Chapter 148: What A Wall Means

The first rig came up the drive at forty an hour with its lights off and its driver leaning over the wheel squinting into the dark, and I watched it come from the south tower with Ruth’s hand resting on the light switch beside me, and I could tell the exact second the guy saw the gate.

His brake lights came on, and that was it, two red squares in the dark at the bottom of my drive, and then ten more sets of brake lights lit up behind him one after another down the road.

Eleven rigs sat there in a line with their engines running, looking at three meters of concrete that hadn’t been there two days ago.

[Yeah… Take a good look, boys. Nobody told you about that, did they? Because nobody you sent up here ever got home.]

Doors opened all down the line, and guys got out, twenty-nine of them, and stood in the snow between the rigs with their rifles held loose and their heads tilted back, looking at the wall, and looking at the towers, and looking at the closed steel gate, and not one of them was saying anything, because what the hell could they even say?

Then a big rough voice from the middle of the line yelled, loud enough to carry all the way up to me, “What in the fuck is that?!”

And I knew the voice. I’d heard it shouting orders from a flatbed at a crossroads three days ago with my folks in the truck it was shouting about.

[Welcome to the Sanctuary.]

I looked at Ruth. Ruth looked at me. Then she looked down at twenty-nine men standing in the open in her drive with their rifles pointed at nothing, and her face didn’t change at all as she hit the switch, and the floodlights came on.

Two car-bonnet-sized lights on two towers turned the bottom of that drive into a parking lot at noon, and every single one of those guys threw an arm up over his eyes at the same time, and for about half a second nothing at all happened, because seventeen people on a wall who had never done this before were finding out that the moment you’ve drilled for is nothing like the drill.

Then Leo’s voice came down the walkway, quiet and certain.

“Rear truck drivers. Now!”

-Thard-!

That was Ruth, right beside me, DMR kicking against her shoulder, and the driver of the last rig in the line, who was still sitting in his cab with the door open, went sideways across his seat and stayed there.

-Thard-!

Bill, from the north tower, and the second-to-last driver folded over his own steering wheel.

-Tish-!-Tish-!

Leo, from the sandbag nearest the gate, and the third rig’s driver got halfway out of his door, tumbled into the snow beside it, and didn’t get up.

And that was the road closed, because the drive was one lane wide with trees on both sides, and three of the rigs at the back had dead men in the driver’s seats, and nobody was going to climb over a corpse and reverse a truck under floodlights with a wall shooting at them.

[And that’s the door shut. Nobody’s driving home. Now let’s see what you’ve got, Hallam.]

What they had was numbers, and they had the one thing thirty-one women didn’t, which was that they’d done this before.

They didn’t run, and they didn’t stand in the open.

Hallam’s voice went up over all of it, “OFF THE DRIVE, GET BEHIND THE RIGS, GET BEHIND THE FUCKING RIGS!”

And they went, all twenty-six of them who could still move, and inside three seconds the only thing on the drive was trucks and the only thing showing from behind the trucks was rifle barrels.

And then they started shooting back.

I’d been shot at plenty enough that it no longer bothered me, and it bothered me right then, sitting on a tower with my rifle across my knees, listening to rounds go into the wall under seventeen people I’d put there.

-Thard-!-Thard-!-Thard-!

The sandbags took most of it. Concrete chips came off the top of the wall and rattled down the walkway.

Down the line, a woman screamed, not hit, just screaming, the first time in her life a bullet had zipped past her head.

Vera’s voice came right on top of it, sharp: “You’re fine! You’re fine. It hit the bags. Get your head down and get your rifle up.”

Kara was three sandbags from the gate with the Gen-12 laid over the top of hers, and she wasn’t firing because nothing was inside twenty meters yet, and I’d told her what the shotgun was for, and she was watching the drive with the flat face on, and I could see her breathing, slow and even, having decided to stop arguing with herself.

Nora was next to her, and she was shaking. I could see the rifle barrel doing it, then Nora put her cheek on the stock, stopped shaking, and fired.

-Tish-!

A guy behind the fourth rig who had leaned out too far to get a shot at the tower went back behind the rig a lot faster than he’d come out and stayed there.

[Kid… damn… Kid, you hit him… You missed a man at less than ten meters from a stationary truck three days ago, and you just hit one at around forty, under fire from a sandbag… And you’re gonna tell me about it for a month.]

Leo was the steadiest thing on that wall.

He had the Spear up on the sandbag on his crate at the gate with his elbows planted and his face completely still, and every four or five seconds there was a -Tish-! from his position and somebody behind a rig lost his life.

He never hurried, never missed twice either, and his voice between shots was the calmest thing out there.

“Left side… Third truck. He’s reloading. Somebody take him. Good. Vera, two of yours are firing at the same man, spread them out. Good.”

Dana’s voice came over the intercom, flat, saying exactly what she saw and nothing else, the same as I’d told her.

“Six of them are going along the wall to the north. They’ve somehow got a ladder off one of the trucks… They’re at the corner.”

“Bill,” Leo called, without looking up.

“I SEE THEM!” Bill yelled back from the north tower.

And then she said nothing else, because she was busy.

-Thard-!-Thard-!

Two of the six went down in the snow at the base of the north corner. The other four decided the ladder was a bad idea, left it lying there, and went back the way they’d come, and Dana reported too, “They’ve dropped the ladder,” flat as ever.

“North side,” Leo called down the walkway. “They’ve given up on the corner… Everybody on the north half who’s not on the tower, get down here to the gate. That’s where they’re coming.”

And they came, seven women in plates running along a walkway under fire with their carbines held in front of them, and they threw themselves down behind the sandbags nearest the gate.

[That’s Leo’s drill, and they ran it… Under fire. On the first night… God, they’re gonna be alright.]

