Chương 49: Chapter 44 - The Drain Worked. The Hill Didn't.

The Hill Didn't.

Calder Tannerson · Age about ten years"Bury them to the neck. Bait the bottom with rat guts," Cal said, and put the first pot in Mateo's hands.

"They go in for the meat, they drop, the sides give them nothing. We take them out whole in the morning. Clean pelts, every one." The haversack kept giving them up, bulbous things with short necks and fist-wide mouths, more of them than the bag had business holding. The night's rain still stood in the low ground. The crossbow came out last and went across his back. This ground had earned that much.

"Can't wait to get our spatial rings in a few years," Mateo said, watching the pots keep coming.

"Less to lug around, all of it just in there."

"These are my father's," Cal said.

"He keeps the tanning liquor in them. Slick as wet glass inside. Nothing with claws climbs back out." The Earth in the walls, closing the clay tight. He doesn't know he does it. Cal kept that part behind his teeth. The pots would buy a few weeks. The old traps caught less now, the rats going wide around the spots that had taken their kin. Cal could not say why. Maybe the colony was learning. Maybe he had caught the slow ones and the careful ones were what the swamp had left him.

He did not have the evidence to call it, and did not pretend to. Surface traps always came to be learned. Everything above the ground did. So while Mateo set the pots, Cal worked the part he had told no one about. The better trap went under the ground, where nothing learned it. The drains came first. He dug the trenches himself, the survey-sense picking the firm line to set them on. Long gravel runs to funnel the water where he wanted it.

Clay tubes laid through them, his father's slick dense clay that nothing settled in. In each tube he set a float-flap, the channel-mouth device turned around to seal on rise, so a rat fleeing up the drain met a door shut in its face. The water drove them, and the drain locked behind them. The digging was the slow part, and lately he had been trying to make it less so. He held the read open on a shovelful of soft fill and pushed, the same press he used to listen to the ground. Except now he asked it to move.

To pack itself down along the line he wanted. Mostly it did nothing. Mostly he just dug. But twice this season a seam of loose soil had firmed under the weight of his attention, drawing tight on its own before he set a shovel to it. He could not do it twice running. He could not do it on purpose yet. Not yet. But twice is not never. He let it go and went back to digging.

The drains ran to a pit off the main line, clay-lined, the throat angled so a rat fleeing high water would read it for a way out and drop into a chamber it could not climb. The colony would not route around a thing they ran into by their own choice. He would not flood it to drown them. He would flood it to drive them, and the swamp would deliver them to the low ground. The clouds came down over the tree line while they worked, dragging the light grey with them.

The storm's main body, the weight the leading edge had only promised, and the water in the low ground started to lift. It drove a rat up. A big one, dog-sized and dark, erupting out of a flooded run with the water chasing it into the open. Blue had it before Cal saw it. She barked once, hard, and drove in and pinned the thing under a forepaw, jaws at its neck, holding without crushing, waiting on the boys as she had been taught. Cal and Mateo came in with the shovels and finished it.

Quick and flat, how you put down a thing that needs putting down. An aurora sheen rose off the carcass and split, one thread to Cal, one to Mateo. There. That one counted. Not the baby in the tunnel a week back, too slight for the System to bother naming. This one was grown, and grown cleared the line. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"Here," Cal said, and toed the carcass toward Mateo.

"Your payment. Pelt's yours to sell." Mateo was still looking at where the light had gone into him.

"The tithe split. Both of us." The grin came late.

"We earned that." The water moved it. I didn't hunt that rat. The saturation had risen into the run and pushed the rat up where Blue was standing. Yesterday's door, herding today's colony. The doctrine scales. And the tithe sat under the thought. The pots took the small ones, the ones that gave nothing. If they wanted more of it, the kills that counted, they needed traps that took the grown ones. Bigger trap. The pit takes the big ones, or it isn't worth digging.

He climbed to the high ground at the edge of the work, and from the crest the village read as a system under load, the east road ruts cut to clay and holding water. He kept the read off his face. A different day's work. So was the shape in the shallows that had not moved. ✦ The log in the brown water was not a log. Logs do not swim, and Blue saw it first.

She had gone rigid at the waterline, weight forward, the rumble starting low in her chest, and Cal followed her line to a shape half-sunk in the shallows twenty feet off. He had taken it for a sodden trunk. Then the ridge of it resolved. The long flat skull. The eye above the waterline that did not blink. A Cypress Gator, holding station, at home in the brown water. It did not come. It watched. There it is. A medium bull, and it found us before we found it.

It survived by waiting where movement funneled, by knowing the pressure-paths of its water. It already understands what I'm learning. Where the channel runs, the prey runs.

"Don't run," Cal said, low, his hand finding Blue's harness.

"Back off the bank. Slow. It's not hungry yet." Mateo backed off the bank, slow, and did not ask how Cal knew it was not hungry yet. ✦ The fourth drain went live in a light rain. They rested by the cut as it started, and the gravel took the water, the runoff dropping into the channel and quickening underground until he felt the draw of it through his soles. Holding. All of it holding. Then Failure-Point Sense fired, ahead of his reasoning. Not at the drain. It had found something. There it goes again.

The same flat certainty that had read a thousand failing latches and a dying road and a skull, pointed now at the slope above the cut. That seam. There. Top of the slope. The draw he had built was pulling harder than the ground could hold. The hillside let go. The slope above the cut sagged and dropped, a wide wet section sliding down into the channel and burying it. Rat-runs caved in a ripple outward. Half the low sector's trapped water found the door he had opened and went through at once.

And the ground the boys stood on started to go with it.

"Move," Cal said. Then louder, "Mateo, move," because the bank under their feet was sliding toward the water and the only footing left ran them down the slope toward the shallows. They scrambled, boots tearing at slick mud, and the slide carried them the last of the way to the waterline before it set. The gator surged off its station, the long bulk of it driving through the brown water at the noise and the two small things inside its reach. Not patient now. Committed.

Faster than a thing that size had any right to be. Blue met it. She came across Cal's front in a grey blur and hit the water snarling, the louder, closer threat, and the gator's head swung a half-beat toward her. The half-beat was everything. Cal swung the crossbow off his back and seated it to his shoulder. His hands had done the motion ten thousand times with an M16, in a life the boy's body had never lived.

The survey-sense ran down the gator the same as it ran down ground, and the soft places came up clear, the eye, the seam of the jaw, the pale skin behind the foreleg. He put the first bolt in the eye, the second in the soft hinge of the jaw as the head whipped back. Not killing. Hurt it badly enough to change its mind shots. The pain threw the gator into a death roll. The huge body spun, spraying Mateo with a wall of water.

Then it swept its tail through the shallows once and went down and away into the deep brown channel. The boys stood in the wrecked mud, soaked, chests heaving. Blue came out of the water shaking and whole. Whole. Cal counted her legs without meaning to and made it four. Hands steady. The rest of me still under the white dragon.

"It's still out there," Mateo said, eyes on the water.

"You didn't kill it."

"Wasn't trying to," Cal said.

"The drain worked. The hill didn't." Only then did the rest of it land. He had read the volume and missed the current. The water had come through faster and harder than the model said, and the open cut had nothing to hold the slope while the flow tore at it. The fix was already in my head, off a road I can't say out loud. A culvert. Tomorrow we build the door. Down the brown channel, a bull gator carried two of his bolts. It would remember where it took them.