Chapter 3
Burner did not answer.
He moved instead, three steps sideways and down, off the flat ground in front of the shelter and into the rock where the rib broke into slabs, and he went low behind the biggest of them and put the rifle across the stone.
Yak came with him without being told.
Behind him, on the sleeping platform, he heard the blankets move.
He turned his head an inch and found her eyes already open, wide and awake, and he put one finger flat across his own lips and she stopped moving instantly, completely, the way she must have stopped in the deadfall for two nights.
That was a bad thing to see a child do that well.
"You don't have to talk," the voice said. "I'd rather you didn't shoot, though. Nobody up here needs that this early."
The voice was calm. That was the worst part. It was the voice of a man leaning on a fence post.
Burner put his eye to the sights and found nothing. The timber below the camp was gray and thick and the light was still bad. Whoever it was had come up the east approach, which was the one he used least, which meant they had come off the dog's track and not off his.
He had made a mistake. He had gone down to that clearing and walked home with a kid who could not cover her own trail and he had let a straight line get drawn from that camp to this one.
Eleven months of discipline. Undone in a day.
"Here's where we are," the voice said. "There's four of us down here. We can see your woodpile and we can see your meat pole and we've been looking at both for about half an hour. If we wanted to burn you out we'd have done it while you were asleep."
Four. Not six.
Burner filed it.
"So talk," the voice said. "Or don't. But the sun's coming up and I'd like to be somewhere else by then, and so would you."
Burner spoke without lifting his head, angling his voice off the rock so it would not give his exact spot.
"Step out where I can see you."
"No."
"Then we've got nothing."
"We've got plenty." A pause. "You shot a deer yesterday morning. Around seven. One round. Sounded like a 7.62."
Burner's jaw tightened.
"Which means you're not spraying," the voice said. "Which means you're either short on ammunition or you're disciplined, and either way you're a man I'd rather talk to than fight. That's the whole reason we're standing here having this conversation instead of the other thing."
"Who's we."
"My name's Halloran. There's three men with me. We're out of a settlement about fourteen miles northeast, place called the Kettle. Used to be a Forest Service work camp."
"Never heard of it."
"You wouldn't have. That's rather the point of it."
Burner scanned the timber. Nothing moved. If there were four of them down there they were good, or they were lying about the number.
"You've got a kid up there," Halloran said.
Everything in Burner went still.
"I'm not going to pretend I didn't see the tracks," the voice went on, and the calm had a careful quality to it now, a man stepping around something. "Two sets coming up that bench yesterday. One of them's about a size one in a sneaker with no tread left. I've got a daughter. I know the print."
Burner said nothing.
"You want to know how I know you're not the one who took her? Because you were walking behind her, and you stopped every couple hundred yards, and there's a spot back there where she went down and you knelt beside her. Men who take kids don't kneel."
Burner closed his eyes for one second.
"What do you want," he said.
"To come up. Empty hands. Just me. My people stay where they are. And then I want to say four or five sentences to you and after that you can tell me to leave and I'll leave."
"Why."
"Because there's a truck running around this country with six men in it," Halloran said, "and I think you've met their work."
The light was coming up gray behind the peaks.
Burner lay in the frost with his heart going and made himself think.
Shooting first was an option. It had kept him alive twice.
But it was an option that only worked if you were sure, and if he was wrong about these four he would be a man who had murdered somebody's father over a misunderstanding, and there would be three more of them in the rocks and a child behind him.
"Come up," he said. "Slow. Rifle on the ground where you're standing. Both hands out from your sides. You come up that chute and nowhere else."
"Fair."
"Halloran."
"Yes."
"If I see a second man move, I will kill you first."
A pause.
"That's about what I'd say," Halloran said.
He came up the chute the way he had been told, empty handed, moving like a man with a bad hip.
He was somewhere north of fifty. Gray beard cut short.
A canvas coat that had been patched at both elbows with different colored fabric.
He had a revolver on his belt and he did not touch it and he made sure Burner could see him not touching it.
He stopped twelve feet out and stood there and let himself be looked at.
"Morning," he said.
Burner did not lower the rifle.
