Chapter 6 #2
They came down out of the timber at a quarter past nine into the open sage benches above the flats, all four of them, in a line, in the open, moving downhill and fast because downhill and fast is what a family does when it can see the end of something.
The bandits took them at a quarter to ten in a dry wash two miles above the flats.
There were eleven of them and they were not Wingman's and they were not the Yard.
They were a thing that had assembled itself out of the wreckage of four separate groups in the Clark Fork bottoms, and they had been working this side of the divide since June, and they had one rule, which was that anybody moving on open ground was carrying something.
They came from both ends of the wash at the same time, which meant somebody had been watching the Clubmans come down the mountain for an hour and a half and had walked ahead.
Tyler got the rifle off his shoulder.
That was the thing Christina saw, and it was the thing that made her proud in the worst moment of her life: he did not freeze. He had spent eleven days being wrong about everything and he did not freeze.
He shot the first man at forty yards and the round went where he sent it.
The rag Tom Thorn had given him had gone through that bore four times wet and four times dry, on the porch, in the rain, while a man he despised watched him do it.
He worked the bolt and shot the second one at twenty five yards and that one went down too and did not get up.
"Rocks!" Christina screamed. "Boys, rocks!"
They got into the rocks on the east side of the wash, all four of them, and that was where it turned into something that lasted eleven minutes instead of thirty seconds.
Tyler had one round left.
He held it.
Mate and Quentin Clubman, who had spent four months learning to assess a situation because nobody was assessing anything for them, did the only useful thing two unarmed eleven year olds could do.
They threw rocks.
It sounds like nothing. It was not nothing. The wash was full of river cobble the size of a fist, and the boys had thrown rocks at every fence post and can and squirrel between Missoula and the Blackfoot for four months, and they threw from cover, and they threw hard.
Quentin broke a man's cheekbone at thirty feet and the man sat down in the gravel and stayed there.
Mate hit another one in the knee and that one went over sideways into the sage and started screaming, and the screaming did more damage to the others than the rock did.
Christina had a knife.
She had a four inch fixed blade that Kindra Thorn had pushed into her hands on the porch, on Thursday morning, along with a bar of soap and a sheet of birch bark, and she had said, "Keep this where your hand goes."
A woman came over the rock at her and Christina put it in low and pulled up and the woman went away from her making a sound.
Two more came in on the right.
Tyler spent his last round on the closest one and hit him in the hip and then swung the rifle by the barrel and broke the stock across the second man's forearm, and then it was hands.
It took them eleven minutes to finish it and it cost them four dead on the ground and three more who would be dead by dark, seven out of eleven, and Christina Clubman was still alive when it ended because they wanted her alive.
She did not stay that way long, and she made that decision herself, with the knife, and it worked.
The boys went before her.
Mate first, in the rocks, still holding a stone.
Quentin ran. He got sixty yards up the wash and he was fast and he almost made the sage.
Tyler Clubman was the last one and they kept him last on purpose.
They put him on his knees in the gravel of the wash with his arms held out to both sides by two men, and he had a broken forearm and his left eye was closed and there was blood coming out of his ear from something that had happened in the ninth minute.
The man who came up in front of him was not big either.
He wore a mechanic's coverall under a parka and he had a beard dyed orange with something and he carried a machete, the flat cheap kind out of a hardware store, with the black paint worn off the edge in a bright line.
"Stan-Lar," he said.
Tyler looked at him.
"That's my name," the man said. "Everybody gets to know it. That's the one thing I give out."
Tyler did not say anything.
"You killed four of mine."
"Good."
"Yeah." Stan-Lar turned the machete over. "You know what's funny? Four days ago you'd have been nothing. Four days ago you'd have been a starving guy with a rusted rifle."
Tyler's mouth was full of blood and he turned his head and spat it into the gravel.
"What changed?" Stan-Lar said. "Because that bore was clean. That's a man's rifle. You shot two of mine at forty yards and twenty five with a rifle that's been clean maybe a week."
Tyler started laughing.
It hurt him to do it and he did it anyway, and it went on for four or five seconds, wet and awful, and the two men holding his arms looked at each other.
"Somebody taught you," Stan-Lar said.
"Yeah."
"Who?"
"Go to hell."
"Where'd you come from? There's a route over that saddle and you came down it clean, which means you had it drawn. Who drew it?"
