Chapter 9
Luke had been on watch for two hours, and nothing had happened for one hour and fifty-nine minutes of it.
He sat on an overturned crate just inside the barricade with his rifle across his knees, watching a road that hadn't moved since the last time he'd looked at it.
Somewhere behind him, one of the Bennett men worked on a fence post within easy call, close enough to help if Luke needed it, far enough that Luke was the one watching the gate.
Boredom was most of the job, David had told him once.
Luke understood that better now than he had the first time he'd heard it.
Back before the roads had gone quiet, before the barricade had gone up piece by piece over a hard winter, watch duty had meant standing around while his father or Curtis did the real thinking.
Now it meant Luke doing the thinking himself, and finding out that most of it amounted to nothing happening for long stretches punctuated by moments that mattered a great deal.
He checked the tree line. Nothing. Listened. Nothing but wind and the fence-post work behind him. He was starting to think about lunch when Billy Jean came walking down from inside the Hollow, a small cloth bundle in one hand.
"You're not supposed to distract the guard," Luke said.
"You looked distracted before I got here."
She sat down beside him on the crate's edge, close enough that their shoulders touched.
"How long have you been out here?" she asked.
"Too long."
She handed him the bundle — a biscuit, still a little warm, and a handful of dried apple wrapped inside a scrap of cloth.
"Your dad send you with this?"
"My dad didn't send me anywhere."
Something in the way she said it made Luke look at her a second longer than the biscuit required. She'd come because she wanted to, not because Russ had asked her to check on him. He didn't say that out loud. He didn't need to.
They sat close, and after a while she reached over and took his hand while they talked about nothing much — the fence Bennett was working on, whether Grace would let the goats out on the near pasture yet, whether Luke's shift would run long enough to miss supper.
"Ben told me you fell asleep on watch last week," Billy Jean said.
"I did not."
"That's not what he said."
"Ben exaggerates."
"Ben also isn't the only one who said it."
Luke didn't have a good answer for that, so he didn't try one, and Billy Jean let him off the hook by leaning her head briefly against his shoulder before straightening back up.
Luke kept watching the road the whole time.
"You keep looking away from me," Billy Jean said.
"I'm guarding the road."
"Good answer."
"Was there a bad one?"
"Several."
He felt his ears go warm and didn't comment on it.
Then, quieter, she asked, "Do you worry about your dad?"
"He's been farther away than Charlotte."
"That wasn't what I asked."
Luke was quiet a moment. "Yeah."
"He'll come back," Billy Jean said.
"You don't know that."
"No." She looked at him. "But I know your dad."
"That's close enough," Luke said, and meant it.
She leaned against his shoulder, just for a moment.
Then Luke saw movement on the road, and everything else fell away behind the job in front of him.
A man was walking toward the barricade, alone, a pack on his back and a rifle slung across it. Mid-forties, maybe. Clothes worn but not falling apart. Not the walk of somebody who'd been starving in the woods for a week. Somebody who'd eaten recently enough to still have some purpose in his stride.
Luke stood. Billy Jean stood too.
"Stay behind me," Luke said, low.
"I'm not hiding."
"Didn't ask you to."
She moved back half a step but didn't leave.
The man reached conversational distance and Luke called out before he came any closer. "That's far enough."
The man stopped, hands loose at his sides, and offered an easy smile that didn't reach much past his mouth. "Just traveling. Heard people lived up this road."
Luke didn't ask who'd told him that. Not yet.
"Road doesn't go anywhere you need," Luke said.
The man's eyes moved past Luke, past the barricade, toward whatever he could make out of the Hollow beyond it. That was the first thing that bothered Luke — not the words, the looking.
"What's back there?" the man asked.
"Private property."
"How many people live there?"
Luke didn't answer that one at all.
"Got food to trade?"
"No trading today."
"Can I talk to whoever's in charge?"
"You already are," Luke said.
Billy Jean gave him a sideways look, because that was stretching things a little, but she didn't correct him.
The man studied Luke for a beat, and Luke watched something shift behind his eyes once he clocked how young the face in front of him was. His posture eased into something more casual, more confident. Talking to a kid.
He took a step closer.
"Stay where you are," Luke said.
The man stopped, irritation showing plainer now. "I just want to talk."
"We're talking."
