Chapter 164: A Neighbourly Visit

/Nikki’s First Person POV/

Breakfast on the second morning inside the dome was pancakes in Nia’s rig.

June had taken Nia’s kitchen off her inside of a day, which Nia was still loud about, and the big rig’s dinette was the only table on the farm big enough for all of us now that the log house was a block of blue light.

So that’s where we were, nine people and a cat squeezed around a table built for six, snow coming down grey past the windows, while Nora stood at the end of it with her ThinkPad turned around to face us all.

She hadn’t slept a minute all night. Her cap was on crooked, she still had the blanket off her bunk around her shoulders like some royal cloak, and she’d frozen the thermal footage on the one frame that mattered.

Two white blobs for the men doing the carrying. Between them was a long white shape under the tarp. Warm from end to end, with the lump at the near end turned directly toward the farm.

“Three in the morning… they were up the tower.” Nora tapped the screen with one finger. “Four-ten, back down. It is warm, it is the length of a person, and it looked at us. I would like theories, and I would like them in order.”

[The kid’s been awake for twenty-six hours and she’s running the meeting… Cute.]

“A prisoner.” Leo looked at the screen, then at his pancakes, then back at the screen. “Hooded, maybe chained… Two men carrying him. But why carry a man up a tower?”

“A speaker.” Dean pointed his fork at the blob. “Big one, in a blanket. Plays a noise we can’t hear and those things settle down for it… Dogs do that with a whistle.”

“Speakers aren’t warm.” Kara didn’t look up from cutting Tikki’s pancake into squares. “A person with a pheromone spray is… There was a paper on it with pigs. You spray the pen and the whole herd goes calm.”

“Drugs…” I tapped the table next to the laptop. “They stand out there like they’re sedated, and sedated is chemistry, whatever the pastor wants to call it… The guy under the tarp is the one who sprays it I guess. That’d explain the tower. It’s the highest point they’ve got. Wind does the rest.”

[It’s a stretch… but it’s a stretch with a nozzle on it.]

“A virgin~” Nia was lying along the top of the dinette’s backrest with her boots on the window, eating pancakes with her hands. “Hooded, chained, carried up a tower by two men at three in the morning… That’s a sacrifice, big guy. We’ve all seen the movies.”

“Writing it down.” Nora wrote it down under the others. “Under theories dash idiotic.”

“Mea.” Tikki put one paw on the laptop’s screen, right on the warm blob, and left it there.

“Quality control says it’s a person.” I looked at the paw, then at the blob. “Quality control doesn’t say why.”

Nobody at the table had a why. What we had was a tarp that went up a tower at three and looked at the farm, a page with THEORIES (NORA’S) written across the top in capitals, and a wall due to come out of its field any minute now.

June put another pancake on my plate without asking, which was her way of ending a meeting.

-Ding!

{

Phase 2 complete: Perimeter Wall (Bare).

Type: gravity wall.

Height: 10 m.

Base: 9 m.

Crown: 4.6 m.

…

Gatehouse: 1.

…

Helipad: 1.

…

Wall walk: 1.

Lead Engineer: Leo Hart.

Armament: none, per the Host’s committee.

Observation: The System has built the Host a castle with no guns on it.

}

The blue went out on the dot, around the whole farm at once, and there was the wall.

Ten meters of raw grey concrete stood on the old paddock fence line with snow already settling on top of it. From the yard you couldn’t see the valley anymore, or the Infected in it, or anything at all but concrete and sky.

The inside face sloped up, nine meters thick at the bottom and narrowing to a walk along the top, with a stair cut into the slope beside the gate.

Across the drive was the gatehouse, a squat block of the same concrete with a portcullis in it, an actual portcullis, with a steel door behind the bars, and in the north-west corner a square of flat concrete, waiting for the Ghostbird.

Everyone had come out into the snow to watch it, and for a while nobody spoke at all.

“That’s a gravity wall.” Leo was the first one to talk, and he talked to the wall. “Thick at the base, sloped on the inside, so the weight holds it… Nothing pushes that over… It doesn’t need anything but itself.”

