Chapter 10 #2
Delacroix went left along the ditch with the .270 and dropped prone at forty yards with a view down the fence line, and she did not fire, because her entire job was to be there if it went wrong.
Sable and Teague hit the fence with the bolt cutters.
It took eleven seconds. Burner counted them. Four cuts and a peel and a hole four feet high, and Teague held the wire back with both hands in his gloves while everybody went through.
Burner came through first with the Rhino in his hand, because the AK was eight feet of noise and this was a thing that needed to happen close.
The smoke was thick enough to sting. He could see thirty feet.
The guard who had been leaning on the fence was fifteen feet away with his back turned, coughing, one arm up over his face, and Burner hit him behind the ear with the revolver and caught him on the way down and put him face first in the dirt with a knee between his shoulders.
"Rope," he said.
Priest had it. The boy's hands were shaking so hard he dropped it once and then got it right, and had the man's wrists behind him in eight seconds, which was better than Burner could have done at sixteen.
The other guard was worse.
He came out of the smoke at Teague from six feet with his rifle coming off his front, and Teague, who had voted twice against fighting and who had spent two weeks being the man everybody was careful around,
stepped inside the muzzle and put his shoulder into the man's chest and drove him backward into the spoil pile.
They went down together. There was a scramble.
Burner got there in two strides and put the revolver against the back of the man's skull and said, "Don't."
The man stopped.
Teague crawled out from under him with a bloody mouth and sat down hard in the dirt and looked at his own hands.
"I did it," he said.
"You did."
The twelve people in the cellar cut had not moved.
That was the thing Burner had not planned for, and he understood it the instant he saw it.
They were standing in a hole in the ground in a storm of smoke with two guards down and five strangers in their yard, and every one of them was waiting to be told what to do, because they had spent a month being told what to do and the habit had gotten into their bones.
Sable was already in the hole, dragging a man with a splinted leg up by both arms, saying his name over and over.
Burner stood up on the spoil pile so all of them could see him.
"North fence," he said. "Forty yards. There's a hole in the wire and a wash behind it and it's chest deep and it goes all the way to the road. Move now and don't stop and don't wait for anyone."
Nobody moved.
"Right now," Burner said.
A woman in the hole said, "They'll shoot us."
"They can't see you. That's what the smoke's for. It's four minutes and about ninety seconds of it is gone."
Still nothing.
And then one of the children, the boy of about nine with the plastic tub, put the tub down very deliberately in the dirt and started walking toward the fence.
That broke it.
They went. All of them, up and out of the cut and across the open ground in a ragged line, and Priest stood at the hole in the wire holding it back and shoving them through one at a time, and Burner stood in the smoke counting.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
Sable came through with her brother's arm over her shoulder. Ten.
Eleven.
Burner got to eleven and stopped.
He turned around.
The little girl was still in the cellar cut.
She was maybe nine, and she was standing in the bottom of the hole with both arms wrapped around herself, and she had not moved an inch, and her face was the face of somebody who has decided that moving is the thing that gets you hurt.
Burner went down into the hole.
He did not grab her. He got down on one knee in the dirt in front of her, in the smoke, with a fire running up a mountain behind him.
"I know a girl who hid in a woodpile for two days," he said. "Her name's Shyla and she's nine and she's about nine miles north of here right now and she's got a dog and she's learning to knit and she's terrible at it."
The girl's eyes came up.
"She told me to come get you," Burner said. "You specifically. She said get the nine year olds first, before the fuel and the trucks and everything else, and that's what I'm doing, and I'm not leaving this hole without you."
He held out his hand.
She looked at it for a second and a half.
Then she took it.
He went through the wire last with the girl under his arm, and Priest went through behind him, and Delacroix came up out of the ditch and backed down the wash with her rifle up, and none of them had fired a shot.
They made two hundred yards up the wash before anybody in the yard understood that something other than a fire had happened to them.
Burner heard it start. A shout, then more, then a man's voice roaring over the top, and then the first rounds came out through the smoke, high and wild, nowhere near them, snapping off the rocks above the cut.
"Down," he said, "and keep going. They're shooting at noise."
They went.
At the mouth of the wash Otway and Brill came down out of the east draw at a run, black to the elbows, and Otway took one look at the line of people in the ditch and started counting them with his finger.
"Twelve," he said. "You got twelve."
"We got twelve."
"Then I'd like to say something about the flank."
Burner turned and looked back.
The head of the fire was a quarter mile up the slope and going away. But the east flank had caught the shift, exactly as Otway had said it would, and it was rolling back down along the contour in a long orange line, unhurried, eating three feet of cheatgrass a second.
It was four hundred yards from the fence.
"How long?"
"Six minutes to the wire. Ten to the fuel stands."
And then, thin and clear across all of it, from down inside the yard, a woman screamed.
Not in pain.
Words. One word, twice, and Burner could not make it out, and beside him Sable's brother lifted his head off her shoulder and said, in a voice like gravel:
"That's Neve. She's in the shop."