Chapter 160: Fields

"System, take us down," I told the bird, with Leo’s fingers still digging into my shoulder. "The field in front of their gate... and the chin gun on anything that moves."

The bird banked over the valley, and I finally got a proper look at what was standing in those fields.

There were hundreds of Infected spread across the snow in loose rows, every single one of them facing the farmhouse, and when a military helicopter came thundering in over their heads at thirty meters, not one of them turned around.

[...Huh...? Every Infected I’ve ever met turns toward rotors... Two lives, years of running, a whole stupid apocalypse... Every single one.]

That scared me more than if all of them had come running at us.

Tikki stood in the right-hand seat, ears flat and nose pressed to the glass, staring down at them.

"Mea..." he grumbled, low and unhappy.

"Yeah, booger..." I scratched behind his ear without taking my eyes off the fields. "I see it too."

Kilometers down the road, at the other edge of the village, a church sat lit up in the dusk inside a stone wall, with a whole camp spread around the wall, tents, campers, parked cars, and a fence around all of it that a kid could’ve climbed.

Thanks to the enhancers, I didn’t need a scope to see that there wasn’t a single Infected within five hundred meters of any of it.

"HUH..." Nia had woken up at some point and was hanging out of the door behind me, still yelling everything at everyone. "GUESS GOD LIKES THOSE ONES~"

Then the farm came up under the nose, and I knew every inch of it.

I’d spent three university breaks on this farm, and from the air it looked almost exactly like I remembered.

A big two-story log house sat in the middle of it with a porch running all around it, smoke coming out of its stone chimney, and solar panels across the back of the roof. Two red barns and a grain silo stood off to the east, and a long gravel drive ran from the house down to the road.

What I didn’t remember was the wall.

A wall of raw grey concrete blocks now ran around the house and the yard now, about as tall as me, with a big steel farm gate facing the road and a green tractor parked flush against the inside of it, bracing the gate.

[That’s just a farm gate with some steel welded on... The tractor’s the actual lock... Nothing’s pushing that gate in with an eight-tonne tractor parked behind it... And the cab roof makes a perfect firing step. That’s Leo’s dad. Has to be.]

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: landing.

Contacts within 100 meters: 312.

Movement: none.

Observation: Contacts are not reacting to rotor noise. The Host may wish to find this concerning.

}

[Thanks... Super helpful... I do, in fact, find it concerning.]

The skids touched down in the field thirty meters from the gate, and the downwash threw a sheet of snow over the nearest of the Infected, twenty meters away. Yet none of them so much as blinked.

On top of that wall, three guns were pointed at us.

Walter Hart, Leo’s dad, had a scoped lever-action pressed into his shoulder with the barrel resting on the blocks, a man who never used ten words when two would do.

Next to him, Leo’s mom June stood on an upturned feed bucket so she could see over the top, holding a big silver magnum revolver in both hands, a woman who’d fed me so much every visit that I went home heavier each time.

And up on the tractor’s roof, with a pump shotgun aimed square at our windshield, stood Leo’s big brother Dean, the family vet, who’d never once let me forget the summer I fell off the hay trailer.

Leo was out of the cabin before the skids had finished settling, and I scooped Tikki into my pocket and went after him.

He ran three steps across the snow and stopped.

"DAD!" Both hands went up over his head, his voice cracking right down the middle of it.

The scope came down off his dad’s eye.

For about two seconds nobody moved at all. Then Dean dropped off the tractor’s roof into its cab, the engine coughed, and the tractor rolled back off the gate.

The gate hadn’t swung halfway open before Leo’s mom was through it.

She came across the snow at a dead run, five-foot-nothing in a green quilted coat zipped up to her chin, a grey-streaked braid bouncing on her back and the revolver still in her hand. And she hit her six and a half feet son hard enough to rock him back a step.

Leo folded down around her until his face was buried in her hair, while she grabbed two fistfuls of his coat and said his name into his chest, over and over, both of them crying, and neither of them caring who was watching.

His dad came through the gate after her, slower.

Walter was as tall as Leo and a good bit wider, his beard a lot greyer than I remembered, in a canvas work coat over a flannel shirt, with the rifle hanging from one hand.

He put the other hand on the back of Leo’s neck, like Leo was ten again, and left it there without saying a word.

That hand was shaking, and I’d watched it pull a calf out of a cow at two in the morning without a single tremor.

Now it couldn’t keep still on the back of his own son’s neck.

Dean came out last and stopped a few steps back to let his parents have Leo first, the shotgun pointed at the snow and his eyes wet.

He was the good-looking one of the family, tall and lean, clean-shaven, in a fleece-lined work jacket, with the kind of face people trust the second they see it.

Not one of them looked like a survivor.

Their clothes were clean and warm, and nobody looked hungry.

The Harts had land, money, a full cellar, and a woodstove, and they’d made it through the first month of the end of the world just fine.

Doubly so because of the Infected not far behind us, just standing there like statues.

Then Leo lifted his head out of his mother’s hair and looked from her to his dad, to Dean, and back to his mom, counting faces.

Then he counted them a second time, slower.

"Where’s Toby?"

For a second, nobody answered him at all.

June’s face crumpled before anyone said a word. She’d already been crying, but this was different, her mouth pulling down at the corners and her eyes squeezing shut, and behind me Kara made a small, hurt sound.

Dean came up beside them and put one hand on his little brother’s shoulder.

"He turned, Leo..." Dean’s voice was very quiet. "on the first day... he was on the sofa. Then he just... His body couldn’t take it... He was gone before morning."

Dean was a vet, so he’d have known exactly what was happening inside his little brother’s body that whole night, hour by hour, and there hadn’t been a single thing he could do about it.