“It says gravity wall on the panel,” I told him. “Word for word.”

His ears went red in the snow, and he walked off along the base of it with his palm flat on the concrete the whole time, checking it.

I held my hand out over the helipad, and the Ghostbird dropped out of the Inventory onto it with a thump that shook snow off the wall, the whole dark bulk of it sitting there inside a dome that made it invisible from the sky.

Tikki went straight up the skid, walked the length of the cabin roof, and sat down on the nose.

“Mea.”

“Yeah, it’s yours too,” I told him.

Then I went up the stair by the gatehouse to see what thirty million Credits of wall looked like from the top.

The walk was wide enough for three people to run side by side, with a knee-high lip on the outside and nothing at all on the inside.

From ten meters up, the valley opened out below me as it had from the tractor’s roof, except that now I was looking down on the Infected instead of across at them.

They stood in the fields in their loose rows, facing the house, with snow on their heads and shoulders, and they were closer.

I knew they were closer before I counted, and I knew it, even though I hadn’t felt a flicker of Awareness since the lake.

The nearest of them stood cold and still, close enough now that I could see the snow sitting in their eyebrows, with not one of them moving.

“System… scan with the Ghostbird. I want the range to the nearest contact.”

-Ding!

{

Nearest contact: 13 m from the outer face.

Contacts within 20 m of the Host: 11.

Observation: Yesterday the answer was zero. The Host may again wish to find this concerning.

}

[Twenty-four meters yesterday… Thirteen today… Eleven meters, overnight, with nobody saying no to anybody.]

Nia came up the stair behind me, and sat down on the outer lip beside me with her boots over the edge and her black hair full of snow.

“They’re not walking, Nia.” I kept my eyes on them. “They got moved… Three in the morning, that thing under the tarp turns its head toward us, and by sunrise they’re eleven meters closer.”

“So the virgin’s a bossy one~” She looked down at them, and for once she wasn’t smiling. “Fine… We watch the tower every night, and count every morning… If the two match, the thing under the tarp is the thing we want.”

That was the plan, and it was a good one, so of course the next thing I did was look at the wrong thing.

Down by the hay barn, Dean and Kara were hauling a straw bale in through its half-open door, Dean carrying all of it and Kara carrying the twine, and Dean’s mouth was going the whole time.

And Kara smiled at the snow in front of her feet, the small one, the one she doesn’t know she does.

[Look at him… Perfect teeth. Clean-shaven in an apocalypse. Bet he’s never had an Infected at his face…]

I was jealous again, and this time I let the thought sit there and go sour instead of kicking it out, which was new, and I didn’t like how easy it was. Nor did I know why I was jealous at all. By all rights, I shouldn’t be.

[No way… don’t tell me-]

“Your face is doing a thing, big guy~” Nia didn’t even look at me.

“It’s cold.”

“Mhm~”

Nora went down face-first in her bunk around noon, while the drone parked itself four hundred meters over the churchyard to keep watch on its own.

The System passed its feed to my tablet in the gatehouse, where I’d been running the portcullis up and down for the fun of it.

The feed showed the churchyard in the falling snow, and three men walking out of its gate onto the farm road.

Two had rifles slung across their backs. The one in front wore a long black coat and an orange hat, and he walked west without hurrying, straight through the Infected standing along the road, like a man walking through his own congregation.

[Few kilometers… Thirty minutes, in this… he’s coming to say hello.]

Walter was in the gatehouse with me when the feed came up, and he looked at the orange hat on the screen for exactly one second.

“I’m not going out.” He turned around and went back up the drive toward the RVs without another word.

“Didn’t ask you to, sir,” I told his back as he went.

Then I went out instead, with Tikki on my shoulder, through the steel door, under the portcullis and down the drive, and stopped twenty meters out from the gate, which put me ten meters clear of the dome’s edge and out in the open.

Walter’s rule had always been that nobody came closer than twenty meters to his gate, so I moved it to mine.

Behind me, to anyone standing out here, there was a drive, a grey block wall, a shabby log house with no smoke coming out of it, and nothing else in the world.

