there's a fight to be won for the love you find at home. Who: The Davidsons, plus parents, aunt & uncle, cousins, ranch hands, etc. Where: The family farm/compound in Richland What: What good people do to survive. The background to their notorious raider attack, and still picking up the pieces a year later. When: Two Christmases past and present, 2017 and 2018. (Let's pretend this didn't take forever to write!)
Cal drove the appropriated pickup and horse trailer all the way up to the gates that remained steadfastly closed long enough for the cloud of their dust to settle around the tires, but nothing happened. Willa glanced across the cab, her brother shrugging as he cranked the brake and turned off the engine. She tucked the handgun stowed between the seat and her door into the back of her jeans before she opened it, stepping out with her hands in the air. "Anybody home?" she shouted, and Willa recognized the surprise in Jorge's answering call.
"Willa?" There was a pause, one in which she felt sure a gun was being stowed, and then the teenage boy appeared, standing full height in the watch tower once again now that he was sure this wasn't the start to another Christmas like their last.
“Cal?”
“Home again, home again, jiggety jig,” the soldier announced with a laugh, seeing his sister descending from the watch tower to greet him. They collided with a hug, breathing in the dusty scent of the road and her baby brother home from Austin. When he pulled away she scrubbed at her eyes, and he was reminded of the days in the gymnasiums and parking lots, families waiting in eager anticipation to fold their loved ones back into their arms, to take them home, and away from their units.
"I missed you," she answered fiercely, and then punched him in the arm as though it was his fault. And it was, for he was the one who kept leaving for Austin, even though she could hardly blame him.
“Prodigal son and prodigal daughter, home at last,” Cal announced as he clambered out of the truck, stretching his limbs and cracking his stiff neck and back. His heart lifted at the sight of the farm: still standing, still stubbornly keeping on keeping on.
Without communications, if it fell while the Davidsons were away, they wouldn’t hear about it until their next visit. He was always filled with chest-tightening anxiety whenever they drove down that familiar pitted road, bumping over muddy holes and past the worn gate; just waiting to turn the corner and see a burned-out abandoned wreck, all their nightmares come true.
But Jorge was sliding down that ladder and he was grinning and he was alive and saying, “Just in time, you two. We thought you might not make it back to help with prep.”
"Was sort of hoping we'd arrive just in time to sit down, eat, and then fall asleep before we got suckered into doing the dishes," WIlla called, and with the sound of chains being unwound, the gate opened and he appeared. She went to hug him first, leaving the truck and Juniper behind for the brief moment even if letting her guard down here made her even more nervous than it did, in Austin.
"They made it, Sus!" another voice called, and in the distance Willa could see her father, walking out from one of the barns at a clip, wiping his hands on a handkerchief that masked the red Chuck Davidson was rubbing away.
"Hey Chuck?" The walkie talkie on the man's hip interrupted, static crackling for a moment afterwards, before Jorge's voice continued. "Something you should come see. There's a bunch'a trucks, and maybe a motorcycle or two, and I think they're comin' here." Willa's eyes shifted nervously from her father to her brother, and the former drew the handkerchief from where it was tied over his face, giving his hands and then his knife a hasty cleaning before answering the boy's request. "On my way," he said, and gestured at the rest of the half-butchered side of aged beef that would soon be Christmas dinner. "Leave it. Get everyone ready, and send your ma out to finish up."
The two other men lounging on the porch rose, chairs scraping across the hardwood deck.
Jay instinctively stuck by his wife’s side, and he and Cal exchanged a quick look.
"Go," she said, wiping her own cleaver across the hem of a too-frilly apron. "I'll take care of everyone here."
“Calvin, get the boys,” their father added, and Cal gave a crisp nod before vanishing inside the living room to round up his uncle and the ranch hands, his brisk movements betraying a military efficiency as he left Chuck behind.
"C'mon," he insisted, tucking the handkerchief away before Willa could take more than two steps toward him. "Get it all inside, and then there's time for hugs. Is that Cal back there?"
