The sound was not like thunder. It was sharper. A cracking, tearing noise that filled the cabin. Bullets slammed into the heavy timber walls, thudding like hail. The window board splintered, sending showers of sharp wood flying across the room.
Eli fired. He worked the lever of the Winchester with a mechanical rhythm. Crack clack. Crack clack. Keep your head down.
He roared. Un. Clara was on her knees behind the overturned table. She was not shooting wildly. She had the shotgun rested on the table leg.
She watched the door. A shadow fell across the crack beneath the door. Someone was on the porch. Clara pulled the trigger. The heavy recoil bruised her shoulder, but the buckshot blew a hole through the door panel at knee height.
A scream of pain erupted from the other side, followed by the sound of a body tumbling down the steps. "They are flanking," Eli shouted, moving to the side window. "Watch the back! " Clara scrambled to the bedroom door. She pressed herself against the frame, pistol raised. The back window was boarded, but she saw the wood bowing inward.
Someone was using a sledgehammer. Eli, the bedroom, she screamed. Eli spun, firing blindly through the wall where the hammering was coming from. The hammering stopped, but the front was overwhelmed. Bullets shattered the oil lamp on the shelf, spraying glass.
A slug tore through the sleeve of Eli's shirt, leaving a line of red. He hissed but did not stop firing. There are too many. Eli yelled. He was reloading, his fingers fumbling for a second.
In that second, Silas Vance appeared at the gap in the front window, leveling a pistol at Eli's exposed back. Clara saw him. She did not think. She did not calculate. She moved.
She lunged across the room, grabbing Eli's belt and yanking him backward with all her strength. Down. She shrieked. Eli fell back just as Vance fired. The bullet buried itself in the log wall exactly where Eli's heart had been a second before.
From the floor, Clara raised her pistol. She braced her wrist on her knee. She aimed at the gap where Vance's face was. She fired. Vance grunted and disappeared from the window, clutching his shoulder.
"You hit him," Eli gasped, staring at her. "I aim for the shoulder," Clara said, her voice trembling now. Survival, Eli, not murder. The firing outside suddenly intensified, but it was different. It wasn't directed at the house.