The EMP Grey Man

Chapter 1

Francis walked down the road alone.

The white flag hung at the far end of it, small in the morning light, waving slow in the endless plains wind.

A dozen figures moved behind it. Coming up the long dirt track toward the farm. Toward everything he had bled for.

He kept his pace steady. Not fast. Not slow.

The way Earl had taught him.

A fast walk said fear or aggression, and both got you read. A slow walk said you had nowhere to be and nothing worth defending. That was a lie. Francis had everything worth defending sleeping in a cellar behind him.

So he walked in the middle. The grey middle. The forgettable center.

He did not look back at the house. He knew what was there.

Maya at the window with the pepper spray. Nathan in the blind by the fence line, the rifle steady, his eye on the strangers. Junior in the dark of the root cellar with the trap door pulled shut over him, told to stay quiet. Be a ghost. No matter what he heard.

Francis had built all of that. The blind, the drill, the quiet child.

He had built it over a winter of cold work because Earl's voice never stopped telling him that safe was not a place. Safe was a thing you made every day and kept making.

Today he would find out how well he had made it.

The strangers stopped when they saw him coming.

That told him something.

A raider group did not stop. A raider group kept moving. Spread wide, closed the distance, got the angles.

These people bunched up on the road and held. The flag out front. Hands where he could see them.

People who wanted to be seen. People announcing themselves.

That was either exactly what it looked like, or the most dangerous kind of lie.

He closed the last of the distance at the same steady pace. He stopped a good thirty feet short of them.

Out of any easy rush. Close enough to talk. Far enough to run.

He counted without seeming to count. Eleven.

No. Twelve. A small one, half hidden behind a woman's legs.

A child.

They had brought a child up the road under a white flag. That was either a genuine peace, or the oldest trick there was.

He did not assume. He watched.

They were thin. That was the first thing.

Thin the way everyone was thin now. Cheeks hollow, clothes hanging loose. But thinner than his own people. Worn down past the winter into something closer to the edge.

They were tired. He read it in the slump of them. The way even the ones with weapons held them low and loose. Too worn out to be quick.

And they were afraid.

Not of him. Of something behind them.

He could see it in the way a few of them kept glancing back down the road they had come up. The way you glance at a door you think might open.

Francis filed all of it away and said nothing yet.

Let them talk first. The one who talks first tells you what he wants. The one who waits keeps his cards.

A person stepped out from the group.

Not the one holding the flag. An older woman. Sixty, maybe. Short and square and weathered brown. Grey hair pulled back hard under a seed cap so faded the logo was gone.

She moved to the front and looked at Francis with pale eyes that had done a lot of looking in their time.

"You're the one who came down the road," she said. "By yourself. To meet twelve of us."

"I am."

"That was either brave or stupid."

"Little of both," Francis said. "Usually is."

Something moved at the corner of the old woman's mouth. Not a smile. A recognition.

"My name's Ruth," she said. "These are my people. What's left of them."

She let that sit a second.

"We saw your smoke, two days back. Off the far ridge. And we came careful, and we came slow, and we put the flag up a mile out so nobody up here would get the wrong idea and put a bullet in a child."

Her eyes flicked, just barely, toward the tree line where Nathan's blind was.

"Which I'm guessing somebody up there is thinking about right now."

Francis kept his face empty.

She had made the blind. Or guessed it. Either way she was not a fool.

"Nobody's putting a bullet in anybody," Francis said. "Long as nobody gives a reason."

"Fair," Ruth said. "That's fair."

The word landed on him strange.

It was Earl's word. The word the old man had used in the dark house. The word the stranger Nathan had used in the field. The whole system of the new world in one syllable.

Fair. Here is a deal. Nobody aims anything at anybody.

He had learned that the people who said fair and meant it were rare. And worth more than gold. And had a way of dying because of it.

"You've got a farm," Ruth said. "A real one. Water, I'd bet, or you wouldn't have wintered here. Land to grow on. That right?"

Francis did not answer.

You do not confirm what a stranger has about your value. You let them guess. A guess they can talk themselves out of. A yes they cannot.

Ruth watched him not answer, and nodded. Like the not answering was itself an answer.

Maybe it was.

