Chapter 2
The undergrowth moved again, and what came out of it was not what he expected.
It was small.
That was the first thing his brain gave him, before it gave him anything useful. Small, and low to the ground, and moving wrong, crawling on hands and knees out of a gap in the deadfall that a grown man could not have fit through.
Burner kept the sights where they were.
A hand came out first. Dirty past the point where you could tell what color the skin was underneath. Then a shoulder in a pink jacket that had gone gray and brown, and then a head of tangled brown hair with spruce needles in it.
Then a face.
A child's face. A girl. Seven years old, maybe eight, he had no idea, he had never been good at guessing and he had not seen a child in eleven months.
She got to her knees in the duff and put her hands up over her head the way she had been told to at some point by somebody, and she looked at him, and she did not make a sound.
Burner lowered the rifle.
He did it slowly, because his arms did not want to do anything at all, and then he stood there with the AK across his chest and no idea in the world what to say.
The girl stayed on her knees with her hands up.
"Put your hands down," he said.
She did not.
"Kid. Put your hands down."
She did not. She was shaking. Not a little. Her whole body was going, in waves, the way a person shakes when the cold has been in them all night and all the night before that.
Burner looked past her at the tarp in the clearing and back at her, and something in his chest turned over in a way he did not have a name for.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. You keep them up if you want."
He crouched down, slow, until he was more or less at her level. It put him lower than her and he did it on purpose, though he could not have said why he knew to do it.
"My name is Burner," he said.
Nothing.
"There's a dog back there. He's mine. He won't hurt you. He's actually a coward about it, he just looks like that."
Nothing.
He looked at her hands, still up over her head. There was blood under the nails. Not fresh.
"How long you been in there?"
Her mouth moved. No sound came out of it.
He waited.
She tried again, and this time it came out in a whisper so dry it cracked in the middle.
"Two nights."
Two nights. In September, at six thousand feet, in a pink jacket and a pair of sneakers. He looked at the gap in the deadfall she had crawled out of and understood that she had gotten in there and stayed in there while men moved around that clearing, and had not made one sound.
He had been a soldier's age when the world ended and he had never done anything as hard as that.
"Are you hurt?"
She thought about the question a long time, like it was a math problem.
"No," she said.
"You thirsty?"
She did not answer, which was answer enough.
He reached back very slowly and unclipped the steel bottle from the side of his pack. He held it out at arm's length and then, when she flinched, he set it down in the needles halfway between them and moved his hand away.
She looked at the bottle. She looked at him. She looked at the bottle.
Then she came off her knees in a scramble and had it and was backing away with it clutched in both arms before he could have blinked, and she drank standing up, fast, spilling it down her chin and her neck.
"Slow," he said. "Slow. You'll throw it up."
She did not slow down. She drank until the bottle was empty and then stood there holding it and breathing hard through her nose.
"What's your name?"
The bottle came down. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.
"Shyla," she said.
"Shyla." He nodded once, like it was information he had asked for and received, like this was a transaction. "All right."
He stood up.
She flinched again, and backed up two steps, and her eyes went to the gap in the deadfall, measuring the distance.
"I'm not going to grab you," he said. "I'm going to stand here. You can run if you want. I won't chase you."
He meant it when he said it. He was aware, distantly, that he meant it in a way that was going to cause him problems.
She did not run. She stood there with the empty bottle against her chest.
Her eyes moved past him toward the clearing, toward the tarp, and Burner stepped sideways without thinking about it, putting himself in the way.
"Don't," he said.
She stopped looking.
They stayed like that for a while. The wind came up the drainage and moved the tops of the big spruce and the sound was like water.
"Those your folks?" he said.
She nodded.
He had known. He had known from the second she crawled out. But there was a thing that happened when it got said out loud, and he felt it happen, and he stood there and let it.
"I'm sorry," he said.
It was a useless thing to say. It had been a useless thing to say before the lights went out, when people said it at funerals with a casserole in their hands, and out here it was worth even less than that.
He said it anyway, because there was nothing else in him.
"Shyla. I need you to listen to me now."
She looked up.
