Chapter 4 #2
All armed. Shotguns, mostly, he saw, the pump kind and the break-open kind, ugly close-range weapons, and rifles slung on some.
More guns than Francis had seen in one place since the wall in the city.
And a white flag on a pole, held by one of them, snapping in the wind.
And a man came around the front of the middle truck, and Francis knew, the instant he saw him, that this was Stanley Macklemore.
He was not what Francis expected. Francis had built a picture in his head, over the days, of the man Ruth described, and the picture had been hard and lean and cruel-faced.
Macklemore was soft.
He was a big man gone doughy, a heavy pale face, a receding hairline he'd shaved down close, small pale eyes behind wire glasses that he pushed up his nose with one thick finger.
He wore a canvas coat, clean, cleaner than anything Francis had seen in months, and good boots, and on his hip, in a nice holster, a black pistol, and he moved with the unhurried, faintly bored confidence of a man who has never once, in the whole new world, had to be afraid.
He looked like a middle manager. He looked like a man who'd run a warehouse. He looked, Francis thought, exactly like the kind of man who'd have made Diane in claims processing cry over a spreadsheet and gone home feeling nothing.
"Well," Macklemore said. His voice was mild.
Almost pleasant, like Pell's, but underneath it something flat and dead, a voice with no floor to it.
"Look at this. Pell wasn't lying. He said it was a nice one. Water, walls, good ground. And here's the man himself."
He looked Francis up and down, and his soft face did something, a small contemptuous twitch of the mouth.
"This? This is the man of the place? Christ. Look at you. Grey little nothing. You look like you sold insurance."
Francis kept his face empty. Kept his shoulders soft. Grey.
"I did," he said.
Macklemore laughed. A short, wet, unpleasant sound.
"Course you did," he said. "Course you did. And now you're playing farmer at the end of the world. That's rich. That's really something."
He pushed his glasses up. "I ran distribution. Regional. Four hundred employees, God rest their useless souls. You know what that means? It means I know how to look at an operation and see what it's worth in about ten seconds. And I've been looking at yours for about ten seconds."
His small eyes moved over the farm, the barn, the windmill, the fields.
"And it's worth a lot. Which means you're going to be a very good little producer for me, insurance man. A very good little account."
Francis said nothing. He let the insults land and slide off. Grey. Water off a shape the eye passes over. He was reading the men, the angles, the guns, counting, the whole time the soft man talked.
And then Ruth came out of the barn.
Francis felt his stomach drop. She was not supposed to. That was not the drill. But she came out anyway, the old farmer, square and unbowed, and she walked up beside Francis and looked at Stanley Macklemore with pure flat hatred on her weathered face.
Macklemore's soft face changed when he saw her. Something moved in the small pale eyes, recognition, and then a slow ugly pleasure.
"Well, well," he said softly. "Ruth. Ruth from the north place. The one that said no."
His mouth curved. "I wondered where you scattered off to. And here you are. Turned up like a bad penny, at another nice little farm, filling their heads with stories about mean old me, I'll bet."
He shook his head slowly, mock-sad. "You're like a disease, you know that? You just move from one healthy body to the next."
"Leave him alone," Ruth said. Low. Hard. "He's got nothing to do with me. Leave this place alone, Macklemore. Take your trucks and your paper and go."
Macklemore's pleasant expression dropped off his face like a mask hitting the floor.
"Fuck you," he said, flat and cold and sudden, "you savage woman."
The ugliness of it, the suddenness, landed in the yard like a slap.
And Ruth, God help her, Ruth put her hands on her hips and lifted her chin and looked the warlord dead in his soft face and said, "Just so you know. I've got my Glock inside that house. So you watch your mouth."
For one heartbeat, nothing.
Then Macklemore snapped his fingers.
He did it lazily, without even looking away from Ruth, a single soft snap of thick fingers, and behind him and to the sides his men moved as one, and Francis heard the sound he would hear in his nightmares for a long time, the sound of ten pump shotguns racking at once,
that hard mechanical chunk-chunk rippling across the yard, and then there were barrels up, a wall of them, Mossbergs and Remingtons and break-opens, a dozen black muzzles, and every single one of them was pointed at Ruth.
Ruth did not flinch. Francis would remember that. The old woman did not flinch. She stood there with her hands on her hips and ten shotguns on her and did not give the soft man the pleasure of a single step back.
"Just so you know," Macklemore said, and his voice had gone quiet and almost gentle again, which was worse, so much worse than the shouting, "I have got about ten shotguns on you right now. And every one of them will blow you to blood and bone matter, all over this man's clean yard,
if you ever insult me like that again. Bitch."
The yard held its breath.
Francis did not move. Could not move. There was nothing to do.
Ten barrels on Ruth and four defenders and children in a cellar, and any motion at all, any at all, ended in a slaughter.
He stood grey and still and let the terrible moment stretch, and he prayed, wordless, that the old woman would not say another word.
She didn't. She held Macklemore's eyes one more second, letting him see she wasn't afraid even if she should have been, and then, slowly, she took a step back. One step. Enough.
Macklemore held it another moment, savoring it, and then he snapped his fingers again and the barrels came down, and the yard breathed.
"Better," Macklemore said. He pushed his glasses up. And then he turned, dismissing Ruth entirely, and put his small pale eyes back on Francis, and smiled, and the smile was the worst thing yet, because it was friendly again.
"Now," he said. "Insurance man. Where were we. Ah. Compliance."
He clasped his soft hands together. "See, here's my problem. I look at you, and I see a grey little nothing who used to push paper, and I can't tell if you're going to be a good account or a problem account. And I don't like problem accounts. They cost me. So I like a little proof of compliance,
up front, when I meet a new producer. A little demonstration. Shows me where we stand."
He looked Francis up and down again.
"Push-ups," Macklemore said. "A hundred. Right there. Right now. In your nice clean yard, in front of everybody, in front of the old bitch here and all your little people watching from wherever they're hiding. You get down and you give me a hundred push-ups,
and I'll know you're a man who does what he's told. That's all I want. Just to know you'll do what you're told. A hundred. Go on."