Chapter 15 #3
A grey fight. He'd built the whole defense around indirection, around the corn, around chaos as cover, around making the Combine funnel and pay for every foot.
The tripwires rang. The firing positions cracked.
Nathan and Cole and Ruger fought from cover, careful, making rounds count, and the corn, tall enough now, tall enough at last, gave the defenders places to move unseen, to appear and vanish, to fight grey against the Combine's numbers.
It was working. That was the thing. It was working better than the first time.
The fortifications held, the corn hid them, the Combine paid for every yard in a way they hadn't before.
Francis moved through his own fields like the ghost he was, appearing to fire, vanishing, leading Combine men into the tall corn where Cole waited, into chokepoints where Ruger's Colt boomed, and the attack, for a while, stalled.
For a while, Francis let himself believe they might hold.
And then it went wrong.
It went wrong the way it always went wrong, the way Earl had always said. Not through a failure of the plan. Through luck. Through the thing you couldn't have known.
Because Macklemore had learned, the first time, that the farm had a cellar.
That the children hid in the cellar. And this time, the soft patient man had planned for it.
This time, a small team of Combine men, while the main force pressed the defense, worked around, through the chaos, toward the house, toward the cellar, toward the one thing that would break Francis Deckham completely.
Francis didn't see it. He was in the corn, fighting, grey, doing the thing he did, and he didn't see the small team reach the house, didn't see them find the cellar, didn't see, until it was too late, until he heard the sound that stopped his heart in his chest.
Sofia, screaming. From the house. From the cellar.
And then Maya's voice, screaming too, screaming a name, screaming JUNIOR.
Francis came out of the corn like something the world had ended for.
He ran for the house, out of cover, out of grey, everything Earl had taught him gone in an instant, because his son's name was being screamed and there was nothing left in him but the father.
He reached the house. Reached the cellar. And Maya was there, and Sofia, sobbing, and the cellar door was open, and Francis looked down into the dark and the dark was empty of the one thing that mattered.
Junior was gone.
"They took him," Maya sobbed, blood on her, a gash on her head where she'd fought them and lost. "Francis, they took him, I couldn't stop them, there were too many, they came for the cellar and I fought them but they took him, they took Junior—"
The world went white.
Francis turned, and he saw them, a small knot of Combine men, retreating through the chaos toward a truck, and in the middle of them, carried, thrashing, screaming, small, his son.
"DAD!" Junior screamed. "DAD! DAD!"
And Francis Deckham ran.
He ran out into the open, into the battle, into everything, out of all his greyness and all his caution and all of Earl's careful lessons, because they had his son, because the promise, the concrete floor, keep him alive at all costs,
because there was nothing left in the world but the small screaming shape being carried toward a truck.
He drew the little revolver. Four rounds.
He ran and he fired, careful even in the terror, not toward the men holding Junior, never toward them, toward the ones on the flank, dropping one, and he ran, and men turned toward him, the grey man revealed at last, the father, out in the open, coming for his son.
And the guns came up.
Francis felt the round hit him before he heard it.
It hit his leg, his calf, a small hard punch, not the sledgehammer of a shotgun or the tearing of Macklemore's CZ, a small round, a light one, but it went straight through the meat of his calf and his leg buckled and dropped him, and Francis went down in the open ground of his own farm,
in the middle of the battle, with his son being carried away toward a truck.
He got up. He tried to get up. His leg would not hold.
The round had gone clean through the calf, through the muscle, and the leg folded under him every time he put weight on it, and he was down, in the dirt, in the open, and the truck was moving now, the men piling into it with his screaming son, and Francis crawled, crawled toward it,
dragging the ruined leg, firing his last rounds uselessly, screaming his son's name.
"JUNIOR! JUNIOR!"
"DAD!" The small voice, thin, terrified, receding. "DAD, HELP! DAD!"
And the truck pulled away.
It pulled away across the broken fields, growing smaller, the engine growling, and in the back of it, held by Combine men, a small thrashing screaming shape, his son, his boy, the whole reason for everything, being carried east, toward the wolf, toward the warehouse, toward Stanley Macklemore.
Francis lay in the dirt of his farm with a bullet through his leg and watched the truck take his son away and could not stand, could not run, could not do the one thing, the only thing, that had ever mattered.
