Chapter 117: The Road Claimed in Blood

She didn’t come that night.

The impacts went on for eleven minutes, moved north, stopped, and didn’t resume. I stayed on the roof until the sky greyed out, which taught me one useful thing: whatever had made that noise wasn’t in a hurry, and it hadn’t come because of the shooting.

At first light I gave out jobs and left.

"Vehicle gate," I told Sefton. "Hinge post’s shifted two centimetres in the socket. Rebar’s in the storage row, dry mix behind the tank. Don’t make it good, make it hold."

"How long have I got?"

"Assume four hours."

Mira had the rest of it inside a minute, which was when I stopped worrying about the compound while I was away from it. Water to both blocks. Children inside a door that shut. Nell on the eastern fence with the shotgun and an instruction to watch the field and not the gate. Nobody outside the wire.

Otto asked to come. I told him no and gave him the real reason instead of a kind one — that a man who can’t run is a man I have to carry — and he took it better than I would have.

Then I went west alone, because that’s the one thing I am actually good at.

❖ ❖ ❖

I found the herd at half past seven in the shallow valley beyond the service station, and lay in the grass on the northern lip without moving.

Nine animals. Six juveniles and two subordinate females feeding across old pasture with their backs to the slope.

And her.

She was lying down when I first saw her, which made it worse rather than better, because lying down she was still higher at the shoulder than my kitchen table. The plate across her back had fused into one continuous shell from the base of her skull to her hips — grey-brown, dulled with age, cracked in three places along the spine and healed over each time into a raised ridge. Her tusks had been broken and regrown. A long white scar ran down her left flank, put there a long time ago by something with claws.

[Appraisal — Stoneback Matriarch. Level 17.]

She got up while I was watching, and the ground took her weight the way ground takes a truck.

Then she did the thing I keep coming back to. She didn’t graze. She walked a slow arc around the outside of the feeding animals, stopped on the valley’s open side, and stood with her body turned side-on to the empty ground and her head toward it.

Not facing it. Flanked to it — the way you stand when you want the biggest part of you between a thing and the animals behind you, with the fastest possible turn available either way. She’d been on guard all night. The eleven minutes of noise had probably been her walking a boundary and hitting things.

I did not hate her. She was doing exactly what I had been doing on my own roof six hours earlier, with better equipment and worse luck. But my western fence was inside her range now, the service road ran through the middle of it, and there was a quarter tonne of grain and thirteen people sitting on ground she had decided was hers.

Coexistence is available when two ranges don’t overlap. These overlapped completely.

❖ ❖ ❖

I tried to move her anyway.

South of the pasture there’s a dry drainage corridor — a concrete channel two metres deep that used to take runoff off the plant and now takes nothing at all. It runs south-west, away from my land, and it is the easiest walking route in that valley for something built like a wall.

So I spent two hours with what I had. Four sheets of loose corrugate dragged across the pasture’s north exit and wedged into the fence remnants — not enough to stop a Stoneback, enough to make that direction annoying. Split grain at the corridor mouth and another line twenty metres in. The old wire on the corridor’s east side cut through.

Then I went back to the lip and watched it half work. Two juveniles found the grain inside twenty minutes and went down into the channel after it, a third followed, and for about four minutes I let myself believe I was going to solve this with a bag of split wheat.

Then the wounded one came home — up the valley from the south-east, limping badly on the shoulder I’d put two rounds into, breathing in wet grunts, straight past the corridor mouth and into the middle of the herd, trailing blood.

The matriarch’s head came round.

I watched her take it in: the blood, and under the blood, whatever a Stoneback smells on an animal that has been hurt by something that isn’t a Stoneback. Her head went down. The plate along her spine lifted half a hand’s width on muscle I hadn’t known was there.

Then she turned and walked north-east out of the valley on a line as straight as a surveyor’s, and the herd came off the grain and went with her.

North-east is my compound.

I lay in the grass exactly as long as it took to be sure, and then I got up and ran.

❖ ❖ ❖

I had about ninety minutes and a scrapyard.

There was a version of that morning where I sent somebody to Greyhaven and spent the standing favour Ashmark Company still owed me out of Carrow Deep. Nine kilometres each way, my fastest walker was Nell, and by the time anyone in an Ashmark coat reached that gate the gate would be a memory. I noted the idea, put it back where it lives, and didn’t take it out again.

"Vehicle gate," I said, before I was properly through the pedestrian one. "Sefton, is it holding?"

"It’ll hold a wind."

"Good enough. Leave it chained and get me the two flatbed side rails, the cable drum, and every length of angle iron in the storage row."

You cannot stop three tonnes with a gate. Anyone who says otherwise has never watched a Stoneback hit anything. What you can do is decide where it goes.

So we built a lane.

The vehicle entrance already had the loading trench across the inside of it — a metre deep, full of black water, left from whatever the compound used to do with lorries. On the yard side I chained the two flatbed rails at an angle, welded ugly and braced with iron, so that anything coming through the gate on a straight line would find the left half of its road pinched shut and the right half open along the trench edge, under the storage row’s cantilevered loading beam.

That beam had held up nothing since I claimed the compound. We hung the heaviest object on the property from it: a two-and-a-half-metre section of plate off the old press bed, near enough four hundred kilos, swung on doubled cable and held back against a post by a single pin with a release line on it.

Four hundred kilos on a rope against three tonnes at a run is a joke, and I knew it. It only had to hit her side hard enough, at the right moment, to put her shoulder over the trench lip.

"That’s a slaughterhouse gambrel," Sefton said, looking up at it. "That’s a gambrel and a chute, is what that is."

"Will it hold?"

"The beam will. The pin’s the question, and the pin’s the question because it’s my pin." He spat. "Where do you want me?"

"On the secondary. If the first line fouls, somebody has to pull the pin by hand from underneath, and that’s four metres from where she’ll be." I looked at him. "You can say no. Everybody can, it costs you nothing, and I’ll rig it as best I can either way."

Sefton scratched his jaw. "I’ve had a bearing race come apart at nineteen hundred revs a foot from my face. Show me the pin."

Mira took the primary release, because it needed somebody who would pull on a word and not a second before it. Otto took the noise — a length of steel pipe, an empty drum, and every tin line I had — because he could do all of it sitting down. Nell put the four children in the old site office — brick, one door, high windows — and stood in the doorway with the shotgun and didn’t pretend to be anywhere else.

"Anybody who wants to be inside can be inside," I said. "This isn’t a debt and it isn’t a test."

"We’re aware," said Nell.

That was the whole of the conversation.

❖ ❖ ❖

With everything rigged and forty minutes still to go, I stood in the middle of the yard and thought about the charge.

[Blind Call Charges: 1/1.]

One activation. A grade roll I couldn’t control and a person I couldn’t choose, dropped onto that concrete with thirteen civilians and a Level 17 animal converging on the same gate. It might be a B-grade soldier who’d take one look and hold the line. It might be somebody’s terrified mother. It might be a woman with black-crimson fire on her arm who would look at me once and lose hold of herself in front of children.

That last thought was newer than the others, and it decided it.

No.

I climbed the storage row to my firing position and left the charge where it was, and I’d be lying if I said it felt like strength. It felt like putting down the only thing in my hands.

At twenty to eleven, Nell’s voice came across the yard, flat and clear.

"West road."

She came out of the heat shimmer at the far end of the service road with the herd spread behind her in a loose crescent, unhurried, taking up more of the road than a road is supposed to have in it. Four hundred metres. Three hundred.

At two hundred she stopped, and put her head down, and turned that head toward my vehicle gate.