Chapter 149: Snacks

I lay in the ditch a while longer after the radio clicked off, rifle still pointed at an empty patch of snow, looking at my own wall from the wrong side of it: seventeen sandbags, two towers, floodlights still on over eleven trucks, bodies in the snow between them that had been shouting five minutes ago.

Nobody on the walkway was moving, nobody cheering, nobody had even lowered a rifle. They just stood there behind the bags, breathing, looking down at what they’d done.

[Yeah... that’s about right. Nobody tells you the quiet after is just worse than the noise...]

I got up, brushed the snow off, slung the M110A2, and walked back up the drive in the floodlights with my hands in my pockets so Dana on the cameras would know it was me.

The gate was out of the question, a rig folded against the far side of it with a man lying on its hood, so I went along the base of the wall to the north corner where the truckers had left their ladder lying in the snow, stood it up, and climbed my own wall on the enemy’s equipment.

"That’s their ladder." Bill looked down at me from the north tower, DMR over her shoulder.

"It’s my ladder now." I stepped onto the walkway and pulled it up after me. "Nice shooting by the way."

"It held..." That wasn’t about the shooting. She was looking down the wall at the gate, at the wreck against it, her voice with no joke in it for once. "You said it would."

"I say a lot of things... All of them true~"

Everyone was at the gate end of the walkway, seven of Vera’s women who’d run the length of it under fire now sitting with their backs against the sandbags, rifles across their knees, plates and helmets on, nothing left in them of the women who’d been carrying tomatoes that morning.

Leo was on his crate with the Spear across his lap, Nora and Kara standing right beside him.

Nora spotted me first, having held it in since the fourth rig, all of it coming out at once.

"Did you see? Nikki! Did you see? I hit him, the guy behind the fourth truck, I hit him at a so much distance, under fire, from a sandbag, did you-"

"Yeah, I saw."

"You were in a ditch!"

"I was on the tower. Ruth was next to me. Ask Ruth." I pointed back the way I’d come. "I saw you shake, I saw you stop shaking, I saw you put your cheek down and hit him... I went to the ditch after."

"...Oh." Her rifle stayed clamped across her chest in both hands, her eyes very bright, while she decided, in real time, not to cry over a man she’d shot in front of seven women in helmets. "Okay. Good. Because I hit him."

"You hit him, kid..."

She thumped me in the chest with her fist, nowhere near hard enough to move me, then stood there breathing through her nose.

[She’s gonna tell this story at her own funeral... after a week of nightmares...]

Leo hadn’t looked up. Thirty rounds fired, more men put down in twenty minutes than most soldiers manage in a career, and now he sat staring at the drive with a blank face, deciding what he was going to feel about it. I’d watched him do once before on a balcony, three weeks ago, with two kids in a sedan.

"The gate held..." he offered, without looking round. "I just sat here."

"You sat here and ran seventeen people who’d never been shot at, and not one of them broke." I put a hand on his shoulder. "Sit here more often."

His ears went red. He didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t need him to.

Kara had already cleared the Gen-12, inserted a new mag, and put the safety on. She stood at her sandbag with the shotgun over her shoulder, hair down over one eye, looking at me, her hands completely steady, steadier than they’d been at the crossroads.

"You said you’d watch."

"I watched."

"And then you left."

"For one guy." I looked at the drive, at the fifth rig, at what was lying behind it. "Just the one."

"I know." She tucked the hair back behind her ear. "I saw it."

She looked at me a second longer, then walked off along the walkway toward the stairs without another word, and that was Kara telling me she was okay.

Vera’s seven watched all of this from the sandbags, wide-eyed, still working out that they were alive, and one of them, the one who’d screamed when the first round went past her, looked up at me and asked, very quietly, whether it was over.

"For tonight..." I replied.

"And the ones who ran?"

I keyed the chest set and held it out so she could hear.

"Nia."

"Still here~" Nia’s voice came through the little speaker with a crunch behind it. "Tell your ladies to go to bed... Nobody’s coming back up that road. Ever."

Mr. Norton got exactly two customers all night. One of Vera’s women had taken a round on the plate, and she was now lying on his table insisting her ribs were fine in a voice that sounded sure of it, while Marcy had cut her hand open on a magazine floorplate reloading in the dark. He treated both, told each of them one thing, and came out onto the porch cleaning his glasses.

"Nobody died."

"Nobody on our side."

"Nobody died," he repeated, put on his glasses, and went back in.

Ruth found me last, in the yard under the south tower, looking up at a floodlight I’d paid eighty-four thousand credits for, and for once in my life I felt I’d paid a fair price.

She stood next to me with the DMR over her shoulder and didn’t say anything for a good while.

"They’ll come back... Not these ones exactly, but others."

"Yeah... after a few months... to the truly powerful... a pack of women will be worth almost as much as a truckload of ammo."

"And you won’t be here."

"No. I won’t."

She watched the drive a while longer. "Then it’s a good thing we’ve got a wall."

"That thing isn’t invincible, you know... But it is a good thing you’ve got a wall."

Alright, handsome." She gave me the sideways look. "Go to bed."

Nia gave me the short version at two in the morning while I lay on a farmhouse sofa staring at the ceiling.

Fourteen men had come down the road on foot toward the only home they had, toward a woman in the trees with a suppressed rifle and a bag of crisps, none of them seeing her, none of them hearing her. They never even knew what hit them.

"Fourteen rounds for fourteen~" she reported, mouth full. "What’re we doing about the rigs here?"

"In the morning," I said, rubbing my temples.

"I’m keeping one."

"Go to sleep, Nia."

"I’m in the rig, big guy... and it’s got a massive bed. I have never been more asleep~"

Cleaning the drive took most of the morning. Eleven rigs, RV-converted, stovepipes and all, three with dead drivers still in the seats and one folded against my gate.

All of them went into the Inventory one after another under my palm, each one landing square in my chest, slot eight filling up with a second truck stop’s worth of trucks.

Then the rifles came off the bodies, twenty-six of them, six shotguns, a dozen handguns, most of the nine hundred rounds still in pockets and belts, all of it going into the Misc. Chest. The bodies themselves went into the field past the windbreak, Ruth having decided they’d burn once the ground thawed enough to bury what was left, and nobody argued with Ruth.

[I’ll soon have two truck stops’ worth of trucks and trailers... That’s enough stock for months... I now have enough loot to settle Leo down...]

Then I flew out to Kessler Road with Leo, Kara, and Nora in the Ghostbird’s cabin and Tikki in the right-hand seat, a three-minute hop I’d have done alone if the three of them hadn’t earned the ride.

The lot looked exactly like Nia’s description minus the people, a fence of trailers on their sides, a fuel island, a big RV at the back with a generator chugging beside it, three bodies in the snow, more of them strung along the state road south, spaced out over four kilometers, one at a time.

And on top of the nearest trailer, legs swinging over the edge, sat Nia.

A bag of crisps, actually the size of a pillow, sat open beside her, the rifle across her knees, paprika on her cheek, and when the Ghostbird came down she waved a handful of crisps at us and kept eating.

"Morning~" she called over the rotors. "You’re late... I’ve been up since six."

"You said you’d never been more asleep."

"Get down from there."

"Come up. There’s crisps."

I did not come up. But the other four did, one after the other, leaving me in the middle of a dead man’s truck stop to sort the loot out by myself.

I was watching Nora and Nia share a bag of crisps on top of a trailer with Tikki loafing in the middle, a thing I’d have bet money against a week ago.

Leo and Kara were already taking inventory of the lot from up there.

And as I stood there, watching them, I didn’t even realize when that smile spread across my face.