Chapter 4
"Don't move," Burner said.
His mouth was an inch from her ear and he said it so quietly it was mostly breath.
Shyla did not move. Yak lay flat on his belly against Burner's left leg with his ears back, and he did not move either.
Down on the road the man kept his arm up.
Another one got out of the cab. Then two more off the bed. They gathered around the crouching man and looked up the slope, and one of them lifted something to his face, and the little circles of glass caught the morning sun and flashed.
Binoculars.
Burner put his face down into the grass and made himself go loose.
This was the part nobody understood until they had done it.
Every instinct in a man's body screams run, and running is what gets you killed, because the human eye is built to catch motion and almost nothing else.
Six hundred years of prey animals had figured that out and men had forgotten it in one generation of looking at screens.
The grass was knee high and going gold. They were wearing wool and canvas. As long as none of them so much as turned a head, they were three shapes in a field of shapes.
"They can't see us," he breathed. "They found the tracks. They're guessing. Don't move."
He felt her nod. Just the smallest tip of her chin against the dirt.
The seconds went by.
He counted them, because counting kept a man from doing something stupid. He got to forty before anyone on the road spoke, and when the voice came up the slope it was clear enough to understand, which meant they were closer than he wanted.
"How fresh?"
"This morning." A second voice, lower. "Hour, maybe two."
"How many?"
A pause.
"Two. Man and a kid. And a dog."
Burner felt Shyla's whole body go rigid against his arm.
"Easy," he breathed.
"Which way?"
"Up. Into the black timber."
There was a silence then that went on too long.
"Leave it," said a third voice, and this one was different. Flat. Uninterested. A voice that had settled something and did not expect to be asked twice.
"It's a kid, Halstead."
"I said leave it. We're eight miles from the yard with a half tank and I'm not putting four men up a mountain after a dog track."
A pause. "They're going northeast. Everything out here going northeast is going to the same place, and we'll be going there ourselves inside a month. We'll collect it then."
Burner lay in the grass with his heart going like a hammer and did not move a muscle.
"Get in the truck."
Doors. The clatter of boots on a steel bed. The engine came up out of idle and the gears went in and the sound of it swelled and then began to draw away south down the gray road.
He did not move until it had been gone for five full minutes.
When he finally rolled onto his side his shirt was soaked through and the morning was cold enough that the sweat went to ice against his back inside of a minute.
Shyla's face was three inches from his in the grass. Her eyes were enormous.
"That was them," she said.
"I know."
"That was the same truck."
"I know."
She did not cry. He had almost started to wish she would.
"The one who talked last," she said. "The one who said leave it."
"Halstead."
"That was him." Her voice had gone very small and very even, and she said it the way somebody reads a label. "He's the one who did my mom."
Burner looked at her for a long moment.
Then he sat up in the grass and looked south down the empty road where the dust was still settling and he felt something shift over in his chest and lock into a new position, like a bone going back into a socket.
"All right," he said.
They made the last five miles by dark and they made them ugly.
He would not use the low ground now. He took her up along the shoulder of the ridge through the deadfall where the going was three times harder and the sight lines were four times better,
and she fell twice and tore the knee of her jeans and the second time there was blood and she got up without being asked.
Somewhere around four in the afternoon the country changed.
He started finding sign. A cut stump, axe not saw, gone gray but not old. A snare wire on a game trail, set well, anchored to a root. A line of rocks across a wash that was not natural and was not random.
Somebody was working this country and working it carefully.
At six, in the last of the light, a voice came out of a stand of doghair lodgepole about eighty feet above him.
"Stop walking."
Burner stopped.
"Hands off the rifle. Don't take it off. Just move your hands."
He moved his hands.
"There's a kid with him," a second voice said, somewhere off to the right and lower. Young. A boy's voice trying to be a man's.
"I can see that. Mister, what's your name?"
"Burner."
Silence.
"Halloran came to my camp two days ago," Burner said. "Told me about a place called the Kettle. Told me they take children."
More silence. Then a low whistle, two notes, and an answering whistle from somewhere behind him that he had not known was there at all.
He had walked through at least three people to get here. He revised his estimate of the Kettle upward.
