Chapter 3 #3
The two of them had nothing left to say to each other, which was how he knew it was finished.
BURNER ONE: All right.
BURNER TWO: All right what.
BURNER ONE: I take her down. I go inside.
I look at the place with my own eyes. If it's what he says, I stay through the winter and I help with the thing they want, on my terms and my ground, and I do not stand in the middle of a road and trade shots with six men because that is how you die for nothing.
BURNER TWO: And if it isn't what he says.
BURNER ONE: Then I take her back out the same night and we deal with winter.
BURNER TWO: That's not a plan. That's two plans and a coin.
BURNER ONE: It's the best either of us has got.
He went down off the rib.
Shyla looked up when he came into camp with the stick in her hand and the dog sitting on her feet.
"Sit down," he said. "I need to talk to you like you're grown, because I don't have time to do it the other way."
She sat.
He crouched in front of her.
"There's a place about fourteen miles from here," he said. "People. Fifty-one of them. Nineteen kids. They've got food and a stove and a woman who used to be a nurse. The man who was here this morning is from there."
She watched him.
"I want to take you," he said. "You'll be warm. There'll be other kids. There'll be walls."
"Are you going?"
He had known it would be the first thing.
"I'm going to walk you there," he said. "And I'm going to go inside with you and I'm going to look at it. And if I don't like what I see, we walk back out that same night, both of us. I'm not handing you to anybody I haven't looked in the face."
"And if you do like it?"
He made himself hold her eyes.
"Then I'll stay through the winter," he said. "That's what I can promise. I won't promise more than that because I don't know more than that, and I'm not going to lie to you. You've had enough of that from adults this week."
She thought about it. She thought about it a long time, a lot longer than a child should have to.
"Okay," she said.
Then, after a moment: "Does the dog come?"
"The dog comes."
"Okay," she said again, and something went out of her shoulders that had been in them since the deadfall.
They spent the rest of that day and the next getting ready.
He cached what he could not carry. He wrapped the reloading kit in oilcloth and buried it in a dry crevice under the rib with two hundred rounds and the powder and the primers, and he built a cairn of three stones that would look like nothing to anyone who was not counting.
He smoked the deer over a low alder fire until it was black and hard and light.
He made her a coat out of a wool blanket and a hundred feet of paracord and cut down a pair of his own wool socks to stuff into her sneakers, and it was an ugly bad thing that would keep her alive for three days, which was all it had to do.
He took two hundred and twenty-two rounds and left a hundred and seventy in the cache and carried fifty-two, and he loaded the AK's magazines and put the rest in his coat.
The Rhino he cleaned and loaded and put back in the crossdraw rig with eighteen more in a leather slide.
They left at first light on the fourteenth.
The morning was clear and hard and there was frost on every needle in the drainage, and it burned off as they climbed toward the saddle.
Shyla walked better than she had. She ate the smoked deer as she went and she did not complain once and she stopped when he told her to stop.
They made nine miles the first day.
They camped without a fire in a cut bank above a dry creek, and he sat up most of the night with his back to the dirt wall and the girl asleep against his ribs and the dog across both their legs.
The second morning they came up out of the timber onto an old cut and the country opened.
From the top of the cut he could see down into a broad drainage, and a line through it that was too straight to be natural, an old two-lane road going gray and cracked with grass in the seams.
Halloran had said the Kettle was northeast. The road ran that way.
He came down to the edge of it carefully and lay in the ditch grass for an hour and watched.
Nothing moved on it in either direction.
They crossed.
They were a hundred yards up the far slope, in the open, the last stretch of open ground before the timber closed again, when Yak stopped.
Burner heard it two seconds later.
An engine. Low. North of them. Coming down the road in a descending gear, and not fast, the way a vehicle moves when the men in it are looking at the ground for tracks.
He grabbed Shyla by the back of her blanket coat and went down flat in the grass.
He could see the road from here. He could see the whole straight gray length of it.
The truck came around the bend, a big flatbed with a plow mount on the front and men standing in the back, and it slowed, and it slowed more, and then it stopped.
It stopped exactly where the three of them had crossed.
A man got down out of the bed and crouched in the road and put his hand on the dirt, and then he turned his head and looked up the slope, straight at the grass where they were lying.
And he raised his arm and pointed.