Chapter 13
They planned in the barn until dawn.
Dale knew things. That was the gift of him. A whole year at the edge of Combine country, watching, and a mind that had once loved the woman at Macklemore's right hand.
He drew the warehouse for Francis in the dirt. Where it sat. How it was guarded. Where the trucks parked at night.
And the fuel.
"Here," Dale said, jabbing the dirt. "That's the thing you want. There's an old fuel depot, next to the warehouse. Tanks. That's where he keeps it. That's the whole kingdom, right there, in those tanks. Everything he's got runs out of them."
Francis felt the cold clean click of it. The thread. Right where he'd known it would be.
"Guarded?" Francis asked.
"Guarded. But not like you'd think. That's the thing about Macklemore." Dale sat back. "He guards it against theft. Against a man sneaking in to siphon a can. He's got men on it, day and night, watching for thieves."
"But not against destruction," Francis said slowly.
"Not against destruction." Dale's pale eyes gleamed in the lantern light.
"Because who'd destroy it? It's the most valuable thing on the plain. Nobody in their right mind burns fuel. Everybody wants to steal it, nobody wants to wreck it. So he's set up to stop thieves, not to stop a man who just wants to put a match to the whole thing and walk away."
Francis turned it over. Cold. Careful.
"That's the plan, then," he said. "Not steal it. Burn it. Take away the throne."
"That's the plan," Dale agreed. "You burn those tanks, and Stanley Macklemore's got maybe what's in the trucks and a few cans, and then he's done. A month, two months, and the trucks stop, and he's just a fat man in glasses in the middle of a field."
They talked all night. The trucks. The men. The numbers.
And Sarah.
"Tell me about her," Francis said, near dawn. "Not the vampire stuff. I believe you on that, and I believe Ruth. I mean the practical thing. What's she to Macklemore. What's she do there."
Dale was quiet a moment.
"She's his weakness," Dale said finally.
"That's what she is. To you, she's his weakness. She's the one thing that soft calculating bastard isn't rational about. He's a manager, Macklemore. Everything's a number to him, cost and benefit, cold. Except her. Around her, he's a fool. He performs for her. He wants her to think he's strong.
He'll do stupid things to impress her."
His jaw worked. "I know because I was him. I did every stupid thing there is for that woman. She makes strong men stupid. That's her whole gift. And Macklemore's got it bad."
"So if I wanted to make Macklemore do something stupid," Francis said slowly.
"You'd go through Sarah," Dale said. "You'd find a way to use her. To bend him through her. God knows how, from the outside, but that's the crack. That's the soft spot in the wolf. The vampire he doesn't know is draining him."
He looked at Francis. "But you be careful, whatever you do. Because a man who thinks he can use Sarah is a man Sarah's already using. That's how it always goes. You reach for her thinking you'll turn her to your purpose,
and you wake up a year later grey and drained and doing her bidding and you don't even know how it happened. Ask me how I know."
Francis filed all of it away.
Sarah. The crack in the wolf. To be approached with more care than the fuel, the trucks, anything.
They finished as the sky greyed toward morning.
"I'll come with you," Dale said. "Not to your farm, not yet. There's men out here who need the word same as the ones you've been reaching, and I know which farms are which better than you do. Let me help you raise them. Out here, the eastern farms, close to the warehouse. I know these people.
Some of them, anyway. The ones with steel left in them."
"You'd do that," Francis said. "Come out of your bunker. Move around. Risk it."
"I've been dead in that bunker a year," Dale said.
"Waiting to die for nothing. You've given me a reason to be alive. So yeah. I'll come out. I'll raise the eastern farms with you, the ones I can reach, and I'll help you build your army, and then when it's time, I'll be in a doorway somewhere with my Mossberg and hundreds of shells,
doing the one thing I'm still good for."
His voice was steady. "For Ruth. Everything now, it's for Ruth."
And so they went out together, the grey man and the gunfighter, into Combine country, to raise the eastern farms.
It went well, for a while.
Dale knew the ground and knew the people, and between his knowledge and Francis's grey craft, they moved farm to farm, quiet, careful, unseen, and they planted the word, and the word took root.
You are not alone. There are others. There's a man out west who said no. There's an old gunfighter here in the east who's had enough. When the time comes, there'll be a plan, and a way to be free.
And the frightened farms, one after another, heard it, and something kindled in them, coal by coal, farm by farm, all across the plain.
