Chapter 12 #3
I chose the vampire over the best woman I ever knew. And Sarah drained me for years and left me a husk and moved on to stronger prey the second she found it, exactly like Ruth said she would, and by then Ruth was long gone and it was too late."
"Sarah's with the Combine now," Francis said. "Isn't she. She's with Macklemore."
Dale's face twisted.
"Of course she is," he spat. "Where else would she be? He's the strongest man on the plain. She found him the way she finds all of them. She's out there right now, at his right hand, in that warehouse, bleeding him the way she bled me, only he doesn't know it yet, he thinks she's his,
he thinks she loves him, the poor soft bastard, and someday she'll have drained him too and moved on and he'll never even know what happened to him."
He looked at Francis with sudden sharp focus.
"That's how you found me, isn't it. You're not just a man in my barn. Ruth told you about Sarah, and Sarah's with Macklemore, and you came looking. You've got a plan. You're going to war with the Combine."
And Francis Deckham looked at the old man, the fortified survivor, the last of a line, the man who had loved Ruth and lost her and hated Sarah with a hatred twenty years deep, and he made his decision,
and he said the thing out loud that he had been building toward across a hundred miles of grey country.
"Yes," Francis said. "I am. I'm going to war with Stanley Macklemore. He murdered Ruth in my yard and spat on her body, and he's had his boot on this whole plain for a year, and I'm going to take him apart. I've got a farm full of people who'll fight. I've got a plan to hit his fuel,
which is the one thing everything he's got hangs on. And I'm out here right now, grey, unseen, weaving all the frightened alone farms of this plain into an army, because he's kept everyone isolated and I'm the thread connecting them back together."
He held the old man's eyes. "It's a war for the harvest, Dale. That's what it comes down to. Whoever holds the harvest holds the plain. He means to take everyone's. I mean to stop him. I'm calling it what it is. The War of the Harvest.
And I came looking for you because Ruth told me you were the best she ever knew with a gun, and because a man who hates Sarah and Macklemore as much as you do is a man I want on my side when it comes."
Dale Crotinger stood in his barn door and looked at Francis for a long moment.
And then something changed in the old man's face.
The grief was still there, would always be there now, the black weight of Ruth.
But under it, something else kindled. Something Francis recognized, because he'd felt it himself on the ridge four days ago, watching Macklemore spit.
Purpose. Cold, terrible purpose. The grief turning into fuel.
"You want me on your side," Dale said slowly.
"I do."
Dale straightened up off the door frame.
He hefted the shotgun in his hands, and now Francis looked at it properly for the first time, and saw that it was not the pump gun he'd half assumed.
It was something better. Something serious.
A tactical shotgun, matte black, an extended magazine tube running most of the length of the barrel, a gun set up for one purpose.
"You know what this is?" Dale said.
"A shotgun. A good one. That's about the limit of what I know."
"Mossberg 930," Dale said. "Semi-automatic. Not a pump. You don't work the action, you just pull the trigger, and it fires again, and again, fast as you can pull it. Eight in the tube, one in the chamber. Nine rounds of buckshot, and each round of buckshot's nine pellets,
so that's eighty-one balls of lead I can put out downrange fast as my finger moves."
His pale eyes had gone hard and cold and certain.
"I set this gun up years ago for exactly one thing. For the day a lot of men came for me at once. I've got shells. I hoarded them, all this last year, traded for them, saved them. I've got hundreds of rounds of buckshot for this gun, because I knew, someday, they'd come,
and I meant to make them pay in a way they'd never forget."
He looked at Francis.
"You put me in the right spot," Dale said, "in a doorway, in a chokepoint, somewhere they have to funnel to me, and I can take on a lot of them. A whole lot of them. This gun, in a tight spot, with me behind it and hundreds of shells stacked up,
I can hold a door against numbers you wouldn't believe. That's what it's for. That's what I built it for. I always figured I'd die behind it someday, alone, taking as many of them with me as I could."
His jaw set. "But I'd rather not die alone. I'd rather die, if I've got to die, behind this gun, standing with people, for a reason worth it. For Ruth. Against the man who killed her and the vampire at his side."
Francis felt something settle in him. Another strand. The best strand yet, maybe. An old gunfighter with a semi-automatic shotgun and hundreds of shells and a twenty-year hatred and nothing left to lose.
"Then you'll come," Francis said.
"I'll come," Dale said. "God, yes, I'll come. I've been sitting in this bunker for a year waiting to die for nothing. You just gave me something to die for instead. Or better yet."
His weathered face did something that might once have been a smile, long ago, before Sarah, before all of it.
"Better yet, something to live for. To win. To see that soft bastard's kingdom come apart and Sarah with it."
He looked at Francis. "I know things too, you understand. About the Combine. About the warehouse. I've lived out here at the edge of it for a year, watching, same as your ridge girl watched from the west. And I know Sarah. I know how she thinks, how she works, what she wants.
If you're going to pull the thread that's Sarah, you're going to need somebody who knows exactly what she is. That's me. I'm the man who loved her and lost everything to her. There's nobody alive who understands that vampire better than I do."
Francis looked at the old man, and understood that he had just found something far more valuable than a gun.
He'd found a way into Sarah. A man who knew her mind. A crack in the Combine that ran to its very heart.
"Then let's talk," Francis said, and came out of the shadows at last, into the lantern light, hands open, one survivor to another.
"Let's talk all of it. The warehouse. The fuel. Sarah. Macklemore. Everything you know. Because I've got an army to raise and a war to win, and you, Dale Crotinger, just became the most important man on this whole plain. For Ruth. We're going to win this thing for Ruth.
And we're going to start right now."
And the old man lowered his shotgun the rest of the way, and set the lantern down between them, and the two of them sat down in the barn in the dark at the edge of the world, the grey man and the gunfighter, the widower of a marriage and the witness of a murder, and they began, together,
to plan the War of the Harvest.