Chapter 11 #4
"Two enemies who don't want each other here."
They spent the first of February getting ready for the wrong thing, and Tom knew it while he was doing it and did it anyway, because the alternative was doing nothing.
They ran the three site drill twice, once at dawn and once at four in the afternoon, and both times it went clean.
Twenty two minutes to the quinzhee. Thirty one to the log jam. Nine to the stand.
Nell made the log jam on her crutch in thirty eight minutes with Sofie beside her, and at the end of it she sat down on a root and was sick, and then got up and went into the shelter and got the fire kit out and had a small fire going in the vent before Kindra arrived.
"I'm all right," she said, before anybody asked.
"You are not all right. You just threw up."
"I'm all right and I made it in thirty eight minutes," Nell said, "and last week it was fifty one."
They stocked both sites a final time. Four more days of food to each, more fuel, a second pot at the quinzhee.
And at every site Tom put one more thing, and this one he explained to everybody twice.
"There's a signal system and we're going to learn it tonight," he said. "Because the worst thing that can happen to us on the fourth of February is not that somebody gets caught. It's that we get separated and stay separated."
"Because we'd never find each other."
"Because we'd never find each other and because we'd all come back here looking, one at a time, on different days, and get picked off."
So they built the signals.
Smoke, at fixed times. Noon and four o'clock only.
"One column, small, four minutes, then out. That means alive and in place."
"How do we know whose it is?"
"We know the three locations. There's nowhere else it can come from."
"And if there's no smoke?"
"Then it means nothing," Tom said firmly. "That's the most important rule. No smoke means nothing at all. It means the wind's wrong or somebody's asleep or the fire wouldn't take. Nobody, ever, goes looking for anybody because there was no smoke at noon."
"Then what's the point?"
"Smoke is good news only. It's never bad news. There is no signal in this system that means come and get me, because a signal like that is how a family gets killed one person at a time."
"That's cold," Kindra said.
"That's the coldest rule we've got and I want everybody to say it back to me."
They said it back to him, all five of them, including Sofie.
"And the other one?"
"The other one is the meet," Tom said. "Nine days. If anything happens, anything at all, everybody goes to their site and stays there and does not move for nine days. On the ninth day at noon, everybody comes to the log jam."
"Why nine?"
"Because that's how long the food lasts at the smallest site, and because nine days is long enough that anybody hunting us has gone home, and because it's a number nobody will forget."
"And if somebody's not there on the ninth day?"
Nobody answered.
"Then on the tenth day at noon," Tom said, "and the eleventh. Three days of waiting. And on the twelfth, whoever's there goes east over the spine and does not come back."
"Tom," Kindra said.
"Say it back."
They said it back.
That night they slept in the cabin and it was the last night they ever did.
Tom knew that afterward. He did not know it at the time, and he was glad about that for the rest of his life, because if he had known he would have done something ceremonial and ruined it.
Instead it was an ordinary night.
Kindra made a soup out of the last of the biscuitroot and four rabbit. Oliver emptied his bucket and reset it. Sofie timed the boil. McKenzie sorted brass she would never load.
Nell sat by the stove with her foot up and her wooden spoon in her hand and listened to Sofie tell her about a beach in Oregon that Sofie had visited when she was four and did not actually remember.
Tom sharpened four knives.
At nine o'clock Kindra took the first watch and at eleven Tom relieved her and at one McKenzie relieved him, and at three he took it back.
At 4:41 in the morning on the second of February, Shyla stood up off the hides.
She went to the east window.
Not the door. The east window, the one that faced up the draw, and she put her feet on the sill and her hackles came up from the shoulders to the tail, and she did not make a sound.
Tom was on his feet with the GP100.
"Up," he said. "Up, up, everybody up, it's now."
And it was the most beautiful ninety seconds of his life, because six people came out of their beds in the dark in a freezing cabin and nobody screamed and nobody asked a question and nobody looked for anything, because everything was already in a pack by the door and had been for eleven days.
Kindra had Sofie's coat on Sofie before Sofie was properly awake.
McKenzie had the .22 and her pack.
Oliver had the fire kit and the water and had the door bar off.
Nell was on her crutch with her pack on her back in eleven seconds.
"Groups," Tom said. "Go."
"Wait," McKenzie said.
"Kenz."
"Dad, wait, listen."
Tom listened.
There was nothing. No sound at all outside the cabin except the dog breathing.
"She's looking up the draw," McKenzie said.
"I know she is."
"Everything we've planned assumes they come from the meadow or the river." McKenzie's voice was completely steady. "Dad, the draw is where our sites are."
Tom went to the window and put his eye to the crack.
Nothing. Black timber, gray snow, no light anywhere.
And then, up the draw, about six hundred yards, something moved across a patch of open snow and was gone into the trees.
One shape. Then another. Then, four seconds later, two more.
"Four," Tom said.
"Coming down?"
"Coming down."
"That's not sixteen."
"That is not sixteen." Tom's mind was going at a speed he had not experienced since the morning the woodshed burned.
"Four men coming down the draw in the dark at four in the morning is not an assault, it's a blocking force. They're not coming for the house. They're going to sit above us and wait for us to run uphill at first light."
"So the sites are cut off."
"The quinzhee isn't." He turned. "The quinzhee's downhill and west and they're up and east. The log jam's downhill and west."
"Then it works."
"It works if we go now, right now, before they get down to the bench and see us cross the open."
"Then go," Kindra said.
And then Nell said, in a voice that stopped everything, "That's not Wallace."
Tom turned.
"Nell."
"That's not him." She was staring at the window. "He doesn't come down a draw in the dark. He comes at ten in the morning in the open with his hands out. That's what he does. That's what he always does."
"You're sure?"
"I watched him do it to four places," Nell said. "He walks up the road and he talks. He's never once gone into the trees in the dark in his life, that's the whole thing about him, he says the dark is for scaring people and the day is for taking things."
"Then who's up the draw?"
Nobody answered.
Outside, very far off, down the river, an engine started.
Tom's whole body went cold.
"That's it," he said. "That's the thing. Both of them. Kenz, you were right."
"About what?"
"Two enemies who don't want each other here, and they're both coming this morning, and neither one knows."
"Which one's up the draw?"
"Orange beard," Tom said. "He came off the road, he's had two days to walk in, and he's got trucks four miles down that are moving right now. He's going to close from downriver and he's already got four men above us in the dark."
"And Wingman?"
"Wingman walks over the saddle on crust and arrives at ten in the morning in the open, exactly like he's done every single time, expecting us to be in the rocks and the house to be empty."
"And walks into twenty people."
"And walks into twenty people who are not expecting him either."
The cabin was completely silent.
"Tom," Kindra said. "What do we do?"
Tom Thorn stood in the middle of his cabin with a revolver in his hand and did the fastest thinking he had ever done.
"We leave," he said. "Right now, west, downhill, both sites, exactly like we drilled, and we do not stop for anything."
"And then?"
"And then we sit in a hole in the ground and we let them find each other."
"That's it?"
"That's it. That's the entire plan and it's the best one I'll ever have."
He was already moving. "Kindra, Oliver, Sofie, log jam. Kenz, Nell, me, quinzhee. Go west on the ice shelf to the split rock and then break. Nobody talks. Nobody stops. If somebody falls, the group keeps going and one person helps them."
"Tom, the pairings."