Chapter 11 #3
He watched Macklemore weigh it. Watched the soft shape stand in the yard and calculate, the manager's mind, the cost-benefit of it. And he watched Macklemore decide.
The trucks began to pull back.
Not defeated. Never defeated. But satisfied.
Macklemore had come to make an example and he had made one, the worst one, the old woman dead in the yard with his spit drying on her, and the farm bloodied and terrified and shown, utterly, that it could not stand against him.
He did not need to lose ten men storming a house to prove a point he had already proven with one bullet.
The Combine loaded their dead and their wounded, Ruth's three among them, and they mounted the trucks, and they pulled back down the road and across the broken fields, the engines growling, the dust rising, and they left.
They left Ruth where she lay.
They took their own dead and left hers in the dirt, one last insult, and the trucks rolled away east, back toward the warehouse, back toward the wolf's den, and the farm was left standing, bloodied, broken, but standing, with an old woman's body cooling in the summer yard.
Francis lay on the ridge a long time after the trucks were gone.
He did not move. He watched his people come out of the house, slow, disbelieving, watched them gather around Ruth's body, watched Maya kneel by her and check for a pulse she knew she would not find.
Watched the children come up out of the cellar, watched Junior come out into the light, watched his son see the old woman dead in the yard.
He watched it all from a mile away, and he did not go down.
Because he could not. Because if he went down now, walked into the farm now, it would mean the mission was over. It would mean he'd turned back for good. And some cold clear part of him, the part that had opened up when Macklemore spat on Ruth, understood that turning back now was exactly wrong.
The Combine had just shown him everything.
They had shown him their strength. Their numbers.
Their tactics, the flanking, the trucks around the road.
They had shown him Stanley Macklemore himself, in the flesh, the soft face and the wire glasses and the CZ that had killed Ruth.
And most of all they had shown him, past any doubt, that there was no living beside the Combine.
No complying. No deal. Nell had been right.
Ruth had been right. The deal was death, slow or fast, and today it had been fast, and it had been Ruth.
There was only one way through this now. There had only ever been one way. And it was the way Francis had already set out on. East. To the warehouse. To find the fuel and the trucks and the one thread that unraveled the whole thing.
And now, God help him, to find something else too.
Because Ruth was dead. And Ruth had told him a thing at the windmill, a thing about a woman named Sarah, who drained men dry, who was out east at Macklemore's right hand.
And Ruth had made him swear not to spend a single grey step of caution on her grief, not to avenge her, to use Sarah only if she was useful and never touch her for Ruth's sake.
Francis had sworn it. At the windmill. Come home to that boy, nothing else.
But Ruth was alive when he swore it.
Ruth had a round through her forehead now, and Stanley Macklemore's spit drying on her corpse, and the promise Francis had made was a promise made to a living woman about a grief he could afford to leave alone.
He could not afford to leave it alone anymore.
Because now it was his grief too.
Francis lay on the ridge and looked east, toward the warehouse, toward the wolf and the woman who fed on the strong, and the cold clear terrible thing that had opened up in him settled into a shape, into a purpose, into a plan colder and harder than any he'd made before.
He was going to go find Sarah.
He was going to go east, grey, unseen, exactly as planned, and he was going to scout the warehouse and find the fuel and raise the army, all of it, everything he'd set out to do.
But now there was one more thread to pull.
The woman at Macklemore's right hand. The energy vampire.
The one who took the strongest man in the room and bled him.
The crack in the Combine that Ruth had handed him at the windmill with her dying wisdom before she'd ever known she was dying.
And there was Dale.
Dale Crotinger. The name Ruth had kept behind a wall.
The man Sarah had taken, twenty years ago, and drained.
Where was Dale now? Ruth had never said.
Dead, maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe Dale was out there too, east, wherever Sarah had washed up, wherever the strongest man in the room had drawn her.
Maybe Dale was in the Combine. Maybe Dale, who had taught Ruth to shoot, who had loved her hard in his difficult way, who had put a Glock in her hand and a summer of a hundred rounds a week behind it, maybe Dale was another thread. Another crack. Another way in.
Francis did not know.
But he was going to find out.
He was going to find Sarah, and find Dale, and find every crack in Stanley Macklemore's soft patient wolf's kingdom, and he was going to pull every thread until the whole thing came apart, and then he was going to come home and lead his people, what was left of them,
in a war that would end with the man who spat on Ruth painted on the ground exactly the way he'd painted her.
That was the plan now. Cold. Clear. Total.
Francis Deckham took one last look down at the farm, at his people gathering their dead, at his son small and stricken in the summer yard.
I'm coming back, buddy, he thought. I'm coming back before the corn's tall, the way I promised. But first I've got a thing to do. First I've got to go find out who Sarah is. And I've got to go find Dale.
And he turned east, and pulled his grey hood up, and began, alone, in the terrible cold new silence inside him, to move down the far side of the ridge toward the warehouse and the woman and the whole unraveling of the Combine.
And behind him, unheard, a mile away in the yard, his son knelt in the dirt beside the body of the old woman who had taught his father the other half of surviving, and wept, and did not know that his father was alive, and watching, and already gone.