Chapter 168: Good Call

/Leo’s Third Person POV/

They had taken another step in the night, and Nikki had seen them do it himself.

Leo was on the wall at first light to measure it.

He stood at the outer lip of the walk above the gatehouse with his father’s laser rangefinder, the one Walter used for deer, and put the red dot on the chest of the nearest one, a man in a torn hi-vis vest standing in the snow below with his head tipped back toward the house.

Eleven meters, the readout told him.

He did three more along the south side to be sure, and they all came back the same, eleven and eleven and twelve, where Nikki had called it thirteen the morning before.

Two meters closer than the day before. One step, for a tall man, and every one of them had taken it at the same time, in the dark, without a sound, while Kara sat in the RV and watched a tarp go up the bell tower at three in the morning for the second night running.

She’d written it in the log in her notebook before she went to bed: up at 3:02, down at 4:11, the same two men, the same lantern, the same window.

Nikki had told them all to watch the tower every night and count every morning, and if the two matched, the thing under the tarp was the thing they wanted.

The tower and the count had matched.

Leo put the rangefinder in his coat pocket and looked down at the man in the hi-vis vest, who didn’t look back, and did the other sum, the one he didn’t want to do.

The dome broke at ten meters. Nikki had read it off the panel at the table, and Nora had written it on her page in capitals. The nearest of them stood eleven meters from the wall now, one step outside the edge of the thing that made the farm look empty, and the next step they took would put them inside it.

And what that would entail, Leo couldn’t predict.

On one hand, they’re just mindless things. But on the other, they’re behaving far too organized to be mindless.

After all, inside the dome, there was no shabby log house to look at. There was ten meters of wall.

He didn’t know what one of those things did when the house it had been staring at for a month turned into ten meters of concrete overnight, and he didn’t think anybody did.

His eyes stung in the cold, which happened to him when he was scared and never when he was anything else.

He wiped them with the back of his glove and went down the stairs to find his father.

Walter was at the dinette in Nia’s rig with his coffee, alone, with June’s pancake pan already going behind him and June already not talking to anyone before her second cup.

Leo put the calendar down in front of him.

It was the feed store’s calendar from the old kitchen wall, with the picture of the combine on it, and he’d turned it over at the dinette at four that morning while Kara watched her screen, and he’d filled the back of it in pencil, top to bottom, with a ruler.

The watches came first, the drone through the night in the rotation Nikki had set, and the wall day and night, two people at a time, four hours on.

Under that came who cooked, which was June, with the word HELP written under it and crossed out by June herself at five with NO written beside it. Then who hauled water from the melt pot and who split wood, then who trained with Nia, which was everyone.

And at the bottom sat the RV-yard rules his mother wanted enforced, written out word for word as she’d given them: boots off at the door, quiet after ten, nobody sleeps in Nia’s rig, but Nia, and the cat eats first.

Walter read all of it with his coffee in his hand, the whole page, top to bottom, the same as he read a seed contract.

"Fine."

Leo stood there with the calendar in his hands.

In twenty-two years of being Walter Hart’s son, he had never once put a piece of paper in front of his father and had it come back with nothing changed on it.

Not a chore list, not a school form, not the plan for the new hay shed he’d drawn in his first year of university, which had come back with eleven corrections in red pen and a note about the snow load.

His ears went hot in the warm rig. He was pleased, and he was embarrassed about being pleased at twenty-two over a word, and both of those sat in his face at once while his father went back to his coffee.

"Right," Leo managed.

"Pin it up by the door," Walter told the coffee. "Where your mother can see it."

Nikki found him at the dinette an hour later with the tablet and put it down on the calendar.

"System’s got a consultant mode." He slid it across the calendar. "It’s put the house on here for you... The whole thing, every floor, and the bunker under it. You can draw on it with this pencil if you want any changes..."

The screen showed the new house in blue lines on black, from above and from the side, five floors of it standing on the footprint of the log house that was gone, with the bunker going down under it in a long rectangle twice the length of the house.

"Where’s it wrong?" Nikki asked him, the same as on the porch roof.

Leo pulled the tablet toward him and didn’t answer. He was already looking at it.

"The porch faces north." He turned the drawing with two fingers. "That’s where the wind comes from... Mom will never sit on it."

"Then turn it."

"The water tower’s on the gravel pad by the silo. Gravel pad’s on fill. It’ll heave in the first thaw and go over..." He dragged the little tower across the screen to the rise behind the big barn without being told he could. "Bedrock’s a meter down there. Dad hit it digging the silo footing."

"Good."

"There’s no mudroom." Leo looked up from the screen. "It’s a farm... Everybody comes in covered in it. You need a mudroom with a drain, or Mom will kill whoever walks on her floors, and it’ll be me."

Nikki laughed at that, stood up, and pushed his chair in.

"Your call, lead engineer." He picked Tikki up off the bench and put him on his shoulder. "Change whatever you want... System’ll read into it before noon... I’m going to go stand on my wall."

And he went and left Leo alone with it.

Leo understood exactly what that was, and his ears went red again, and there was nobody at the table to see it this time.

He was still at the dinette at eleven with the mudroom drawn in, and the stair moved twice when the picture on the tablet changed by itself.

The house went away, and in its place the drone’s feed came up, grey and quiet, looking down on the farm road from four hundred meters up, with a line of text across the top of it that read

CONTACT: FARM ROAD. ONE ADULT. UNARMED.

A woman was walking west along the road toward the farm, alone, in a blue jacket, through the Infected standing along both verges with the snow on their shoulders, and not one of them turned a head as she passed.

She walked the same as everyone in this valley walked past them now.

