Chapter 14
Francis scouted the depot alone.
Dale wanted to come, and Francis would not let him.
This was the grey work, the pure grey work, the thing Francis did better than anyone alive, and a second man was a second chance to be seen.
So he left Dale in the culvert and went the last miles east by himself, into the heart of Combine country, toward the warehouse and the tanks that were the throne.
It took him two nights to get close and a full day to read it.
He lay on high ground a half mile off, through the daylight, still as the ground itself, and he watched the depot the way Nell had watched the plain, the way Earl had taught him to watch a house before he went near it. He counted. He timed. He read.
And what he saw made the plan real.
The depot was exactly as Dale had said. A cluster of old tanks beside the warehouse, fenced, guarded.
And guarded, exactly as Dale had said, against theft.
Men posted to watch for a thief creeping in to siphon.
Men who watched the fence, the gate, the approaches, looking for someone trying to get in and take.
Not looking for someone trying to get in and destroy.
Francis watched the guard rotation all day.
Watched where the men looked and where they didn't.
Watched the gaps. Watched the moment near dusk when the shift changed and for a few minutes the attention slackened.
Watched, most of all, the tanks themselves, and thought about fire, about how a man might get close enough to set the whole thing burning and get away before it went up.
It could be done. He saw it, by the end of that day, the way he saw the loose thread in a stack of ten thousand pages. It could be done. Grey, careful, timed to the shift change, a small team, fire laid right, and out before the sky lit up.
He had the plan now. The real one. The complete one.
And he had one thing more he had not expected.
Because in the long day of watching, he saw the warehouse too, and the yard around it, and the comings and goings of the Combine's heart, and twice, in that long day, he saw Sarah.
She came out of the warehouse in the morning and stood in the yard a while, small and dark and still, and men moved around her the way they always did, and Francis watched her through Nell's cheap binoculars and understood, again, what Dale and Ruth had told him.
The stillness of her. The way the place turned around her.
And he saw Macklemore too. The soft shape, the wire glasses.
He came out to her in the yard, and Francis watched the wolf go to the woman, watched Macklemore's body language even at that distance, and saw it, plain as anything, the thing Dale had described.
Macklemore performing. The cold manager going soft and eager around the one thing he wasn't rational about.
Francis filed it all away. The crack in the wolf, confirmed with his own eyes.
But he did not reach for it. He held to the plan he and Dale had built. You don't recruit Sarah. You win, and she recruits herself. So he watched, and he learned, and he did not reach.
And then, on his way back out, grey and careful in the dark, working back west toward the culvert and Dale, Francis nearly died.
It was not the depot. It was not the warehouse. It was luck, bad luck, the thing Earl had always said would kill you no matter how careful you were, the man in the doorway you couldn't have known about.
A Combine patrol, out at night, off their usual route, crossed Francis's path in the dark.
He heard the engine first, and went flat, the old reflex, and the truck passed, and he thought he was clear.
But there were men on foot too, spread out ahead of the truck, quiet, a night patrol working the ground the truck couldn't, and Francis, moving grey in the dark, moving well, moving the way he always moved, came up on one of them before either of them knew it.
They nearly walked into each other in a dry wash.
For one frozen half second they stood a few feet apart in the dark, the Combine man and the grey man, both of them shocked, both of them reaching.
And Francis's hand went to the little hidden revolver, Ruger's revolver, the SP101, the thing for the one bad night when the grey ran out.
The grey had run out.
The Combine man opened his mouth to shout, and brought his own weapon up, and Francis drew the little stainless revolver and did the thing Ruth had drilled into him behind the barn a lifetime ago. Front sight. Finger. Press.
The .357 went off in the dark like the end of the world.
It was enormous, out of that short barrel, a great white flash and a roar that Francis felt in his teeth, and the recoil nearly tore the little gun out of his hand, and the Combine man went down, hit, and did not shout, and did not get up.
But the shot.
The shot carried. Of course it carried. A gunshot on the dark plain carried for miles, and there was a truck close and a patrol close, and Francis heard it all react at once, heard the engine rev, heard men shout, heard the whole night turn toward the sound of the shot.
He ran.