"You don't give anything away," she said. "Good. That's good. Means you've lived long enough to learn how. Most who didn't learn are dead by now."

"What do you want," Francis said.

It came out flat. Not hostile. Just the question, put plain. The way you put a number on a claim.

Ruth's pale eyes held his.

"Right now? I want to sit down out of this wind."

She said it simple. Almost tired.

"We've been walking eleven days. We've got a woman back there with a cough that scares me. We've got that child, and she hasn't had a hot meal since we left what was left of home. I'm not going to stand here in the cold and dance around you and pretend we came up your road for the view."

She looked at him steady.

"We came because we're out. Out of food, near enough. Out of road. Out of places that don't already belong to somebody meaner than us. We heard there was smoke up a long road nobody uses, and we hoped, God help us, that it might be people we could stand next to instead of run from."

"That's a lot of hope to walk eleven days on," Francis said.

"It's all we had left to walk on," Ruth said. "Hope's free. Everything else ran out."

Francis said nothing.

He was doing the thing Earl had drilled into him. Watching the whole of them while he looked at the one. The hands. The eyes. The weapons that had not come up.

None of it was moving wrong. None of it was the slow closing dance of people getting into position.

They were just standing there in the wind. Tired. Waiting on one man's word.

"Where's home," he said. "Where'd you walk from."

Something crossed the old woman's face. It was quick, and she put it away fast, but he saw it.

Grief. The dried out kind. The kind that has stopped being a wound and started being a weight.

"North and east," Ruth said. "Little place. Doesn't matter what it was called, there's nobody left to call it that. We had a good thing, for a while. Better than most. Wintered fine, first winter. Made it to spring."

"And then?"

"And then it stopped being ours," Ruth said.

She did not say more. And Francis did not push.

Because he knew that voice. He knew that exact flatness, the flatness you put over a thing so you can say it out loud without coming apart.

He had used it himself. Talking about Cheryl. Talking about a concrete floor.

There was a story in it. A whole terrible story, of how a good place stopped being yours.

But she was not going to spill it here, in the cold, to a man on the other side of a fence who had not decided yet whether to let her live near him.

And the fact that she did not spill it, the fact that she held it, made Francis trust her a fraction more, not less.

People who leak their whole story at a stranger's feet are trying to make you feel something. People who hold it are just trying to survive it.

"You've got a leader," Francis said. "You. They moved back down that road on your say so. No arguing."

"I've got a group that's learned to move quick when somebody says move," Ruth said. "That's not the same as a leader. That's just what's left after the slow ones die."

It was such an honest, ugly, true thing to say that Francis almost smiled.

He did not. But almost.

"All right," he said. "Here's how we do this."

He kept his voice level. In charge without leaning on it. The way he'd learned to talk to his own people over the winter, when they were scared and looking at him to not be.

"You send everybody else back down the road. Out past that dead tractor. Where my man can see all of them and none of them can reach me."

Ruth nodded slowly.

"You and one other come up to the fence. No closer. Hands open. Anything on a shoulder gets slung and set down in the dirt where I can see it. Then we talk. Really talk."

"And the child?"

"The child stays with your people. In the open. Where I can see her breathing. Nobody touches a child today. Not yours, not mine. But she doesn't come to the fence."

Ruth studied him a long moment.

"You've got a child up here," she said. It was not a question. "That's why you came down alone. So we'd never see which house to point at. So there'd be nothing to grab."

Francis said nothing.

But he thought, she is quick, this one. She is very quick.

And quick was dangerous.

And quick was also exactly the kind of person worth having near you, if the fair in her was real.

"All right," Ruth said. "Your way. It's a good way. It's the way I'd do it, I had a child up a hill and twelve strangers at the bottom of it."

She turned and spoke low to her people. They moved back down the road. Slow, without argument.

Francis watched the discipline of it and did not like how much he liked it.

A group that moved on one word without argument was a group that had learned obedience the hard way.

Ruth kept one man with her.

He was young. Lean, dark eyed, a hunting rifle on his shoulder that he unslung the moment Francis's eyes touched it, and set down in the dirt without being told twice.

The two of them came up to the fence and stopped. Francis came to the other side of it. Close now. Close enough to speak quiet, the wind pulling their words apart before they could carry.