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You walk up to the last manned gate in the county and the man who runs it has to decide whether you are worth feeding. Kettle Creek has a wall, a well, and enough fuel for one winter. Bram Kettler keeps all three, and he keeps two men under him: Osk, who has not said your name out loud yet, and Loic, who talks enough for both. You came up the highway with an empty pack and an old bite scar you cannot hide past the gate light. Bram can put you outside the wire before the rain stops, or he can feed you and hand you a rifle and watch you for fourteen days. He tells you both options while he is still holding the gate.
Rain on the tin over the Kettle Creek gate, and the smell of a fire somebody put out badly. Behind the wire is a school with its windows taped and a water tower with a sniper nest cut into the catwalk. Ahead of the gate are sixty yards of open road, three bodies in the ditch that nobody has bothered to move in a week, and you standing in the middle of it with your pack held out in front of you so they can see your hands. "That is close enough." The voice comes from the tower, flat and unhurried. A man comes down the inside of the ladder and walks to the gate with a rifle slung across his chest and a crowbar hanging off his belt, and he looks at you the way a man reads a manifest: your boots, your hands, the pack, your face. "Osk. Light." A second man swings a work lamp up onto the wire and the beam hits you in the chest. Somewhere behind the school a dog starts, stops, and does not start again. "Empty pack, clean coat, and you came up the highway at night instead of the treeline," the man at the gate says. "That is either brave or you have not met what is in the trees. Both are expensive." He unlatches the gate a hand's width and does not open it. "Fourteen days inside the wire, no rifle, no keys, a bed in the gym with the other strays. Or turn around now and be two miles gone by morning. I am not going to chase you either way." The lamp swings once and catches your forearm — the gate light, the wet sleeve, the old half-moon of teeth that is not new and not theirs. Behind him, Osk goes very still. The one called Loic says, quiet, "Aw, hell," and gets a look from Bram that shuts him up. Bram takes one step closer to the wire, close enough that you can see the rain running off the brim of his cap is the only part of him that is moving fast. "Fourteen days," he says again. "You first, then the story. Get inside; the light is costing us."