Chapter 5 #3
The meeting happened the next morning in the long hall, and every adult in the Kettle was in it.
They stood along the walls where the benches ran out. Weathers took the children out to the greenhouses at the start, all twenty of them, and Marin took Shyla by the wrist and pulled her along and Shyla looked back once over her shoulder at Burner before the door shut.
Halloran did not stand at the head of the table. He stood in the middle of the long side, which Burner noticed, and thought was smart.
"Here's what we know," Halloran said. "I'm going to say it once and I'm not going to soften it."
He said it. The date, the terms, the food, the seed stock, the fuel. Then the four people.
The sound the room made was different this time. Quieter. They had all slept on it.
"Now here's what we don't know," Halloran said. "We don't know if the date's real. Burner thinks it isn't. I'm inclined to agree with him and I'll let him say why in a minute."
"Let him say it now," somebody called.
So Burner stood up.
He had not planned to talk. He had planned to sit with his back to the wall and watch faces, which was what he was good at, and it took him a second to get his feet under him.
Forty-nine people looked at him.
"He gave you the date so you'd build one wall," he said.
He heard how his own voice sounded in the room and did not like it. Too flat. Eleven months of talking to a dog.
"If you know a man is coming Sunday at sunrise, you put everything into Sunday at sunrise. You pull your watchers off the ridges Thursday because you need the hands. You work people till they're stupid with tired on Saturday night.
Then he comes Friday afternoon from the north and there's nobody on the rock and half of you are asleep."
"That's a lot of maybe," said a woman near the stove.
"Yes."
"So what's your alternative?"
"Ready every day," Burner said. "Starting now. Not one big morning. A hundred small ones. Somebody on the north rock and somebody on the south spur from an hour before first light to an hour after full dark, every single day, rotating, no exceptions, including on days when we're behind on wood.
Nobody works past dark on defenses, ever, because a tired camp is a taken camp."
"That's a lot of labor we don't have."
"It's less than you think and it's cheaper than the alternative."
Teague spoke from the far end.
"You keep saying ready," he said. "Ready to do what? That's the thing nobody will say. Are we talking about shooting at them?"
The room went quiet.
"Say it, Halloran," Teague said. "Are we going to shoot at six men over potatoes?"
"Not over potatoes," Halloran said.
"Then what."
"Over four people."
"And if they'd only asked for the potatoes?"
"Then we'd give them the potatoes and eat thin and I'd stand here and take whatever you all thought of me for it," Halloran said. "I've done it twice. I'd do it again. I am not a proud man and I have never once believed that a full container was worth a funeral."
He looked around the room.
"But they didn't ask for the potatoes."
Teague put his hands flat on the table and looked at them.
"I've got two grandkids," he said.
"I know you do."
"If it goes wrong it's not four of us. It's everybody."
"I know that too."
"Then how do you stand there and say fight?"
"Because I've counted it the other way," Halloran said, "and it's worse."
He straightened up.
"Let's say we give him four. Say I go, and three others. What happens on the twenty-ninth? There's forty-seven of you here with no seed and no fuel and a winter coming, and a lesson learned, and the lesson is that when the truck comes somebody gets picked. Now it's March. Now it's April.
He comes back, because of course he comes back, and now he wants six, and what exactly is the argument against it? You already agreed to the principle. All you're doing after that is haggling over the number."
Nobody answered.
"There's forty-nine adults in this room," Halloran said. "Sooner or later that's all of us. Not at once. Four at a time, over years, with everybody left behind being very reasonable about it."
A long silence.
"That's the sum," he said. "That's the honest one. Anybody wants to dispute it, now's the time, and I mean that. I'm not looking for agreement, I'm looking for somebody to find the hole in it."
Weathers spoke from the end of the table.
"There isn't one," she said. "I've been up since three trying to find it."
Teague had not looked up from his hands.
"And if we say no and it goes wrong," he said, "and it's not four of us but thirty, and it's the kids too. What then? Who's answerable for that?"
"I am," Halloran said.
"That's a word, that's not an answer."
"No," Halloran agreed. "It isn't. There isn't an answer. There's just which wrong thing you're willing to be the cause of, and I have picked mine, and I will carry it, and if you pick the other one I won't call you a coward for it, because you aren't one."