Leo watched her do it and felt sick about it, the same as he had every day since the bird came down.

She reached the bottom of the drive, stopped beside the mailbox, put both hands in her pockets, and stood there looking up at the house.

Leo took the tablet down to the gatehouse.

Nikki and Walter were already in it, with the portcullis down and the steel door open behind it, looking out through the bars at the woman standing at the bottom of the drive.

Walter looked at her for about as long as he’d looked at the pastor on the screen the day before, and shook his head once, and that was all.

"I’ll go," Nikki started, and reached for the door.

"I’ll go."

Nikki stopped with his hand on the steel, looked at him for a moment, then stepped back from the door and held out the tablet.

"She stays at the road... You walk the whole drive, and you walk it back." Nikki’s face gave Leo nothing at all. "Take Tikki. He’s a better judge of people than you are."

"Mea."

So Leo walked down his own drive for the first time in a month with a cat on his shoulder and his rifle in his hands, under the portcullis and out through the dome without feeling anything when he crossed it, and down through the Infected standing in the field on either side, eleven meters off and then twenty and then fifty, with their heads all turned the other way.

The woman watched him come the whole length of it, but what she saw was Lea coming out of a house that looked abandoned.

She was older than him by a few years, thirty maybe, thin inside a blue Dunmore Transit jacket with the reflective strip gone grey, two sweaters under it, and a knitted hat pulled down to her eyebrows, and when he got close enough he could see she’d been crying before she ever got to the mailbox and had stopped on purpose to talk to him.

"You’re Leo." She looked up at him, and up. "Pastor said you’d be the tall one. I’m Darla. Darla Huff."

"Yes, ma’am."

Tikki, on his shoulder, hadn’t made a sound the whole walk down, and Leo had decided before she opened her mouth that this counted for a lot.

"My boy’s sick." She took her hands out of her pockets and put them back in. "Petey... He’s seven. It’s been four days now with the fever, and his chest sounds like a washboard, and the pastor said... He said the people with the helicopter might have medicine."

Leo looked at her, and then past her down the road, east, where the camp was, where kilometers of fields and thirty empty houses and a line of willows sat between him and a place he’d been every Sunday of his life until he was eighteen.

According to his father, Mrs. Hennig was in that camp. She’d taught him fourth grade and let him sit by the radiator. Travis Ambler’s mother was in it, who’d driven him to football for three years with his own father always out in a field.

Dale Pruitt, who’d once let him sit in the helicopter with the blades going.

He’d been baptized in that church in the stone font with his brothers, and he had sung in it, badly, at Christmas, for eighteen years.

And Darla Huff, who he didn’t know from anyone, was standing at the bottom of his drive with her hands in her pockets, telling him about her boy’s chest, and she had walked kilometers through those things to do it.

She had faith in the pastor. He could see it on her.

From what his father had told the gorp, the man had flown her and her son out of Dunmore when nobody else had come for them, and he had kept them alive for a month in a camp with a fence a child could climb, and she believed in him the same as Leo had believed in his own father at seven.

Leo didn’t know how the pastor was doing it. Nobody on the farm did yet.

But he knew what a seven-year-old with four days of fever was, and he knew what his mother would have done at the bottom of this drive, and he knew that the man standing in the gatehouse behind him with the cold face had left him alone with a tablet that morning on purpose.

"We’ll get you medicine for him." It came out level, like everything that came out of his mouth, even his hands stayed steady in his pockets. "... Wait here, ma’am. Don’t come up the drive. I’ll bring it down."

"Oh..." Darla’s face came apart, and she put a hand over it. "Oh, thank you. Thank you, I-"

"Wait here," Leo told her again, and turned around, and walked back up the drive.

He hadn’t asked Nikki for permission. He understood that about halfway up, with Tikki’s claws going into his coat as he walked faster, and his eyes stung once again in the cold.

Nikki was leaning on the inside of the portcullis when he came back under it, with his arms folded.

"I told her we’d get medicine for her boy." Leo stopped in front of him. "Seven years old, four days of fever, chest congestion. And I told her Mr. Norton would come and see him."

Then he stood there and waited for whatever was coming, with his hands in his pockets clenched into fists.

Nikki looked at him for a while.

"Good call." He unfolded his arms and pushed off the bars. "Sir, what do I buy?"

Mr. Norton had come down from the RVs at some point, and he stood inside the gatehouse with his bag over his shoulder, his taped ear toward them, and he told them once.

"Amoxicillin-clavulanate, the suspension. Forty milligrams per kilo, twice a day, ten days... Write it down for her." He looked at Leo through the cracked lens. "And I see him myself, in their camp... I’ll handle the others while I’m at it."

"Tomorrow," Nikki told him. "And when you go, I’m going with you."

He held his hand out, palm up, and a white plastic bottle dropped into it out of nowhere, then a second one. Nikki looked at them, shrugged, and handed Leo both.

"One’s spare."

Leo walked them back down the drive with Mr. Norton’s instructions written on the back of a feed-store receipt, put them into Darla Huff’s hands at the mailbox, and watched her read the receipt twice, lips moving, before she put it inside her jacket against her chest.

"The doctor’s coming," he told her. "Tomorrow, to the camp, to look at him properly... Tell the pastor."

"I will. I will, Leo, thank you... God bless you." She was crying again, not stopping this time, and she took one step back toward the road, then stopped, turned around, and all the gratitude drained from her face at once, replaced by the absolute solemnity.

"When you come..." Darla Huff looked up at him with the bottles held against her chest and her mouth gone flat. "Don’t ever look at the Ark. Pastor says it’s death."