Chapter 7 #2
"That's what I want. That's the whole idea. But there are eleven people in that camp who voted against fighting and there are twenty children in two buildings and some of those buildings are wood, and if this turns into a gunfight at three hundred yards then some of them are going to die tonight."
Sable did not say anything.
"I've been standing here about ten seconds trying to find a version where that isn't true," Burner said.
"Is there one?"
"No."
"Then light it."
"I want you to say it too."
She looked at him.
"Why?"
"Because I've spent eleven months being the only person in the room," Burner said, "and I've learned that a man who's the only person in the room starts believing he can't be wrong. So either you tell me you'd do it too, or you tell me not to, and I'll actually listen."
Sable looked past him at the black timber where nine men were crawling toward a camp of sleeping children.
"Light it," she said.
He lit it.
The kerosene took with a soft heavy sound like a sheet snapping and then the dry slash went up all at once, and in four seconds the whole north bench went from black to orange,
and the light ran out across the bowl and up the far rock and turned the entire west timber from a wall of dark into a stand of individual trees with things lying between them.
There was a shout from the doghair. One voice, then three.
Then the first shot from the camp.
It came from the south granite spur and it was Delacroix, because it was one round and it was aimed, and down in the lodgepole a man who had been getting up went back down and did not get up again.
Then the whole bowl came apart.
Burner grabbed Sable by the collar and dragged her flat behind the burning pile as the first rounds came up at the bench, high, cracking overhead, three of them fast.
"Move!" he shouted.
They went sideways off the lip and down into the rocks below the bench, sliding, Yak scrambling after them, and the fire threw their shadows forty feet out in front of them the whole way, which was the worst part,
and then they were behind granite and the rounds were hitting the bench where they had been standing.
Sable was laughing. It was not a good laugh. It was the thing that comes out of a person who has been holding still for sixteen days.
"They're shooting at a fire," she gasped.
"Some of them."
Down below, it had turned into what he had known it would turn into.
The twelve had been caught in the open with three hundred yards of lit ground behind them and a camp that had been lying awake in the dark for three hours with orders and positions and four hours of instruction in how not to stand up.
They were doing the right thing, which was to break contact and get out of the light, and to do that they had to move, and moving is when you get hit.
Burner came up on the rock with the AK.
He found the far end of the doghair in the sights where the slope broke and a man would have to cross eleven feet of open to get out, and he waited.
A man crossed it.
Burner shot him.
He did not feel anything at all, which he noted, and set aside for later, because later was a thing you dealt with in a bunk at four in the morning two days from now.
Another man crossed. Burner missed.
A third did not cross, and instead went down on one knee at the edge and put four rounds up at the bench so fast and so well grouped that Burner heard all four come through the same two feet of air above his head and he went down behind the granite and stayed there.
"That's one of the four," he said.
"What?"
"The real ones."
The shooting went on for six or seven minutes and then began to come apart into single shots, and then into nothing.
By the time the slash pile burned down to a red heap, the west timber was empty.
They found three bodies in the doghair at first light.
They found a fourth two hundred yards out with a blood trail that went another fifty and then stopped, which meant somebody had been carried.
They found the ankle wire, snapped in two places, with a strip of canvas caught in it.
Burner came down into the camp at seven in the morning with Sable behind him and the dog at his knee, and the entire Kettle was standing in the yard, and when they saw him something happened that he was not prepared for at all.
Somebody started clapping.
Then all of them were, forty-some people in the frozen yard, and somebody was shouting, and Teague of all people was pounding him on the back so hard it hurt, and Burner stood there with his rifle in his hands and did not know what to do with his face.
Halloran came through them.
He looked twenty years older than he had six days ago.
"You lit the mountain," he said.
"Yes."
"We had them in the timber and no way to see them and I was four minutes from calling everybody out of the buildings because I thought it was a deer." Halloran's voice was not steady. "Four minutes. And then the whole sky went orange."
"Who's hurt?"
