Chapter 4
Tom ran.
He came down four hundred yards of frozen scree in a way Charter would have called stupid, skidding the steep parts on his heels with the .22 held out for balance, and twice he went down and twice he got up without slowing.
McKenzie met him at the gulch bottom.
"Home," she said.
"I see it."
"Dad, that's black."
"I know what it is."
Black smoke meant pitch, or fat, or something poured on. Black smoke meant a fire somebody had started on purpose and then helped along.
He caught her collar and stopped her.
"We don't go down the gulch."
"Dad, it's the house."
"If it's the house it's already burning, and me getting there four minutes sooner doesn't put it out."
He was breathing like a bellows and made himself slow it.
"And if they're standing in my yard waiting for a man to come running down a gulch, then the one thing I don't do is come running down a gulch."
McKenzie's face was white to the lips.
"Mom's down there. Sofie's down there."
"I know exactly who's down there." Tom crouched and got both hands on her shoulders. "Your mother has sixty one rounds and this whole family drilled the fall back eleven times. If they came, she is not in that house. She's in the rockslide."
"You don't know that."
"No. I don't." He stood. "So we go up the draw and over the saddle and we come at the rockslide from above, which is where they'd be, and which is the last direction on earth anybody would come from."
"That's forty minutes."
"That's forty minutes," Tom said. "And it's the only version of this where we're any use to anybody."
They went up the draw.
It was the worst forty minutes of Tom's life and he did it at a controlled walk, stopping twice to listen, because a man who runs in timber hears nothing and Charter had told him that on the second day.
At the saddle they stopped and looked down.
The smoke had thinned.
It was gray now, and it was not climbing so much as leaning off downriver in the wind, and Tom stood in the rocks and studied the color of it for ten full seconds.
Gray meant wood. Gray meant a fire that had used up whatever was poured on it and was now burning only what was there.
"It's smaller," McKenzie said.
"It's smaller."
"Is that good?"
"It means nobody's feeding it."
They came down onto the rockslide from above at half past eleven, and Tom did it right, which meant the last hundred yards took nine minutes.
He stopped behind a block of granite the size of a bus and made the signal.
Not a whistle. Charter had been very firm about whistles.
Two clacks, stone on stone. A pause. Then three.
Nothing.
He did it again.
From forty feet below, out of a crack in the slide that Tom himself had picked eleven days ago, a small voice said, "Three then two."
"Three then two," Tom said, and did it.
His son came out of the rocks at a dead run and hit him at the waist hard enough to knock him back a step.
"Where's your mother?"
"Here. She's here." Oliver was shaking all over. "She's got Sofie. Nobody's hurt. Nobody's hurt, Dad."
Then Kindra came up out of the slide with the Beretta in her right hand and Sofie on her left hip.
Her braid was gone entirely. Her hair was full of rock dust and there was a scrape running the length of her right forearm, beaded up and already crusting.
Tom got to her in four steps and put his arms around all three of them at once.
Nobody said anything for a while.
"Shyla," McKenzie said.
"She's down in the crack," Kindra said. "She walked. She walked the whole way on three legs and she never made a sound."
"How?"
"Because Sofie told her not to."
The story came out in pieces, sitting in the rocks, while Tom passed around the water and made them all drink whether they wanted to or not.
At 9:40 Kindra had been at the woodshed and Oliver had been splitting, and Sofie had been on the porch.
The first clapper went at 9:41.
Not the river gap. The upstream one, past the gravel bar, the one Oliver had set out past where he thought anybody would come.
"It worked," Tom said.
"It worked," Kindra said. "It gave us about ninety seconds."
She had not gone to look. That was the thing Tom would think about for the rest of his life.
She had not gone to look, not for one second. She had yelled once, grabbed Sofie off the porch, and Oliver had dropped the maul and gone straight through the woodshed for the dog, and McKenzie's absence was the only thing that changed the drill.
They went out the back and up the draw in about seventy seconds, and they were four hundred yards up and lying in the brush when the shooting started.
"Shooting," Tom said.
"Two shots. Maybe three, close together."
"At what?"
"At nothing. At the house." Kindra's jaw flexed. "I think they shot the door."
"Why?"
"Because nobody answered it."
They had watched from the brush. Five men, she said, maybe six, she never got a clean count because of the timber.
They were in the yard nine or ten minutes. Two went in the cabin. One went to the cellar door and came back out almost immediately.
