Chapter 5: The Farm

Signe's POV

"Don't," I said.

I was out of the truck before Wyatt had set the brake, with my hand on the barrel of Tor's shotgun.

He looked at my hand and then at me, and he didn't pull it away.

"Ma'am, that's my gun."

"A shot carries three miles on a morning like this," I said. "It'd bring every one of them in the county."

"One of them is standing in my drive."

"I know. Please. I can move it."

Tor Engen was sixty-six, with a white crew cut and a gray mustache.

He stood on his porch like a man who had spent forty years telling pilots no.

He hadn't known me for one minute in this life, and I'd spent twenty days on his floor in the last one.

He had cooked me eggs when I couldn't eat.

He had died in a hangar on the sixty-first day with a pill bottle in his fist.

I would not let that happen again.

"What's your plan?" he said.

"A phone and a boy who can run."

Jonas was already on the steps, small and freckled in a stocking cap with a Guard patch.

"I can run," he said.

I put Bets's phone in his hand and showed him the alarm.

It was the loudest one it had, a rising electronic shriek.

"Set it on the far fence post, across the pasture by the creek."

"Then run back along the ditch where it can't see you."

"Why the creek?" Jonas said.

"Because it'll walk straight at the noise, and the creek is the other direction."

He looked up at his grandfather.

Tor said, "Go on."

The boy took off over the yard in a flat gallop, glasses bouncing, and I watched him and my chest hurt.

He cleared the pasture gate and set the phone on the post, and the alarm went up like a siren.

At the end of the drive the medic's head came around.

She was a woman in her thirties, with a name tag and a ponytail.

Her eyes were white all the way across.

She turned and began to walk across the grass, and she was gone from the drive in a minute.

Tor lowered the shotgun and leaned it in the corner of the porch.

He walked to the Quonset shed without a word.

He came back with a six-foot steel fence-post driver, the kind with a weighted sleeve.

"Is there anybody in there?" he said, to me, quietly.

"No."

"You're sure," Tor said.

"I've sat with one for an hour. There's nobody."

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