He ran grey, ran smart, ran the way Nathan and Maya had taught him, low, using the ground, breaking sightlines, but he ran, because there was no melting off now, no being nobody, the shot had made him somebody, the most wanted somebody on the plain, and behind him the Combine came.
The truck found his general direction and came bouncing across the ground, its lights, real lights, headlights, the first Francis had seen since the old world, sweeping the dark, hunting.
Men fanned out on foot. And Francis ran through it all, through a nightmare of light and engine and shouting, and he understood with cold clarity that this was the night, this was the bad night, and that all his greyness had come down to this, a footrace in the dark against a truck and a dozen guns.
He would not have made it. He knew it even as he ran. A man on foot does not outrun a truck across open ground, and the ground was opening up ahead, and the lights were finding him, and it was only a matter of time.
He would not have made it.
Except Dale had not stayed in the culvert.
Dale had heard the shot too. Miles off, but he'd heard it, the flat crack of a .357 in the night, and Dale Crotinger, who had spent a year waiting to die for a reason, had known exactly what it meant, and had come.
Francis heard the Mossberg before he understood what it was.
A different sound cut through the chaos, from off to his flank, in the dark.
The deep fast boom of a semi-automatic shotgun, one, two, three, four, fast as a man could pull a trigger, and the Combine truck's lights swung wildly and one of them shattered, and men were shouting in a new way now, a hurt way, a way that meant they were being hit.
Dale, in the dark, on the flank, with his Mossberg 930 and hundreds of shells, doing the one thing he was built for.
"Francis!" the old man roared through the dark. "This way! To me! I've got them, run to me, RUN!"
And Francis ran to the sound of the shotgun.
Dale was in a fold of ground, dug in, and the Mossberg was working, boom boom boom, eighty-one balls of lead per second going out into the dark toward the truck and the men, and it was not accurate, not at that range in that dark, but it did not have to be accurate, it had to be terrifying,
and it was, a wall of buckshot roaring out of the dark, and the Combine men, who had thought they were hunting one running man, suddenly found themselves under fire from a fortified position they couldn't see, and they went to ground, and the truck braked and swung.
"Down here," Dale barked, and Francis threw himself into the fold beside the old man. "You hit? You hit anywhere?"
"No. No, I'm clear. Dale, there's a truck and a dozen men—"
"I know exactly what there is," Dale said grimly, feeding shells into the Mossberg's tube without looking, fast, practiced, his eyes on the dark.
"And they know exactly where we are now, which is the problem. We can't stay. We hold them a minute, make them cautious, and then we break and run west, together, and we lose them in the dark. You got that little gun?"
"Five rounds. And seven more."
"Then save them. Save every one. This is my work now."
Dale's weathered face was lit by the muzzle flash, and it was, Francis saw, almost peaceful, the face of a man finally doing the thing he'd been waiting a year to do.
"You just run when I say run, and don't stop, and don't look back, and don't you dare die, because I did not come out of my bunker to watch Ruth's man die in a ditch. You hear me? You live. That's the job. I hold them, you live."
And the old man rose up out of the fold, and put the Mossberg to his shoulder, and fired into the dark, methodical now, controlled, boom, a pause, boom, making each round of buckshot count, keeping the Combine men pinned and cautious and afraid to advance,
one old gunfighter holding off a truck and a dozen men in the dark with a semi-automatic shotgun and hundreds of shells and twenty years of grief.
"Ready," Dale said, between shots. "On my word, we break west. Low and fast. I'll cover, then follow. Ready. Ready."
Francis got his feet under him, the little revolver in his hand, his heart slamming, the whole night a chaos of light and lead and shouting.
"Go!" Dale roared, and fired a long fast string, boom boom boom boom, emptying half the tube into the dark to make them all duck.
And Francis went.
Francis went low and fast into the dark, west, away from the lights, and behind him Dale's shotgun kept roaring, boom boom boom, buying him every foot of it.
He ran the way he'd been taught. Broke sightlines. Used the folds. Put ground and dark between himself and the truck. And behind him, the Mossberg kept working, steady, controlled, an old man holding a line so a younger one could live.
Then, a gap in the firing.
Reloading, Francis thought. Feeding the tube. Any second the shotgun would start again.
It didn't start again.
Francis ran another twenty feet before the silence registered, and then he stopped, and turned, and listened, and his stomach dropped through the ground.