26. Chapter Twenty-Six #2
For a while neither of us said anything.
Then the toll my body had been putting off came due all at once.
The way it does once the thing that meant to kill you doesn’t.
My ribs. Rourke hauled the whole graceless weight of me over that door by the collar, and something low on the left had gone when he did it.
A deep grinding wrongness flared white when I breathed too deep, so I made a point not to.
A hot stripe ran down the outside of my thigh.
I caught it crossing the running board, past the reaching hands, and it had torn open through the canvas—the door edge or a tooth, I never did learn which.
The blood was already going tacky and cold in the heat of the cab.
My right knee wouldn't answer when I asked it to move.
I felt it wrench when Rourke stamped us into reverse with my legs still hanging out the door.
Now it swelled tight against the seam of my jeans and settled into a dull roar that promised worse by morning.
I catalogued all of it the way I catalogue everything, and said none of it, because a man doesn't itemize his hurts to the one who just drove into a flood to spare him.
Rourke looked over anyway. Years of reading what a man was worth and whether he'd keep, and he read me in about two seconds.
"You're leaking," he said.
"Some."
"Ribs?"
"Some of those too."
He grunted, and eased the truck along the bench above the narrows, slow now, the need for speed all drained out of the night. "That medic of yours going to put you flat on your back a while?"
"He's going to try."
"Let him." He wasn't quite smiling. “Poor way to end a war, dying under a slide a week after because you were too proud to say your own ribs were cracked.” He brought us to a stop where the bench opened out over the fork, and looked at the leg I was keeping too still, and didn't offer me a hand, because he knew better than that by now. "Can you stand on it?"
"Long enough to watch this," I said.
We watched it turn from the bench above the narrows. The two of us, Rourke on his feet and me propped against the warm hood with the bad leg not taking much of my weight, both of us out in the cold.
There is no describing it and I won’t cheapen it by trying too hard.
The north road was gone, walled in snow and flame.
The body of the flood—the whole endless grinding weight of it, the thing that emptied three valleys and broken every rule I built my life on—met the wall and slewed.
It found the one road left open; the south narrows, Trigger’s hard road.
And it poured into it. All of it. Bank to bank down the choke between the rock walls and over the lip of the old spillway and down into the dead country beyond the burn.
It poured itself out into a place with no smoke and no walls and no living soul to reach.
It took the rest of that day and all the night to pass.
But it passed south. Every settlement on the mountain lived because a flood the size of a season went down the one road a hard woman walked up months before and remembered.
Rourke and I stood and watched it go and didn't talk for a long while.
"You came back for me," I said finally. It sounded stupid out loud.
I said it anyway, because it wanted saying.
"You pulled your people. Our deal was you held the mouth of the pass, not the fork.
You were clear. You had no call to be within a mile of that shoulder.
" I looked at him. "You came back into that for me. Why."
Rourke spat into the snow and watched the flood pour south and took his time, the way he took his time over everything he ever weighed the worth of.
"I held that junction since the world ended," he said.
"Turned back four camps, buried men on both sides, told myself the whole time the only law up here was what a man could hold with his own two hands and to hell with everybody else's.
" He worked his jaw. "Then a stubborn bastard walks into my camp with no gun and thirty pounds of meat and says nobody lives through this one alone.
And I shook on it thinking it was a simple trade.
His hands, my ground, a deal." He finally looked at me.
"It stopped being simple somewhere back there, Hale.
I don't know the hour it happened. I came around that shoulder and saw you down at the lip of the fork lighting that fuse by hand with the whole of it coming down on you, standing where you told your own people not to stand, and I found I already turned the wheel before I figured it out at all.
" He looked back at the flood. "That's the answer.
I didn't have a reason. I just wasn't going to let it happen.
Turns out that's a thing that can grow in a man even at my age, even in me. Who knew."
"I didn't," I said. "I thought the nothing on your face last night was contempt."
"It was me deciding I'd probably have to come pull you out of exactly this," he said, "and being irritated about it in advance.
" And he almost smiled, that grim not-quite thing.
I laughed, the first laugh in a week, standing on a bench above a river of the dead with a man I spent five years planning against, and it was as real a thing as I've had from anybody.
We got the coalition's tally by radio through the night as the flood poured itself south.
Hudson's people held the north fork's far side and never had to fire a shot, the wall doing their work for them.
Isaac's crew pinched the Blackfork feed and cost the body a fifth of its mass before it ever reached the fork. Nobody was dead. That's the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I couldn’t have promised any of them a week before and wouldn’t have bet a can of corn on.
A flood the size of the end of the world came down out of the high country onto five scattered settlements and a camp of raiders, and every one of us held our stretch of the river, and nobody was dead.
I got a truck ride back toward the pass in the gray before dawn, Rourke’s plow leading, the way south full of the sound of them draining off into dead country.
Somewhere in that ride, with the worst of it behind me and my hands finally still, I let myself think about the thing I shoved down at the lip of the fork.
The green eyes gone to milk. The first one I ever put down.
The wall I built my whole self around for five years and never once opened to a living soul.
I walled the north fork with snow and fire so a flood couldn't take the easy road.
There was one wall left in me, and I was done keeping walls.
I was going home to take it down for her, by hand.
To tell her the last true thing. And then—if she’d still have the man who was left when the wall came down—I was going to ask her the one question I’d been too much of a coward to ask.
What her mother named her. So I could say for the rest of whatever life we just bought.