Chapter 5 #2
Knows about running out. Knows you don't burn the farmers, you tax them, because you're playing a long game to a future where the trucks might not run and you need the farms producing anyway.
Francis lay in the dark with his split skull and understood his enemy the way he understood himself, and for the first time since the yard, he felt something other than pain.
He felt the cold clear pleasure of a claims man who has found the one loose thread that unravels the whole fraud.
You don't beat Stanley Macklemore with more guns. You'll never have more guns. You beat him by pulling the one thread everything hangs on. You take away the thing that makes him a king. You take away the engines. You take away the fuel.
It was not a plan. Not yet. It was a direction. A place to aim. But it was the first time since Macklemore's trucks had rolled up the road that Francis had felt like there was a place to aim at all, and it was enough, for now, to hold onto in the dark.
On the fourth or fifth day, Francis was well enough to sit up against the wall, though the world still tilted if he moved too fast, and Nathan came and sat with him, and the two men talked low while Junior slept.
"There's a thing you need to know," Nathan said. "While you were down. The south." He kept his voice under the sleeping house. "It came back. Twice."
Francis went still.
"The scout?"
"The scout," Nathan said grimly. "Same signature. Both nights while you were flat. Trips the wire or shows itself just at the edge of sight, holds long enough for us to react, then melts off. Cole's taken to sitting the south blind with me. Between us we've clocked it careful now. And Francis."
He paused. "It's not the Combine."
"You're sure."
"I'm sure. Because the second night, I got a good look, best I've had. It's one person. Alone. On foot. No truck, no engine, nothing. Moves like a hunter, patient as sin, but it's alone, and it's ragged, and it's careful the way scared people are careful, not the way soldiers are careful."
Nathan shook his head. "The Combine's got trucks and numbers. They come loud, up the road, with a clipboard or with fifteen guns. They don't creep around in the grass in the dark alone on foot. Whatever this is, it's something else. Somebody else.
And they've been watching us longer and closer than Macklemore ever did."
Francis frowned into the dim room, his split head aching with the effort of thought.
Two forces. He'd known it from the first morning, the shot from the south before the truck from the north.
But he'd let the Combine, loud and terrible and immediate, crowd the other one out of his mind.
And now, lying here broken, with Macklemore's threat hanging over the fall, there was still this.
Still the patient thing in the grass. Still the watcher who never showed a face and never came up the road and never wanted anything Francis could name.
"What do they want," Francis said. "That's the thing I can't get. Macklemore wants the harvest, simple, he told us to our faces. But this one. Watches for months. Fires one round. Trips wires. Shows itself and vanishes. Never takes anything, never demands anything, never announces.
What does a person like that want?"
"I don't know," Nathan said. "But I'll tell you what my gut says, and my gut's kept me alive."
He leaned in. "My gut says that's a person who's alone, and scared, and desperate, and doesn't know if we're safe or not, same as we don't know about them.
My gut says that's somebody who's been out there watching us all winter trying to work up the nerve to do the one thing that's hardest of all now. Walk up to strangers and ask to be let in. My gut says the shot and the wires aren't threats. They're a person too scared to come to the door,
poking at us, testing us, seeing whether we're the kind of people who'd shoot a stranger or the kind who wouldn't."
Nathan sat back. "Or my gut's dead wrong and it's a Combine scout after all, or something worse, and it's counting our defenses so they can gut us in the fall. And the hell of it is I can't tell which. Nobody can, from here. Not until we do something about it."
"What do you want to do about it?"
Nathan was quiet a moment.
"I want to catch them," he said. "Not kill them. Catch them. Next time they come and play their little game in the grass, I want to be already out there, in the dark, waiting where they don't expect, and I want to take them alive and bring them in and find out what in God's name they want.
Because I'm tired of a ghost circling the place I sleep. A known enemy I can plan for. A ghost just eats at you."
He looked at Francis. "But it's a risk, and it's a risk to me, and it's your farm and your call, and I wasn't going to do it while you were flat on your back unable to weigh in. So I'm asking. When you're on your feet. Do we hunt the hunter?"
And Francis, sitting against the wall with his cracked skull and his cold new understanding of Stanley Macklemore's one weakness, looked at the loyal weathered man who had watched his back since a muddy ditch, and he thought about the patient thing in the southern grass, and he made a decision.
"Yeah," he said. "We hunt the hunter. But my way. Grey. We don't go out swinging in the dark and get you killed. We set it up so they come to us, on ground we choose, in a moment we make, and we take them soft, no shooting, no noise. We turn their own game around on them.
They've been reading us all winter. Time we read them."
He grimaced, shifting his aching head against the wall.
"Give me a few more days to stand up straight. Then we do it. Together. And we find out who's really out there in that grass. Because I've got a bad feeling that before this fall is over, we're going to need to know exactly who's on this plain and exactly which side they're on. All of them.
Every last soul out here. Because Macklemore's coming for the harvest, and four of us and twelve of Ruth's can't stop three trucks and fifteen guns, and if there's one more player out there in the dark, I need to know if they're one more enemy."
He looked at Nathan, and the cold clear thing was in his eyes now, under the pain, the thing that had been born in the yard when the shotgun stock came down.
"Or one more ally," Francis said. "Because we are going to need every ally on this plain we can find. Every single one. Alone is death, Nathan. And there is no version of this fall where sixteen of us beat Stanley Macklemore alone."