Chapter 9 #3
"You never said there was a back door."
"There isn't one," Halloran said. "There's a thing that eleven people might survive if the alternative is certain. That's not a door."
Burner nodded slowly.
"Understood."
Shyla was standing at the edge of the gravel with Yak's collar in her fist.
He went to her.
Neither of them said anything for a second.
"Dog stays," he said.
"I know."
"He'll want to come. Don't let him."
"I know."
He crouched down.
"Four days," he said. "Two down, one there, however long it takes to walk twelve people north. Maybe six days. Don't start counting on the fourth."
"Okay."
"Shyla."
She looked up, and her eyes were absolutely dry, and that was the worst thing he had seen all week.
"I'm not filing it," she said. "I want you to know. I'm not doing the thing where I put it away. I'm just not going to cry in front of forty people."
Burner did not trust his own voice for a second.
"That's fair," he said.
"Go on then."
He stood up.
He got about ten steps toward the canyon mouth before she said his name, and he turned around.
"Get the nine year olds," she said. "Get those two first. Before anything else. Before the fuel and the shop and the trucks."
Burner stood in the gravel with six people waiting for him and fifty watching.
"First," he said.
Then he walked out of the canyon into the dark, and the seven of them went south.
They made eleven miles that night and lay up all day in a jumble of scree above a dry creek, and made fourteen the second night, and at four in the morning on the twenty-seventh they came up onto the same bald knob where Sable had put a shotgun on the back of Burner's head five days before.
They lay down in the rocks in a line and Burner put the glasses on the maintenance yard.
The fence. The three fuel tanks on their stands. The block building. The burn barrel, cold.
The shed on the east side.
And in the yard, parked in a neat row inside the gate, all three vehicles.
The flatbed. The pickup. The plow truck.
None of them gone.
Burner lay in the rocks with his stomach dropping away from him and counted the moving figures in the yard, and got to nine, and then eleven, and then fourteen, and kept counting.
"They didn't go," Sable whispered.
"No."
"He said Thursday. He said it himself, at the gap."
"I know what he said."
Burner lowered the glasses and looked east, where the sky had just begun to go gray over the ridge, in the direction of a box canyon twenty-six miles away with one way in and fifty-one people in it.
Then a hand closed on his ankle.
It was Otway, flat in the rocks below him, and his face was white.
"Don't move," he said. "There's a man forty feet behind us and he's been there since we came up."
Burner did not move.
Seven people lay in a line in those rocks and every one of them had a rifle and every one of them was pointed the wrong way, which was the exact thing he had spent a week teaching eight people not to let happen, and he had done it himself because he had been looking at three trucks in a yard.
"Hand," he said, very quietly. "Otway. How do you know."
"Because I crawled back for my canteen and I damn near put my hand on his boot."
"Is he awake?"
"He's sitting up against a rock with a rifle across his knees and his eyes open and he watched me crawl back here."
Burner closed his eyes for one second.
"Then he's letting us have this conversation," he said.
"Why would he do that?"
"Because he's been letting us have it for about four minutes already."
He rolled onto his back, slow, so that the movement would look like a man turning over and not a man bringing a weapon around, and he looked up the slope.
The sky behind the ridge had gone from black to the color of dirty water, and against it, thirty-five feet up and to the left, he could make out a shape sitting with its back to a boulder.
"Morning," the shape said.
Sparrow.
"You people are very good at getting places," he said, "and absolutely terrible at arriving."
Burner had the AK around and up before the sentence was finished.
"Don't," Sparrow said. "Not because of me. Because there's a man on that roof who sweeps this slope every eleven minutes and a muzzle flash on a bald knob at first light will finish this for all eight of us."
"You were supposed to be at the gap on the twenty-fourth."
"I was at the gap on the twenty-fourth."
Sparrow's voice was flat and exhausted and had nothing left of the pleasantness in it.
"I was lying in the grass four hundred yards west of it watching your camp put out its lights and watching two trucks come up the two track and thinking that if I stood up in that field I'd have about nine seconds to live."
"He came the twenty-fourth."
"He came the twenty-fourth," Sparrow agreed. "Which I did not know he was going to do. Which is why I've been sitting on this rock for two days."
Burner did not lower the rifle.
"Say the rest."
"He lied to me." Sparrow shifted against the rock. "He told me the twenty-sixth in front of eleven men and he moved on the twenty-fourth with ten and he did not tell me, and I found out when I watched it happen from a field."
