Chapter 14 #2
No shotgun. The Combine guns still cracking, still firing, but no answering boom. No Mossberg.
"Dale," Francis breathed.
He should have kept running. Every lesson he had said keep running. Don't go back toward the guns. A grey man walks away from what he can't fix. Get to your boy.
He went back.
He couldn't not. He went back low and fast toward the fold where he'd left the old man, toward the Combine guns, everything in him screaming that this was wrong, this was exactly the thing that got men killed, and he went anyway,
because he could not leave Dale Crotinger the way he'd been forced to leave Ruth.
He found the old man in the fold.
Dale was down. On his back, the Mossberg still in his hands, and his chest was wrong, dark and wet and wrong, and Francis knew that wrongness, he'd knelt in it before, in a city street a lifetime ago, holding an old man named Earl.
"Dale," Francis said, sliding down beside him. "Dale. No. No."
"Told you." Dale's voice was a wet whisper. His eyes found Francis's face in the dark. "Told you to run. Stubborn. Just like her. Ruth never listened either."
"You're okay. I've got you, we'll—"
"Don't." The old man's hand found Francis's arm, gripped it with the last of a strength going fast.
"Don't lie. Not to a dying man. You don't lie. I can tell. You're like her that way."
A terrible wet sound that might have been a laugh.
"Chest's gone. I know what a chest that's gone feels like. I've made enough of them."
Francis knelt in the dark, the Combine guns still firing somewhere, and held the old man's arm, and did not lie.
"Okay," Francis said. "Okay. You're right. It's bad."
"It's the end," Dale said. "That's all right. That's all right, son. I've been waiting on it a year, and I got to do it for a reason instead of alone in a bunker for nothing. That's more than I hoped for."
His grip tightened. "Listen. No time. They'll be on us. You go. You go now. West. Don't argue. I'll cover you the last of the way, I've got a few left in the tube."
"Dale, I'm not leaving you to—"
"You are." Fierce, even dying, even now.
"You are leaving me, because I've got a shotgun and a minute of life and there's nothing you can do for me but waste both. You take what I've got and you make it matter. That's the only thing left I can give. Let me give it. Don't you take that from me too."
His eyes burned in the dark. "Burn his fuel, Francis. Burn it all. For Ruth. And when Sarah comes crawling to you off his sinking ship, and she will, she will, you use her cold and then you."
He stopped. His voice changed. "No. Don't. Don't do anything to her for me. That's Ruth talking. That's Ruth in me now. Just win. Just win and live and get to your boy. That's all Ruth ever wanted for anybody. To live and get to the ones you love."
The Combine guns were closer now. Men advancing, cautious, in the dark, toward the fold where the shotgun had gone quiet.
"Go," Dale said. "Now. I mean it. Go, and I'll give them the last of what I've got, and I'll do it happy, because I finally get to spend my life on something worth it. Go to your boy. Win the war. And when it's done."
His voice was fading. "When it's done, and you bury your dead, you put me next to Ruth. You hear me? Whatever's left of me. You get me to Ruth. Twenty years I stayed away like a coward. Put me next to her at the end. Let me be sorry, next to her, forever."
"I will," Francis said, and his throat was closing. "I swear it, Dale. I'll get you to Ruth. You'll be next to her. I swear."
"Good." The old man's hand loosened on Francis's arm. His eyes were going far away. But his jaw set, one last time, and his hands found the Mossberg. "Now go. And don't look back. Some things you don't look back at. Go."
Francis went.
He tore himself up and away and west into the dark, and behind him, the Mossberg roared back to life, boom, boom, boom, an old man on his back with his chest gone, firing the last of his shells into the advancing Combine, holding the line one final time,
buying Francis the dark and the distance and the life.
Francis ran, and he did not look back, because Dale had told him not to, and because looking back would break him, and behind him the shotgun fired, and fired, and fired.
And then it stopped.
And this time it did not start again.
And Francis ran on into the dark, alone, another dead man's voice joining the ones he carried, and did not look back, and did not stop, all the long way west,
until the lights and the guns were far behind him and the plain was empty and dark and silent around him and there was nothing left but the stars and his own hammering heart and the terrible cold weight of one more good man dead for him.
He ran until he couldn't. Then he walked. Then, in a dry wash miles from anywhere, he stopped, and folded down against the bank, and let it come.
He grieved for Dale in the dark. An old man he'd known nine days. Who'd loved Ruth and lost her and hated Sarah and come out of his bunker to die for a reason, for Francis, for Ruth, in a fold of ground with a shotgun in his hands.
Just like Earl. God, just like Earl. The good ones kept dying for him. The good ones kept walking toward the fire with him and dying in his place and leaving him alive to carry it.
Hold onto it, Earl's voice said, from a lifetime ago. Long as it costs you, you're still a man. It's when it stops costing you that you've turned into something else.
It cost him. It cost him everything. Dale cost him, and Ruth cost him, and the cold clear machine that had grown in him since the yard had not made the cost any smaller, only made him able to keep moving through it.
He was still a man. Earl's proof held. But God, the price of it. The price of it never stopped.
He grieved until it burned out, the way it always did, grief in the new world a luxury with a short clock.
And then he got up.
Because Dale had told him to. Because Dale had spent his life on Francis living, and to waste that living was to make the death mean nothing. Because there was a war to win and a fuel depot to burn and an army to rouse and a boy watching the corn grow tall out west.
Because he knew now how to burn the fuel. He'd scouted it. He had the plan, the real one, the complete one, the last piece Dale had died helping him carry home.
He got up in the dark wash, and he checked his kit, Earl's knife, Ruger's revolver with four rounds left now, Nell's map, the seeds Ruth had given him a lifetime ago. And he turned west.
Toward home. Toward his son. Toward the farm where Ruth was buried and the corn was coming tall and the whole family waited, not knowing he was alive, not knowing what he carried, not knowing the war was about to come to them, wounded and total and burning.
He had everything now. The knowledge of the fuel. The army half-raised across the plain, waiting for the signal fire. The whole plan of the War of the Harvest, built with a dead man in a barn, complete at last.
And two more names in the long list he carried. Earl. Cheryl. Ruth. And now Dale.
He would get Dale to Ruth. He'd sworn it. When the war was won and the dead were buried, he'd put the old gunfighter next to the old farmer, the two of them side by side at last, twenty years and a whole apocalypse and a coward's shame all ended, together in the ground, forgiven.
But first, the war.
Francis Deckham pulled his grey hood up, and squared his shoulders, and began the long walk home, west across the dark plain, toward the corn and the boy and the fire and the end of everything.
He walked all night, and into the dawn, and did not stop.
He was coming home at last.
And he was bringing the war with him.