"Say your sentences."
Halloran nodded, like that was reasonable.
"The Kettle's got fifty-one people in it," he said.
"Nineteen of them are kids. We've got a spring, we've got two greenhouses made out of a wrecked tractor trailer and a hundred windows, and we've got a woman who was a nurse practitioner for thirty years and knows more than any of us deserve. We are not paradise. We ration. We argue.
We buried four people last winter and we'll bury more this one."
He stopped.
"That's four sentences," Burner said.
"Here's the fifth." Halloran looked at him steady. "We take children. No conditions on it. We do not always take adults, and I won't lie to you about that, because there's a vote and I've seen the vote go the wrong way. But we have never once turned away a kid."
Burner's finger stayed along the trigger guard.
"And what do you want for it."
"That's the question, isn't it." Halloran's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "There's a price. I'm going to tell you what it is because you'd find out in a day and then you'd hate me."
"Tell me."
"We need a man who can shoot to help us with the truck."
There it was.
"The men in that truck have hit us twice," Halloran said. "Spring and July. Second time they took eleven hundred pounds of seed potatoes and a nineteen year old girl. We got the potatoes back. We did not get the girl back."
Burner said nothing.
"We know where they hole up. It's a highway maintenance yard on the old state route, concrete building, fuel tanks. They've got the only running vehicle in a hundred miles and that means they move faster than we can, and as long as they have it they own this whole country,
and the rest of us are just growing food for them."
"So take the truck out."
"With what." Halloran spread his hands. "I've got thirty-one adults. Eight of them can shoot in the sense that they've shot a deer. Two can shoot in the sense that I would put them behind a rock with a rifle and expect them to hit something that is moving and trying to kill them. Two."
"That's not my problem."
"No," Halloran agreed. "It isn't."
He let that sit.
"I'll take the girl either way," he said. "Right now if you want. Today, walking, no conditions, and you never see me again and you go back to your woodpile. I meant what I said about kids."
Burner stared at him.
"Then why tell me the price at all."
"Because there's a difference between a man who chooses and a man who gets used," Halloran said. "I've been on both ends of that. I'd rather look you in the eye."
Burner lowered the rifle. Not all the way. Enough.
"I need to think," he said.
"Take the day. Take two." Halloran glanced at the sky. "Don't take a week. It's the twelfth of September. There'll be snow on that saddle by the fifteenth of October and a child doesn't walk fourteen miles in it."
He turned to go, and stopped.
"For what it's worth," he said. "If it's the fight that scares you, that's not cowardice, that's a man doing math correctly. You'd be walking toward the worst people I've ever met in my life. I want to be honest that I'm asking you for something I have no right to ask."
He went back down the chute.
Twenty minutes later Burner heard four men move off through the timber, and they were quieter going than they had been coming, which told him the coming had been on purpose.
The sun came over the ridge at seven.
He sat on the flat rock with a cup of pine needle tea going cold in his hands and did not drink any of it.
Shyla sat on the end of the sleeping platform with the blanket around her shoulders and her legs hanging down and watched him, and did not ask a single question, and that was somehow worse than being asked.
Around eight he got up and split wood for two hours, hard, badly, hitting the rounds off center and sending halves skidding across the frost.
It did not help.
By ten he had given up pretending, and he went and sat above the camp on the rock rib where he could see forty miles of country, and he let the two of them out.
They had been in there since the clearing. He had been shoving them down all morning under the sound of the maul.
He had been alone long enough that this had stopped seeming strange to him. Sometime in the second month, up here with no voice but the creek, he had started hearing himself argue in two directions, and rather than fight it he had given them names, because a man has to keep track of who is talking.
The first one was the one who had kept him alive.
The second one was the one who had gotten him into things.
He sat down on the rock and let them go at it.
BURNER ONE: We walk her to a ridge above that place. We wait until we see people. Then we send her down and we come home.
BURNER TWO: And if the vote goes wrong.
BURNER ONE: He said they never turn away a kid.
BURNER TWO: He also said the vote sometimes goes the wrong way. You're choosing which of his sentences to believe based on which one lets you go home.