Chapter 22: All of It

Robin's POV

The glass was still steaming when I walked out of the greenhouse.

The six men from the farm road had pulled back to the edge of the yard.

They were not looking at me anymore. They were looking at the field.

"Fall back!" one of them shouted. "Fall back to the bird!"

The helicopter came in low over the silos with its light swinging.

It set down hard in the open ground behind the warehouse, and the rotor wash flung dust against my face.

The noise was enormous. Out in the field, the dark mass quickened.

"The noise is pulling them," Nolan said at my shoulder. "Everything they've got is pulling them."

"Then we give them somewhere to go."

"Where?"

I pointed at the lane.

It was two fences and a burnt road, two hundred feet long.

A fused gate closed one end of it, and the other end was open to the road.

It was the one place on my farm built to hold something in.

"Funnel them," I said. "All of them. Into the lane."

"You can't hold hundreds."

"I know."

"Robin."

"I'm going to try," I said.

I ran for the inner gate. The mechanic ran beside me, and the boy's mother, and then half the yard.

Nobody had told them to.

They rolled out the fuel barrels I had stacked for the generators.

They tipped them on their sides along the lane fence and cut the lids off with Amos's axe.

"Light them when I say!" the mechanic shouted.

The first of the Bloomed reached the outer gate.

They came through it a few at a time, and then in a flood.

Their milky eyes shone in the glow of the barrels.

I took hold of the inner gate bars.

I did not wait to be angry. I did not need to be.

I thought about Amos on his bucket, rubbing his knee. I thought about a boy with a wristband in his fist.