“Piece of shit starter’s on the fritz,” the blond man shouted from the window of the truck, by way of answer. “I’m gonna want to take a look at it later with you guys’ parts.” With an aching grumble, the engine finally came back to life and the pickup rolled its way down the bumpy lane, horse trailer in tow. Willa and Jorge drew the gates closed behind them, looped the heavy chains back into place.
The trucks and motorcycles made an ominous rumble as they approached the Richland farm, like an oncoming storm. The men behind the wheels and handlebars were a hard-bitten lot: scarred, scruffy, not starving but not especially well-fed either. Too many men rode in the back of the pickups too, a motley assortment like a bunch of hicks coming for a tailgate party, ‘cept their expressions weren’t friendly at all.
Chuck and his daughter stood by the gate, stony-faced and wary.
“Howdy, neighbour,” the biker in the lead called, as their troupe drew up short. Mostly out of range of the watchtower.
She could see the weapons, bare in the way that meant they wanted them seen, and Willa raised her hand to shield her eyes for a better look, taking stock. "Happy Christmas Eve," she returned, voice purposefully trepidatious.
"That what day it is?" one of them laughed, and the others joined in.
Willa took a step back.
The Davidsons set the table, laying out dishes and glasses for themselves, their cousins, and five ranch-hands, this makeshift community that had sprung up around the compound.
(Four fewer faces than last year, though.)
Bone-crushing hugs were doled out for the new arrivals—Cal bodily lifting his mother, Susannah shrieking a little as her feet left the floor, and Chuck’s weathered face breaking into an unbridled grin at the sight of his two kids healthy and hale. Their greeting of Uncle Pete was a bit more subdued, the man looking paler and thinner than ever, but he managed a smile for the siblings as well.
When they took seats around the large dining table, Cal paused for a moment before claiming the plate next to his sister, the spot usually reserved for Jay.
They didn’t leave any empty places, instead drawing in tighter. Practicality reigned over sentiment, as it always did here. They’d rather move forward than be reminded of what they’d lost.
“No guns at the dinner table, gents. We’re doing y’all a solid, sharing our meal like this. ‘Least you could do is settle the hell down and enjoy some yams.”
Jay stood in the doorway to the farmhouse, hands on his hips as he watched his wife and father-in-law, holding their ground on the front porch while a band of sixteen men held the patch of sparse grass that made up the front lawn. For a moment, no one moved. "Good faith," he said finally, stepping out onto the porch and shrugging out of the shoulder holster he wore, hanging it on one of the row of hooks that lined the walls and posts of the porch, bearing fishing boxes, ropes, and other errata.
"Oh just leave the fucking guns on the porch," Willa snapped, and both men looked at her sharply, though one of the band of others laughed again. "All you're gonna find in there are two of my cousins, one of their husbands, my aunt, my arthritic uncle, and four kids younger'n ten, brushing their teeth and getting ready to go to bed early so Santa will come and leave them presents. You really aren't brave enough to sit down and eat without assault rifles?"
"Your girl's a real piece of work," one of them answered, though he grinned at Chuck, and stepped forward to lean the gun against the porch.
"Don't I know it," Jay interrupted. "And you're not even married to her."
The rest of them laughed this time, and Willa scowled.
"Willy, Neon, take a look around, and if you don't find no one else, come in and eat peaceably," ordered the man who seemed to be in charge as he climbed the stairs onto the porch. "But if you do find somebody out there -" his eyes met Willa's, and she forced herself to back down, to look away, "you shoot 'em on sight."
"On this, the most joyful of holidays, we give thanks Lord, for this food which is bountiful and delicious. We give thanks for this time when we can all be together," Willa's left hand squeezed her brother's, her right arm wrapped around Bryce in her lap, "and for the memories of those who are now gathered around your table instead of ours. In Jesus' name -" and the entire family chorused in time with the last of Chuck's blessing, "Amen."