"Keep coming," the first voice said. "Straight up the draw. Don't go left."
He did not ask what was left. Whatever it was, it was set to hurt somebody.
The Kettle sat in a bowl of ground with granite on three sides, which was where it got the name.
He smelled it before he saw it. Woodsmoke, and under that something he had not smelled in eleven months and could not place for a full ten seconds.
Bread.
He came around the last of the rock and stopped without meaning to.
There were buildings. Six of them, low and long, old Forest Service barracks with new roofs of corrugated steel and stovepipes coming up through them, and every stovepipe was running.
There was a gravity water line on stilts.
There were two greenhouses made of a wrecked semi trailer and a hundred mismatched window sashes glued together with tar and prayer, glowing faintly from lamps inside.
There was a fence, but it was a bad fence, and he noted that.
And there were people.
Not one or two. Dozens. Moving between buildings with buckets and armloads of wood, and a woman hanging washing in the last light, and somewhere out of sight a hammer going, and children.
Children running. Four of them, chasing each other around a woodpile, shrieking.
Shyla stopped dead beside him.
She stared at the running children the way a man dying of thirst stares at water, and she did not move toward them, and she reached up and took hold of the sleeve of Burner's coat with one fist and held it.
"That's a lot of people," she said.
"Yes."
"Is it okay?"
"I don't know yet," Burner said. "I'm going to find out. You stay next to me."
Halloran came out of the second building with a lamp in his hand and stopped on the step when he saw them.
He looked at Burner. He looked at the girl holding Burner's sleeve.
"Well," he said.
"I'm looking," Burner said. "That's all. That was the deal I made with her."
"That was the deal I made with you." Halloran came down the step. "Hungry?"
"She is."
"Then that's easy," Halloran said. "That's the one thing here that's easy."
They ate in a long room with a plank table down the middle and two woodstoves going and forty people in it.
The noise was the thing that nearly took Burner apart.
He had not been inside a room with a conversation in it since last October.
It came at him from all directions, voices overlapping, somebody laughing at the far end, a baby complaining, cutlery, a bench scraping, and he sat with his back to the wall and his hands flat on the table and worked on breathing for about four minutes before he could take in anything else.
They gave them barley soup with venison in it and two slices of dense gray bread and a cup of something hot made from roasted dandelion root.
Shyla ate like an animal and then, halfway through the second slice, slowed down and looked around the room.
A girl about her own age was staring at her from across the table with frank open interest.
"You're new," the girl said.
Shyla nodded.
"I'm Marin. Do you know how to knit?"
Shyla shook her head.
"I'll teach you," Marin said, as though the matter were settled, and went back to her soup.
Burner watched Shyla's face while that happened.
Something came into it that had not been there in three days, and then she glanced sideways at him to check whether it was allowed, and he gave her a nod, and she turned back to the girl and said, "Okay."
The nurse practitioner was named Weathers and she was sixty-some and built like a fence post and she took Shyla away to look her over.
Halloran took Burner outside.
They stood in the cold by the woodpile with the sound of the hall behind them.
"Say it," Halloran said.
"Your fence is decorative."
"It is."
"Your east approach comes up a draw with no fields of fire and I walked within eighty feet of three of your people before anybody spoke to me, which means they were waiting for me to get close instead of stopping me far. If I'd had four men behind me you'd have lost this place tonight."
"I know."
"Your stovepipes are visible from the ridge north of here. All six. At night with the doors opening you can see the glow from two miles."
"I know that too." Halloran's face was tired in the lamplight.
"You want to hear the rest? The water line freezes every January and we haul by hand for six weeks. We have one rifle in this camp chambered in anything we can find ammunition for. Eleven of our adults are over sixty.
Our granary is a shipping container with a padlock that a determined man could open with a rock."
"Then why are you still alive?"
"Because they don't want us dead," Halloran said. "That's the whole answer. We're a garden. You don't burn a garden, you come back in the fall."
Burner said nothing.
"So now you know what I meant about the price," Halloran said. "I wasn't recruiting a soldier. I was recruiting a man who could look at this place and tell me the truth about it, because everybody in here loves it too much to see it."
"You've got one round of a fight in you," Burner said. "Maybe. And then it's over."
"Yes."