Chapter 11
Burner stood in the mouth of the wash with twelve people behind him and a fire coming down the slope, and for about four seconds he did not think anything at all.
Then Sable's brother said it again.
"The shop. Not the building. The shop."
Burner turned on him.
"How do you know?"
The man was gray with pain and he had a splint on his leg made out of a shovel handle, and he held onto his sister's shoulder and got the words out.
"Because that's where they put you when you've done something," he said. "There's a chain and a ring set in the floor by the parts bench. I was in it for two days in August."
"How far from the fuel stands?"
"Sixty feet."
Otway said, very quietly, "Ten minutes."
Burner looked back at the yard.
The smoke was thinning on the north side. The wave had rolled through and up, and what was left was a brown haze you could see fifty yards in, which was not four minutes of blind anymore, it was daylight with a filter on it.
And the east flank was coming down the contour in a long orange line, and behind the fence men were running.
Not toward the wash. Toward the tanks.
"They're trying to save the fuel," Delacroix said.
"They can't."
"They don't know that."
"No," Burner said. "They don't."
He turned around.
Twelve people were standing in the ditch in front of him. Eleven adults and a child, and a second child, and a man with a shovel handle on his leg, and every single one of them was looking at him.
He had come for exactly this. He had it. It was standing in the water in front of him and it was breathing.
"Brill," he said.
She came forward.
"You've got twelve people and you are going up that wash to the road and then north, and you do not stop for anything, and you do not wait for me."
"Burner."
"Two miles to the cut bank where we lay up. That's all I'm asking. Get them two miles and get them off the road and lie down in the rocks and count everybody twice."
"And if you don't come?"
"Then Delacroix has it and you do exactly what she says."
Delacroix stepped up beside him.
"No," she said.
"Delacroix."
"I'm not arguing about who leads." Her voice was as flat as it had been every other time she had spoken, which was four times total. "I'm telling you that if you go back through that wire alone you'll be a man with a revolver in a yard with fourteen men in it. You'll want somebody in the ditch."
Burner looked at her.
"Forty seconds," he said. "That's how long it'll take them to find where you're shooting from."
"I know how long it takes."
"Delacroix."
"I've got nobody in that canyon," she said. "No children, no husband, nobody who'd be ruined. I have thought about that a great deal in the last four days and it is the only reason I volunteered, and I'd like it to count for something."
There was no time to argue and she had known that when she picked her moment.
"Ditch," Burner said. "Forty yards west of the hole in the wire, where you were. You do not shoot to kill anybody standing still. You shoot at men who are moving toward that shop and you shoot to make them lie down."
"Understood."
"Priest."
The boy came forward with his face set.
"You go with Brill."
"No."
"You've got a hole in your shoulder and you're sixteen and you did your part twenty minutes ago and it was good."
"And there's twelve people who need somebody at the back of the line who can shoot," Priest said, "and Brill can't, and Teague's got a split mouth and Otway's a firefighter, and the person at the back of a line of twelve people in the open is the one who matters."
Burner looked at him for one second.
"Back of the line," he said. "Go."
They went up the wash, twelve people and Brill and Teague and Otway and Priest, and Sable did not go with them.
She put her brother's arm around Otway's neck and stepped back.
"Don't," her brother said.
"Shut up, Nate."
"Sable."
"I sat on a hill for sixteen days," she said, "and I am not going to walk north for two hours wondering."
Burner did not have time to fight her either.
"Bolt cutters," he said. "You carry them. That's your job and that's the whole job and if I tell you to run you run."
They went back down the ditch at a dead sprint.
Delacroix peeled off at forty yards and went flat behind the gravel lip and worked the bolt on the .270 and said nothing at all.
Burner and Sable went through the hole in the wire.
The yard was chaos, and chaos was the only reason they lived through the next ninety seconds.
Eleven men were at the fuel stands. Burner could see them through the haze, and they were doing something frantic with a length of hose and a hand pump, trying to move a few hundred gallons out of a tank on steel legs with a grass fire four hundred feet away,
which was a thing that could not be done and which they were doing anyway because the alternative was standing there watching.
Two more were dragging burlap and beating at the grass on the far side of the fence, which was worse than useless.
Nobody was looking north.
