Luella was alive). “It won’t hold much water, Leland.”
“No, I guess not. Not when you think about the girls in the houses. But I hear that’s the theory.”
“What are they doing about it?”
“What they’re doing about it is, they’ve organized themselves a kind of a army. A bunch of them are just riding around the country, taking a town at a time.”
“I don’t get it.” But I did get it, by premonition.
“Seems like they take that theory as gospel. And they’re spreading the gospel.”
“Where are they?”
“They’d have been here by now, only they veered off north of Colton. You know they got to stop and recuperate now and then.”
“All right, Leland, pass it on. Not everything you’ve told me—just a KCR alert. I’m going to see Arslan.”
It was apparently news to him, and interesting news, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He said nothing— politely—but the corner of his mouth tucked in with amusement. The idea of a troop of dedicated rapists, riding out to save the world by force, had to appeal to him. Salvation through violation—it was a concept that suited Arslan, even when it meant salvation from him.
“So much for Plan Two,” I said as viciously as I knew how.
“Perhaps. At worst, it was worth a try.” And he gave me the old bland look of half-surprise. It only needed the caption:
I stood and leaned my palms on his desk, leaned far over to him. “You stinking bastard,” I shouted into his face, “I’m going to round up all the women and children in this county and I’m going to bring them here, and you’re going to defend them or die trying, and if you don’t I’m going to kill you—I don’t know how, but I’ll kill you by quarter-inches!”
And he laughed—a big, open, joyful laugh that tossed his head back and pointed his beard at me. “Hurry,” he said. “No men, no boys who can fight. We can’t take more than a thousand. Sanjar will go to scout out these raiders of yours.”
It was the biggest single operation we’d had to handle in years, and we weren’t really geared for that kind of an operation any more. I’d said “all the women and children,” but in fact we only needed to bring in the women of child-bearing age—stretching it a little on both ends, of course. We released as much ammunition as we could afford to people with families to protect—those that wouldn’t be likely to waste it—but we took nothing to the school. The rest of our little stock would be safe where it was, and Arslan could spare bullets better than we could.
Well before sundown we had the school crammed full. We had brought in practically all of the girls—the very youngest, after all, were already twelve—and women and girls were all over everywhere. Every room, every hall, every other step of every staircase. It would have been impossible to conduct a defense, or anything else, in such a mob. Arslan’s answer was to set two of his boys to painting boundary lines. (They had turned up some usable paint in the course of their remodeling, and Hunt had done good work with it.) A bright stripe down every staircase reserved a broad passageway “for authorized personnel,” as Arslan put it. Stripes on the floors packed the crowd into the rear of the classrooms and against the corridor walls; the window areas were off limits to them, along with generous aisles that would make it easy for the defenders to get around in a hurry.
One of the things Arslan’s gang had done was take out most of the basement floor. The concrete slabs had been put together on the remaining part to form a rainwater cistern, fed from the gutters by a pipe that came in through a convenient chink. In the dank subsoil they had excavated a large-scale latrine. The school was ready for a siege.
If the raiders had guns or explosives, there might be one; otherwise, it looked like no contest. Arslan was as serious about the Battle of Kraftsville School as if the fate of the world depended on it. He hadn’t hesitated to hand out automatic weapons to my men, with a little lecture on how to use them. The KCR was manning the first floor and the basement, with a few monitors scattered through the crowd of females to keep them in line. Arslan’s boys were bubbling like a pot of soup, full of pepper and hotter than sin. This was what they’d been waiting for all their lives—all summer, anyway. Arslan himself looked a good ten years younger and ten pounds heavier.
“What happens if nothing happens?” I asked him. “These kids can’t keep the steam up very long. Ten to one there won’t be any attack tonight, and tomorrow they’ll be down.”
He fairly chortled. “There will be an attack tonight. At least, it is very probable.” And it occurred to me that Sanjar had never returned from his scouting.
“When’s Sanjar getting back?”
“When he is ready.”
So Sanjar was dropping some kind of bait to bring the raiders hot on his tracks. There was a lively blaze now in the big fireplace where the furnace used to be, and there must have been plenty of smoke coming out of the chimney. They wouldn’t have any trouble finding us—and just in case they did, Arslan was already having the lamps lit on the top floor.
They came without much commotion, riding down Pearl Street at an easy pace. There must have been about a hundred. They pretty nearly filled the block, not solidly, but in ragged clumps. At the southwest corner of the schoolground they stopped and bunched up into a dense mass. “Why not fire now?” I didn’t see how we’d ever get a decent shot, otherwise, in the dusk.
Arslan shook his head. We were watching from a second-floor window. “No. We shall get a better return for our bullets.” And he added, not as casually as he seemed to think, “Sanjar may be with them.”
For all the orders of silence, the crowd inside kept up a steady buzz of noise. Everything considered, they were being pretty quiet, but you couldn’t expect that many women to be soundless. The horsemen were talking, but there was no hope of hearing anything they said.
Now they started their move, still not in much of a hurry. Maybe twenty-five or thirty of them peeled off and came across the parking lot at what started as a walk and ended as a fast trot, bringing up at the south door in a flurry of shouts. “Now!” Arslan bellowed. His boys were hanging half out of the second and third-floor windows; the line of fire was practically straight down. Arslan himself was fairly mortised into the window frame, his hip on the sill, the light rifle making one stiff vertical rod with his left arm and shoulder. One momentary burst of fire was enough; then he was yelling, swearing at his boys furiously, and the shooting sputtered out. The poor fools outside hadn’t exactly expected this kind of treatment, judging from the screams. A belated volley of missiles came from the main body in the road—rocks, or something just as futile. I felt like the U.S. Cavalry in an old western.
Not many of the women were really squealing, but it was enough to make quite a racket. Arslan was at the stairwell, roaring them quiet, yelling at his boys to follow orders, then back to the window. The attackers were lugging their casualties back across the parking lot. The main body milled and shrank away from the school. A few loose horses ran or stood aimlessly. Right beside the door, a wounded horse—I hoped it was a horse—was making a terrible noise. Obviously, they were taking too long to begin their next move. Arslan’s lips swelled with pleased contempt.
Somebody on the third floor started shooting into them, and Arslan went up the stairs three at a time, clubbing the rifle in his hands as he ran. The thudding of his blows came down through the woodwork. Maybe he was expressing fatherly concern; Sanjar might still be out there. By the time he came back down, they had rallied and started their move. They split into three parts, one group tearing north and east around the block to attack the north side of the school. There, they would have the disadvantage of the steep north bank, but maybe they didn’t know that yet. The second group was supposed to hit the south side at the same time, presumably, but they got there first. They couldn’t have hoped to do much more than smash in the doors and first-floor windows, and to do that they had to get right up to the walls again. This time they got it from all three floors, hard. They wouldn’t have tried it if there’d been enough light to see how those doors and windows were barred. Their rocks and clubs were entirely wasted.
But the third group—the biggest one—were dropping off their horses and ducking into the ruins of the west wing. Arslan had said he was going to demolish that wing, but he hadn’t been in much of a hurry to get around to it. There was no immediate danger there—they’d have to knock a hole in the brick wall, and that would take a little while—but they were protected from our fire. There was enough of the roof left to provide considerable cover, and the west wall of the main building was blind—not a window in it. (Arslan’s answer to that problem had been to install a trapdoor in the roof, and I wondered if there was anybody up there now. But the top floor was in his jurisdiction.)