The army was being born. Slow. Invisible. But born.
And then, on the sixth night out with Dale, they got close to something they should not have gotten close to.
It was Dale's fault, and he knew it, and he'd say so after. He'd wanted to reach one more farm, a good one, people with steel, and it was closer to the warehouse than they should have gone, and they cut across a stretch of ground that Dale thought was empty and wasn't.
Because there was a Combine patrol out that night. And a Combine camp, small, temporary, that Dale hadn't known about, pitched at a crossroads near the farm they were trying to reach.
And there was Sarah.
They saw her before they saw the danger, which was the strange thing. Francis and Dale went flat in a shelter belt at the edge of a field, and below them, at the crossroads, was a Combine camp, a few men, a truck, a fire.
And a woman by the fire.
Small. Dark hair, long, catching the firelight, always perfect, exactly as Ruth had said, exactly as Dale had said. Slight. Still. The men moving around her, doing for her, while she did nothing, sat by the fire like a queen, like a still center the whole small camp turned on.
Beside Francis, in the dark, Dale went rigid.
"Sarah," Dale breathed. Barely a sound. But Francis heard the twenty years in it. The whole broken history. "That's her. That's Sarah. God. She's right there."
"Don't move," Francis breathed back. "Don't you move, Dale. We're grey. We're nothing. We watch and we melt off. Do not move."
And Dale did not move. But Francis could feel the old man trembling beside him, the whole force of twenty years fighting to keep him still, and Francis understood that this was the most dangerous moment of the whole journey, an old man a hundred feet from the woman who'd destroyed his life,
and Francis put a hand on Dale's arm, hard, and held him there in the dark.
They watched.
And what they watched, Francis would not soon forget.
Because there was trouble at the fire.
One of the Combine men, a big one, was arguing. Francis couldn't hear all of it, only fragments carried on the night wind. But he could read the shape. The big man was angry. Angry at Sarah, it seemed, or about her. Gesturing. His voice rising.
"Jenner," Dale breathed, recognizing him. "That's Jenner. One of Macklemore's. A mean one. He never liked Sarah. Never trusted her. Thought she had her hooks in Stanley. He was right. But nobody says it. You don't say it. You don't cross Sarah."
The big man, Jenner, was crossing Sarah.
Francis watched it build. Watched Jenner get louder, angrier, watched him point at the woman by the fire, watched the other men go still and careful and step back the way men step back from a thing about to happen.
And Sarah sat by the fire and watched Jenner rage, and did nothing, said nothing, still as a stone.
And then, unhurried, she rose.
She rose from the fire, small and slight and calm, and she reached down beside her where something had been leaning against a log, out of the firelight, and she picked it up.
It was a shotgun. A short one. Two barrels, side by side, stubby, the kind Francis would learn was called a coach gun. An old, ugly, brutal, close-range thing.
She held it easy. Like she knew it.
Jenner stopped raging. Francis watched him stop, watched him see the coach gun come up in the small woman's hands, watched a flicker of contempt cross his big face, the contempt of a big man who could not believe the little woman would dare.
"You don't have the—" Jenner started.
Sarah unloaded both barrels into him.
It happened in an instant, no hesitation, no warning past the raising of the gun, and the coach gun boomed, both barrels at once, a huge double roar at close range, and Jenner was picked up off his feet and thrown backward into the dark, his chest torn open, dead before he hit the ground,
gone in a single terrible instant.
The camp froze. The men stood stock still, the firelight on their faces, staring.
And Sarah stood by the fire with the smoking coach gun broken open now, calmly, ejecting the two spent shells, and calmly reaching into a pocket for two more, and calmly reloading, and the whole time her face, what Francis could see of it in the firelight, did not change at all.
She reloaded the coach gun, snapped it shut, and looked around at the frozen men.
And she said something. Quiet. Francis couldn't hear the words. But he could read the effect, because the men dropped their eyes, every one of them, and went back to their business fast, and nobody said one word about the dead man Jenner cooling in the dark at the edge of the firelight.
Nobody crossed Sarah. Jenner had crossed Sarah. And now Jenner was dead, both barrels, and the lesson was made, and the camp went on as if nothing had happened.
Beside Francis, in the shelter belt, Dale had gone absolutely still.
"That's her," Dale breathed, and his voice was strange, hollow, awful.