Burner went along the back wall of the block building in a crouch with the Rhino up and Sable on his heel.
The shop was the second structure, a long steel-sided building with a roll door at the south end and a man door on the north, and the man door was standing open.
He went in low.
The inside was dim and full of the smell of grease and hot metal and smoke coming in under the eaves.
There was a parts bench running the length of the east wall and a truck up on blocks with its hood off and a floor covered in tools, and at the far end, by the bench, a woman was pulling against a chain.
She had it in both hands and she was hauling on the ring in the concrete with her whole body weight and her feet braced, and she had clearly been doing it for several minutes, and there was blood on her wrists.
"Neve," Burner said.
She spun.
She was younger than he had expected, even knowing the number. Twenty. Short dark hair, badly cut. She had a shackle on her left ankle with about eight feet of chain from it to the ring.
She looked at the revolver first, the way everyone did now, and then at his face.
"Halloran sent you," she said.
It was not a question and there was nothing hopeful in it. It was a woman checking a fact.
"Yes."
"Is he alive?"
"He was four days ago."
Something went through her face and did not stay.
"The bolt's in the ring, not the shackle," she said, pointing, already turning back to it. "There's a cutter on the second shelf. Not the small one. The long ones with the red handles."
Burner had never in his life been so glad to be given an order.
Sable was already at the shelf. She came back with a four foot bolt cutter and got the jaws on the chain link nearest the ring and put her whole weight on one handle while Burner put his on the other.
It did not go.
"Again."
It did not go.
"It's case hardened," Neve said. "I've watched the mechanic cut chain. He heats it."
Burner looked at the ring in the floor and then at the chain and then at the truck on blocks, and his eye went past the truck to the wall behind it, where a rack of tools hung on pegboard outlines somebody had painted years ago, and on the bottom of the rack, upside down on two hooks:
A hacksaw.
And next to it, a cordless angle grinder with no battery, and next to that, on a shelf, a long steel breaker bar.
He took the breaker bar.
"Move," he said.
He put the end of the bar through the ring and got both hands on it and hauled.
The ring was set in concrete and it had been set well, and it did not move, and he set his boots and pulled until his vision went white at the edges and something in his lower back tore in a way he would feel for a year.
It came up an eighth of an inch.
"Again," Sable said, and got her hands on the bar next to his.
They did it four times.
On the fourth the concrete around the ring cracked in a ragged circle and the whole plate came up out of the floor with three inches of anchor bolt and a fist of gray rubble hanging off it, and Neve went over backward into the parts bench.
She got up with the ring in her hands like a purse.
"Go," Burner said.
Then the shooting started outside.
It was Delacroix. Burner knew it by the sound, the single measured crack of the .270, and then a second one nine seconds later, and then a rising confusion of voices and three or four rifles answering from the fuel stands.
She had seen something. She had seen men moving toward the shop.
"How many," Sable said.
Burner went to the man door and put one eye past the frame.
Four men were coming across the concrete from the south end of the yard at a run, spread out, and they were coming right at the shop, and two of them were doing it properly, moving in bounds while the others covered.
The real ones.
And behind them, standing perfectly still in the middle of the yard with his hands behind his back, no hat, canvas barn coat, was a man who was not running anywhere.
He was looking at the shop.
"Rowe," Neve said from behind Burner's shoulder. "The one on the left is Rowe."
The .270 cracked again and one of the four went down, and it was not Rowe, and the other three went flat and then got up and kept coming.
"Roll door," Burner said. "Is it open?"
"Chained from inside."
"Sable."
She was already running the length of the shop with the bolt cutters.
Burner leaned out and fired twice with the Rhino at a hundred and ten feet, which was not a shot with a snub barrel and which he had never expected to make, and did not. But three men went down in the open concrete and stayed there for four seconds, and four seconds was the whole point.
"Open," Sable shouted.
They went out under the roll door into smoke.
The flank had reached the fence.
Burner came out of the shop into a world that had gone the color of rust, with a sound over everything like a freight train a long way off, and the north fence line was burning along its entire length and the grass inside the wire had caught in three places.
Sixty feet away, the fuel stands stood in a lake of burning cheatgrass, and the eleven men who had been fighting for them were gone.