Chapter 3 #4
"We had a smokehouse then," she said. "Full of it. We had the best fishing on this stretch of coast, because we've got a bar across our cove and it holds the fish the way it holds everything else, and we had four hundred pounds of smoked salmon hanging in a shed."
"You traded with them," Isaiah said.
"We fed them." Nell's mouth twisted. "They'd been on the water two days. They were wet and cold and one of them had a bad hand and I put moss on it. And we sat them down at a fire and gave them fish and hot water and we talked about the weather and the tides, and they were polite,
and they thanked us, and in the morning they got in their skiff and rowed away north."
"And came back," Liam said.
"Nine days later. Nineteen of them, in three boats."
Nell's hands were folded very still in her lap.
"They took the smokehouse. All of it. Four hundred pounds. They took our nets, both of the good ones. They took a boy named Cully who was fifteen and who could dive better than anyone here, and they took him because they wanted a diver, and they took him off the beach in front of his father,
and when his father tried to stop them one of them broke his arm with an oar and they laughed about it."
Nobody in the room moved.
"They didn't kill anybody," Nell said. "I want you to understand that, because it's the whole thing about them. They didn't kill a soul. They took what they wanted and they told us they'd be back in the spring, and they told us to have more fish smoked by then,
and they left us alive to do the smoking."
Liam felt something cold and familiar unfold in his chest.
Ashford. Calder, in his ruined town, explaining pleasantly how everybody earned their place.
The world made men like this. It made them everywhere.
"They're farming you," he said.
Nell Rook looked up at him.
"Yes," she said. "That's the word for it and I've never once been able to say it. Yes. We're a field they come back to."
"But it's not spring," Isaiah said. "Nell. It's February. They said spring."
"They did."
"So why are they here?"
And Nell Rook, who had answered every question Liam had put to her that night, even the ones that cost her, said nothing at all.
Liam went back to the glass.
The longboat had reached the shallows. It was in among the drowned trailers now, oars shipped, poling through the wreckage of the sunken half of the Landing, and Liam watched two men swing over the side into thigh-deep water and drag the bow up onto the gravel.
He watched them unrope the tarp in the bow.
He watched them lift out the cans, one by one, and set them on the beach in a neat row.
Five cans.
"Nell," he said. "They're landing. They're offloading the fuel on the beach."
"How many are ashore."
"All of them now. Nine. No, ten, there was one in the boat I couldn't see."
He tracked them. They were moving with an easy confidence, unhurried, spreading out along the shore, and one of them stood in the middle of the beach with his hands on his hips looking up at the dark trailers of the Landing like a landlord looking at a house he had decided to buy.
"They're not sneaking. Nell, they're not sneaking at all. They're walking up your main street like they own it."
"They do own it," said Dawes, from the fire. It was the first thing he had said all night. "That's what they came in November to establish."
"Shut up, Dawes," Nell said, without any heat.
"It's the truth."
"I know it's the truth."
Liam pulled back from the slit.
"Nell," he said. "The Landing's empty. Every one of you is in this box. They're going to walk through those trailers and find nobody home, and they are going to figure out that the fish are in here with us, and then they are going to come here."
"No," Nell said. "They're not."
"Nell—"
"They're not going to come here," she said, "because they will not walk into those willows after dark. They know better. They learned that in November."
She stood up and came over to the slit and looked out at the black, at nothing, with her hands flat on the cold concrete.
"They lost two men in the trees the night they raided us," she said quietly.
"Two of them went into the willows after a woman who ran, and they did not come out, and their friends stood on that beach until sunrise shouting their names and nobody answered."
Her jaw tightened. "The Sawtooth learned about our willows the hard way. They come by day now. Always by day. In and out before the light goes."
"Then why are they here at night?" Isaiah said.
"They're not," Nell said. "Look at what they're doing. They're not coming for us tonight. They rowed down under dark so nobody on the water would see how many boats or which way they went, and they landed, and they made camp on our beach, and they'll sit there with a fire and wait."
She turned around. "They're going to hit us in the morning. At first light, when we come out of this box. They're going to be standing on that beach when the doors open."
Liam looked at the steel door, barred three times.
He looked at the twenty-two thin gray people in the concrete room, and the two babies behind the crates, and Petyr with his garden fork, and Dawes with his eleven years of silence, and an old woman by the fire mending a net she would probably never use.
He looked at Chloe.
She was burning up on her door, and her lips were moving, and a woman with cracked hands was wringing out a rag in a bowl of swamp water and laying it across her forehead, and it was the only medicine in the world.
"How long can you stay in here," he said.
"Two days," Nell said. "Three if we cut the water. There's no well in here. We fill barrels in the morning."
"So you have to come out."
"We have to come out."
"And they know that."
"They know that."
Liam turned back to the slit and put his eye to the scope, and found the beach, and found the man standing in the middle of it with his hands on his hips.
He was a big man. Not Uebert big. Wider than that, and older, and he wore a coat made of something that shone wetly in the little light. And while Liam watched, he turned his face up toward the black rise where the blockhouse stood, and he seemed to look directly into the scope.
He could not have. There was no light in the slit, and it was three hundred yards, and the man's eyes were nothing but a smudge in the glass.
But Liam's finger found the trigger anyway.
Fifteen rounds.
Three hundred yards, downhill, no wind under the trees, a man standing perfectly still on open gravel.
He could make that shot. He knew he could make that shot the way he knew his own hands.
You do not fire this rifle to scare something off. You do not fire it in anger. You do not fire it to prove a point.