Chapter 11 #2
"Don't look at it," he said. "North. Go."
They ran.
They went along the east side of the shop with the fire on their right and the yard on their left, and something hit the steel wall above Burner's head with a sound like a hammer and he did not stop or look.
Neve ran with the ring and eight feet of chain gathered up in her arms and she did not drop it once.
They got to the wire.
Sable went through, then Neve, then Burner, and he turned around in the gap with the revolver and saw exactly two things in the two seconds he allowed himself.
The first was Rowe, forty yards back, coming around the corner of the shop.
The second was a man standing motionless in the middle of the burning yard in a canvas coat, not running, not shooting, watching him go.
Then the first fuel tank went.
It did not explode the way it did in films. It failed at a seam and vented, and a column of fire went up sixty feet and sideways forty, and the sound arrived a half second later and knocked Burner off his feet into the ditch.
He got up with mud in his mouth and no hearing at all and pulled Neve up with one hand and they ran.
They found Delacroix three hundred yards up the wash.
She was sitting against the cutbank with her legs straight out and the .270 across her lap and her right hand pressed flat against her left side.
"There you are," she said.
Burner got down in the water beside her.
"Move your hand."
"I'd rather not."
"Delacroix."
She moved her hand.
It had gone in below the ribs on the left and it had not come out.
"How long ago?"
"About the time the door opened." She said it as evenly as she said everything. "I got four of them to lie down. I want that in the record. Four."
"It's in the record."
Sable was already tearing the lining out of her own coat.
"Don't pack it," Delacroix said. "I've seen Weathers do this. Don't pack a belly. Just cover it and get me flat and get me cold water and don't let me drink anything."
"You're telling us how to carry you?"
"Somebody has to."
They made a litter out of two rifles and a coat and it was a terrible litter, and they got her out of the wash and onto the road and went north with the whole southern sky behind them turning black.
They caught Brill's group at the cut bank two miles on.
Twelve people were lying in the rocks and Priest was at the top of the slope facing back down the road with his rifle across a stone, and when he saw the litter he came down so fast he fell the last eight feet.
Weathers was nine miles away.
That was the thing Burner could not get past, lying in the rocks that afternoon while a fire burned four hundred acres and a fuel dump behind them.
There was a woman with a hole in her gut and the only person in the world who could help her was in a box canyon with fifty people and eleven men walking toward them.
"How far to the canyon?" he asked Otway.
"From here? Twenty-four miles the way we walked it."
"And the direct way?"
"Seventeen. Over the shoulder. There's a pass at seven thousand feet and there's a mile of scree on the north side that I would not take a healthy man over at night."
Burner looked at the litter.
"She won't survive seventeen miles of that," he said.
"No," Otway said. "And she won't survive twenty-four either."
Delacroix, who was not asleep and had heard all of it, said, "Stop talking about me in the third person, it's rude."
They lay up until dark.
Burner spent two hours of it doing the thing he had been putting off since the mouth of the wash, which was counting.
Twelve out of the shed. Neve. Seven who had walked in from the north. Twenty.
Delacroix shot. Teague's mouth split to the bone. Priest's shoulder open again and bleeding through the strapping.
And Sparrow.
Nobody had seen Sparrow.
Not in the yard, not at the shop, not in the wash. Burner had gone through the whole afternoon in his head four times and there had never been a moment when a man could have walked out of that gate and lived, and there had also never been a moment when Burner had looked for him.
At dusk Neve came and sat down next to him on the rocks.
She had the shackle still on her ankle and the ring in her lap because nobody had been able to get it off and she had refused to leave it behind, on the grounds that somebody at the other end would have a file.
"You're the one from the grass," she said. "Above the road."
Burner looked at her.
"They talked about you," Neve said. "In the building. For six days it was the only thing any of them talked about. The man who lit the mountain."
"What did Halstead say about it?"
"Nothing." She pulled her coat tighter. "He never says anything. That's how you know. The morning after your camp, he came in and sat down and ate and didn't say one word, and every man in that room was terrified."
Burner nodded slowly.
"He was standing in the yard," he said. "At the end. In the middle of it, with the tanks going, just standing there."
"That sounds like him."
"He watched me go through the fence. He could have raised a rifle."
Neve looked out at the dark.
"He was counting," she said. "That's what he does. He was working out what it cost him and what he's got left and what he does tomorrow. He'll have finished by now."
They moved at full dark and made six miles with the litter, four people carrying at a time and rotating every ten minutes.
Delacroix stopped talking around midnight.
At two in the morning they came over a low saddle and Burner, walking point, stopped so suddenly that Brill walked into his back.
Ahead and below, across four miles of black timber, in the direction of the canyon, there was a light.
Not a fire on a slope. Not a lamp.
A long, low, moving glow, strung out in a line along the base of the mountain, going east.
Torches.
Somebody was walking a line of torches toward the canyon mouth in the middle of the night, and no man who intended to attack a place would ever do such a thing, which meant it was not an attack.
It was a signal.
And then, faint and flattened by four miles of cold air, Burner heard the sound of three iron bars being struck, over and over and over, and they did not stop.