Around him the battle was ending. The Combine, having what they'd come for, having taken the one thing that would break Francis Deckham, pulled back, mounted their trucks, and withdrew east across the plain, leaving the farm bloodied and standing and hollow, and taking with them,
in the back of a growling truck, an eight-year-old boy screaming for his father.
"No," Francis said, in the dirt, watching the trucks shrink toward the horizon. "No. No. No."
Maya was there, and Nathan, hands on him, Maya's fingers finding the wound in his leg, and voices, far away, and Francis did not hear them, could not hear them, could hear nothing but the fading echo of his son's voice screaming Dad,
and could see nothing but the truck growing smaller and smaller against the eastern sky, carrying Junior away toward the warehouse and the wolf and the woman who drained men dry.
They'd taken his son.
Macklemore had his son.
The one thing. The only thing. The promise to a dying woman on a concrete floor.
Keep him alive, at all costs. And Francis had built an army and scouted the fuel and planned the whole War of the Harvest, all of it, everything, and none of it, none of it mattered now, because the wolf had reached into the cellar and taken the boy, and was carrying him east,
and Francis lay in the dirt with a hole through his leg and could not stand.
"Francis." Maya's voice, cutting through, hard, the ER voice, the voice that made you listen.
"Francis, look at me. The bullet went clean through. It's your calf, it missed the bone, it missed the artery, you're not going to bleed out, you hear me? It's a twenty-two, a little round, it went straight through the muscle. You'll walk again. You'll walk soon. Look at me.
It's not a killing wound. Do you hear me?"
Francis heard her from very far away.
He looked down the eastern plain, where the trucks had gone, where the dust was already settling, where his son was being carried toward the warehouse, and something happened in Francis Deckham then that had never happened before, not in the stairwell, not on the rooftops, not on the concrete floor,
not on the ridge watching Ruth die.
The cold clear thing that had been growing in him all this time, since the yard, since the shotgun stock, since Ruth's skull came open, since Dale died in the dark, the cold clear terrible thing opened all the way, and this time it did not stop.
It filled him up entirely, and it burned out everything else, all the caution, all the grey, all the careful arithmetic, and left only one thing, one single purpose, hard and total and absolute.
Get the boy.
Whatever it takes. At all costs. There was never a choice. There was only ever the boy.
"Francis," Maya said, gripping his face now, forcing him to look at her. "Talk to me. Say something. Are you with me?"
And Francis Deckham looked up at her, and his face was a thing she had never seen, a thing that frightened her, cold and still and absolutely certain, past grief, past fear, past everything.
"He has my son," Francis said. His voice was very quiet. Very level. The quietest, most terrible thing she had ever heard. "Stanley Macklemore has my son. And he's taking him to the warehouse."
"Francis—"
"Bind my leg," Francis said. "Right now. Stop the bleeding and wrap it tight so I can stand on it. Because I'm going to get up. And I'm going to go east. And I'm going to burn his whole world to the ground and everyone in it, and I'm going to take my son back, or I'm going to die doing it."
He looked at her, and past her, down the eastern plain, toward the wolf and the warehouse and the boy.
"The War of the Harvest just changed. It's not about the harvest anymore. It's not about the plain, or the farms, or the fuel, or any of it. It's about my son. And there is nothing on this earth, nothing, that is going to stop me from getting him back."
He got up.
He got up on the ruined leg, with Maya's hands trying to hold him down and failing, and he stood, swaying, blood running down his calf into the dirt, and he looked east, toward where the trucks had gone,
toward the warehouse where a soft patient wolf now held the one thing in all the world that Francis Deckham loved.
And somewhere out there, east, a truck carried a screaming boy toward a woman who felt nothing and a man who spat on the dead, and the whole long war, the fuel and the fire and the rising and the army, all of it, narrowed down now to one single thread.
The boy.
Francis took one step east, on the ruined leg, and then another, and did not fall.
And behind him, his people gathered themselves, bloodied and broken and stunned, and understood that whatever came next was going to be more terrible than anything that had come before, because the grey man who had always been so careful, so measured, so grey,
had just had the one thing taken that turned careful men into something else entirely.
Something with nothing left to lose.
Something coming east.
To be continued...