The table came to life in the span of time it took them all to lift their heads, silverware clattering, napkins laid in laps or tucked into collars, empty plates and heavy side dishes being passed between them all, but the six year old in her lap did scarcely more than wiggle. "What do you want to eat?" Willa asked, giving his middle a squeeze. "We'll fix your plate and then you can sit at the little table with your brothers and cousins."
"We don't have to go eat in bed this time?" he asked, and Willa swallowed hard.
"No baby, not this year."
The children had been hustled away upstairs before the intruders even stepped foot beyond the gates, bundled into their beds with an instruction: We’re going to play a game. You’re going to be real quiet, and you get to eat dinner in your bedroom tonight. The iPod’s going to play some holiday music, and if you're good then Santa's going to come even sooner. Okay? Okay.
Meanwhile, out back, Cal stood in the barn with bloodied knuckles and Uncle Pete beside him. The second raider—who apparently boasted the most illustrious name of Neon—had been struck with a pike to the head, blood now trickling from his temple and soaking into the sawdust. They’d only meant to knock him out, but he wouldn’t wake up. Jorge squatted on his heels, hand to the man’s wrist, and finally shook his head at Cal.
Another ranch-hand, Eddie, worked quickly to tie up the other man, using the same tight knots he used every day around the farm. Willy groaned weakly, his face pressed into the dirt. Uncle Pete kept a gun levelled on the stranger.
“How many of you are there?” Cal was asking, his voice hard. (He’d done this before, overseas, and he would be doing it again.) “C’mon. How fucking many?”
“Six--teen,” Willy managed to growl, “and we gonna get you back for this. You gonna regret that, man. Neon? Neon, you okay? Neon?”
Cal didn’t pay him any attention, flexing his bruised hand and thinking.
He was doing the math.
"Any spotting?"
Natalia shook her head. "No, but we couldn't find any prenatals anywhere, none of the stores even had an expired bottle anymore."
"It's okay," Willa said immediately, absolving whatever guilt her cousin's wife must have been dealing with. "You're eating better and more regularly than a lot of women were, even before the virus hit. I mean, they make your hair shiny and your nails strong, but you've had plenty of calcium and protein and vegetables, so you should be getting everything you need just from your regular diet."
A nervous smile spread across the woman's lips in response, and Willa filled her mouth with corn pudding rather than say something about how stupid it was to get knocked up, now. She didn't need to. "I'm scared," the brunette whispered.
"No," Willa breathed, glancing across the table at Jake. "No, Natalia, women gave birth without hospitals and drugs for centuries - for millenia. You're going to be fine."
"Will you stay? Will you help me?"
She felt herself tense, reaching out only in spirit for her brother beside her. It was harder to let him go, now that Willa knew what was going on in Austin, how dangerous it was. He could practically feel her expressly not looking at him, and Cal just gave the smallest nod, as he filled up his plate with seconds.
“Our vet here’s the best in the county,” he announced. A joke, and tacit approval. “If she can’t help you with the winter calving, no one can.”
“Hey, man,” Jake cut in, “that’s my wife you’re talking about.”
“Sorry. Foaling?”
“Asshole.”
Everyone laughed but Susannah, who snapped her napkin at her nephew, gesturing to the coffee table that had been dragged nearby, and the four sets of little ears that had perked up at the swear. "Language!"
The stiff-jawed, nervous dinner gathering had started digging into the food, the raiders feasting with the enthusiasm of mangy, starving dogs. Spoons and forks ladled out corn and potatoes, and the men took in the fresh meat with almost reverent awe—life had been corned beef and spam for far too long.
Fourteen raiders joked with one another, bantered and swore and laughed while the Davidsons sat uncomfortable, trying to eat while watching strangers abusing their flatware. Most of the men seemed to relax with hot food in their bellies, but their leader, Ray, was noticeably on edge and getting even more wired.
“You alright there, sir?” Chuck asked, his voice as deceptively mild as ever. He’d draped one arm over the back of his chair.
Ray had been looking out the window. “Neon and Willy ain’t back,” he said.
Those words made his nearest men go still.
