Chapter 143: Compensation

/Kara’s Third Person POV/

A thin layer of frost had grown on the inside of the kitchen window overnight. So Kara scraped a patch clear with her thumbnail as she stood there with a mug of coffee in one hand, out of a trailer that had sat on the lawn since Nikki dropped it there last night.

And her eyes, through the hole she’d made, were fixed at the man kneeling in the snow beside his own truck.

Nikki had taken the Ascender’s driver door off, the one that had almost bowed out of its frame yesterday, and laid it flat on the snow with the mesh still bolted to it.

And he was kneeling at the empty hinges with both sleeves shoved up past his elbows, which he had never once done in the three years she’d known him before all this because he’d always been weird about his forearms, a hand tracing the two bullet holes on the door.

He hadn’t been moving long enough for Nia, sitting on the truck’s roof above him with a sleeve of crackers from the dry-goods trailer, to stop dropping the broken ones onto his head and just watch him do it.

Kara knew what he was measuring, because she had measured it herself from the passenger seat while it happened, and the answer was about a hand’s width between those holes in their bodies.

And she could not stop looking.

Because the Nikki who had come through the door on the third floor of that mafia building on day zero, soaked to the hair in other people’s blood with a shotgun in his hands and a cat on his shoulder, had been a stranger wearing the face of the goofy man she loved.

She had known it in the first second, and she had been living beside that stranger for more than two weeks since, being polite to him, cooking for him, laughing when he was funny, and feeling it all in her stomach every time.

She had decided, after the first week, lying on her bed in the penthouse, that the boy was gone and the stranger was what she had.

And the stranger did not kneel in the snow with his hand on a door.

The stranger fixed things because broken things were inefficient, but last night the stranger had stood in a farmhouse front room and given four reasons for spending a fortune on thirty-one women he’d known for a day. The fourth reason, the one he’d said quietest and last, had been that it would make his own people happy, and he had looked at her when he said it.

Kara did not know what to do with a man who was becoming two people at once, so she drank the coffee, which was very good, and kept looking through the hole in the frost until she heard the engines.

"Sis..." Nora said from the porch, her voice devoid of her usual pitch, and by the time Kara had put the mug on the sill and got the front door open, the trucks were already through the cattle gate at the bottom of the yard, two pickups and the flatbed, and six men were climbing down out of them into the snow.

Ruth was already walking out to meet them with the shotgun broken open over her forearm, and the women were coming out of the house and the barns behind her and forming up in a loose line without a word passing between them, because they had done this three times in eight days and knew where to stand.

Kara stood on the porch with Leo breathing wrong beside her, short and high through his nose, which he’d been doing since the crossroads whenever he forgot to hide it. She didn’t need to look for Nora because she could hear the drone controller’s little cooling fan whining against her sister’s coat, and that fan was the only sound on the porch until the first truck door slammed.

Nikki and Nia were around the back of the house, out of sight of it all, with a truck door lying in the snow between them and the gate.

Kara thought about shouting for him and didn’t. She would spend a long time afterward turning that decision over, because part of it was that Ruth had handled these men three times without a single man in the yard.

And Kara was not going to be the one who turned Ruth’s fence line into a place that needed one, and part of it, the part she wouldn’t say out loud, was that she wanted to find out whether the man kneeling in the snow behind the house would hear this on his own.

The one who did the talking had shaved for it.

And Kara noticed. Every one of the five behind him had a week’s beard on. This man’s jaw was almost pink, with a nick on the underside of his chin and a bead of blood dried on it.

He was wearing a good wool overcoat whose sleeves came down over his knuckles so that he kept pushing them back with the opposite hand, first one and then the other, over and over, while he looked straight past Ruth at the two trailers sitting on the lawn.

"Where’d the reefer come from?" he mumbled before anything else.

Nobody answered him, and after a second he seemed to remember why he had driven up here in the first place, and then the smile came on.

"Morning, Ruth. Everybody get through the cold all right?"

"We’re fine."

"Good." He pushed a sleeve back. "I’ll say it again because I’ll keep saying it, thirty-odd of you out here on your own with December coming and a fence I could push over with the flatbed... It’s not right, and you know it’s not right. C’mon luv, we’ve got room and a roof and forty men who know a rifle from a broom handle... I’d sleep better if you were all inside it, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted for you."

