by Urban Waite
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
I
II
III
IV
V
Acknowledgments
About the Author
BOOKS BY URBAN WAITE
Sometimes the Wolf
The Carrion Birds
The Terror of Living
URBAN WAITE
TITAN BOOKS
FAR CRY: ABSOLUTION
Print edition ISBN: 9781785659157
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785659164
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First Titan edition: February 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
© 2018 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved.
Far Cry, Ubisoft, and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover by Faceout Studio
Book design by dix!
Special thanks:
Yves Guillemot, Laurent Detoc, Alain Corre, Geoffroy Sardin, Yannis Mallat, Gérard Guillemot, Jean-Sébastien Décant, David Bédard, Manuel Fleurant, Dan Hay, Andrew Holmes, Nelly Kong, Marie-Joelle Paquin, Julia Pung, Sébastien Roy, Andrejs Verlisd, Sarah Buzby, Clémence Deleuze, Caroline Lamache, Victoria Linel, Anthony Marcantonio, François Tallec, Joshua Meyer, Virginie Gringarten, Marc Muraccini, Cécile Russeil, Raha Bouda, Stone Chin, Holly Hua, Jordan Archer, Bailey Mcandrews, Adam Climan, Heather Haefner, Barbara Radziwon, Damian Dale, Tom Curtis, Giancarlo Varanini, Lauren Jaques, Derek Thornton, Tina Cameron.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For the fans who make this real
PROLOGUE
The harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels.
—MATTHEW 13:39
THE SHERIFF CAME IN AND SAT IN HIS CHAIR. HE TOOK OFF HIS hat, put up his feet, and looked across the desk at her. “What’s this all about?” he said.
“You know what this is about,” Mary May said. “I just want to know what you’re going to do about it?”
The sheriff fingered the band of his hat, picked something off the brim and flicked it away. He had been a bull rider at one point and Mary May remembered him from when she had been a girl. Daddy and Mamma had brought her and her brother, Drew, to see this man ride. The man had been skinny then, and young. She had stood at the edge of the railing and watched him come out of the gates. They had hollered at him to stay on as he rode out into the center with the dirt kicking up under the bull and the man bouncing atop, barely able to hold on. He had seemed fearless in that moment. He had seemed like some sort of hero, but he did not seem like that now.
He tossed the hat on the table, took his feet down from the desk, and looked her straight in the eye. “Shit, Mary May, you know I can’t do a thing about it. You know it wasn’t nothing but an accident and even if it wasn’t there’s not a goddamn thing to be done.”
“An accident? Daddy went out there to get Drew. Forty some years of driving trucks, his and anyone’s he worked for, and he never even put a scratch on one of them. Now you’re calling it an accident?”
“I’m sorry for your loss, but there’s nothing that can be done.”
She looked at him sitting there. She could see the genuine compassion in his eyes and she felt saddened for him because she knew that what he was saying was true. “You think they’re ever going to push you too far? You think they’re ever just going to push you so far you fall off the edge?”
“What are we talking about here?”
She smiled. She ran her eyes around the office and then back to the desk where his hat was sitting on the wood between them. She would turn thirty years old that fall. She had lost nearly all that she ever cared about and it seemed like it had happened overnight. The only thing she had left was the bar and the rage that had grown in her. “Drew is still out there,” she said. “I plan on getting him back, or at least telling him our Daddy is dead. That’s what I’m talking about.” She pushed back from the desk and stood. She wore a T-shirt and jeans and her shoulder-length brown hair was tied up behind her head and she could feel the dangerous pulse of the blood tapping away in a vein in her neck, but she had no way of controlling it.
“I went out there once,” he said, his voice stopping her in place, her hand on the metal doorknob of the office door. In the glass above, with the stenciled lettering across the window, she could see him standing now watching her.
“I was invited. They asked me if I’d come sit in on one of their services.”
She turned.
He took a few steps and came around the desk. “We’ve got preppers, we’ve got doomsday freaks, we’ve got whole families of folks living in shacks up in the hills. No power. No water. Grandma and the great-grandkids sleeping three to a bunk while mommy and daddy make more. We’ve got gun nuts. We’ve got bunkers and compounds. We’ve got free thinkers, anarchists, nihilists, democrats, and god knows what else, but I’m telling you, what I saw up there at Eden’s Gate—the conviction they have, the goddamn power they gave to the words of The Father, it was infectious, it got damn near under my skin. And they’re believers, you know? Every one of them. And that’s not to say a bad thing about them, or to question their faith, but I tell you, it scared me more than anything I have yet seen in this life and there’s not a thing I can do about that. Because, you know what, it’s perfectly legal.”
“You practice that?” Mary May asked.