“They’ve taken way too long. Where the fuck are they?” They’d already checked upstairs before dinner, combing through both floors of the house and frightening the children, much to Molly’s irritation. But now he levelled a harder look at Willa, who sat nearest him. “Anyone on the farm you neglected to mention?”
"Cows," she answered, blinking and gesturing to what remained of the roast. "Chickens. Half a dozen horses. Are Willy and Neon stupid enough to go messing around in a barn, get themselves kicked in the head?"
His hand tightened on his fork. Staring at the blonde, as if weighing her words on a scale and figuring out if they passed muster.
In the end: “Not both of them at once,” Ray said flatly. He set the fork down, gestured with a hand. “Wells, Enrique, go and—”
BANG!
The front door burst open and everyone jumped, and into the room came the most bedraggled Santa Claus Willa had ever seen. Pete had excused himself to the bathroom ten minutes ago, and Willa covered her smile so that she wouldn't laugh, as all of the children's eyes had grown as big as their dinner plates. His voice was big, booming, the way that Willa remembered her mother's brother from her own childhood, rather than the weary widower he'd become. "Where did he get that?" she hissed as the children broke from their table in haste to meet Santa and see what was in the bag slung over his shoulder.
"We found it in a storage building out at the Hillsboro Outlets," her father admitted, sheepish. "Thought it would be good for a laugh."
Nicholas was the only one who stood off, arms crossed over his chest, eleven now, and deeply suspicious of the scene before him. He glanced back at the table, at the seat Pete had been sitting in, and Willa pressed her finger to her lips, begging him to keep quiet for the sake of the others.
She went upstairs to check on Molly and the children, all of them tucked together into the bed that Willa and Jay usually shared, and Molly sitting in the chair by the window. Her finger pressed against her lips, doing her best to keep the quiet game going, and Willa nodded.
A quick glance out the curtained window showed her the next two men who'd been sent off to search the property, departing from the porch and stopping, confused at the absence of the weapons they'd left behind. Willa moved to the dresser, pulling a revolver from the top drawer and making for the door. "Not long," she assured them in hushed tones before meeting her cousin's eyes and nodding at the stereo dock.
Molly’s fingers fluttered over the iPod, turning up the sound until Christmas carols throbbed in their eardrums.
It almost drowned out the gunfire outside.
But not quite.
"Where do you think they found the bb guns?" Willa wondered, squinting out at the sunset and the silhouettes cast by her cousins and their sons. Little pops of the younger boys' air rifles mingled with the crisp shots from Nicholas' .22. It wasn't the first time they'd been lined up, shooting at a variety of things lined up on a two-by-four set atop sawhorses, but it was the first time any of them had been shooting something that wasn't fundamentally a toy. It was Texas; the idea wouldn't have been unusual even if there wasn't an added practicality to teaching an eleven year old how to fire a gun, now.
“Walmart, I bet,” Cal guessed with a grin. “I mean, their shops got cleaned out in the first weeks after the outbreak, but they still got most things if you can make it past the zombies. I got my latest camping tent from the one in Corsicana, if you can believe it. Still livin’ up to my highmost ambitions of being white trash.”
She touched her chest and feigned a proud tear, grinning at him anyhow. "Probably no one wants anything that can't make a killshot," Willa agreed, fading into silence as she watched the second Christmas in a row that featured guns. "You can't stay, can you?" she asked after a moment of comfortable silence that last year had lacked.
He shook his head, leaning back into the rocking chair. Watching the livid reds smearing themselves across the sky, and the sun slowly setting over Richland.
“I wish,” Cal said. “Life here’s simpler and better, and I wouldn’t have to think about shit like Bode in prison. But.” It was that albatross around his neck, the anchor around his ankle. Duty. Responsibility.
One of these days, it would drown him.
“But I got a job to do back in Austin. People and coworkers that count on me, and I want to be there for ‘em considering someone like Olinger’s in charge. Just ‘cause the raider officers are locked up doesn’t mean our work is over.”