"That's what a man says when he's been caught."
"Yes," Sparrow said. "It is. It's also what a man says when it's true, and I don't have any way to prove which, and I've had two days on this rock to make peace with that."
"Then why sit here?"
"Because you were coming." Sparrow gestured down the slope with two fingers, toward the yard.
"You've got sixteen days of my rotation sheet and a woman who's watched that place from this exact knob and a camp that just emptied itself. There was only ever one thing you were going to do, and this was the only hill to do it from."
Sable spoke, very low.
"He's lying."
"Maybe."
"He gave us a sheet with the twenty-sixth on it. Halstead came the twenty-fourth. The whole sheet's worthless."
"The sheet was a guard rotation," Sparrow said.
"It was true when I wrote it and it's true right now, which you'd know if you'd been lying here counting instead of talking about me. Tully's on the east fence. He went on at three and he was asleep by twenty past, same as he is every night of his life."
Sable went quiet.
Burner did not take his eyes off the shape on the rock.
"Check it," he said.
Sable put the glasses up. It took her a long minute.
"There's a man sitting down at the east fence corner," she said. "He hasn't moved in the four minutes I've been watching him."
"Anything else on that sheet still good?"
She scanned, working left to right.
"Two on the roof, one at the gate, one walking the fuel stands," she said. "That's the four-man night watch he wrote down. It's all there."
Burner lowered the AK about six inches.
"Then here's my problem," he said, up the slope.
"Your sheet's right about tonight and wrong about everything that matters. There are three vehicles in that yard. There are fourteen men that I've counted and probably twenty I haven't. Nobody has gone anywhere. He told us to our faces he'd be at our canyon on Thursday, and it's Thursday,
and he's down there."
Sparrow was quiet for a moment.
"No he isn't," he said.
Burner's stomach turned over.
"Say that again."
"Halstead isn't down there." Sparrow shifted forward.
"He went out on foot at midnight with eleven men and no vehicles. Eleven. I watched them go out the north gate and I have been sitting here for four hours trying to work out what it meant, and you've just told me, and I'd like a moment because it's worse than I thought."
"On foot," Burner said.
"On foot."
"Why?"
"Because of you." Sparrow's voice was tight. "Because he told you at that gap that he'd find your camp on Thursday, and then he lay awake and thought about what kind of man empties a settlement in two days and lights a mountain on fire, and he decided that kind of man might do exactly this."
Nobody on the knob said anything.
"He kept the trucks here," Sparrow said, "so that anybody watching this yard from a hill would see three trucks and count fourteen men and believe that nothing had happened. And he walked eleven men out the back gate in the dark."
"Then where are they?"
"Eleven miles that way," Sparrow said, pointing east, "or wherever your people went. He'll be there by mid-morning."
Burner rolled over and put his face against the cold rock.
Twenty-six miles. Two nights of walking. Brill could do nine miles in a morning and there were twenty-six of them between here and the canyon and no way in the world to get a word there in less than two days.
Halloran had said four hours.
"How many are actually down there," he said.
"Now?" Sparrow did the count in his head. "Fourteen fighting men. Four of the women who are with them by choice. Seven who aren't. Plus the twelve in the shed."
"Fourteen."
"He left the middling ones and took the good ones, except for two." Sparrow's tone did not change. "Rowe's on the gate and Rowe is one of the four real ones, and he left him because Rowe is the one he trusts with the fuel."
Delacroix spoke for the third time that Burner had heard.
"Fourteen against seven," she said.
"Yes."
"We came for four."
"Yes," Burner said.
He sat up in the rocks in the gray light with six people looking at him and a stranger on a boulder above him, and he made himself go through it the way he had gone through everything for eleven months, which was slowly and without any comfort at all.
The whole plan had rested on one number and the number was gone.
Four men on a yard while twenty-five stood in front of a canyon. Seven people walk in at first light, open a shed, burn the fuel, and walk twelve people north.
Fourteen men on that yard. And Halstead's eleven at the canyon by ten in the morning.
"Burner," Teague said. "What do we do."
Burner looked down at the maintenance yard, at the three trucks parked in their neat row, at the fence and the tanks on their stands and the shed on the east side with twelve people in it and two of them nine years old.
"We can't take it," he said.
Nobody spoke.
"Say the rest," Sable said.