Chapter 3 #3
Outside, from somewhere down the mountain, carried up through a quarter mile of cold still air, came the unmistakable sound of an engine.
Joe pushed Hazel behind him and listened.
Not a car. Not a truck.
A generator.
It was running somewhere down the valley, a long way off, the flat unmistakable drone of a small gas unit under load, and the still air was carrying it up the mountain like it had nothing better to do.
Joe let out a breath that hurt on the way out.
"That's not here," he said.
"It sounds like it's here."
"It's down by the Osterman place. Maybe further. Cold air does that. Sound rolls downhill and then it pools and then it climbs."
Hazel stepped out from behind him.
"Mack doesn't think it's far away."
Joe looked at the dog.
Mack was still faced out at the driveway with the ridge up on his back, and he had not so much as glanced toward the sound.
"No," Joe said slowly. "He doesn't."
He reached back into the wall, past the wingnuts he had just tightened, and took out the thirty aught six instead.
"Go in the house. Tell your mother somebody's on the road. Tell Bill to take the front window and tell him not to point anything at anybody until I say so."
"Dad."
"Go."
She went.
Joe came around the corner of the shed with the rifle low.
Whatever Mack had was still four hundred yards out and invisible, somewhere down in the timber where the drive switched back, and for a long moment there was nothing at all.
Then he heard it.
Not an engine.
Hooves.
Unshod or shod he could not tell, but the rhythm was unmistakable, a slow four beat walk on gravel, and under it the small irregular chime of a bit ring and the creak of leather.
Joe took a knee behind the splitting stump and waited.
The horse came out of the timber at the last bend.
It was a big rangy bay gelding with a white sock on the near hind and mud to the hocks, head down, walking loose on a slack rein like it had walked a very long way and intended to keep doing it out of habit.
The man on it was long.
That was the first thing. He was folded into the saddle the way tall men fold into things, all knees and elbows, and he had a canvas duster on that had been a color once and was now simply old.
He had a hat that had also been a color.
Across the pommel, resting in the crook of his left arm as casual as a rolled newspaper, was a shotgun.
Joe knew what it was before he could see it properly, because the profile was wrong for anything modern. Two barrels, side by side, short and heavy and blunt at the muzzle, with a set of exposed hammers standing up behind the breech like a pair of ears.
A coach gun. Genuinely a coach gun.
The man stopped the horse at eighty yards.
He did not reach for anything.
"Hello the house," he called.
His voice was not loud and it carried anyway.
Joe stayed down.
"Hello the house," the man called again. "I see you behind that stump and I'd take it as a kindness if you'd stand up, because I've got a crick in my neck from squinting."
Joe stood up.
He kept the rifle across his body, muzzle at the dirt.
"That's better," the man said.
"Who are you."
"Man on a horse."
"Try again."
"Fair." The man reached up with two fingers and pushed the hat back off his forehead.
"Name's Stance Ulebrook. I run the string up at the Broken Y, which is nine miles northeast of you over the saddle, and I have been in the saddle since before sunup and I have not had coffee, and I want you to understand that everything I say for the next ten minutes is happening through that."
"Ulebrook."
"Stance Ulebrook."
"That's a real name?"
"It is a name my mother selected on purpose," Stance said, "and I've spent fifty one years answering for it."
From the house behind him, Joe heard the front door open.
He did not turn around.
"Bill," he said, loud enough to carry. "Stay put."
"Bill?" said the man on the horse. "Bill Tandy?"
Joe's grip shifted.
"Why."
"Because if Bill Tandy is in that house then this is going to be a great deal easier than I had planned for."
The front door opened the rest of the way and Bill Tandy came out onto the porch with the shotgun in the crook of his arm and stood there squinting into the afternoon.
"Well, I'll be damned," Bill said. "Stance."
"Bill."
"You still on that miserable horse?"
"This is a different miserable horse."
"They're all the same horse," Bill said. He turned to Joe. "Put the rifle down, son. I've known this man since he was nineteen years old and skinny as a fence wire."
"I'm still skinny as a fence wire."
"You're taller now. It's worse."
Joe lowered the thirty aught six all the way and let it hang at his side.
He did not put it down.
Stance Ulebrook noticed, and Joe saw him notice, and something that was not quite approval moved across the man's face.
"You're Henfry," Stance said.
"I am."
"The Californian."
"That's going to follow me for a while, isn't it."