“I tell it to myself every night before bed.”
She turned to the door and opened it. “He’s my brother. He’s all I have left,” she said, and walked out.
* * *
MARY MAY WAS HALFWAY UP THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE SAW THE white church truck appear in her rearview. It followed her for another five miles. She raised her eyes on it at every turn of the road, watching the far trees and the bend of the asphalt where the road disappeared, but the truck never wavered. Always appearing again from out of the curve and following along as if the two—her red Ford pickup and the white church pickup—had been tethered together with rope, one dragging the other right behind.
She went another mile before she pulled over on the side of the road and turned off the engine. She brought up her father’s old chrome-plated .38 and set it on the dash before her. If there was someone to call she would have done it right then, but there was no one to call and no signal to get in all of Hope County so she waited for the white truck to break from around the last curve.
When the truck pulled into the gravel behind her, she recognized the man sitting in the driver’s seat. John Seed. She had known him for almost half her life and she had, at one time, thought of him as just another human being in this world, but not anymore. He was something dangerous to her and to any that seemed to chance across his way. He and his brothers ran Eden’s Gate and if anyone knew what had happened to her father, or where she might be able to find her brother, it wa
s John Seed.
She watched him push open the door and then stand. He was ten years older than her and near six foot with brown hair and a beard that covered the lower half of his face. In the mirror, she could see how he kept his eyes on her then reached back inside the truck and brought something out of the cab. Mary May thought maybe it was a gun but she could not be sure. He lifted the tail of his shirt and hid away whatever it was. When he walked up to her she had already cracked her window.
“You scared?” John asked.
She looked at him. “Should I be?”
He stood there a few seconds more and then he put a hand out and ran his fingers across the top of her window, his fingertips within the cab. “You got a license for that thing?” he asked, nodding to the gun on the dash, his fingertips lingering on the top of the window before he took them back.
Her eyes went to the gun and then she looked back on John where he’d taken a step back and stood a little way apart from her truck, like maybe he expected her to use it. “It was Daddy’s,” she said.
She watched him. He seemed to be considering what the right response might be. “I was sorry to hear about him,” John said, and she thought, well, that almost sounded human.
“He was coming up here to get Drew when it happened.”
“Is that right?”
“Now I’m coming up to get Drew and tell him to come home.”
“I heard about that, too.”
“You have?”
“Sure,” John said. “I hear all kinds of things from the people I know. I hear you all are still serving alcohol even though we asked you not to. That’s just one of the things I hear.”
She looked at him as if he might be stupid, but she knew very well that he was not. “How do you expect me to keep running a bar with no alcohol?”
“I don’t.”
He said it very matter-of-fact and she knew he meant it. “You know where my brother is?”
“I know where he is. He’s with us.”
“Does he know about Daddy?”
“He knows.”
“You going to let him come down off the mountain?”
“He can come down off the mountain any time it pleases him. I’m not his keeper.”
“That right?”
“That’s what I’m saying to you.”
She put her hand to the key and cranked the ignition then sat there with her hands on the steering wheel. The chrome-plated .38 was still on the dash and it vibrated in time with the engine.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get my brother.”
“Look,” he said. “You’re a smart girl.”
She hated him for saying it like that, as if he knew something better than she did.
He came forward a bit and she raised a hand up the wheel and her eyes went to the gun again.
“All this isn’t necessary,” he said. “Why don’t you turn around and go back down the mountain before something happens that can’t be undone?”
Instead of answering, she put the truck in drive and left him standing there. In the rearview she saw him take the thing he had placed beneath the tail of his shirt and raise it to his lips. It was a radio and she knew whatever he was using it for probably concerned her, and was probably also not good.
After a mile, she took down the .38 and placed it beneath her thigh, keeping pressure on it so that it would not slide away as she continued up the mountain, taking each curve in the road and looking up at the rearview each time, half expecting to see John still following her.
When she came around the next curve of the road she saw two church trucks waiting crossways. Four men stood there, each of them carrying what she could only guess from this distance was a rifle or even a machine gun. She stopped the truck and took the gun from beneath her thigh and flipped open the cylinder to look in on the casings. She had half a mind just to turn around. But she knew that she wouldn’t, to give up now was to give up on her brother and all that he’d ever meant to her, all that had been her family and that her father had fought so fiercely to preserve.
She pushed the transmission into reverse and threw a hand up across the bench seat and then slammed down on the gas pedal. The truck tires spun and she was moving now, going backwards on the road, thinking of a small gravel logging road she’d seen that went up the mountain. When she came around the curve just before the gravel road she saw John coming up along the mountain in his own truck.