"We laid him in the yard..." Walter kept his eyes on the snow.

He said it in the same flat voice he used for the weather, and that made it worse. The man had swung a pickaxe into the ground from morning till dark to dig his sixteen-year-old a grave, and that was all he was ever going to say about it.

Through the open gate, I watched Leo’s eyes sweep the yard, find a wooden cross standing in the snow beside the barn, and stop there.

Behind me, Kara had a hand over her mouth, crying before Walter had even finished, and then she was past me with her arms around Leo’s mom, the two of them holding each other up.

Leo didn’t say a word, just walked past all of them, through the gate and across the yard, and went down on his knees in front of the cross.

It was two planks of barn wood nailed together, and Walter had cut TOBY into the crosspiece with a knife, deep enough to last.

Those blocks were a month old at most. He’d buried his youngest on day two, then built a wall around his house, his yard, and his boy, so nothing could ever dig him up.

Leo knelt there without making a single sound, his big shoulders shaking the whole time.

Nora went after him and knelt in the snow at his side with her hand on his arm, and for a long time she didn’t say a single thing, which for Nora was a first.

Tikki climbed out of my pocket, padded across the yard, and sat down against Leo’s knee without anybody asking him to. Leo’s hand came down on the cat’s back without him even looking, and stayed there.

"...You still owe me a beanie, you little thief." When Nora finally spoke, it was to the cross, and her voice broke halfway through it.

Then she pulled her own beanie off, a grey knitted thing with a pompom on top, and hung it on the end of the crosspiece, fixing it twice so it sat straight.

"...Keep it this time," she whispered.

Toby Hart was sixteen, the baby of the family, all elbows and enormous feet, built to end up Leo’s size someday, and now he never would.

He’d spent three university breaks trailing after me around this farm asking about the city, borrowing my phone every night to read NovelPhoenixs under his blanket, then swearing he hadn’t, while I pretended to believe him.

He followed Kara around the barn asking how to be a vet like his big brother, and he stole Nora’s beanie on the first day of every visit just to make her chase him across the yard for it.

I’d liked that kid, a lot. I was sad standing there, and there’s no point pretending I wasn’t.

But I wasn’t shaken, not like Kara and Nora were.

I’d buried too many people in my last life, kids included, and at some point I’d lost the ability to come apart at every grave.

Everyone I’d brought here was breathing: Kara, Nora, Leo, Nia, Mr. Norton, and Tikki.

That was the count that mattered to me, and it had come out right.

I loved the kid, just nowhere near as much as I loved the people I came here with.

So I stood at the gate and did the math instead, because apparently that’s all I am now. An accountant.

[Ten percent immune... A family of four out here, three of them still standing... Point one cubed, times point nine, times four ways to pick who’s missing... point three six percent. One in two hundred and eighty, give or take... Unless it runs in families.]

I looked at Kara, then at Nora, two sisters, both breathing, then at Leo on his knees beside his little brother’s grave, and decided that it did.

[...And I’m doing statistics at a funeral... Great. Super normal. Nailed it... Sorry kid...]

Over June’s shoulder, Kara looked up, found my face, saw that it was dry, and looked away again with that little crease between her brows. She’d noticed, because Kara always notices.

Dean found me at the gate after a while.

"Was the cat... flying that?" He looked from the bird to Tikki, still sitting against Leo’s knee by the cross, then back at me.

"He’s licensed," I deadpanned.

He laughed, then grabbed me in the same back-slapping hug he’d given me every university break, when Kara, Nora and I got off the bus with nowhere else to go and three bags of laundry.

"Look at you..." He held me out by the shoulders and looked me up and down. "Did you get bigger? You got bigger."

[Enhancers, man. And protein... Mostly the enhancers.]

Then he let go of me, turned to Kara and smiled. "Doctor Woodbrew."

And Kara smiled back at him, the first real smile I’d seen on her in a month.

For one second, I was jealous of the guy, which was stupid, and I knew it was stupid.

[Good for her... That’s good. That’s a good thing.]

I told myself that twice, which was once more than a good thing should need.

Dean’s eyes went from Kara to Nia yelling at Mr. Norton about her stitches, then back to me, and I watched him decide that Nia and I were a thing.

"Inside, all of you." Leo’s mom wiped her face with the back of the hand holding the revolver. "There’s a roast in the oven, I’ll make it stretch-"

[A roast for four... Two of us eat like a small army now... That thing would last about nine seconds.]

"Ma’am..." I held out my hand, and a fifty-kilo sack of rice came out of nowhere and thumped into the snow by her boots, with a crate of canned beef and a second sack right behind it.

"What are you?" Leo’s dad looked at the rice, then at me, very slowly.

"Yes, I’m a wizard, sir." I dusted my palms off.

"...Right."

[Huh... So that’s where Leo gets it from.]

Leo’s mom fed Tikki first, and nobody argued with that, least of all Tikki.

After dark, with nine of us and a cat crammed into a log house built for five.

I climbed up onto the tractor’s roof, where Dean had parked it back against the gate, with Tikki in the pocket for one last look.

The Infected were still out there in the fields, standing in the dark, facing the house.

Then Tikki’s ears swung round to the north-east.

-Thup-thup-thup-thup-!

Rotors, small and far off, and not mine.

A helicopter came in low over the fields from the north-east without a single light on, a little four-seater, the kind farmers spray crops with, and as it crossed in front of the camp’s lights I saw a dark shape swinging on a line underneath it.

It went toward the church, and after a few minutes the rotor noise cut off.

And every infected in the fields it had just flown over was still facing the farmhouse, and not one of them had looked up.

[...There’s another helicopter in this valley... and it flies dark... there’s something really wrong going on here...]