Chapter 6
Burner did not turn around.
He lay flat in the rocks with the binoculars still up at his eyes and his rifle lying along his right side where it had been for the last twenty minutes, and he ran three things through his head in about a second and a half.
The first was that the voice was close. Twenty feet. Maybe less.
The second was that the man had said don't turn around instead of don't move, which was a mistake, and men who made small mistakes with their words sometimes made larger ones with their hands.
The third was that Yak had not made a sound.
That was the thing that stopped him.
The dog was lying six feet to his left in a slot between two slabs, and he had his head up and his ears forward and his hackles were flat.
Flat.
Burner had seen those hackles go up at a coyote a half mile off. They had gone up at Halloran. They had gone up at four men in the dark below his camp.
They were flat.
"You're not with them," Burner said.
A pause behind him.
"That's a hell of a guess."
"It's not a guess. My dog doesn't like them. He doesn't mind you."
Another pause, longer.
"Slide your left hand out from your body," the voice said. "Slow. Then the right. Leave the rifle."
"No."
"I've got a shotgun on the back of your head."
"You've got a shotgun at twenty feet on a man in rocks and you've been sitting on me for at least a minute without pulling it," Burner said. "If you were going to, you would have."
Silence.
"Also," Burner said, "your first words were don't turn around. A man who intends to shoot doesn't care whether I see his face."
The silence went on a while.
Then, quietly: "Jesus Christ."
"You can come up beside me," Burner said. "I'd rather you did. You're skylined where you are and there's a man on that roof down there with a pair of glasses who sweeps this slope every eleven minutes, and he's about due."
There was a scrape of boots on stone, fast, and then a body slid into the rocks two yards to his right and went down flat.
Burner turned his head.
It was a woman.
Thirty, thirty-five. Long dark braid going to pieces. A face that had been eating badly for a long time. She had a single-barrel twenty gauge across her forearms and a canvas bag over her shoulder and she was so thin that the bag looked heavier than she was.
She was staring at him with an expression he could not read at all.
"Eleven minutes," she said. "You've been up here how long?"
"Since first light."
"And you counted his sweeps."
"That's the job."
She looked away from him, down at the yard, and something in her face tightened.
"Then you've seen it," she said.
"I've seen thirty men and eleven people sitting in a row."
"Twelve. One's inside with a broken leg." She adjusted herself on the rock. "And it's not thirty men. It's nineteen men, four women who are with them by choice, and seven who aren't and who they let walk around because there's nowhere to walk to."
Burner looked at her.
"How long have you been watching this place?"
"Sixteen days."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
"Why."
She did not answer for a moment.
"Because my brother is the one with the broken leg," she said.
Her name was Sable.
She gave it flatly, like a thing she expected him to argue with, and he did not, because a man called Burner had no standing on the subject of names.
"You came up from the south," she said. "I watched you cross the bench at four this morning. You're good. I want you to know I'm saying that as a fact and not being nice. I had you for eleven seconds in an hour and then I lost you and I only found you again because the dog moved."
"He does that."
"I'd been sitting in that draw for six days and you walked past me at forty feet."
"Then we're even," Burner said, "because I didn't know you were there at all."
Her mouth moved slightly.
"You're from the Kettle," she said.
Burner went still.
"I'm not from anywhere."
"You're wearing a wool coat cut down with paracord stitching and there's exactly one person in a hundred miles who does that, and she's the old nurse up at the work camp." Sable did not look at him. "I traded there in April. She sewed my hand shut."
Burner said nothing, which was itself an answer, and both of them knew it.
"Relax," Sable said. "If I meant you harm I'd have let you keep counting sweeps for another four minutes."
The roof man came out at the eleven minute mark almost exactly.
They watched him do the sweep. He took about ninety seconds and he did it badly, in the way of a man who has done a thing four hundred times and never once found anything.
"He starts east and goes west and he rushes the last third," Sable said. "Every time."
"I noticed."
"There's a two minute window behind the burn barrel where the smoke breaks the line of sight to the west fence."
"I noticed that too."
She glanced at him.
"You've been here four hours."
"You get quick," Burner said, "or you get finished."
They lay there through the morning and traded what they had, which was the only currency either of them owned.
