Chapter 72: A Compound With Teeth
Chapter 72: A Compound With Teeth
I left at first light the morning after the rest day. I had kept the whole day, including the part where I did no training, which was the part I hated.
The leg was better. Not good — better. I could walk on it without the strapping arguing, and I’d worked out that if I kept my steps short and under my hips, exactly as she’d spent two hours telling me, it cost me a great deal less over distance.
That’s the thing about that lesson. I’d expected it to matter in a fight. It mattered on a road.
Nine kilometres took me most of the day, because I did it properly. I read the ground before I crossed it and I picked the place I’d fall back to before I picked the route forward. I stayed off the crests and out of the middle of things. Twice I went the long way for no better reason than that the short way had one exit, and I did not resent either detour, which is new.
Feline Grace and Liora’s corrections stacked in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The skill puts my feet where I mean them to go; her footwork keeps my weight underneath me while it happens. Together they mean I can cross a slope of loose brick at a walk in near silence, and I did that three times without any part of it feeling clever.
Feline Senses did something different. It did not choose the safe stones or correct my balance. It separated the road into layers. Wind through dead grass. Water moving under a blocked drain. Claws ticking over asphalt somewhere beyond a line of abandoned cars.
Twice, I stopped before I knew why. The first time, the scent of spoiled meat warned me about a carcass hidden in the weeds and the flies around it. The second, I heard breathing inside a delivery van whose rear doors were almost closed.
Neither warning told me what to do. The skill was not danger sense and Liora had been very clear about that. It gave me better information. I still had to avoid walking up to the van like a charitable idiot investigating a noise.
I killed two things on the way.
The first was a lone digger in a culvert. I heard it worrying at something below the road, backed away before it scented me, and dropped a fist-sized stone through the drain opening from the opposite side. It came toward the disturbance. I waited above the narrow exit with my knife reversed against my forearm.
Eleven minutes of patience bought me about a second and a half of violence. It pushed its head through, found nothing where the stone had landed, and never got enough of its body out to turn. I drove the knife through the soft join behind its skull and held on until it stopped moving.
The second was a low grey scavenger by a dead car, and that one I had to work for. It saw me first and came around the bonnet low enough that the rifle would have been clumsy. I stepped too far on the first evasion and had to catch myself against the car. On the second, I turned through the knee and felt the joint complain.
The third time, I stopped trying to move like Liora. Short step. Weight under me. Turn through the hip. The scavenger committed to the place I had been, and I finished beside its shoulder with my feet set well enough to put the knife in cleanly.
One correct exchange out of three. Liora would have called that progress and then made me repeat it fifty times.
I took the hides off both. That was new too. Two days ago I’d have taken the meat and walked away from four kilos of something a stranger with a ledger apparently values.
The compound came into view at about four in the afternoon and I did not go anywhere near it.
I went up instead — into the second floor of a burnt-out roadside unit four hundred metres west of the fence line, with a window that had lost its glass and kept its frame, and I lay down behind the sill with the rifle beside me and started watching.
Within twenty minutes I understood that I was not going to be moving in.
The compound was exactly as drawn. Two water tanks on a concrete plinth. The workshop with its roller door half up. Three storage units, one with the doors gone. The generator house, squat and windowless, at the northern end. Security fence, three metres, in good order.
And hounds.
I counted eleven in the first hour and thirteen by dusk. Not the low grey things — these were tall, long-limbed, deep-chested, with hide like scorched leather and something wrong with the shape of the skull. Level 11s and 12s where I could get a read.
The alpha was on the plinth between the water tanks, and it was Level 16, and it did not move for two and a half hours.
That stillness bothered me more than pacing would have. Every lesser hound crossed the yard around the plinth. None climbed it. When two patrols returned together, they separated without being told and passed on opposite sides of the alpha as though the concrete had an invisible boundary.
It was not merely the largest animal in the compound. The pack had arranged the place around it.
I stayed behind the sill until darkness erased the fence. Leaving immediately would have meant walking an unfamiliar road with a damaged leg, so I moved one building farther back and used an office on the second floor. It had two exits, a door I could brace, and a collapsed section at the rear that opened onto a low roof. I checked all three before eating.
I had spent the Blind Call at twenty past four two afternoons earlier. It would recover at the same time the next day. I had a little over twenty-four hours when I first saw the compound. By the time I settled in to sleep, I had less than twenty.
That was enough to learn. It was not enough to waste.
I returned to the burnt-out unit before dawn and watched the pack wake around the alpha. By midmorning I had most of the physical layout in my notebook.
Patrols: three groups. Two of three, one of four, plus the alpha and two that never left the plinth. The groups ran different circuits at different intervals and none of the intervals were regular, which took me a full day to be sure about.
Entrances: the vehicle gate, chained but sagging enough to get a shoulder through at the bottom. The pedestrian gate, which they used, and which was therefore useless to me. And a section of fence at the north-east corner where the ground had washed out underneath, sixty metres from the generator house and out of sight of the plinth.
Salvage: the tanks looked intact and one of them still had a working sight gauge. The workshop had a bench, a vice, and a wall of tools I could see from four hundred metres. The generator house was closed and I had no way to know.
Trap ground: three of the roadside units on my side of the fence were structurally sound with one door each. That mattered more than any of the rest of it.
I checked the time against the dead pharmacy clock I had reset from my watch.
The Call would return shortly after four. I had most of an afternoon left, thirteen hounds in front of me, and no intention of introducing myself to any of them.
Then the alpha gave its first order.