"Till you die," Stance said, "or till you do something that gets talked about more. Whichever comes first."
He swung down.
He did it in one motion that took about a second and a half, the way a man dismounts when he has done it eleven thousand times, and he came down on the gravel with the coach gun already broken open over his forearm.
Two brass hulls sat in the chambers. He did not take them out.
And when the duster swung open with the motion, Joe saw the revolver.
It rode high on the man's left hip, butt forward, in a plain brown holster with the leather gone dark and shiny at the edges. Crossdraw rig.
The barrel was long. Absurdly long. It ran down past the bottom of the holster by a good four inches and Joe found himself doing the estimate without meaning to.
Seven and a half inches. The cavalry length.
The finish was blued and worn through to gray at the cylinder edges and along the top of the frame where a hand had been resting on it for decades.
The grips were ivory, yellowed to the color of an old piano key, with a hairline crack running through the left panel.
"That's a single action," Joe said.
"It is."
"Colt?"
"Uberti," Stance said. "Italian clone. Made in 1981, which makes it younger than my truck and older than my second marriage, and it has outlasted both."
"Caliber."
"Forty five Long Colt."
Joe nodded slowly.
"Two hundred and fifty grain at about eight hundred and sixty feet per second," he said. "Big slow bullet. Low pressure. You can load it with black powder if you run out of smokeless."
Stance Ulebrook stopped moving.
He looked at Joe for a long three seconds.
"Say that last part again," he said.
"You can load it with black powder. It was a black powder cartridge originally. Eighteen seventy two. The case has the volume for it and the pressures are low enough that the gun doesn't care."
"And you know that how."
"I read," Joe said.
Stance turned to Bill Tandy.
"Bill," he said. "I take back every word I said about this man in July."
"What'd you say about him in July?" Joe asked.
"Nothing you'd enjoy."
"Try me."
"I said there was a fella up on the bench who'd bought forty acres and a dream and would be gone by the second winter," Stance said, "and I said it in the feed store in front of eleven people, and I was wrong, and I'll say that in front of eleven people too."
He looked past Joe at the house.
"Now. Is that coffee I'm smelling or is that hope."
They put him at the kitchen table.
Delores Tandy gave him coffee and a plate and he ate like a man who had made a professional decision not to waste time, and when he was done he pushed the plate away two inches and folded his hands.
"All right," he said. "Here's the county."
The room got quiet.
"Power's gone and it's staying gone. I've got a cousin who worked eleven years for the co-op and he says the substation at the mouth of the canyon is slag. Not tripped. Slag. He walked up to it and there's oil on the ground and the transformer casings are split."
Bill said, "Split?"
"Split like a dropped melon."
Joe said, "That's geomagnetically induced current. It runs through the neutral and saturates the core and the thing cooks itself from the inside in about ninety seconds."
Stance pointed at him with two fingers.
"See, that's what he said and it took him four minutes."
"How many substations?"
"Every one he's checked. Four."
Imogen, standing by the stove with her arms crossed, said, "What about the hospital."
"Heber has a generator and about a week of diesel and no way to get more, because the pumps at every station in this valley are electric and the tanks are underground."
Stance turned his cup a quarter turn. "They started hand pumping on day one with a thing they built out of a well pipe. That's how you know who's smart. The smart ones started solving problems in the first eleven hours."
"How many people are up there?"
"Too many. They've got about four hundred in the parking lot who came looking for insulin and oxygen and dialysis and there's no dialysis without power and everybody knows it."
Imogen closed her eyes.
"How long," she said.
"For the dialysis folks? They've got days. Some of them a couple weeks." Stance said it gently. "I'm sorry, ma'am. I know that's a hard thing to say out loud in a kitchen."
"It's the thing nobody's saying out loud," Imogen said. "Say it. I'd rather hear it."
Stance nodded once.
"Then here's the rest of it," he said. "Insulin's the big one. There's maybe three hundred diabetics in this valley and the refrigerated stuff went warm inside of two days, and what's left is going to be gone by Christmas.
There's four hundred people on blood thinners and heart medication that they've got thirty days of. There's the oxygen concentrator crowd, and those machines are all electric, every one."
"My mother's on one," Joe said.
He had not meant to say it.
Stance looked at him.
"Where."
"Nevada."
Stance did not offer him anything. He just held the look for a second and then moved on, and Joe was obscurely grateful to him for it.
"Now the part you actually called me up here for," Stance said.
"Nobody called you," Joe said.