The mention of him made her throat tighten. Raider officers. It was what he was, even though Willa didn't like to think of him the same way she thought about the men who lay in the graves they'd dug. Another shot rang out from Nicholas' gun, and she pressed her fingertips against her lips, staring over at the patch of greenest grass beyond the barn.
“Where the hell are the—” Enrique started, staring at the empty hooks on the porch.
In the heartbeat that it took for them to process the betrayal, Sergeant Davidson’s bullet drilled into Enrique’s temple. The man toppled in a bloom of brains and bone, as neat a shot as Davidson had given any of the shufflers.
The second man fell from a second shot a moment later, and then all hell broke loose.
Inside the house, the raiders in the dining room lurched up at the noise, a clattering of plates and food flying. Ray knew it then, knew that these farmers had turned on them, that his men were dead outside—
Chuck had been sitting at the head of the table, befitting his position as patriarch. So his hand dove for the pistol taped beneath the dining table, ripped it loose, and managed to nail another raider as they went for their own hidden weapons. Typical; of course they hadn’t given up all of them, just enough for appearance’s sakes.
Willa’s footsteps thundered down the stairs as Molly slammed the door shut behind her, a heavy scraping coming through the ceiling that meant the mother bear was dragging a barricade into place in case things didn't go as plan. With only six shots Willa didn't fire until she'd already chanced a glance around the corner - it was a chaotic show of violence, and the Ranger didn't balk at the idea of adding to the mess. A shot to the stomach, a shot to the chest; unlike her brother Willa only aimed to incapacitate, keenly aware that the old adage was true; nothing could be learned from the silence of a corpse, and they had to know what else could follow. The one who lurched for the door moved too quickly, and a shot meant for a shoulder landed in the meat of a neck, and she swore.
Four men came barging through the back door: Cal, his uncle, ranch-hands Jorge and Eddie—the latter fell back against the screen door as the first raider shot back, colliding with a smear of red against the cracked white wood. Pete spared a startled look for Eddie, but then Cal was shoving past the older man —don’t stop—and he tried to think of their enemies as zombies, as mindless monsters, even as he felt his fingers tighten on the trigger and saw the light of intelligence and awareness fleeing their faces, jaws turning slack, bodies crumpling.
“Hands down!” Chuck was shouting over and over, “Hands down!” and Ray found himself knees-down in the blood of his own men, four corpses, others knocked down with a pistol-whip to the face from the blond soldier and his uncle.
And just like that, twelve raiders had been disabled and the entire room of farmers stood with guns levelled on the intruders. And Ray felt the legs of his jeans turning hot and wet, and he wondered how the fuck they’d all ended up here.
“And you’re definitely not coming back with me?” Cal sounded hopeful even when he knew he shouldn’t be. They were too alike.
Willa sighed. Being home was muddying what she thought she wanted, or maybe it had been her time in Austin and the thought of what Cal was going back to. She knew now what he meant, about Olinger and the threats that hadn't been locked up with Rodeo and the rest of them. She knew that Bode was alive. "I can't just leave it to Mom and Molly. Or Dad," Willa laughed, shaking her head at the idea of her father, as good as he was with the laboring cows, trying to soothe Natalia. "But… I'll go back, once they're settled here." The thought of separating from him made her nervous, and she didn't try to hide it. "Just do me a favor and stay in one piece for another month without me?"
Cal leaned forward then to pat his sister’s arm. From anyone else, it might have seemed gently condescending, but the look in his eye was serious for once.
“Doin’ my best,” he said. “And hey, I’m mostly kidding anyway—Natalia needs you. It’s more important that her kid’s born safe and sound than I have someone to shoot the shit with over text messages. I’ve been fine in Austin for years, what’s another couple months?”
"God, I hope for her sake that it's not that long." Willa pushed up out of her chair and stretched, her belly pleasantly full of food and free of babies. "Want to drive the fence with me?" she asked. "You're not going to leave until the morning at least, right?"
