Chapter 4
Francis moved.
He was through the kitchen and out the door before the last of Nathan's words had died, Earl's folding knife already in his hand, his body doing the thing it knew how to do now without asking his mind first.
The night was cold and huge and full of stars, more stars than the old world had ever let anyone see, and under them the farm lay in silver dark, and Francis dropped low the moment he cleared the porch and froze against the wall and made himself see.
South. Nathan had said south. The tripwire had rung south.
He found Nathan's blind by the fence line, a black shape against the star field, and he saw the rifle up and pointed out into the dark, and he moved to it low and fast, staying below the sightlines, the way the last months had drilled into him.
"Talk to me," Francis breathed, sliding in beside Nathan. "What have you got."
"Movement," Nathan said. Low. Tight. "Out past the wire. Something came through the cans and then stopped. It's out there right now, in the grass, not moving. It knows it rang the wire. It's holding, seeing if we come."
Francis strained his eyes into the dark.
Nothing. Brown grass, silver under the stars, the long slope down toward the south fence, the ridge beyond a black line against the sky.
Then, movement. Low. A shape in the grass, maybe forty yards out, shifting, and then still again.
One shape. He thought. Maybe one.
"One?" Francis whispered.
"I think one," Nathan said. "But I thought one this morning too, and there was a shooter I never saw. So I don't know."
His voice was grim. "I don't like this, Francis. A raider comes fast or comes quiet. This is neither. This is somebody who trips a wire and then just lays there letting us know they tripped it. Same as the shot this morning. Same exact thing.
Somebody who keeps announcing they're there and then doing nothing. Testing us. Reading us. Seeing how we move."
Francis felt the cold understanding.
Because Nathan was right, and it was the same signature, the shot and now the wire, someone circling, watching, making the farm react so they could see how it reacted.
That was not a raider.
That was a scout. A patient, professional scout.
"Don't shoot," Francis breathed. "Whatever it is. Don't shoot unless it comes at us. A shot brings the whole night down on us and tells everybody for ten miles exactly where we are. We watch. We wait. Earl's rule. We wait past when we want to."
"That's what I've been doing," Nathan said. "But it's your call now you're here. I just wanted your eyes and your knife, and I wanted you to know before I ever pulled a trigger."
So they waited.
They waited in the cold with the rifle up and the knife ready, two men in a blind at the edge of the world, and the shape in the grass waited too, and the stars wheeled slow overhead, and nothing happened, and nothing happened, and the not-happening was its own kind of terror.
And then, after a long, long while, the shape in the grass moved. Away. Down the slope, low and smooth, back toward the south fence, back toward the ridge. Slow. Unhurried. In no fear of them at all.
Gone.
Nathan let out a long breath.
"It left," he said. "It came, it rang the wire on purpose, it laid there letting us come out and get scared, and then it just left."
He shook his head. "That's the coldest thing I've seen in a while. Whoever that is, they wanted to know one thing. How fast we come to the south fence in the dark, and how many. And now they know. Now they've got our whole reaction timed and counted."
Francis stared out at the empty dark where the shape had been.
"Somebody's building a picture of us," he said slowly.
"Piece by piece. The shot this morning, to see the daytime reaction. The wire tonight, the nighttime one. They're not attacking. They're scouting. Careful, professional scouting, the kind you do before you hit a place, so you know exactly what you're hitting."
"The Combine," Nathan said.
"Maybe." Francis frowned into the dark. "But the Combine came to the front door with a clipboard, Nathan. Loud and proud. Why scout the back in the dark when you already own the front? It doesn't fit. It's two different kinds of enemy. One that struts up the road with a pen,
and one that circles in the grass and never shows its face."
He shook his head slowly. "I don't know who the second one is. But I know I like it even less than the first."
They held the watch the rest of that night, all four of the farm's own splitting it, no one sleeping much, and the south stayed quiet, and the dawn came grey and cold and empty, and by the time the sun was up the whole thing had the unreal quality of a bad dream,
except for the three cans still hanging crooked on the tripwire, rung and swinging faintly in the morning wind, proof it had been real.
The days after that were work.
That was the thing about the new world that no one told you, Francis had learned.