Hallam tried the gate next, because it was the only thing left to try.

Someone got into the lead rig backed up in the drive with its tires spinning in the snow, thirty meters, and then it came at the gate with its engine screaming and Hallam bellowing from behind it, “GO, GO, GO!”

The guy driving it must have thought a steel gate on a farm was a farm gate.

-KRUNCH-!

The gate did not move, not an inch. Instead, the rig’s front end folded up against it and the engine died the very next second with a final wheeze.

And the idiot driving it flew out through the windshield and lay on his own hood in the floodlights, while behind the gate the concrete blocks of the chicane sat there in their zigzag with nothing to do.

[Reinforced. Certified… And I still didn’t breathe until it didn’t move.]

Kara fired then, at the two guys who came up behind the crashed rig to see if the gate was going to give.

-Dich-! -Dich-!

And both of them went down behind the wreck, one with a face nearly blown apart.

Kara didn’t look at what she’d done, nor did her face change at all, she just got back to it, and I’ve never in my life been more sure of anyone.

And that was when I stood up.

The fight was on, and it was theirs, and they were holding.

Down there behind the fifth rig was one guy with a big, rough voice who’d come up my drive with twenty-nine men to take thirty-one women, and I had a quest with his name on it. I’d promised the yard I would watch. I hadn’t promised anybody where from.

“Ruth.”

She glanced over from the DMR. “Go.”

I went down the inside stairs of the tower three at a time, across the yard behind the house where nobody could see me from the road, then up onto the back wall at the east corner where the windbreak trees came almost up to the walls, and I dropped off the far side into the snow with the M110A2 across my chest.

Three meters, and I landed it like a step.

Then I ran through the trees along the east side of the property, in the dark, with the floodlights behind me throwing my shadow out ahead, and I have never in either life run through a forest in the dark at that speed.

Two weeks ago that speed would’ve put me into a tree and killed me, that is, assuming I could even run that fast, and now the trees just came and went. The snow didn’t slow me down either, nor did my breathing change.

[Six hundred meters… Forty seconds… I’m not even warm.]

I came out of the treeline onto the state road two hundred meters south of the last rig in the line, behind all of it, and I lay down in the ditch in the snow with the rifle in front of me, and I looked at the whole thing from the other side.

And it was the best thing I’ve ever built.

Eleven rigs boxed in a one-lane drive with dead drivers in the last three, twenty-something men who couldn’t go backward and couldn’t go forward, muzzle flashes going off all along the top of the wall, with the floodlights on the towers making sure not one of Hallam’s guys could sneak into trees, and every time one of them leaned out from behind a rig to fire, a round came off that wall and made him think better of it.

They weren’t winning. They’d stopped being able to win about ninety seconds in, when the gate didn’t move. They just hadn’t worked it out yet.

I found Hallam exactly where I’d last seen him, behind the fifth rig, halfway down the line, where he could see both ends.

He was a big guy in a canvas coat with a lever gun in his hands, his back to me, shouting at the men on either side of him to get up, to keep firing, to hold, because it was a fence, it was just a fucking fence, and that they had the numbers.

[You lured a horde onto my family… You boxed them in and shot at them for four minutes while I listened… You sent a man up a road to buy two women I love with your dead… And now you’re standing in the snow yelling at people to die for you. One round. That’s all you get from me. One.]

I thumbed the little box on the rail, and through the gold-rimmed specs a thin green line floated out into the dark and went across the snow and up the back of the fifth rig and stopped, exactly, on the back of Dean Hallam’s head, and I put my cheek on the stock and breathed out, and the line didn’t move, because I don’t shake anymore.

-Thwip-!

The back of his head went out through the front of it in a shower of blood, brains, and skull, and what remained of his face got bashed into the rig he stood in front of while the lever gun went into the snow with a dull thud.

The two men on either side of him looked down at what had been standing between them, then looked at each other’s white-in-fight faces, and for a long moment, neither could utter even a single word.

-Ding!-

{

QUEST COMPLETE

Bounty: Dean Hallam

Reward: Skill Token: Enhanced Learning x 1

Delivered to Inventory.

Kill Credit: +500 Credits

}

I didn’t move from the ditch. I lay there with the rifle in front of me and the green line still floating out there in the dark over an empty patch of snow, and I just watched.

It took them about twenty seconds to understand that the voice had stopped.

Then one of them shouted, “Dean’s down!”

Then somebody else shouted it, and then the whole line of them was shouting it, while the shooting from behind the rigs went ragged, then thin, then stopped, but the shooting from the wall didn’t, because Leo hadn’t told it to.

So they ran out from behind the rigs and down the drive and past the dead drivers and onto the state road, south, on foot, fourteen men leaving eleven trucks and their rifles and their boss lying in the snow, running toward home in the dark with the floodlights on their backs.

They ran right past me. I was in the ditch two meters from the nearest one and not one of them looked down, their widened, frightened eyes at the road ahead, at the nine kilometers of it between them and a truck stop with a fence of trailers and a big RV with the generator running, and the beds they’d left that morning.

I let them go, all of them.

I lay there and watched the last of them disappear into the dark, and then the wall stopped firing, because Leo had finally called it, and the drive went quiet except for one of the rigs still ticking as its engine cooled, and up on the walkway seventeen shapes behind seventeen sandbags weren’t saying anything at all.

Then I keyed the chest set from the ditch.

“Nia.”

“Here~” She sounded very comfortable. “Lot’s mine… Three down, two women untied, generator’s still running, and I have found a bag of paprika crisps the size of a pillow.”

“Fourteen coming your way. On foot… No rigs.”

A pause, and I could hear her sit up.

“…Oh, that’s perfect~”