Chapter 5 #4
"That's better than what people usually say," he said.
"What do people usually say?"
"That you get used to it."
"People who say that are lying or they're broken," Burner said, "and either way don't take advice from them."
The next four days went fast, which was the thing about time, that it only ran slow when nothing was at stake.
He closed two more approaches and opened one that had been closed, a false gap through the east rock that funneled into forty feet of open ground under the north spur, and he did not tell anyone what it was for except Halloran and Delacroix.
He moved the last of the seed stock into three separate places, none of them the root cellar, because one hiding place is a hiding place and three is a problem.
He built what he privately thought of as the ugly things and did not enjoy building them.
A trench of sharpened stakes under the south fence line, covered with grass.
Two hundred feet of wire strung at ankle height through the doghair lodgepole where a man coming quietly would have to come.
A pile of dry pine slash on the north bench with a can of the camp's small stock of kerosene buried beside it, which was not a weapon but was the brightest thing he could make at three in the morning.
He rigged a signal. Three iron bars hung from a frame outside the hall and a length of pipe to hit them with, and he had every adult in the camp practice sprinting to their position from wherever they were standing, at random times, four times a day.
The first drill took eleven minutes and was a disaster.
The eighth took two minutes and forty seconds.
The fourteenth took ninety-one seconds, and Halloran stood in the yard with a watch he had wound by hand and looked at it and said, "Well, I'll be damned."
On the fifth night Weathers came and found Burner where he was working by lamplight, cutting slots in the shutters of the second building so a rifle could be laid through them.
She stood there with her arms folded.
"You're not sleeping," she said.
"I'm sleeping some."
"You're sleeping about four hours and you're the only person here who knows how to do any of this, and if you fall over on the twenty-fifth then all of it goes with you." She handed him a tin cup. "Drink that and go to bed."
He looked in the cup. Something dark that smelled of bark.
"What is it?"
"Willow and a few other things. It'll make your knee stop talking to you."
He drank it. It was foul.
"That girl of yours," Weathers said.
"She's not mine."
"Mm," said Weathers, in a way that closed the subject entirely. "She asks about you eleven times a day. Where is he, is he eating, did he sleep. She's got a system. She checks in on you the way a nurse checks a chart."
Burner set down the chisel.
"She's a strange kid," Weathers said. "I don't mean that badly. I mean she's got something in her that most people have to be about forty to get, and she got it in a woodpile in two days, and I'd rather she hadn't."
"Is she all right?"
"She's not sleeping either. She wakes up about two and sits up straight and doesn't make a sound, and then after a while she lies back down. Marin told me. Marin's a good girl, she came and told me privately instead of talking about it."
Burner rubbed his eyes.
"What do I do about that?"
"Nothing you can do about that."
"That's not an answer."
"No," Weathers agreed. "There aren't a lot of them going around. You keep showing up. That's the whole treatment. Twenty years from now she won't remember one thing you said to her and she'll remember that you were where you said you'd be."
She took the cup back.
"Bed," she said.
On the sixth day he told Halloran he was going down to look at the maintenance yard.
They were up on the north rock with the map between them, held down at the corners with stones.
"Absolutely not," Halloran said.
"It's the twenty-first tomorrow. If I'm right about the date he could come as early as the twenty-third and everything I've built here is based on a picture I put together from what a kid heard from the bed of a truck."
"And if you don't come back, we've got a camp full of people who've learned four things from you and nobody to tell them the fifth."
"That's a real argument," Burner said.
"Thank you."
"It's also the argument for going." Burner put his finger on the map.
"Look. I've made every one of these decisions blind. I've got the greenhouses as the thing they want. Is it? Maybe the fuel's what they want. Maybe they're down to fumes and the truck is the whole reason for the schedule change,
and if that's true then everything I've done is wrong and the answer is to put a hole in a radiator and go home."
Halloran was quiet.
"How many nights?"
"Two. Down tomorrow night, lie up all day, look at it, back the night after."
"Alone?"
"With the dog."
"Take Priest."
"No."
"Burner."
