Chapter 11
It came before the corn was tall.
That was the thing none of them were ready for. Francis had said watch the corn, come home when it's tall, and they had all built their nerves around that, around a fall harvest, around months of warning.
But Stanley Macklemore did not wait for the harvest.
He came in the green of early summer, when the corn was barely waist high, weeks before anyone thought the war would start.
He came because a soft patient man had decided that the farm with the old woman who'd said no twice, the farm where an insurance man had refused to kneel, that farm needed a lesson before the other farms got ideas.
He came to make an example.
Nathan saw the dust first.
He was in the north blind at midday when it rose on the horizon, a long brown smear against the sky, and his gut knew before his eyes confirmed it. Not one truck. Not three.
Dust like that meant many.
"Trucks," Nathan roared down across the farm. "Trucks, a lot of them, coming fast up the road. This is it. This is it. Everybody to positions. Now. Now."
The farm exploded into the drill.
They'd practiced it a hundred times, and the practice held.
Children to the cellar, Junior and Sofia and the little ones, vanishing into the dark under the house.
The sick and the old to the safest walls.
Weapons up. The fighters to their spots, the blinds and the barn and the fence line, the places Francis and Nathan had chosen over a winter of planning.
But there was a problem, and Nathan knew it the instant he counted the dust.
The plan had been built for three trucks. For fifteen guns. For the harvest, in the fall, with Francis home and the army raised and the fuel strike ready.
Not this. Not five trucks. Not thirty guns. Not now, with Francis a hundred miles east, with the army unraised, with twenty souls and half of them children and old folks against the full weight of the Combine come to make a lesson.
They were not ready. They were months from ready.
And the trucks were coming up the road.
"Hold," Nathan called, steady as he could make it, the way he'd seen Francis do it. "Hold your positions. Let them come to us. This is a good ground. One road in. We make them pay for every foot."
But even as he said it, he saw the trucks split.
They were not all coming up the road. Three came up the road, straight at the barricade of dead vehicles they'd built across it.
But two peeled off, one north and one south, bouncing across the open ground, flanking, and Nathan understood with a cold drop in his gut that Macklemore had planned this.
Had scouted it. Knew the farm had one road and had brought enough trucks to go around the road entirely.
The one road that was supposed to be their strength was being flanked on both sides.
"South," Nathan roared. "Truck coming south. Cole, the south. Ruger, with him. North truck's mine."
The battle started all at once, everywhere.
The three trucks at the road stopped short of the barricade, and men poured out of them, a lot of men, more than the farm had ever seen, and they came forward using the dead cars for cover, and the first shots cracked out across the summer afternoon.
Nathan fired from the north blind, careful, aimed, making every round count, and a man dropped, and another went to ground, but there were so many, too many, and they kept coming.
The north truck bounced across the open field toward the fence, men in the bed firing wild, and Nathan swung to it, and put two rounds into the windshield, and the truck swerved but did not stop, and slammed through the fence and into the yard,
and men were spilling out of it into the heart of the farm.
Into the heart of it.
That was the thing they could not allow, and it was happening anyway.
Cole and Ruger fought the south truck at the fence line.
Cole with his rifle, cold and fast, dropping a man off the truck bed.
Ruger with the ancient Colt, thumbing the hammer, firing, the big .
45 booming, and a man folded, and Ruger thumbed and fired again, unhurried even now, an old gunfighter doing the one thing he'd always known how to do.
But the south truck's men got past them, some of them, using the outbuildings for cover, working toward the house.
Everywhere, the Combine was getting in.
Maya was in the house with the children in the cellar and the sick against the walls, and she had the pepper spray in one hand and Nathan's spare pistol in the other, the one he'd left her,
and she crouched at the window and watched men in Combine coats come across the yard toward the house and understood that the plan had failed, that they were overwhelmed, that the enemy was inside the wire.
And in the middle of it, out in the yard, stood Ruth.
She had not gone to a safe wall. She had come out. Of course she had come out. The old woman with the Glock, unhidden now, worn openly on her hip for weeks, waiting for exactly this, for a man exactly like Stanley Macklemore.
And Stanley Macklemore came.
He came in the second wave, out of the third truck at the road, once his men had drawn the fire and gotten in close.