I’d made sure of that for twelve million Credits, and I was about to find out whether it had been worth it.

They came up the drive thirty-four minutes later, which was long enough for the snow to fill in my tracks back to the dome’s edge, and long enough for me to stop feeling my toes.

The two with the rifles stopped fifteen meters short of me without being told, an old man in a cap with a scoped deer rifle and a younger one chewing on nothing, and both of them looked at my shoulder before they looked at my face.

The pastor kept coming until he was close enough to shake hands, and then he stopped and smiled at me with his whole face.

He was big, bigger than Walter through the shoulders, gone soft around the middle under the black coat, with a white priest’s collar at his throat, a broad pink face, and white hair combed straight back under a knitted orange hunting hat.

The crow’s feet folded deep when he smiled, and he smiled first and talked after.

“Is June eating?” That was the first thing out of his mouth. “She goes off her food when she’s worried… Thirty years I’ve known her, and she never once ate at a funeral.”

[…That’s the opener? That’s a hell of an opener.]

“She’s eating,” I told him.

“Good. Good.” He looked past me at the house with no smoke on it, and the smile didn’t move. “Gideon Stroud… I baptized all three of Walter’s boys in that church down the road… June knitted me this.”

He touched the hat with two fingers. “Three Christmases back.”

“Nikki.”

“Leo’s friend from the city.” He gave me a slow nod, and I could tell he’d spent two days waiting to meet me. “You brought him home in a helicopter, son… I heard it from my pulpit. A hundred and three people heard it.”

“Lot of helicopters around.” I shrugged under the cat. “Heard one myself that night. Flew with no lights on.”

“Dale’s.” He didn’t so much as blink. “He sprays crops. Sprayed, I suppose… He goes out at night for whatever the Lord has left for us in Dunmore, and he goes dark so the demons don’t follow the lights home.”

[Lights… Sure. Because rotors are famously quiet.]

Then he looked down the drive at the Infected standing in the field on either side of it, twenty of them within a stone’s throw of us, with the same face Walter gives the weather.

“They don’t set foot on the holy land…” He turned the smile back on me. “I don’t ask you to believe it, son. I ask you to come and see it. Bring the family. There’s a hundred and three of us and room for more, and we’ve got thirty-one children with coats on them for the first time this month… A young man with a helicopter could do a great deal of good for a hundred and three people.”

He was warm, and he was patient, and for about a minute of standing there in the snow I couldn’t find a single thing about him to dislike, which bothered me more than if he’d come up the drive swinging a crucifix.

“I’ll pass it on,” I told him.

“Do.” The smile never moved. “And tell Walter there’s a place for the boy, when he’s ready… Consecrated ground, with his people. Not out in some yard where demons can desecrate him.”

That made me angry, the cold kind, but I kept my hands open inside my gloves, because a man like that watches for fists.

“I’ll pass that on too.”

“And son…” He looked past me again, up the drive at the house, at the chimney with nothing coming out of it. “They’re closer to the house than they were. Those things… I notice these things, I walk this road… I’d hate for June to have one of them at her window.”

[…There it is.]

He put it the same as you’d tell a neighbor his gutter was coming loose, helpful and concerned, while every Infected in that field stood eleven meters closer to Leo’s mother than it had the day before.

Tikki, on my shoulder, had been looking at the pastor the whole time without a sound.

Now a growl came up out of his chest, low and deep, and it didn’t stop.

It kept going, steady, with his ears flat and his body gone stiff against my neck, while the snow came down on all of us.

The pastor’s smile held right where it was.

But his eyes went to the cat, and stayed there.

He stood there with the smile on and the cat growling at him, and for a few seconds nobody on that drive moved at all.

“Good day to you, son.” He tipped the orange hat and turned, and he walked back down the drive toward his men without once looking back at me.

He looked back at Tikki twice.

Tikki growled at his back the whole length of the drive, until the black coat went out of sight behind the Infected, and even then he didn’t stop.

[…What do you smell on him, booger?]