Chapter 1 #2
"This is Cole," Ruth said. "He's good in a bad spot. And he doesn't talk much, which I've come to think is the rarest virtue left in the world."
Cole didn't offer a hand. He just looked at Francis with those dark eyes.
And there was something in them Francis recognized. Something burned down low. Something he had seen in his own face, in a bathroom mirror, in the days right after Earl died.
The look of a man who had watched something happen that he could not stop.
"You keeping count of us, up in that blind?" Cole asked. First thing he'd said. His voice was quiet and even.
"Every one of you," Francis said.
Cole nodded, like that was the right answer. Like he'd have thought less of Francis if it wasn't.
"Good," he said. "Man ought to."
Francis looked back at Ruth.
"You said you had something to tell me. Something I need to hear whether I take you in or send you off. You said it's coming for this farm either way."
"I did."
"So tell me. Plain. No dancing."
Ruth leaned on the fence rail. Her hands were a farmer's hands. Thick, cracked, the nails black at the beds. She looked out past him at the dead brown fields behind the house. The fields waiting to be worked.
"You mean to plant those," she said. It wasn't a question either.
"Come spring. Soon. That's the whole plan. That's why this place is worth anything."
"Course it is," Ruth said. "Water and land and a long road nobody travels. It's the best place I've seen in five hundred miles of walking." She looked at him. "And that's exactly why I'm scared for you. Because I've seen a place like this before. I lived in a place like this before."
"And it stopped being yours."
"And it stopped being ours," Ruth said.
The wind moved between them.
"You've been up here alone all winter," she said. "Safe. Hidden. Living off what you stored and what you hunted. And it worked, didn't it. It worked fine. So you're thinking this spring is just more of the same. Put seed in the ground. Watch it come up. Bring it in. Eat all winter. Simple."
"That's the plan," Francis said carefully.
"It's a good plan," Ruth said. "It's the right plan. It's the only plan, this far into it. The finding's over. The cans are gone, or near enough. Everybody left alive is about to learn the same hard fact all at once, this spring."
She held his eyes.
"Whoever eats next winter is whoever puts seed in the ground now. That's the whole world, from here out. Not what you can find. What you can grow."
"I know that."
"You know it. But here's the part you maybe haven't got to yet. Sitting up here, hidden, safe."
She leaned in.
"That field you're about to plant. Come July, it's going to be green. Tall and green and beautiful. The only green for miles, on a plain that's all dead brown."
Francis felt something turn over in his chest. Slow. Cold. He didn't like where it was going.
"A green field," Ruth said quietly, "can be seen from a long, long way off. From the ridges. From the roads. By anybody looking down off high ground with a pair of binoculars."
She let it land. "Your hidden farm stops being hidden the day it turns green. You understand me? The very thing that keeps you alive is the thing that puts a flag up over your head."
Francis said nothing.
Because she was right. He knew she was right the instant she said it. He'd been so proud of the long road, the tree line, the one way in. And none of it hid a field in full summer. Nothing hid green.
Earl's voice, quiet in the back of his skull. She's got a true thing, son. Listen to the true thing even when you don't want it.
"There are people out there," Ruth said, "who don't grow one single thing. Who never once picked up a hoe. And who eat just fine every winter anyway. You want to know how?"
"They take it," Francis said. Low. "They let other people farm. And then they come at harvest and take it."
"They come at harvest and take it," Ruth said. "Most of it. Leave you just enough to not die and not fight. So you're always hungry, always weak, always too scared to run and too tired to swing back. And every fall they come again. And take it again."
"That's not raiding," Francis said. "That's a system."
"It's a system," Ruth said. Her voice went flat and hard. "Built by a man who knows how to build systems. And I promise you, mister, whatever your name is, I promise you on the graves I've been walking away from for eleven days."
She looked at him, and behind the tiredness there was iron.
"That man is going to find this farm the day it turns green. He finds all of them. It's what he does. And when he does, you are going to face the exact choice we faced. And I would give a great deal to spare you learning it the way we learned it."
"Then say his name," Francis said. "The man. Give me the name."
And behind Ruth, thirty feet back, the young man Cole went very still. And down the road, where the others waited by the dead tractor, Francis saw one of them turn and look back up the hill at the sound of the question, as if even the shape of it in the air was enough.
Ruth opened her mouth to answer.
And that was when the shot came.
It cracked flat and hard across the open plain, from somewhere out past the ridge, from the wrong direction entirely, from the empty land to the south where there was supposed to be nothing and no one at all.
And Cole dropped to the dirt like his strings had been cut.