He came the way a manager comes onto a floor once the dangerous work is done, soft and unhurried, wire glasses catching the summer sun, and he walked into the yard of the farm he'd come to make an example of, and he saw the old woman standing there waiting for him.
"Ruth," Macklemore said. Even now, mild, pleasant, that voice with no floor to it.
"I told your insurance man what I'd do if I heard one more word out of you. And I heard a great many words, apparently. Word came to me that this farm's been asking questions. Talking to other farms. Getting ideas."
He shook his soft head. "That's a shame. I did like this place. Water and everything. But ideas spread, Ruth. And you're the disease, like I said. So I came to burn out the infection before it spreads."
"You came yourself," Ruth said. Her hand rested on the Glock at her hip. "That's your mistake, Stanley. You should have sent your men and stayed in your warehouse counting your fuel. But you came yourself. To gloat. And now you're standing in my yard."
Macklemore smiled.
"Your yard," he said. "That's cute." And his soft hand moved, unhurried, to his hip, to the holster there, and drew.
It was a pistol. Not a shotgun, not this time. A handgun, black, a fine one, an old European make, the kind of gun a man who fancied himself above his soldiers would carry. A CZ. Francis would have known it. Ruth only knew it was a gun and it was coming up.
And Ruth was fast, faster than a woman her age had any right to be, a summer of a hundred rounds a week thirty years gone but never forgotten, and her hand went to the Glock and the Glock came up.
But Macklemore was already aimed.
The CZ barked, a flat hard crack, and Ruth felt it hit her, low, in the hip, a sledgehammer of impact that spun her half around and dropped her leg out from under her, and she went down onto the hard ground of the yard with fire tearing through her hip and her leg gone useless beneath her.
"Ruth," Maya screamed from the house window.
But Ruth did not scream. Ruth did not go down all the way.
Ruth went down onto one knee, her shot leg splayed and useless, blood already spreading dark across her hip, and she brought the Glock up anyway, both hands, high and tight, the way Dale Crotinger had taught her a lifetime ago behind his place,
a hundred rounds a week until she could put them where she wanted without thinking.
She put them where she wanted.
The first round took the nearest Combine man in the chest, a man rushing in on Macklemore's flank, and the .40 caliber hollow point did exactly what Ruth had promised Francis it would do, it opened up wide and tore through him and dropped him dead in the dirt.
The second round took another, a man swinging his shotgun toward the wounded old woman, and it caught him in the throat and he went down gurgling and did not get up.
Macklemore was moving, backpedaling, surprised, his soft face for once not pleasant, firing the CZ wild as he retreated behind his men, and his shots went over Ruth's head because she was low, down on one knee, small, and hard to hit.
The third round.
Ruth swung the Glock to a third man, one coming around the truck with a rifle, and she pressed the trigger clean and the .40 barked and the round took him high in the chest and spun him down into the dirt beside the others.
Three men. Three rounds. Three dead Combine soldiers in the space of a few seconds, dropped by a sixty-year-old woman kneeling in her own blood in the yard, and for one moment, one shining terrible moment, the whole Combine advance faltered, men diving for cover,
shocked that the old woman on the ground was killing them.
Ruth swung the Glock, looking for Macklemore, looking for the soft face behind the wire glasses, wanting more than anything in the world to put the fourth round through it, to keep the promise she'd made, to find out for certain what the .40 caliber would do to Stanley Macklemore's face.
She found him. Behind his men, backpedaling, exposed for just a second in the gap between two soldiers.
She lined the front sight on his soft pale face.
She pressed the trigger.
And the slide locked back.
Click.
Empty.
Thirteen rounds. She'd loaded thirteen. She'd fired more than she'd counted in the chaos, three at the men and others she didn't even remember, wild in the first shock of being shot, and now the magazine was empty and the slide was locked back and the gun was a dead weight in her hands,
and Stanley Macklemore's face was in her sights, right there, and there was nothing behind the trigger but a click.
The worst sound in the world. Click. Empty. At the exact moment that mattered most.
Macklemore heard it too.
He heard the click, and he saw the slide locked back, and he saw the old woman kneeling in her own blood with an empty gun, and his soft face changed, the shock draining out of it, the pleasant mask sliding back on, and something worse underneath it now, something cold and patient and cruel.
"Empty," Macklemore said softly.