He told her almost nothing about the Kettle and she noticed him doing it and did not push, which he respected.
She told him about the yard.
"The man in charge is Halstead," she said. "Late forties. Wears a canvas barn coat, no hat, ever, even in the snow. He does not shout. In sixteen days I have not heard that man raise his voice once."
"How many can actually fight?"
"Eleven. Maybe twelve. The rest are hangers-on, they'll hold a rifle and stand in a line but they'll break."
She counted on her fingers without looking at them.
"The twelve are the problem. Four of them were military, and I mean actually. I've watched them clear the shop building as a drill. They do it right. They stack, they call, they move."
Burner's stomach went cold.
"How often do they drill?"
"Every three days. Same hour."
"That's not a gang."
"No," Sable said. "It isn't. That's what I've been trying to make somebody understand for two weeks."
"Who've you tried to tell?"
"Nobody worth telling," she said. "There's a place out east of here with nine people in it and a man who thinks God's going to handle it. There's two families up on the creek who've already decided to starve quietly. And there's you people,
and I didn't go to you people because the last time I was up there, there was a vote about whether to let me stay the night, and I heard the vote through the wall."
She said it without heat.
"They let me stay," she said. "But I heard it."
"They vote about everything," Burner said. "It's the only thing holding the place together and it's also the worst thing about it."
"That's about what I thought."
Around ten the bay door came open and they brought the flatbed out.
Burner got the glasses on it and his hands went tight.
Four men working. Two under the hood. One with a jack under the rear axle. One standing there with a clipboard, an actual clipboard, writing things down.
"They're maintaining it," he said.
"They maintain everything. That's the part nobody believes."
Sable's voice had gone flat and tired. "They've got a mechanic. Real one. He's got a shop and a parts pile and he's scavenged four other trucks down to the frames. They rotate the tires. They filter the fuel through cloth in a rig he built."
"How much fuel?"
"Three tanks on stands. Two are empty, I'm sure of that, you can hear it when a man knocks on them. The third's got something. I don't know how much."
"Guess."
"A few hundred gallons. Enough for months the way they use it."
Burner lowered the glasses.
"Then the fuel isn't the pressure," he said.
"What?"
"I came down here with a theory that they moved up the schedule because they were running out of fuel and needed one last big haul before the truck died. That's wrong. They're not desperate. They're organized and they're patient and they're moving up the schedule for some other reason."
"Because of the people."
He looked at her.
"Say that again."
Sable pointed with her chin at the row along the fence.
"Eleven out there and one inside," she said. "There were four when I got here sixteen days ago. There's twelve now."
Burner felt something cold come up the back of his neck.
"They've been collecting."
"Three trips. Every four or five days. They go out with the flatbed and come back with people. Two, three, four at a time. Yesterday they came back with three."
Her voice did not change. "There's a shed on the east side. They put them in it at night. It's about twelve by sixteen and there's twelve people in it."
"What are they for?"
"I've had sixteen days to think about it," Sable said, "and I have exactly one answer that fits, and I hate it."
"Say it."
"Winter."
Burner waited.
"They've got fifty acres of nothing down there," she said.
"Concrete and gravel. They don't grow anything and they can't. They've been living on what they take, and every year there's a little less to take, because the people out here who grow things are dying off and the canned food in the houses ran out last spring."
She looked at him. "You can raid a valley for three years. You can't do it forever. Somebody down there has figured that out."
"So they need farmers."
"They need people who can work a greenhouse in February and dig a root cellar and butcher a hog and know what to do with two hundred pounds of grain. That's what those twelve are. He's not taking hostages. He's taking a labor force."
Burner lay very still in the rocks.
"He asked our camp for four people," he said.
Sable turned her head.
"Four adults of working age," Burner said. "He was very specific that they weren't to be children. And I've been walking around for a week telling everybody it was a loyalty test, a way of breaking us so we'd hand over anything after."
"It probably is that too."
"It's that too," Burner agreed. "But it's also a requisition."
He put the glasses back up and looked at the twelve people sitting in the cold along the fence and understood that he had been reading the whole thing as cruelty when at least half of it was planning.
That was worse. Cruelty burned itself out. Planning did not.
The woman came out again at noon.