"The men who did this. Do you know how many there were?"
She held up one hand. All five fingers. Then she folded the thumb down and put it back up, uncertain, and looked at him to see if that was allowed.
"Five or six," he said. "That's good. That helps."
"There was a truck."
Her voice was stronger the second time. Still a whisper, but it had something underneath it.
"I heard it," he said. "Which way did it go?"
She pointed north, up the drainage, toward the saddle.
"They took our stuff," she said. "They took everything. They took Mama's ring off her hand."
Burner did not say anything.
"They were there when it got dark and they were there when it got light and then they were gone," she said. "I counted. I counted three hundred and I started over. I did it a lot of times."
"That was smart."
"My dad said get in the hole and don't come out for anything." She said it fast, all in one breath, like she had been holding the sentence for two days and it was heavy. "He said don't come out for anything. Not for anything. Even if."
She stopped.
"Even if," Burner said.
She nodded.
"You did exactly right," he said. "You hear me? You did exactly what he said and that is why you're standing here."
Her face did something then, the first thing it had done since she crawled out, a kind of collapse at the corners of the mouth, and he thought she was going to cry.
She did not.
She took a breath and held it and pushed it out and her face went back to being nothing, and that was worse than crying, and Burner turned away from it and looked north up the drainage and thought about six men and a running truck.
"You need to eat," he said.
Yak came up when Burner whistled him, low and slow with his head down, and stopped six feet from the girl and sat.
Shyla went rigid.
"He's all right," Burner said.
The dog looked at the girl. The girl looked at the dog. Yak yawned, which is a thing dogs do when they want something to relax, and then lay down in the needles with his chin on his paws.
Shyla did not relax. But she stopped holding her breath.
"Can we go," she said. "Can we go away from here."
"Yes."
He did not take her back through the clearing. He took her out the long way, up the side of the drainage through the timber, and he made sure she was walking ahead of him the whole time so that she never had to turn around and see anything.
She could not go fast. Two nights in the cold had taken something out of her legs and she stumbled twice in the first quarter mile, and the second time she went down hard on a root and stayed down.
Burner crouched next to her.
"I can carry you."
"No."
"Shyla."
"No." She got her hands under herself and pushed up. "I can walk."
So she walked.
It took them five hours to make three miles. He stopped her every twenty minutes whether she wanted to stop or not, and gave her water, and the second time he stopped he dug a strip of jerky out of his pack and made her chew it slowly, and she ate it like a wolf anyway.
Halfway up the long bench, Yak went off the trail.
He went sideways into the sage at the edge of the burn, fast, in that low silent way, and there was a short scuffle in the brush and a squeal that cut off in the middle.
Shyla stopped walking.
The dog came out with a rabbit hanging from his jaws, still kicking, and set it down and finished it with one shake and then lay down right there in the open and started to eat.
He ate the way he always did. No ceremony. He pinned the thing with a forepaw and went to work and the sounds were what they were, wet and businesslike, and in four minutes there was almost nothing left but the back feet and a smear on the stones.
Burner watched the girl watching the dog.
He thought about telling her to look away and he did not, because it seemed to him suddenly that there was no point, that whatever a dog eating a rabbit could do to her had already been done by better teachers.
She watched the whole thing without blinking.
"Does he always do that," she said.
"When he can catch one."
"Does he share?"
"No."
Something moved across her face that was almost, but not quite, the ghost of a smile.
"That's rude," she said.
Burner looked at her for a second.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
They made camp two hours before dark, and he did not take her all the way in.
He stopped a half mile short, in a jumble of rock below the rib, and put her in a hollowed spot out of the wind with the wool blanket from the bottom of his pack and told her to stay there, and left Yak with her.
Then he went up and circled his own camp twice, slow, wide, checking every approach, because he had just spent a day walking around in country that had six armed men in it and he was not going to walk in the front door of his own house without looking first.
Nothing had been touched. The meat still hung. The woodpile was as he had left it.
He went back down and got her.
She stopped when she saw the shelter under the rock overhang, the stacked wood, the stone hearth, the meat pole with the quarters hanging in cheesecloth.