He tried a few more angles after that — wanted water, wanted a meal, wanted somewhere to sleep for a night or two, said he'd work for it, said he had things worth trading if anybody was interested.
"I can refill your canteen," Luke said. "That's it."
"That's it? A canteen of water and nothing else, after I walked all this way?"
"Nobody made you walk it."
The man's smile flattened out.
"I'm not asking to move in. I just want to come in long enough to talk to somebody."
"You're talking to somebody."
"A kid holding a rifle."
"A kid holding a rifle who already told you no twice."
The man took another step anyway.
Luke didn't shoulder the rifle. He shifted it, just enough that the man would notice the change without Luke needing to say anything about it.
"Stop."
The man stopped.
Billy Jean saw it too — the shift from a bored teenager minding a gate to something with real weight behind it — and something in her face told Luke she hadn't quite believed he had that in him until right now.
Bennett had noticed the raised voices and come closer from the fence line, rifle in hand but not raised, just present. The stranger clocked him too, and some of the confidence went out of his shoulders. Not alone anymore. Still, he didn't leave.
"There's got to be somebody in charge here," the man said.
"There isn't one."
"There's always somebody."
"Then you're still talking to him," Luke said, and Billy Jean's mouth twitched like she was fighting a smile she didn't want the stranger to see.
Bennett was the one who finally said it, low, mostly to Luke. "Maybe somebody ought to get Grace."
The stranger caught the name immediately. "Who's Grace?"
Nobody answered him.
"I'll go," Billy Jean said.
Luke looked at her. He didn't like the idea of her walking off with this man still standing there watching, but she'd be heading into the Hollow, not out toward the road.
"Go straight there," Luke said.
She gave him the look that meant she already knew that. "I know where she lives."
She left at a fast walk that turned into a jog once she cleared the gate's sightline.
The wait that followed felt longer than it probably was. The Turner house sat the better part of a mile off, and there was no way to make that distance disappear just because a stranger was getting impatient on the other side of a barricade.
He paced. Looked at the gate. Looked along the fence line like he was measuring whether there was an easier way around it.
"How long is this going to take?" he asked.
"As long as it takes," Luke said, and didn't fill the silence after that no matter how long it stretched.
Grace was checking seed trays when Billy Jean reached her, breathing hard from the run.
"There's a man at the gate."
Something in the girl's face told Grace this wasn't an ordinary traveler passing through. "Problem?"
"Luke told him no."
"And?"
"He thinks no means wait for somebody older."
That told Grace nearly everything she needed before she'd even moved.
She went for her rifle without any drama in it, the same motion she'd have used to grab a coat before stepping outside. Billy Jean fell in beside her as she started back toward the barricade at a fast walk.
"How did Luke handle it?" Grace asked.
"Good." A beat. "Really good."
Grace felt something warm settle under the worry, and didn't let herself dwell on it yet. There'd be time for that once the man at the gate was gone.
When Grace reached the barricade, nothing had changed, which was exactly what she wanted to see. The stranger still stood outside. The gate still stood closed. Nobody was shouting. Nobody was hurt.
She took in Luke's positioning — angled so Bennett had a clear line if it came to that, rifle held easy but ready, Billy Jean a few steps back and out of any direct line — and didn't say anything about it yet either.
The stranger looked at her with open irritation at having been made to wait for a woman to show up and settle things.
"You're Grace?"
"I am."
"You in charge?"
Grace glanced once toward Luke, then back. "Depends who you ask."
The man ran through his story again for her benefit — traveling, heard people lived up this road, looking for shelter, willing to work.
"Where are you coming from?" Grace asked.
His answer was vague. Where he'd slept the night before, vaguer still. When she asked where he'd heard about the Hollow, he just said, "People talk," and didn't offer anything past that.
"Who?" Grace asked.
He didn't answer that one either.
What bothered Grace wasn't the dirt on his clothes or the rifle on his back.
Everybody carried both these days. It was the way his eyes kept moving past her shoulder — toward the buildings visible past the barricade, toward whatever livestock he might catch a glimpse of, toward the general shape and size of what the Hollow amounted to.
Taking stock, the way Harlan had once described men doing before they decided whether a place was worth the trouble of testing.
She didn't say any of that out loud. She just didn't like how he was measuring the place, and that told her enough.
"We're not taking anybody in," Grace said.
"I can work."
"I'm sure you can."