Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Eli
Three men. Up the open slope in the new light, fanned out the way the scout never thought to, which tells me the one giving orders has learned from losing the first one.
They're spread wide and low, using what little the terrain gives them, rifles up and ready, and they are coming for the cabin with the patience of men who've decided the last quarter mile is a problem to be solved and not a place to die.
They're wrong about that. But they're not stupid, and not-stupid is harder to kill than stupid, so I do the thing I do and I get cold and clear and I become the mountain.
"Cellar," I tell Wren. There's a root cellar under the floor, dug into the slope, one way in and that one through a hatch I can cover.
"Down, pistol, hatch latched from inside.
On, off, don't ride the slide. You don't come up for anything you hear.
Not for me yelling, not for me screaming, not for silence.
You come up when I open the hatch and say your name twice.
Two times. If anyone opens that hatch and it isn't me saying Wren, Wren, you make them earn it. "
"Eli—"
"Two times. Say it back."
"Two times." Her face is white and her hands are steady. "You come back through the door."
"Every time." I kiss her once, hard, and put her down in the dark, and latch the floor over the best thing that ever happened to me, and then I'm not a man in love anymore. I'm the last thing three men are ever going to misunderstand.
I don't wait in the cabin. The cabin's a coffin if you let them get you in it; you want the high ground and the cold and the white, the country I'm made of and they're just visiting.
I go out the back into the blinding morning, into the whites, and I take the slope above them, and I let the mountain make me into weather.
The first one I take quiet, at the edge of the trees, before he's even in the open.
The wide flank man, too far from his friends, too sure of his rifle, never once looking up the hill the way the scout didn't. I give him one word, "Wrong mountain," and then the cold fast animal arithmetic, and then there are two.
The second one hears it. That's the trouble with not-stupid men; they communicate.
He calls out, a name, gets no answer, and goes still, and the slope goes still, and now they know.
Now they know what the scout learned. Two of them left, dug in low behind a granite shelf, and me above them in the snow, and the sun climbing, and a long cold game of who moves first.
The one who's giving orders is good. Dale, I'd put money on it.
He's read the ground now. He knows somebody's above him, knows it's one man, knows that one man has to come to them eventually because every minute that passes is a minute closer to the witness being found and finished if they can just get past me to the cabin.
So he splits his last man off to flank up toward the cabin while he pins my position with fire, and it's a good plan, it's the plan I'd run, and for about a minute it works.
The flanker gets to the cabin. I hear the door go.
I hear him inside, fast, searching, and my whole body goes to ice that isn't the cold, because Wren is under that floor with a pistol and a latch and the order I gave her, and I am two hundred yards up a slope pinned by a man's rifle and I cannot get to her.
I hear the shot from inside the cabin.
One shot. Then nothing.
I have been afraid exactly three times in my life that I can name. The avalanche, twice. And this, now, the longest two seconds of my life, pinned in the snow with one man's rounds cracking off the granite by my head and one shot fired inside the cabin where I left her, not knowing — not knowing —
Then the cabin door bangs and the flanker comes out backward, fast, wrong, the way a man moves when something's gone bad for him and not for the people he came to kill, and he's got a hand pressed to his thigh and red coming through his fingers, and I understand, in a flood that nearly undoes my aim, what happened under that floor.
She made him earn it.
She made him earn it, and he didn't, and now he's bleeding in the open with his back to the hill and his attention all on the cabin behind him and none on the slope above, and Dale's broken cover to see why his flanker's screaming, and for one half-second both of them are in the open and unaware and the mountain has them and so do I.
I don't miss. I've never been able to make being good at this into being good. But I have never once, when it was them or her, missed.
When the slope goes quiet, it goes quiet the way it does after a slide.
Total. Ringing. The snow swallowing everything.
I'm on my feet and down the hill faster than the wound in my side lets me, because somewhere in the last exchange one of them got lucky and I've got cold wet heat spreading under my shell that I'll deal with later, after, when there's an after.
I hit the cabin door and I get the floor hatch up and I make myself say it right even though my voice is shaking, even though I'm bleeding on her clean floor:
"Wren. Wren."
Two times.
And the latch goes, and the hatch comes up, and she's there in the dark with the pistol still up and her face streaked and fierce, and she's alive, she's alive, she made a man earn it and lived, and the last thing I think before the floor tilts under me is that I came back through the door.
Every time.
Like I promised.