Chapter 6 #2
Nathan marked it, a patch of low ground below the south fence, a shallow fold where the slope dipped before it rose to the ridge. "There. Every time. That fold. It's the only cover between the ridge and our fence. They come up it because it hides them from the blind till the last stretch."
"So they've got a pattern," Francis said.
"They think it's their pattern. Their safe route. And a pattern is a thing you can use, because the person using it doesn't know you've seen it."
He tapped the map. "We don't wait at the fence for them to come to us. That's what they expect. That's what we've done every time, and they've timed it, they know exactly how long it takes us to react and reach the fence. So we do the opposite. We put people out past the fence, before dark,
down in that fold, hidden, waiting. And when the ghost comes up their safe little route in the dark, they walk right into us, and we take them soft, from behind, before they know anyone's there."
"Take them how," Cole said. First he'd spoken. "Alive, you said. That's harder than dead. A person you're trying to take alive can shoot you while you're being gentle."
"Alive," Francis said firmly. "This isn't Macklemore. This is one scared person alone who's spent all winter working up nerve, if Nathan's gut is right, or it's a Combine scout we need to question, if it's wrong. Either way, dead tells us nothing. We need to know what they know. So alive."
He looked at Cole. "You've done this. Taking a person in the dark. I can see it on you. You've done things I haven't."
Cole's dark eyes were flat.
"I've done things," he said. And that was all he said, and Francis did not push, but he understood he was looking at a man with a hard history, and that the hard history was, right now, an asset.
"Then you take point on the taking," Francis said.
"You and Nathan. You've got the hands for it. Nathan covers with the rifle from a spot where he can see the whole fold but not be seen. Cole, you're the hands, up close, from behind. I'm there too, but slow, because Maya'll have my head if I move fast,
and I'm no good in a scuffle with a cracked skull. I'm the eyes. I read it, I call it, I make sure we don't shoot a scared kid or get gutted by a Combine soldier. We take them soft, we take them quiet, we bring them in, and we find out who's really out there."
He looked between the two men. "No noise. That's the whole thing. A shot out here at night carries for miles and tells everyone on this plain exactly where we are. We do this in total silence or we don't do it at all."
They did it that night.
They went out before dark, the three of them, low and quiet, out past the south fence and down into the fold, and they settled into the cold grass in the last of the light, spread the way Francis had drawn it, Nathan back and high with the rifle, Cole and Francis down in the fold itself,
in the dark, in the ghost's own safe route, waiting.
And they waited.
It was hard. Francis's head throbbed with every heartbeat, and the cold got into his healing skull, and the waiting stretched long, and the stars came out overhead, more than the old world had ever shown,
blazing down cold and bright on three men lying in ambush in a fold of ground at the edge of everything.
Waiting for a ghost.
Hours passed. Francis kept his mind sharp against the pain by running the plan, the harvest, the fuel, the trucks, the great cold clockwork of the thing he was trying to build.
And by thinking of Junior, asleep back in the house with Sofia guarding him in her small fierce way, and Maya watching, and the whole braided fragile thing he was fighting to keep alive.
And then, in the deepest part of the night, the ghost came.
Francis felt it before he saw it. A wrongness in the dark. A shape where no shape should be, coming up the fold, low and smooth and patient, exactly along the route Nathan had marked, exactly as Francis had bet.
It came closer. A person. Alone. On foot. Ragged and careful, moving like a hunter, or like prey, the two looked the same in the dark. A long shape in its hands. The rifle. The one that had fired the single round on that first morning, that had watched them all winter.
It came closer, into the fold, into the trap, right between where Cole waited on one side and Francis on the other, and Francis's whole body coiled, and he waited for the exact moment, the moment when the ghost was past them, committed, unable to run,
and he lifted one hand to give Cole the signal to take them.
And in that half second, in the starlight, the ghost stopped.
Stopped dead. Went rigid. Some animal sense, some hunter's instinct honed over a hard winter, screaming that the fold was wrong, that the safe route was not safe, that there were shapes in the dark that had not been there before.
The ghost started to turn, rifle coming up, mouth opening to shout or to fire.
And Francis, out of time, dropped his raised hand, and Cole moved.
Cole moved like water going downhill.
Francis had never seen anything like it.
