Chapter 116: What the Gate Keeps Out

Three of them.

I got that from sound before I got it from sight: three separate weights on the gravel outside the western fence, moving at three separate rhythms, and the low grinding huff a Stoneback makes when it is working a smell.

I put my back to the roof vent and let the dark do its job. Feline Senses turns a black yard into a grey one, and after a minute the grey resolved into shapes — three low bodies, none of them shorter at the shoulder than my chest, moving with their heads down and their armoured backs riding above them like slabs of pavement on legs.

The lead animal put its snout under the fence mesh at the weak section and lifted.

The whole panel came up four inches. Posts I had re-driven six hours ago leaned and held.

I keyed the yard floodlight once, a half-second flash, and all three animals shied hard and scattered twenty metres out into the field.

Not because light hurts them. Because it’s new. That’s the entire trick and it only works about three times.

Behind me, in the north block, a door opened, and Mira’s voice said something short and flat, and the door shut again. She had four adults awake and posted where I’d asked — two in the upper windows of the east block with a view of the yard, one at the north stair, one at the washroom door with the children behind her. None of them outside. Nobody in that compound was a soldier, and I had no intention of finding out how they’d learn.

The yard was mine.

They came back at four minutes, which was faster than I wanted.

The two smaller animals worked the western line again, and the largest went round for the pedestrian gate, and that was the one that mattered, because the pedestrian gate is chain and angle iron and the vehicle gate is chain and angle iron and my own bad welds and neither of them was built with three hundred kilos of plated boar in mind.

I dropped off the workshop roof onto the storage row and ran the length of it.

Feline Grace is not flight. It doesn’t make me strong and it doesn’t make me fast. What it does is stop me falling — it puts my feet where I meant them to go, and it takes the shock of a two-metre drop through the ankles and knees instead of through my spine. Before I gained it, I would have broken something doing what I did on that roofline without thinking about it.

I went down the far ladder into the yard shadow and let Predator’s Veil settle, and crossed forty metres of open ground twelve paces from an animal that never knew I was there.

At the pedestrian gate the big one had its shoulder into the frame and was leaning.

The chain sang. The hinge post shifted in its socket with a wet grinding noise, and something in me went very cold, because behind that gate was a yard, and behind the yard was a block with four sleeping children in it.

I put the first round through its right eye at nine metres.

The Veil broke on the shot, which it always does — the noise, the muzzle flash, the sheer forceful presence of firing. The Stoneback screamed, wrenched back off the gate, and came round at me with its head down and blood coming out of the socket, and I was already moving because I had picked the angle before I fired.

Four steps to the loading trench. The concrete lip is thirty centimetres high and the trench is a metre deep and half full of old rainwater, and I went over it and it did not.

Its forelegs went in. The plated head came down hard on the far lip.

I put two rounds into the joint behind its jaw where the plate stops and the neck starts, at a range of about two metres, and it stopped being a problem.

The other two were coming along the fence line.

[Stoneback Boar — Level 11 — defeated.]

I ignored it. Experience arrives when it arrives; it has never once helped in the following eleven seconds.

The second animal came at the western panel where the mesh was already lifted, and I shot it twice through the shoulder above the plate, which is not lethal and was never intended to be. It went sideways into the fence, screamed, tore a dozen metres of my mesh out of the ground, and ran. The third turned with it and followed, and the sound of them went away west and downhill and did not come back.

Total: five rounds. Two dead animals’ worth of noise and one dead animal.

I stood in the yard for a while with my hands shaking in the ordinary way and the smell of it everywhere, and then I sat down on the trench lip, because my palms had both split open again and I had not noticed, and the bruise had reopened its opinions about my ribs.

I’d like to say I finished the night looking impressive.

I did not. Mira came out with a lamp ten minutes later and found me on the trench lip with blood down both wrists, and I let her wrap the left hand because I couldn’t do it one-handed, and every adult in that compound got a good look at me not being invincible. On balance that was probably worth more than the alternative.

She tied the wrap off and didn’t let go of my wrist.

"I want to ask you something and I want the real answer."

"Ask."

"Did we make ourselves safer coming in here, or did we just move the danger onto your fence?"

"Both," I said. "Your grain’s on their route. That was true at the pump house, it was true at the grain store, and it’d be true in a ditch outside Greyhaven. Wherever you stopped, they were coming. What changed tonight is that there was a wall and a trench and somebody who knew the ground, instead of a brick yard with a hole in the north side."

"And the cost is yours."

"The cost was five rounds and a hand." I got my wrist back. "And I’ll walk you to Greyhaven myself once the road’s clear. That was the offer and it still is."

Nell Abbot said, out of the dark by the north block, "And if it isn’t clear?"

"Then we’ll talk about the road."

❖ ❖ ❖

A carcass is a document if you can read it, and Sefton brought a second lamp.

Young female. Small for the species, and the plates along her back were thin at the trailing edge and still growing in, which Sefton spotted before I did and described as "not finished, like a casting that came out of the mould early."

Not a raiding party. Not even a proper family group. Juveniles and subordinate females, pushed out to the ragged edge of somebody else’s range.

I took the lamp out through the pedestrian gate and followed the blood.

The wounded one hadn’t run for cover, and that was the thing that mattered. It had run home — south-west, off my land, in a straight line toward the shallow valley beyond the service station. Which is where the deep tracks I’d cut on my first scout had come from. The set I’d noted and hadn’t measured, because I’d been in a hurry and because I hadn’t wanted to.

I found one of them forty metres out and put the lamp beside it. A cloven print the width of my two hands with the fingers spread, and behind it the plate-mark pressed three full centimetres into ground my own boot had barely marked at all. Not a print. A hole with a shape.

Big enough that the number stops being the point, and I still ran the number, because I always do. Sixteen at the least. More likely seventeen.

So: a wounded animal was bleeding its way back into that valley, and either the herd would take the loss and shift its route away from the noise and the dead, or the thing at the centre of them would come and reclaim the road, the grain, and the ground.

There is no third option with a territorial animal. There is only which one, and how soon.

I straightened up with the lamp in my hand and my back to the compound, and the answer arrived before I had finished asking the question.

It came out of the dark from the south-west — one deep impact, then another, spaced like slow footsteps, rolling flat across four kilometres of open field the way only something enormous can carry.

Twenty metres to my left, with nothing near it and nothing touching it, the third post in my western fence line shivered in the ground.