, and they had a good homestead set up. I’m betting they’re fine out there. I want to go see, check on them, but there just hasn’t been time,” I said, slapping my thigh. “Even riding Sue, even assuming I ran into no trouble at all, it would take me a couple of days to get out there and a couple of days back. And of course, assuming I won’t run into trouble is just ridiculous. There just hasn’t been time.”
“It’s been crazy all right,” Kara agreed. “Why are you thinking about that now?”
“Because of Peter and all this shit going down. Because Delores is dead, and I think Turner had her killed, and I wonder if it was actually Peter who had her killed,” I said. I shook my head. “If he comes at us, I don’t know if we can stop him. Hell, that’s not true. I know for certain that we cannot stop him. Not with that dragon. Running off to find my parents feels like a decent plan some days.”
“But is he likely to do that? Peter, I mean. He was cozying up to you, right? I doubt he’s going to drop that angle and just launch an assault,” Kara replied.
She was right, and I nodded my agreement. “Sure. Are you saying you think I should become his queen, like he wants, to keep from getting killed? I’ve read a lot of fantasy novels, and I can’t think of a single one where that ended well for the queen or her people.”
“Then we go. If that’s what you think is best, then we can take off. Bring anyone who wants to come, and leave the city. Probably easier to survive in the countryside anyway,” Kara said. “The main thing is, whatever we’re doing, let’s do it together. Your people love you. You’ve saved the lives of everyone living here, some of us more than once. They will follow you, if you ask.”
I sighed, and dropped my gaze to my hands, clenching and unclenching them in frustration. “I think I knew that, but I appreciate the reminder. Thing is, I don’t know if I’m worrying about nothing or not. Maybe I’m just over-reacting to all of this, and it’s not such a big deal. I just don’t have enough information, and I don’t know how to get more.”
“Why not ask Gideon what he thinks? We can make a run up there tomorrow, if you want. Might be worth it. Share the intel we have and ask him for advice.”
It was a good plan. I’d been figuring to head that way soon anyway. Gideon needed to know about the changes at the Guard base. He had spies out all over, so I figured the odds were he already knew much of what I did. He might even have some information that I didn’t yet, and he almost certainly had some insights that I’d missed.
“I think that sounds smart. We’ll do that,” I replied. “I want to do something else, too. If that dragon hits us, the walls are useless, and we don’t have enough ballistas to take her down. We need something else, a way to get people out of harm’s way if an attack comes.”
“An escape route,” Kara said.
“That’s my thought exactly,” I replied. “And I know just what to do. I’ll set the zombies working on it, now that the inner wall is complete.”
“Good. Do that, then get some rest. Tomorrow, you and I can head over to Carver’s fortress and hopefully learn more. But you’ll want to be at your best for that, right? So rest!”
“Yes, mom.” I flashed her a grin.
She tossed a pillow at me. “No backtalk. Seriously, get some rest soon.”
Kara rose and left the room. With space to think more, I pondered the crude plans we’d formed. Visiting Carver was smart. I probably should have done that today, but the avians and ratkin kept me too busy to think of it. Tomorrow would have to do.
Before climbing into bed, I ordered my zombies to begin work on an escape tunnel. It would run from underneath the big barn and finish far enough away from the Farm that people could use it to escape any real disasters which came our way. With luck, that would turn out to be a crazy amount of overkill, but I wasn’t willing to trust all our lives to luck.
