Chapter 8 #2
"Meaning if Halstead ever sees that sheet, Sparrow's dead. He wrote it in his own hand. He didn't have to do that. He could have told us the same forty-one lines out loud in the grass and left nothing behind."
Sable was still looking at the paper.
"He gave us a hostage," she said.
"What?"
"That's what that is. It's not information. Information's free." She tapped the sheet. "He handed us a thing that can kill him and he walked away and left it in our hands. That's a man paying a deposit."
Halloran looked at Burner.
"Do you believe him?"
Burner thought about a man standing in open grass with his back to nothing, not once looking over his shoulder.
"I believe he wants out," he said. "I believe everything he said about Halstead. And I think he's told us the truth about the twenty-sixth because he needs us to survive it."
"That's not the same as believing him."
"No," Burner said. "A man who'll betray one side will betray the other. That's not cynicism, that's just what the sentence means. But he's useful right now, and right now is all we've got."
That night the whole camp ate together, and afterward, with the children gone, Halloran stood up and asked the different question.
"Burner said it this afternoon and I've been sitting with it for six hours," he said. "We've been asking how to keep them off us. And we did it, last night, barely, with a fire on a mountain and a lot of luck and a nine year old boy with a hole in him."
Nobody said anything.
"They're coming on the twenty-sixth with twenty-five men," he said. "So I'm going to say the thing out loud and then I'm going to sit down and let you all shout at me."
He put his hands on the table.
"We can't win here," he said.
The hall stayed quiet. That was the worst part. A week ago there would have been eleven voices.
"You can all see it," Halloran said. "We held last night against twelve, in the dark, with surprise, and we got two people hurt and one of them is nine. In daylight, against twenty-five, with a truck, we lose. I've turned it every way there is."
"Then what," Delacroix said. It was the first thing Burner had ever heard her say in a room.
"Then we don't fight it here."
Weathers spoke from the end of the table.
"Say the rest of it, Halloran."
"The rest of it is that this camp is a place," Halloran said. "It isn't the people. I have loved it for two years and I built half of it with these hands and it is a collection of buildings with a spring under it."
He looked around at all of them.
"There's a box canyon nine miles northeast," he said. "Some of you know it. It's got water and it's got a cave system in the back big enough for everyone and it's got exactly one way in that's forty feet wide."
"There's nothing there," somebody said. "There's no food, there's no stove, there's no greenhouses."
"There's what we carry."
"In four days?"
"In four days."
"That's everything we own."
"That's right," Halloran said.
The noise started then, all at once, and he stood and let it happen for a full minute before he raised one hand.
"I'm not finished," he said. "There's a second half and Burner's going to say it, because it's his and because I don't fully believe it yet and I won't stand up here and sell something I'm not sure of."
Burner got up.
Forty-nine faces again. He had gotten no better at it.
"If we go to the canyon and sit in it," he said, "we've bought a month. Maybe six weeks. They'll find us, because there's tracks for fifty people carrying everything they own and no way to hide that. They'll come to the forty foot gap and they'll look at it and they won't come through it,
because they're not stupid."
"Then what do they do?"
"They sit down in front of it," Burner said. "And they wait. And they have three vehicles and two hundred gallons of fuel and a fifty acre yard and twelve slaves, and we have what we carried in our arms, and around the second week of December we come out on our own."
Nobody spoke.
"That's what happens if we just run," he said. "So we don't just run."
He took a breath.
"On the twenty-sixth, Halstead brings twenty-five men here," he said. "Which means there are four men eleven miles south in a yard with twelve people in a shed."
The hall went absolutely still.
"Four," Burner said. "I have a sheet of paper that tells me their names and where they'll be standing, and I have a woman who has watched that place for sixteen days and can walk me to the fence in the dark."
"You want to be down there," Teague said slowly, "while they're up here."
"Yes."
"While they're burning our camp."
"Yes."
"With what? Everybody who can shoot?"
"Six people," Burner said. "No more. Six people and four days of walking and the rest of you in the canyon where they can't reach you."
"And what do six people do against four men?"
"They open a shed," Burner said. "And then there are eighteen of us, and twelve of those are people who have been sitting on a concrete floor for a month thinking about exactly one thing. And there's a fuel dump and a shop and three vehicles and nobody there to watch them."
Teague stared at him.
"You want to take their yard."
"I want to take their winter," Burner said. "They can't hold this valley without that shop and that fuel, and they cannot fight us and rebuild it at the same time. And on the twenty-sixth, for about nine hours, that entire thing is sitting in the sun with four men on it."
The silence stretched out and out.
Halloran broke it.
"Vote tomorrow," he said. "Sleep on it. Talk to each other, all of you, and talk to me, and I'll be in my room till midnight and the door's open."
Burner found Shyla afterward by the chopping block.
He sat down and held out the knitted square of gray wool.
She took it and turned it over in her hands.
"Marin said a man had it," she said.
"He did."
"Did he take it from here?"
"One of them did. This morning. On the way out."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"So they were right here," she said. "Where I'm sitting."
"Yes."
She did not say anything else about it. She folded the knitting very carefully into a square and put it in her coat pocket and buttoned the pocket.
"You're going south," she said.
"I haven't been told yes yet."
"But you're going."
"If they vote it."
"And if they don't?"
Burner looked out at the dark.
"Then I'll go anyway," he said, "with whoever comes, and that's the truth and I won't dress it up."
Shyla nodded slowly.
"There's a nine year old in the shed," she said. "Priest told Marin and Marin told me."
"That's right."
"Two of them."
"Yes."
She looked at her hands.
"Then you have to go," she said.
Burner turned his head and looked at her, and the thing he felt was not pride exactly and not grief exactly, and he did not have a name for it.
"I want you to hear the other half," he said. "The half I'd rather not say."
"Okay."
"You'll be in the canyon. I won't be. And if it goes wrong down there, I don't come back, and nobody comes to tell you, you'll just be standing in a canyon and eventually you'll know."
Shyla did not move.
"That's what happened before," she said.
"I know."
"With my dad. He said get in the hole. And then after a while I knew."
Burner did not say anything, because there was nothing, and because he had learned in eleven months that the worst thing you can do to a true sentence is answer it.
She sat with it.
Then she held out her hand.
"Shake on coming back," she said.
He looked at the small dirty hand for a long moment.
"I can't," he said.
Her chin came up.
"I'll shake on trying," he said. "I'll shake on doing everything a man can do. I will not shake on coming back, because I don't own that, and the day I lie to you is the day I'm no good to you."
Shyla's eyes filled.
She did not let it get further than that. She pushed her hand out further, hard, almost angry.
"Then shake on that one," she said.
He took her hand and shook it once.
"It counts," she said fiercely.
"It counts."
The vote the next morning was thirty-one to eighteen, and Burner had six volunteers before Halloran had finished counting.
He got a seventh an hour later, when Sable walked up to him in the yard and said, "I'm not a volunteer, I'm a condition," and he said he knew that.
They spent the twenty-fourth stripping the camp.
Fifty-one people carried everything that could be carried, nine miles northeast, and came back and did it again, and the greenhouses came apart pane by pane and went in wheelbarrows, and Weathers packed her entire clinic into four crates and cried once, briefly, and then did not do it again.
At dusk on the twenty-fourth Burner walked down to the south gap to meet a man with a white rag on his arm and give him an answer.
The grass was empty.
He waited an hour. Then two.
At full dark he was still standing there when Priest came running down from the north rock with his strapped arm bouncing and his face the color of paper.
"There's a truck on the two track," he gasped. "Headlights. Coming up."
Burner looked at him.
"It's the twenty-fourth," he said.