For only a moment she thought of her father. She thought of how they had found him, bent over the wheel, the front windshield cracked and the big truck buckled and bent. There had been no witnesses, no evident cause for what had happened to him, but he was dead now and he had gone out just like she was, trying to bring back her brother. She thought of John’s words, what had been said, what he had meant and she knew almost beyond a doubt that her father had not died in an accident.
Mary May did not slow as she came up on John, instead she mashed down on the gas and with the engine whining she cut the wheel hard to the left as soon as she saw the gravel offshoot and then bounced off the road. She was going backwards now up the mountain, the gravel catching in the tires and pinging in the wheel wells and when she turned to glance back through the front windshield she could see John following through the dust of her tires.
Down on the roadway the two other church trucks had turned in, one after the other, and followed John up the logging road.
Mary May took this all in as she drove, the engine blaring and the speedometer reading forty miles an hour as she kept going in reverse. There was nowhere on the narrow road to turn around so she kept her foot to the pedal, her arm up over the bench, her eyes on the road. The gravel had disappeared, she was driving on sodden dirt lined on all sides by the thick growth of alpine forest. The truck splashing through puddles with the mud tossed into the air by the tires and landing against the rear window. The rear bed of her truck seen as it bounced up out of a deep puddle looking like the hull of some boat breaking through muddy brown waves. The window gradually clouding with the spray off the tires.
When she hit whatever it was that she hit—a rock or a branch laid out in the road—she was still going forty miles per hour. It was enough to send the truck sliding sideways on the road. She tried to brake and spin the wheel, something caught . . . the truck went airborne, crashing over the side of the road into the forest beyond.
I
Those who put their hands upon our ark, those who mean to drown us in the flood, those who want to cast us aside after all our toil—they will find any hand they put upon us will be severed and taken from their arm. Cut from them just as easily as the farmer, after all his labor, now bends to reap his wheat.
—THE FATHER, EDEN’S GATE
Hope County, Montana
ONE WEEK BEFORE . . .
THE BEAR WAS A BIG BOAR GRIZZLY DOWN OUT OF CANADA. Thunder had woken Will Boyd and he had come out into the night and looked to the north where the silhouette of the Northern Rockies stood like dark sentries amid the lighter gray of cloud and moon. The storm was somewhere to the north. He had felt it building all through the day as he worked, the air growing thick and that damp heavy feel that built with it. Erased in a second as the rain came down and the sky lit and cracked open like shattered lake ice soon subsumed by the pool of water it had grown from.
Six or seven miles away on the slope of the mountain he could see how the rain had started to fall in sheets, pushed forward on the wind. He stood and watched it from his place on the hill. The forest all around him, lodgepole pine and white spruce, and farther down in the hummock between foothills and forests he could see how the lightning lit and expanded across the field of Junegrass below.
He had crossed that same field many times in the past twelve years or so. He knew what it looked like in full spring bloom, filled with purple harebell and blue flax. In the summer, much of it gone to golden green and then brown all through the fall, until it sat scraped to a flat land of white
for six months of the year. He crossed this field in bitter cold and deep fetid summer, moving down from the cabin he’d been given, across land the church had charged him with watching over, carrying with him the two plastic buckets he used to collect his water. Often, he would see elk or deer, sometimes a hawk or eagle circling high above.
Now he stood above this field, wrapped in the same wool blanket he had taken from his bed and he watched the far rain being pushed from ridge to ridge as if the wind were a thing to be seen and touched. The first rumble of thunder had woken him from his sleep and he had walked out into the blue night and waited, watching the far mountain. The lightning crashed a second time and the thunder followed a few moments later. The surrounding hills and mountains lit anew in that electric light of blue and white. Will pulled the blanket closer around his shoulders, moving forward a little, watching the pulse of light fade away and letting his eyes adjust again. The lightning had forked and branched and when he closed his eyes he could still see it there captured in the blackness beneath his lids.
What he saw first was the deer, a full-grown buck, just beginning to grow its antlers for the year. When the lightning struck again it had come halfway across the field in the darkness. Caught moving, frozen in time by the bolt of lightning from above, one of its front legs outstretched and the two powerful back legs caught mid-bound as the animal appeared to float across the field. Will saw this animal and then saw it disappear again, the lightning fading from the sky and the boom of the thunder soon following, the storm now grown closer and the foothills far out beginning to disappear within the rain.
He took several steps farther into the grass and sedge in search of the buck, but in the spare seconds it had shown itself it was gone again, rushed across the field as if in flight.
The big grizzly then came into the field. A shape of humped muscle moving in that greater darkness just before the storm, all upper body and lean moving muscle beneath that coat of fur. Ears pushed back along its head as it moved in great haste and speed. The lightning sparking high above and the bear pictured there like something seen standing within the depths of some great museum hall—large and fierce.