One second the young man was a shape in the dark grass and the next he was across the fold, low and silent and impossibly fast, and he hit the ghost from behind and below, not a tackle, something more precise than a tackle,
an arm hooking across the throat and a leg sweeping the legs and the whole body coming down controlled, the rifle pinned before it could rise, a hand clamping over the mouth before the shout could get out.
They went down together into the grass with barely a sound.
Francis was moving too, slow, his cracked head protesting every step, but moving, and he came down on the pinned rifle, both hands, wrenching it clear and away, and Nathan was there in a heartbeat from above, the muzzle of his own rifle a foot from the ghost's face, and it was done.
It was done in maybe four seconds. No shot. No shout. Barely a sound at all, out here in the dark, the exact grey silent thing Francis had wanted.
The ghost thrashed once, hard, under Cole's weight, a desperate animal heave, and then went still, because there was a rifle at its face and a knee in its back and no way out, and Francis heard, muffled under Cole's hand, a sound.
A high sound.
A young sound.
Francis's stomach dropped.
"Cole," he said, low. "Ease up on the mouth. Just enough. Let them talk. Slow."
Cole eased his hand back a fraction, ready to clamp down again at the first shout, and a voice came out of the dark, ragged and terrified and gasping, and it stopped Francis's heart in his chest.
"Please. Please don't. Please, I wasn't gonna, I wasn't gonna hurt anybody, please—"
It was a girl.
Not a woman. A girl. Fifteen, maybe. Sixteen at the outside.
The voice cracked high and young and raw with terror, and Francis knelt in the dark grass with a wrenched rifle in his hands and felt the whole thing turn over, felt the trap he'd so carefully built close on something he had not expected at all.
A child.
The ghost that had circled his home all winter, the patient professional scout, the thing that fired one round and vanished, the hunter in the grass, was a starving teenage girl alone on the plains.
"Okay," Francis said, and he heard his own voice change, gentle it, the way you'd talk to a spooked animal. "Okay. Nobody's going to hurt you. Nobody. Cole, let her up. Slow. Give her air. She's not going anywhere, we've got her rifle, just let her up and let her breathe."
Cole looked at Francis for one second, checking, and then he shifted his weight off her back and let her roll, and the girl came up onto her hands and scrambled backward until she hit the far slope of the fold and could go no further,
and she pressed herself against the ground and looked at the three of them with white terrified eyes in a thin dirty face.
She was rail thin. Even in the starlight Francis could see it, the hollow cheeks, the sharp bones, the ragged too-big coat hanging off a frame that had been living on nothing for a long time.
Her hair was hacked short and uneven, cut with a knife by her own hand, and there was a hardness in the terror, the particular hardness of someone very young who has had to become very old, very fast.
Francis knew that hardness. He'd watched it come into his own son's face over one terrible winter.
"My name's Francis," he said, staying low, staying still, keeping his voice even and quiet.
"This is my farm. The one you've been watching. All winter, I'm guessing. From the ridge."
He set the rifle down beside him, deliberately, in the girl's sight, taking it out of his own hands, a gesture, the same gesture Earl had made in a dark house a lifetime ago, the same one Nathan had made in a field.
"There. I'm not holding your gun. I'm not holding anything. We're not going to hurt you. We just want to talk. That's all. We've been trying to figure out who you were for a long time."
The girl said nothing. She was breathing hard, fast, an animal deciding whether to bolt, her eyes going from face to face, from Cole to Nathan to Francis, reading them, running the same fast math everyone ran now.
"You fired a shot," Francis said, keeping her talking, keeping her here. "First morning. Across the whole yard. Why? You had the range to hit somebody if you wanted. You didn't. Why fire at all?"
The girl swallowed. When she spoke it came out cracked and defiant and scared all at once.
"There were people coming up your road," she said.
"A whole line of them. Under a flag. I'd been watching you a long time and you didn't have that many people and then all these strangers were coming and I thought."
She stopped. Her jaw worked. "I thought maybe they were bad. Maybe they were gonna hurt you. And I fired to warn you. To make you take cover. So you'd see them coming and not walk into it."
Her eyes flashed, defiant through the fear.
"I was trying to help you, okay? That's all it ever was. I was trying to help."
Francis went very still.