Teague was quiet for a while.
Then he lifted his head.
"Ask me the question," he said. "Ask me straight out, in front of everybody, and don't let me sit here and be careful."
Halloran looked at him.
"Teague. If it comes to it, will you stand?"
"Yes," Teague said. "God help me. Yes."
They voted with hands, which was how they did everything.
Thirty-eight to eleven.
Halloran counted it twice and said the number out loud both times and then said something that Burner thought was the best thing he had heard any man say since the lights went out.
"The eleven stay," he said. "You voted your conscience and it's noted and it's finished and nobody in this camp is to bring it up again. You'll be given work that isn't shooting and there's no shame attached to it and if I hear otherwise from anybody I'll deal with it personally.
We're not that kind of place."
He looked at the whole room.
"The eleven and the thirty-eight eat off the same table on the twenty-ninth. That's the whole point of the thing we're doing. If we lose that, we've lost anyway."
Burner spent the rest of that day doing something he had never done in his life, which was teach.
He was bad at it for the first hour.
He had eight people in a line behind a granite spur on the south side and he told them all the true things he knew and watched them absorb approximately none of it, because he was telling them in the order the things existed in his head instead of the order a person could learn them.
He stopped. He sat down on a rock and thought for five minutes while they waited, embarrassed for him.
Then he started over.
"Forget shooting," he said. "Nobody's shooting today. Today there's one thing and it's this."
He put his hand on the rock.
"Rocks stop bullets. Wood does not. Trucks do not. Doors do not. A wall of a building does not, and I know that's the one that's going to get somebody killed, because every person alive thinks a wall is cover and a wall is just a thing you can't see through."
He walked them along the spur.
"Concealment is where they can't see you. Cover is where they can't hurt you. Those are different words and people die from mixing them up. You can stand in a bush all day and feel very safe and a round will come through that bush like it isn't there."
Priest, the sixteen year old, put his hand up.
"What about the greenhouse?"
"The greenhouse is glass. If it starts, you do not go to the greenhouse. Nobody goes to the greenhouse. Say it."
"Nobody goes to the greenhouse."
"Everybody."
They said it. Eight voices, raggedly.
"Good."
He worked them for four hours.
He taught them to lie behind a rock instead of on it, to keep their heads low on the same side every time so a watching man could not learn their pattern, to move in the three seconds after they were seen and never in the two seconds before.
He taught them to shout what they saw instead of shouting look out, because look out is a sound and a direction is information.
He taught them, over and over, until they were tired of him, that when a man behind cover gets scared he stands up, and that standing up is the single most common way to die, and that the only cure is to have practiced staying down so many times that the body does it without asking.
By the end of the afternoon they were sick of him and they could do four things they had not been able to do at noon.
He picked his two shooters at dusk.
One was a woman named Delacroix, forty-four, who had put four rounds into a paper plate at a hundred and thirty yards with an old bolt action .270 and had not said one word the entire time she was doing it.
The other was Priest.
He had not wanted it to be Priest. The boy was sixteen and had a mother in the camp and Burner had spent the whole afternoon quietly hoping somebody else would be better.
Nobody was. The kid was calm, he shot the same way five times running, and when Burner had told him to stop and reset because his breathing was wrong, he had said thank you instead of getting sullen.
"You understand what this is," Burner said, when the others had gone in.
"Yes sir."
"Don't call me sir."
"Okay."
"Say it back to me. What is it."
Priest looked at the ground for a second.
"It's not target practice," he said.
"That's right."
"My dad shot a man at the pass in the first winter." He said it steadily. "He came home and he didn't talk for nine days. Then he talked about it once and never again, and he died in February of the fever, and I have thought about those nine days every week since."
Burner did not say anything.
"I'm not stupid about it," Priest said. "That's what you're asking. I'm not stupid about what it does."
"No," Burner said. "You're not."
They walked back toward the buildings in the dark.
"Can I ask you something," Priest said.
"Ask."
"Have you?"
Burner walked ten more steps.
"Twice," he said.
"What's it like?"
"It's nothing, and then it's everything, and the everything doesn't arrive for about two days." Burner looked ahead at the lit windows. "And then it stays. It doesn't get worse, but it doesn't leave either. You just get bigger around it."
Priest took that in.