"No." He said it flatly. "Not because he's not good. Because two men make four times the noise and eight times the tracks, and because if it goes wrong I'd rather it be one."
Halloran folded the map.
"Then I want three conditions," he said.
"Say them."
"You do not engage. Not one round. You look, you come home. If you see that girl from July, if you see her alive, tied to a post, screaming, you do not go get her."
Burner did not answer for a second.
"Say it," Halloran said.
"I do not engage."
"Second. You're back by dawn on the twenty-third. If you're not, I'm not sending anyone after you and I'm not holding the camp for you and the plan changes to whatever Delacroix and I can manage."
"Agreed."
"Third." Halloran looked at him steadily. "You tell the girl yourself. Before you go. Not a note, not me telling her after. You stand in front of her and tell her."
Burner let out a long breath.
"That's the hard one," he said.
"That's why it's third."
He found her in the greenhouse in the afternoon, on her knees in the dirt between two rows, doing something with beans.
She looked up when his shadow fell across her.
She knew instantly. He watched her face do it, the whole thing, in about a second and a half.
"You're going somewhere," she said.
"Tomorrow night. Down to where they live. To look, that's all. Then back the next night."
She sat back on her heels and wiped her hands slowly on her jeans.
"That's two nights."
"Yes."
"Is Yak going?"
"Yes."
She nodded. She looked at the beans.
"Okay," she said, in that filing voice, and that was when Burner realized he could not stand it, that he would rather have taken a beating than hear that particular word in that particular tone one more time.
He got down on his knees in the dirt so he was level with her.
"Don't do that," he said.
"Do what?"
"The okay. Where you put it away." He shook his head. "You can be angry at me. You're allowed to be angry at me, I'm not going to go away because of it."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't want you to go," she said.
"I know."
"I'm not saying don't go. I know you have to. I'm saying I don't want you to." Her voice was absolutely steady and her eyes were not. "There's a difference and I want you to know both of them."
Burner closed his eyes for a second.
"That's fair," he said. "That's completely fair."
"Two nights."
"Two nights. I'll be back before it's light on the twenty-third."
"You said you're not going back up the mountain."
"I'm not."
"Say it again."
"I'm not going back up the mountain," he said. "I'm going eleven miles south, I'm going to lie in a ditch and look at a building, and then I'm coming back here, to this camp, where you are."
She held out her hand.
It surprised him enough that he just looked at it.
"Shake on it," she said. "My dad said if you shake on it it counts."
He took her small filthy hand in his and shook it once.
"It counts," he said.
He left at full dark on the twenty-second with fifty-two rounds, the Rhino, four days of smoked deer, no light of any kind, and the dog.
Halloran walked him to the south gap.
"Anything else you want said if you don't come back?" he asked.
"No."
"Nothing at all?"
Burner thought about it.
"Tell her I meant it," he said.
He went south along the ridgeline through the black timber and made six miles by two in the morning and then went to ground in a cut bank to wait out the dangerous grey hours.
At first light on the twenty-second he came up onto a bald knob above the old state route and lay down in the rocks with the binoculars.
The maintenance yard was a mile and a half off and eight hundred feet below. Concrete block building with a bay door. Three fuel tanks on stands. A chain link fence, actual fence, with actual wire on top. A burn barrel smoking.
He got the glasses on it and started counting, and his stomach turned over.
There were not six men in that yard.
There were thirty.
There were tents inside the fence line and men moving between them, and two more vehicles that were not the flatbed, a pickup and something with a snowplow blade, and off to the side, in a row against the fence, sitting on the ground with their hands behind them,
eleven people who were very clearly not part of the family.
And a woman in the yard hanging laundry on a wire in the cold, moving stiffly, with dark hair cut short.
Nineteen years old, maybe. Maybe twenty by now.
Burner lay in the rocks and watched her, and the whole plan he had built for fifty-one people came apart in his hands.
Then, from somewhere below him and to his left, much closer than the yard, he heard a dry metallic click, and a man said quietly:
"That's far enough. Don't turn around."