“Fuck that,” Cal said. “Not leaving anywhere long-haul at night. I’ve learned my lesson about keeping safe, these days. But a sweep, that’s fine.” And with an exaggerated, almighty heave, Willa pulled him onto his feet.
The half a dozen pairs of handcuffs kept in the house left Willa kneeling in the small of a man's back, using her knowledge of calf roping to loop around wrists, tying knots around elbows of the last two left alive.
"What do we do with them?" Jay said, pushing a hand into his hair. This wasn't what her husband was built for, and Willa was sorry to have put him in the position in the first place. She looked at her brother instead, reading in his eyes the same miserable outcome. There were hours if not days left before this would be done.
"We'll move them," she declared. "You can help Mom and Janet clear up before the kids come down. Just wrap them up and get them out to the barn."
Jay nodded, his relief palpable and making the contrast between them even more stark. He could carry an already dead body when his family's well-being called for it, but the preacher's son wasn't cut out for conducting interrogations on living prisoners. And she was.
It wasn’t a comfortable thought to ponder.
“C’mon, up and at ‘em,” Pete said, sounding more avuncular than ever even as he and Jorge hefted some of the handcuffed raiders back to their feet, guiding them outside. (Eddie’s body had already been moved out onto the porch as well, neatly laid-out and covered with the tablecloth, too festive a red to camouflage what lay beneath.)
It was like herding cattle in more ways than one, this long string of ragged, bloodied men shuffling reluctantly across the earth and towards the barn, carefully supervised by their would-have-been victims. They moved in a mostly organised fashion.
Until one of the unwounded tried to make a break for it—one of his buddies lunged after him as well, and they both tore out of their captors’ grip and started sprinting towards the fields, awkward and off-balance from their bound arms.
The blast that followed from Pete’s shotgun seemed to catch him off-guard as much as anyone else. The runaway fell, peppered with deershot, and Rosalie's pistol finished the job.
But the second man was out of range and kept running like the very hounds of hell were after him, and when Cal tried to train a bead on him, one of the other raiders knocked his shoulder into his, throwing his aim off. The raiders were unruly with the prospect of escape in front of them, and it took almost all of the Richland defenders to keep them contained.
“Fuck!” Cal swore, re-holstering his gun.
“Cal! Go!” his sister shouted, while she twisted another raider’s arm sharply behind him in a professional grip.
And he started running.
Darkness was settling around them as they drove the inside perimeter of the compound; fencing on one side of the electric sedan, cornfields on the other. Even though there wasn't any sign of snow, the night was clear enough to be cool, and Willa reached to turn the heater on low. Ever since he'd mentioned it, she'd been battling herself not to ask, but the solitude of the security sweep left her mind to linger.
"Are you going to see him again, when you go back?" If he was any kind of brother, he wouldn't make her say who they were talking about. She could understand why he hadn't said anything last Christmas, why it had seemed like a better idea to leave her in the dark with regards to Bode's transformation into Bishop, Chaplain of the Hellhounds, considering what had happened in their own home, but now that she knew exactly where and who he was… Consciously Willa eased back her grip on the steering wheel, letting color back into her knuckles.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a promise. But then Cal cleared his throat, tried to explain. “They’re in custody. It’s a little hard for me to get in, since I’m not DoJ. I can pull some strings again, though…”
She could read the unease in her brother’s voice like it was scrawled across him. The entire situation was unpalatable. It was what their law enforcement needed, but parts of it were still unpalatable. "I can't go," Willa said after another moment. "As far as he knows, you're the only string I have to pull on, and to him, we're not seeing eye to eye right now."
It was an unspoken askance for Cal to watch over the greatest ghost from their past lives. She'd gone in undercover, not only because of one man, but it still felt as though he'd become her responsibility, and now he was out of her hands.
Cal exhaled, watching his sister easing the steering wheel to the left.
Normally he was the driver. But he could tell that his mannerisms shifted ever so slightly around Willa, sliding back into the role of younger brother, the one who listened and obeyed rather than blazing off-trail. If Willa was asking him to keep checking in on Bode, then he’d do it—more for her than for Bode, and if that made Cal a shitty friend but good brother, then so be it.