"The answer’s the same," Ruth replied, eyes staring dead at the man in front of her.

"I thought it would be," he said, and he nodded at that for a while, pleasantly, then pushed the other sleeve back, then stopped pushing his sleeves and put his hands in his pockets, and the yard went colder without the temperature changing at all.

"So here’s the other thing, then. Yesterday at the crossroads..." He let it sit as a predatory smile curved on his face. "Your girls fired on my people. I’m not going to pretend I don’t understand it, because there was a truck... There was shouting, and people get excited, I know... but Pauly’s dead, and Pauly wasn’t even supposed to be on the flatbed. He was covering for his brother, and his wife hasn’t stopped since we brought him home... Marco’s boy is eleven, and he asked me this morning if I was going to go and get the people who did it. Four men, Ruth... I’m not angry. I’ll never be angry at you. I’ve never once come up this road angry. But a thing like that has to be squared, or what’s any of us doing out here?"

"Huh..." Ruth crossed her arms, the broken double-barreled shotgun on her shoulder.

"The newcomers." He tipped his head toward the porch without turning it. "That fancy truck... They’re what brought this on you... everybody standing here knows it, so hand them across, and nobody living in this house gets touched. I’m giving you that in front of witnesses."

And then he turned his head, his brown beady eyes looking at the porch for the first time since he got out of the truck, and his eyes went past Leo without stopping and came to rest on Nora.

"Especially the women..." he said to Ruth, still looking at Nora. "That one’s young... and let me tell you, the young ones settle fast. She’ll be laughing about all this by Christmas, just you watch."

Kara heard Leo’s breath go in through his nose beside her and stop there, but she heard nothing else from Nora at all, and then the man’s eyes moved off her sister and onto her.

"That one too... especially that one. Got a face on her I like." He was already coming up the steps, unhurried, the too-long sleeves swinging.

"Hey-!" Bill said from beside the gate, and the man didn’t so much as glance at her.

"Livens a place up, a face like that." He stopped in front of Kara close enough that she could smell aftershave.

He’d shaved and splashed something on for this, for driving up a road to buy women with his dead, and he lifted one hand out of his pocket and reached for the side of her face with the sleeve sliding down over his fingers.

And the moment he did, Kara’s hand moved before the rest of her had any say in it.

And the sound went out across the yard flat and wet and came back off the barn a half second later, while the man’s head snapped to the side and stayed turned.

A beat later, a white print of her palm slowly bloomed on his face. Nothing in that yard made a sound afterward, not the six men or the thirty-one women or the drone’s fan high above.

Kara had not decided to do it, and she wanted that straight in her own head even as her palm burned, because her hand had done it alone, exactly as it had once put an elbow into Nikki’s face on a staircase without consulting her first. Her body had held firm opinions about men reaching for it since long before the world ended and had just stated one.

And as Kara looked at Ruth, she understood what it was going to cost.

Ruth’s face had gone white, the whole of it at once, and her eyes had left the man on the porch and were counting the six rifles standing in her yard, and then they went past the rifles and down the state road, south, toward the truck stop and the forty-some men in it.

Kara mentally counted with her and came out at the same place. Eleven guns, of which two didn’t feed, thirty-one women, twenty-two of them who’d never fired anything before the fall, against forty men with fuel and trailers, firearms, and the familiarity with the said firearms that only comes after years of carrying.

A slap was no longer just a reflex. It had become a declaration, and this house could not survive what it had declared.

The women knew it too, every one of them, but still Kara saw Vera ready to bring her rifle up, her thumb already flicking the safety off.

She saw all of them moving ever so slightly.

And she knew why.

They had been locked in shipping containers in the basement of a mafia building, and they knew what men did on the morning they finally won.

The man on the porch turned his head back around deliberately slowly.

The smile came back onto his mouth as the print of her hand went on darkening under it, and the corners of his mouth had come loose.

He looked at Kara out of the middle of it and raised his open hand again, slowly, with the sleeve sliding back down over his knuckles.

And through it all, Kara’s gaze on that man never flicked.

And just as the man’s palm descended-

His head exploded.