And Tyler Clubman, who had spent eleven days believing that every decision he ever made had been the wrong one, looked up at a man with a machete and understood, in the last ninety seconds of his life, that he was about to make one that was right.
"Nobody," he said.
"There's a valley on the other side of that."
"There's nothing on the other side of that. It's burned out. We came through it." He got it all the way out, steady. "There's eleven miles of dead timber and four empty cabins and we ate the last thing on that mountain nine days ago."
"You're lying."
"Then go look."
Stan-Lar studied him.
"You're lying," he said again, but slower.
"It's two days over that saddle with a load. You want to spend four days walking to a burn, you go right ahead."
Somewhere behind him a man who had been hit in the hip started up again.
Stan-Lar looked at the machete.
"Last chance," he said.
"Just do it," Tyler said.
Stan-Lar swung.
It was one swing and it came across, not down, and it opened Tyler Clubman from the point of the right shoulder across the sternum to the bottom of the left ribs, and it went through the canvas jacket and the wool and the skin and into the bone underneath.
The blood came out of him in a way that was not like anything.
It did not spray. It surged, in three great pulses that matched his heart, and it went down the front of him and into the gravel and the gravel drank it and turned black in a spreading fan around his knees, and the two men holding his arms let go and jumped back from it.
He did not fall. That took a second.
He knelt there with his chest opened and looked at nothing at all, and his mouth moved twice.
Stan-Lar stepped in and swung three more times at the neck.
The first one did not do it. The second one did most of it. The third one finished it and went into the gravel underneath and rang off a stone and put a notch in the machete that Stan-Lar would look at, months later, and not be able to remember the reason for.
It got quiet in the wash.
"Get everything," Stan-Lar said. "Every pound."
They got two elk hides, four pounds of dried fish, most of a pound of jerky, a fire kit, a broken .30-06 with an empty magazine, a four inch knife, and a bar of amber soap wrapped in cloth.
A man named Deeter turned the soap over in his hands.
"What is this?"
"Soap."
"Who's got soap?"
Stan-Lar took it from him and smelled it, and stood there in the wash with seven of his eleven people dead or dying, holding a bar of soap that smelled like spruce.
He turned it over.
There was a sheet of birch bark in the cloth with it, and somebody had scratched writing into it with a nail.
HARDWOOD ASH ONLY. RAIN WATER. EGG FLOATS A QUARTER.
Stan-Lar read it three times.
"He said the other side was burned out," he said.
Nobody answered him.
"Deeter."
"Yeah."
"Does a burned out valley make soap?"
Six in the morning on Friday, and the door was the last thing.
Tom had been thinking about it for three weeks and had not said any of it out loud, because saying it out loud made it real.
"The cabin's a trap," he told Kindra, in the dark, with the lamp shuttered and the kids still asleep. "Not for them. For us."
"Say it."
"Four walls, one door, one shuttered window on each wall and a loft with no way out of it. If six men get into that yard and we're inside, they don't have to come in at all. They can stand at forty feet and wait, or they can put fire on the north rick and we come out coughing."
"So we're not inside."
"We're not inside, and that's the whole thing, and I've been wrong about it since April." Tom rubbed his face. "I built this place to be defended and the truth is it can't be. A cabin is a box you put yourself in so somebody else can decide when to open it."
"Then what is it?"
"It's a warehouse. It's where the food and the stove are, and it's worth exactly as much as the stuff inside it and not one ounce more."
Kindra was quiet for a second.
"You're saying if they come through the fence, we're already gone."
"I'm saying if they come through the fence, we are in the rocks four hundred yards up, watching, and they can have the box." Tom's voice caught slightly. "Because I can rebuild a cabin in a summer and I cannot rebuild Sofie."
"Tom."
"That's the door. That's the third thing. It's not a fortification, it's a decision, and I'm making it now while I'm calm instead of at ten in the morning with men in the yard."
They built the last piece at dawn, and it was the simplest thing they had built all month and the most important.
Two hundred yards up the draw, in a granite fold Tom had picked in April and never used, they made a stand.
Not a shelter. A stand: a stone breastwork eleven feet long and chest high, mortared with mud and moss, with a shooting slot at the east end and a second slot at the west, and behind it a flat place big enough for six people to lie down out of the wind.