Chapter 13 #3
Dozens of small fights, all across the plain, all at once, the isolated wolves of the Combine swarmed by the farms they'd thought were sheep.
Alone is death. Together is a chance. Macklemore had kept everyone alone. Francis would make them, all at once, together.
"It's good," Dale said, when they'd built it all out in the dirt. "It's a real plan. It's the first thing I've heard in a year that could actually break him." He looked at Francis. "But it's got two hard parts, and you know it. The fuel and the timing."
"The fuel," Francis agreed. "I still have to see it. Up close. I have to scout that depot myself, find the exact way in, figure out how a small team burns it. That's the next thing. The most dangerous thing. That's what I go do next, alone, grey."
"And the timing," Dale said. "Everything's got to happen at once. The fire, the rising, all of it, timed to the harvest, timed to when the trucks are out. Get the timing wrong and it all falls apart. The farms rise too early, Macklemore crushes them one at a time. Rise too late,
the trucks are already home. It's got to be one thing, all at once, and you've got no radios, no phones, no way to coordinate fifty farms across a hundred miles."
He looked at Francis. "How do you time it? How do you tell fifty farms to rise at the same moment with no way to talk to them?"
And Francis, who had been turning exactly this over, gave him the answer.
"The fire is the timing," he said. "That's the whole elegance of it. I don't have to coordinate fifty farms. I just have to burn the depot. The fire is the signal. Every farm on the plain sees that pillar of smoke go up, and every farm knows what it means, because we've told them, farm by farm,
all these weeks. The word we've been planting isn't just you're not alone. It's when you see the fuel burn, rise. The smoke is the message. You can see it for fifty miles. It reaches every farm at once, the moment it goes up. It's the one signal that can't be stopped, can't be jammed,
can't be missed. A column of black smoke on a flat plain. Rise now."
Dale stared at him.
"The fire's the signal," he said slowly.
"You burn the throne, and the burning is the order to rise, all at once, because everybody can see it."
Something like awe crossed his weathered face.
"That's. God. That's clever. That's the cleverest thing I've heard. You don't need radios. You've got a fifty-mile-high signal fire. And it's the same act that wins the war. Burning the fuel is both the weapon and the signal at once."
"One act," Francis said. "Burn the fuel. It cripples his trucks and it calls the rising, both at once. That's the plan. That's the whole War of the Harvest, in one column of smoke."
He looked at the old man. "Now I just have to figure out how to actually get to that fuel and burn it without dying, which is the part I don't have yet, which is what I go do next."
They sat in the dark culvert a while longer, the plan built between them in the dirt, and Francis felt the enormity of it settle on him. It was real now. It was a real plan. It could actually work.
And it could actually get everyone he loved killed.
"There's one more thing," Dale said quietly, into the dark. "And I've been chewing on whether to say it. But you should hear it before you go scout that depot alone."
"Say it," Francis said.
"When you burn that fuel," Dale said. "If you pull it off. You're not just breaking Macklemore's kingdom. You're taking the one thing he can't replace, can't ever get back, the thing his whole world runs on. A man like that, cold as he is, calculating as he is, when you take that from him."
Dale's pale eyes were grim. "He won't be cold anymore. That's the one thing that'll break the manager in him and let the wolf all the way out. You burn his fuel, you don't get the patient Macklemore who waits a season to make an example. You get a wounded animal with nothing left to lose,
who knows exactly who did it, and who will spend every last drop of his dying fuel and every last man he's got coming for you and yours, fast and total, with no calculation left in him at all."
He held Francis's eyes. "The fire wins the war. But it also brings the whole sky down on your farm, all at once, right after. You'd best be ready for that. Because the same act that beats him is the act that makes him come to end you. And your boy's on that farm."
Francis sat in the dark and took that in, cold and complete.
Dale was right. Of course he was right. Burning the fuel was both the winning stroke and the thing that would bring Macklemore's full fury down on the farm, wounded, enraged, total, with Junior in the cellar and the whole family in the path of it.
The war would end at the farm. It had always been going to end at the farm. The harvest, the fields Ruth had planted, the home Francis had bled for. That was where the last of it would be fought, when the wolf came burning for revenge.
"Then that's where I'll be," Francis said quietly.
"When he comes for the farm. That's where I'll make my stand. Not out here. Home. Where my boy is. Where Ruth's buried. Where it all is."
He looked at Dale. "You go scout the depot with me, help me build the fire. And then we go to my farm, both of us, and we get it ready, and we wait for the wolf to come burning. And we end it there. All of it. The War of the Harvest ends at my home, with everyone I love behind me,
and Macklemore painted on the ground the way he painted Ruth."
Dale nodded slowly, and hefted his Mossberg in the dark, and his weathered face set into something hard and final and almost peaceful.
"For Ruth," the old man said.
"For Ruth," Francis said.
And the two of them settled in to wait out the last of the night, the plan complete between them, the War of the Harvest built and ready, needing only the depot scouted and the fire laid and the army roused,
and Francis Deckham stared up at the blazing indifferent stars through the mouth of the culvert and thought of his son, watching the corn grow tall out west, waiting for a father who was coming home at last, but not alone, and not the same, and not to safety.
Coming home to fight the last and worst of it, on the ground where everything he loved still lived.