“Okay. Yeah. I’ll see what I can do.”
There was more that she wanted to talk with him about, things that she hadn't quite admitted in their months of text conversations or the drive up, that she still wondered if there wasn't yet a way for them to extricate him from the fucked up mess Bode had turned his life into and bring him here. Willa held her tongue, giving Cal a grateful smile that looked eerily wan by the dashboard lights.
They'd dealt with enough raiders here already, and none of them had wanted to be reformed.
Seth's breath was ragged in his throat, blood pounding in his ears, as he tore down the rows of corn and darted back and forth through the field, hoping he wasn’t being followed. He thought he could hear the sound of someone following, but—
Pain suddenly blew out his kneecap and his face slammed into the earth, breathing dirt and corn husks. He tried to wriggle forward and squirm back to his feet, but one of his legs wasn’t responding anymore, useless below the thigh. Without the use of his hands, the raider writhed on the ground like a caterpillar, jack-knifing and staring hopelessly behind him at a blond man as he advanced down the narrow row.
“You shouldn’t have run, man,” the farmer said, sounding pained. Unsurprisingly, his voice had a low Southern drawl to it, just like their treacherous fuck of a host had.
“Fuck you,” Seth snarled back. “You’re all pieces of shit. We were having dinner. We had put our weapons away. We weren’t any threat to you. Why—”
“Yeah, you were. Still are.” The blond hunkered down on his haunches above the fallen man, pistol resting easily in his hand, propped against his knee. The mouth of the gun never wavered from the raider. “I don’t like this shit. I don’t like shooting uninfected humans. But my family’s back there, and believe you me, we will do whatever it fucking takes.”
He didn’t ask for any last words. Didn’t toy with the man, spout off any cocky last words. Nothing so cinematic as that.
He just pulled the trigger.
Cal was seated on the edge of his older sister’s bed, his own carefully-made on the other side of the room—almost as if they were kids again, sharing the same bedroom. The sky outside the window had only lightened from black to the deepest navy, putting dawn at least a half hour away.
“Hey, also, you’ve got to promise to take care of Uncle Pete. I’ve somehow grown even more attached to the guy after pretending to be him in my phone for months.” Cal’s grin was crooked in the dim room, flickering by candlelight.
Willa nodded, tucking her hair behind her ear. She wanted to persuade him to stay the month Natalia likely had left, to wait it out with her, and fuck Austin. It might even have been possible with enough guilt and words about family, but undeniably selfish, too. "It's weird, isn't it? Barely more than a year after Jeff, and he'll be a grandfather again."
“At least it’s good-weird,” Cal said thoughtfully. “Gives him something to focus on. Keep him busy. Nothing focuses the mind like a screaming kid to look after. Or so I hear?”
Willa gave an exaggerated shudder at the thought of living with a newborn. "Why do you think I'm promising to come back to Austin?" The banter wasn't enough to move either of them to laugh, but after a shared smile she nodded. "Hopefully it's good enough for all of us, someday." For all that she doubted Cal would find someone special to bring home and settle down with, or that Jay would ever come home to her again, Willa still clung to the hope that they might still all come together again, live a life that was mostly full of peace. She knew that she wasn't the only one who lived like this, needing the vague promise of a return to normalcy in order to keep going through all of the awful they had to endure, now.
“We pull through,” her brother said, one arm leaning against the cool window, his attention drifting to the distant lights of the farm outside the glass. “We always do.”
By the time he'd made it back, the runner's lifeless body slung over Cal's shoulders in a fireman's carry, the yard was empty. Rosalie stood just inside the barn with one of the appropriated assault rifles in hand, the doors cracked wide enough for a man to enter - and for ominous sounds to exit.
Cal’s head swiveled towards the doorway: recognising the fleshy noises as if from a lifetime and a continent away, a memory that sat heavy in his blood. “Everything under control?”