Even with a warlord's paper under a rock and a ghost in the grass, the work did not stop.
The work never stopped. There was water to haul and wood to split and food to stretch and a sick woman to nurse and now twelve more people to fold into all of it, and the folding was hard, and the folding was also, Francis found, a mercy,
because work was the thing that kept the fear at arm's length.
They braided it together, the way Ruth had said. Strand by strand.
Ruth's people worked. That was the first thing that earned them their place, faster than any speech could have.
They did not sit and eat and wait to be served.
They worked. Cole took a turn on the watch and was good at it, still and patient, a young man who'd learned stillness the hard way.
A gray-bearded man named Wendell turned out to know the windmill, actually know it, the guts of it, the way the old ones worked, and he climbed it and greased it and tightened a thing that had been squealing all winter, and it ran smooth after, and Francis watched him do it and thought,
that man is worth ten cans of beans, that man is worth defending.
And Ruth herself. Ruth walked the dead fields with Francis the second morning, and she crouched and took the soil in her cracked hands and crumbled it and smelled it, and she talked about it the way Earl had talked about survival, like scripture, like a thing she'd given her life to.
"This is good ground," she said. "It's been rested a year, gone to weeds, but that's not bad, that's the ground catching its breath. You've got maybe three weeks before it's warm enough to put seed in. What'd the people who lived here leave you? Seed. Did they leave seed?"
"Some," Francis said. "In the cellar. I didn't know what half of it was."
"Show me," Ruth said, and there was hunger in it, and hope, the first real hope Francis had seen in her, "and I'll tell you what it is and what it'll do and how to make it feed everybody here through next winter. That's my whole trade, Francis. Before all this I was county extension.
Forty years I taught farmers how to make dirt feed people. I'm the most useless kind of person there was in the old world and the most useful kind there is now."
She almost smiled. "The world turned upside down and landed me right side up. Show me your seed."
He showed her the seed, and she went through it like treasure, and something in the farm shifted that day, some center of gravity, because now there was not just a place and a plan but a person who knew how to make the place and the plan into food.
And Francis understood that Ruth was the thing his farm had been missing all along, the knowledge, the green thumb, the deep old craft of making the ground give up a harvest, and that without her his field would have been a hopeful guess and with her it might actually be a harvest.
Which was exactly why, he thought grimly, it would be worth taking.
The braid tightened. Day by day. Maya nursed the sick woman, whose name was Doreen, and on the fourth day Doreen's fever broke and she sat up and asked for food, and something in Ruth's whole group eased at that, because Maya had saved one of theirs, and there is no faster braid than that,
the healer who saves your people.
The children played. Junior and Sofia became a unit, a small conspiracy of two, and Francis heard his son laugh three times in one day, the real laugh, the one that came before the joke was done, and it was worth more to him than the whole harvest, exactly as Ruth had said.
For six days, it almost felt like the beginning of something.
And Francis stayed grey through all of it, and watchful, because Earl's voice never let him rest.
The day it starts to feel safe is the day to be most afraid.
He kept the south watch doubled. He kept his own stores separate and counted.
He kept the knife close and the drills sharp and Junior's cellar-hiding practiced until the boy could vanish in twenty seconds flat.
And on the seventh day, in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight, they came.
Nathan saw them first from the north blind and his call came down clear and hard across the farm.
"Road. Vehicles. Three of them. And a flag. White flag, up front. Francis. Company."
Francis was in the yard in seconds, and the drill went off like clockwork, six months and one hard winter of drilling.
Junior to the cellar, gone, ghost. The children, both of them, Sofia too now, into the hidden dark below the house.
The weapons of Ruth's people, such as they were, out of sight.
Maya to the house window. Nathan on the rifle.
Ruth's people melting back, out of the open, leaving only a few faces showing, the middle-aged and unremarkable, the grey.
And Francis walked out to meet them, into the open, alone, the way he had before, because that was the price of the thing and he had decided to pay it.
Three vehicles came up the road this time, not one.
Old trucks, high on their tires, engines growling that obscene living growl, and they stopped in a loose line a good way out, and men got down from them.
A lot of men. Francis counted fast. Twelve, fifteen.