And one went to the woodshed with a can.
"Diesel?" Tom said.
"I could smell it from four hundred yards."
"Then they've got fuel to burn."
"They've got fuel to waste," Kindra said.
The fire had gone up fast and black and they had all lain in the brush and watched eleven cords of split lodgepole catch, and Oliver had cried and Kindra had put her hand over his mouth and held it there and hated herself for it.
Then the men had walked out. Not run. Walked, down the river trail, single file, in no hurry at all.
"How long ago?"
"An hour and a half."
Tom sat with his back against the rock and made himself think instead of feel.
"They didn't take anything," he said.
"What?"
"You said one man opened the cellar door and came right back out. They were on the ground nine minutes and they walked out empty handed." He looked at her. "Five men walk nine miles and burn your woodpile and don't carry off a single pound of food. Why?"
Kindra thought.
"Because they're coming back," she said.
"They're coming back."
"And they don't want to carry it twice."
"And they don't want to carry it twice." Tom rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. "The wood wasn't a robbery. The wood was a message, same as the dog, same as the note. It's the third one now."
"What's it say?"
"It says we can come whenever we want, we can take whatever we want, and you cannot stop us." He let out a breath. "And it says winter's in three weeks and you have no wood."
Nobody spoke.
"That's the actual weapon," Tom said. "Not the fire. The math after the fire."
They went down at two in the afternoon, carefully, Tom a hundred yards ahead and Kindra bringing the family behind.
The woodshed was a rectangle of orange coals eleven feet by twenty four, still throwing enough heat at forty feet to make Tom turn his face.
The cabin was standing.
That was the first mercy. The shed had been sited thirty feet from the house with the prevailing wind carrying away from it, a decision Tom had made in 2015 for reasons of convenience, and it had just saved their lives.
The door was splintered at the latch where two rounds had gone through it. The bar had held.
Inside, they had not looted so much as browsed.
Drawers pulled out and left hanging. The herb bundles cut down off the joists and scattered. The bed thrown over.
The deer hide on the frame was gone. So was the good cast iron pan, and both hatchets, and Kindra's scissors.
The GP100 had been on Kindra's hip the whole time. The .22 had been with Tom. The Beretta had been in her hand.
They had not gotten a single firearm or a single round.
"That's something," Kindra said.
"That's everything."
The cellar was untouched. The false crate wall had not even been approached; the man had opened the door, seen the ugly food up front, and shut it again.
"He didn't want it today," Tom said. "He was checking it was still there."
Sofie found the bean cups swept off the shelf and sat down in the middle of the floor and began picking them up one at a time.
Oliver went out and stood in front of the burning shed with his hands at his sides.
Tom let him stand there a minute and then went out and stood beside him.
"Three weeks of splitting," Oliver said.
"Four."
"I did a lot of that."
"You did most of that."
The boy's chin was going and his voice had gone up into the register that ten year olds hate about themselves.
"It was my job," he said.
"It was." Tom put a hand on the back of his neck. "And you did it right, and it would have got us through February, and I want you to hear the next part carefully because it matters."
Oliver looked up.
"That fire is not your loss," Tom said. "That's a man's crime. Those are different things, and if you carry it as a loss you'll carry it wrong your whole life. Somebody did that to you. You didn't fail at anything."
"But it's gone."
"It's gone."
"So what do we do?"
Tom looked at the coals.
"We get more wood," he said.
They worked until dark and then they worked past it.
There was no choice about the timing. Standing dead lodgepole was everywhere on the bench, killed by beetles years ago and dried on the stump, and it was the best firewood in the mountains and it was free.
But it was three weeks of labor and they had it to do in whatever time Wallace Wingman gave them.
Tom did the figuring at the table that night by the shuttered lamp.
"A cord is a hundred and twenty eight cubic feet," he said. "Eight foot long by four high by four deep. We burned a cord and a half a month last winter and that was with the shed full and no reason to be careful."
"So eleven cords was generous," Kindra said.
"Eleven cords was eight months. It was generous because I was afraid."
"And now?"
"Now we plan on five cords and we plan on being cold."
"Five in how long?"
"That's the question."
He set the pencil down.
"Here's what I know," he said. "One standing dead lodgepole, eight to ten inches at the butt, forty feet tall, gives you about a third of a cord if you take everything down to wrist thickness. So five cords is fifteen trees."
"That doesn't sound bad."