Rosalie nodded to the small stack of bodies that had piled up. "Leave him there, go'n help your sister." Her thumb jerked back into the barn, toward the shouts.
The horses were skittish in their stalls, and in those without animal occupants Cal could see familiar faces guarding those prisoners left alive. Rick, Jake, his father, Nate, all of them grim and urging him ahead, toward his uncle who had slumped to the ground outside the office door, his face ashen and tearstained when it lifted from the mask of his hands.
Cal paused by their uncle’s side, about to speak, but stopped short at the sound of his sister’s voice.
"Jorge, you have to hold still," came Willa's brash reprimand, on the other side of the half-open door. "I'm doing this practically blind with fucking tweezers."
The groan of pain in response was prolonged, and when Cal looked in, it was the young farm hand he saw first, sitting in the office's chair, his face contorted in pain. His sister was crouched beside the chair, a flashlight wedged between her teeth and hands bloodied as she dug in the back of the boy's shoulder with the declared pair of tweezers. On the desk between them lay Jeff, unmoving, with a bloom of dark scarlet that covered nearly all of his shirt. Willa didn't look up from her work, and moments later, with a proper scream from Jorge, she pulled the chunk of metal from his flesh, and dropped it on the floor before packing a clean towel over the wound. "I'm sorry," she muttered, her hand now soothing the expanse of the boy's back. "I'm sorry I was a bitch."
Jorge nodded his acceptance of her apology, and Willa helped him stand up from the chair. Cal took over for a moment, steadying the ranch hand when he wobbled. "Head into the house, wash up and go upstairs to my room if the kids aren't in there still. I'll find what we need to stitch it up and get you something for the pain." The veterinarian-turned-officer-of-the-law wiped her own bloodied hands on the seat of her jeans out of habit, and then looked up, meeting Cal's eyes. "Get him?" she inquired, seeking assurances that all of the raiders were accounted for before offering any further information about what he'd walked in on.
“Yeah. Got him in the cornfield, deposited the trash outside.”
After making sure that Jorge was able to make his own unsteady path back out towards the house, Cal found himself staring back at Jeff. Their cousin, now nothing more than a pile of meat on the desk, like a carcass abandoned partway through butchering. He could see the wounds where Willa had tried to work her magic, and failed.
It explained the noises coming from Uncle Pete just outside the door: a low wordless moan that seemed to go on and on and on, warbling up and down between his fingers.
Cal noticed it all with a distant sort of detachment; one that he recognised from years fighting abroad, a numbness that sank in like an old friend.
“What the fuck happened to Jeff?” the man asked, and hated himself for that hard edge to his voice. It wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t anyone’s, but those goddamned raiders.
Willa's own voice stayed low, not wanting her words to carry out beyond the cocoon of the office walls. "One of them attacked Jorge when he was trying to cuff 'im to one of the stalls. Got his gun, shot the both of them, but Jeff got him in the head." She looked away from the body, from what she'd forced herself to do in the few minutes that he'd suffered before her cousin's lungs had stopped drawing breath, before his father had let them give up the futile attempts at CPR.
It wasn't a feeling familiar to Willa, and for a moment she thought she might be sick. The stress of the day had been building, walled off out of necessity until a moment when it wasn't absolutely vital that she keep her shit together. The dam had cracked; she was trembling, and the blurry heat of tears distorted her vision. "What the fuck did we do, Cal?"
“What we had to, Willa,” her little brother said, and he wasn’t just her little brother anymore. He was a weary soldier again, leaning back against the wall and looking at the corpse of their cousin, one hand scrubbing idly at the blood that had worked itself into the cracks of his knuckles, caught in the web between his fingers.
“Come on. Let’s clean up before we go talk to the rest of these assholes,” Cal said, his clean hand pressing against Willa’s shoulderblade with a quick squeeze that made her grimace. She automatically handed over a rag, which he accepted gratefully, and wiped at her own eyes with shirtsleeves that had been rolled up to her biceps.
They still had a pile of living, breathing raiders to deal with.