The clapping died.
"Two," Halloran said. "Priest took a round through the shutter slot. Through the meat of the shoulder, out clean, Weathers says he'll keep the arm."
"And?"
Halloran's face did something.
"Teague's grandson," he said. "Nine years old. He was in the third building. There's no cover in the third building, it's plank. A round came through the east wall and through the wall and hit him in the hip."
Burner looked over at Teague, who had just been pounding him on the back.
Teague was standing four feet away with tears running into his beard and his hands hanging at his sides.
"He's alive," Teague said. "Weathers has got him. He's alive."
Burner did not say anything.
"I'm not blaming you," Teague said. "I want that said in front of everybody right now. I voted against the fight and then I voted for it and last night I lay in the dark with a rifle I don't know how to use and I heard that fire go up and I thanked God for it. That's the truth."
"Teague."
"He's nine," Teague said, and then he turned around and walked away across the yard.
Weathers worked on the boy for four hours.
Burner sat outside on the step the whole time because there was nothing in the world for him to do and because he had decided, sometime around the second hour, that he was going to be sitting there when the door opened, whichever way it went.
Shyla came and sat next to him at some point and did not say anything.
She had her hand wrapped around two of his fingers and she did not seem to know she was doing it.
At eleven Weathers came out, wiped to the elbow, and stood in the doorway.
"The ball went through and it didn't hit the artery and it didn't hit the gut," she said. "Which is three miracles in a row and I've used up my allocation for the year. He'll walk with a limp and he'll be sick for a month and he is going to live."
Something went out of the yard, all at once, like a held breath.
Burner put his face in his hands.
They buried nobody that day, which Halloran said out loud twice at the meal, because it was the only thing anybody had to hold onto.
That afternoon Burner stood up in the long hall with every adult in the Kettle looking at him, and he said the thing he had come eighteen miles to say.
"There's thirty of them, not six," he said.
The room went quiet.
"Nineteen fighting men, twelve of them good, four of them very good and trained by a man who used to teach it for a living. Three vehicles. Two hundred gallons of fuel, maybe more. A mechanic and a shop and a parts pile."
Nobody moved.
"And there are twelve people in a shed on the east side of that yard," he said.
"Eleven adults and a man with a broken leg. Four of them a month ago. Twelve now. They are taking people and they are keeping them alive and feeding them, and the reason for that is that they've figured out they can't raid this country forever and they need people who know how to grow things."
He let that sit.
"He didn't ask for four of you because he wanted to break you," Burner said. "He asked for four of you because he needs four of you. And when you didn't send them, he came here in the dark six days early to take them, and he lost three men doing it, and he is not going to let that stand."
"So he comes back," somebody said.
"He comes back," Burner said. "With everything. Soon."
He looked at Halloran, and Halloran nodded once.
"That's the bad news," Burner said. "Here's the other thing."
He turned and looked at Sable, standing at the back wall with her arms folded and her braid coming apart and a face like a woman waiting to be thrown out.
"This is Sable," he said. "She has spent sixteen days lying on a hill above that yard with a single shot shotgun watching every single thing those men do. She knows their sweeps, their drills, their guard rotation, which man drinks and which one sleeps on the east fence at three in the morning."
Forty-nine people turned to look at her.
"Her brother is in that shed," Burner said.
Nobody spoke.
"I'm not going to make a speech," Burner said, "because I'm bad at them and because you've all had six days of people telling you what to think. I'm going to say one sentence and then I'm going to sit down."
He put his hands on the table.
"We have been thinking about how to stop them from coming here," he said, "and I don't believe anymore that there's an answer to that question."
He sat down.
The silence stretched.
Halloran got up slowly.
"Then we'd better start asking a different one," he said.
And then the door at the end of the hall banged open and Priest was standing there white-faced with his arm strapped across his chest, and he said:
"There's a man at the south gap with a white rag on his arm. He's alone. He says he's got something of ours and he'll trade."