Chapter 12 #2
"Four hundred acres burned. Fuel stands gone, and the second tank went while we were running. The shop was standing when I last saw it and it was steel-sided with a grass fire at the wall, so I'd say it's gone too. Three trucks were in the yard when the first tank let go. I didn't see them burn."
"Sparrow?"
"I don't know," Burner said. "I asked him to go into that shop and pull distributor caps at the moment the smoke came over, and I never saw him, and I did not look for him."
Halloran was quiet a while.
"He knew what you'd ask him," he said. "He told me. Tuesday night, at the barricade. He said, that man is going to send me in through the gate, because I'm the only one who can go in through the gate."
"And he went anyway."
"He went anyway."
They sat with that for a while.
"Twelve out of the shed," Halloran said finally. "Tell me about them."
"Eleven adults. One of them's Sable's brother with a broken leg four weeks old that's set wrong. Two children of about nine, a boy and a girl. That's thirteen, I know.
One of the adults is a woman of about sixty who has not said a word since we cut the fence and Weathers is going to have her hands full."
"And they can work?"
"They spent a month digging a cellar with two men watching them."
"That's not what I asked."
"They'll work," Burner said. "That's not the problem. The problem is that eight of them were taken out of homes in the last five weeks and some of them saw their people killed, and they're going to walk into a basin and find thirty-eight strangers, and you've got, what,
four months of food for fifty-one?"
"Three months for fifty-one," Halloran said. "Which is two months and a half for seventy-two."
"Yes."
"And it's the twenty-eighth of September."
"Yes."
Halloran let out a long breath.
"Well," he said. "I'd rather have that problem than the one I had yesterday."
Burner found Shyla in the basin at noon the next day.
They had come over in two groups in the dark and it had taken seven hours with the litter, and Weathers had walked beside Delacroix the whole way with her hand on the woman's wrist, and Delacroix had lived through the night,
which Weathers said out loud four times in a voice that suggested she did not entirely believe it.
The basin was what Halloran had said. Timber, water, no walls.
Thirty-eight people and a great deal of gear spread out under the spruce in a way that was not a camp yet and might become one.
Shyla was sitting on a log at the edge of the timber with Yak beside her, and she was looking down the trail, and she had clearly been looking down the trail for some time.
She saw him.
She did not run. She got up off the log and stood there, and Yak came apart entirely and hit Burner at the knees so hard he nearly went down, and by the time he had got the dog off him she had crossed the distance and stopped about four feet away.
"Five days," she said.
"Five days."
"You said four."
"I said maybe six and don't start counting on the fourth."
"I counted on the fourth anyway."
"I know you did."
She looked him over, top to bottom, the way Weathers did with patients.
"You're hurt."
"My back's torn up. It's nothing."
"There's blood on your coat."
"It's not mine."
She nodded slowly and filed it.
Then she said, "Did you get them?"
Burner stepped aside.
Fifteen yards back down the trail, two children of about nine were standing with Brill, a boy and a girl, both of them filthy, both of them staring at the timber and the people and the smoke of cooking fires like they were looking at something in a museum.
Shyla went very still.
"Both of them?"
"Both of them."
"First?"
"First," Burner said. "Before the fuel and the trucks and everything else. Exactly like you said."
Shyla stood there for about four seconds.
Then her face came apart.
It was the first time he had seen it happen, in nineteen days, through a clearing and a deadfall and a mountain on fire, and it was not a small thing when it came.
She cried the way a person cries who has been holding something enormous with both hands for a very long time, and she did it standing up, and when Burner got down on one knee she put her arms around his neck and held on hard enough to hurt his torn back and he did not say anything about it.
"I'm not filing it," she said into his shoulder.
"No."
"I said I wouldn't."
"You didn't."
After a while she let go and wiped her face with both hands and looked over at the two children.
"What are their names?"
"Cass and Tomlin. She's Cass."
"Do they have anybody?"
"No."
Shyla nodded once.
Then she walked past him down the trail, and Burner turned and watched her go up to a nine year old girl standing in a strange camp holding nothing at all, and stop in front of her, and say something he could not hear.
And hold out the four inches of badly knitted gray wool.
They did the count that evening.
Halloran did it on a flat rock with the whole basin around him, and it took a long time because there were now people in the camp who had never heard of the Kettle and did not know why anyone was counting anything.
Seventy-two people.
Nineteen who could shoot, if you were generous, which was four more than a week ago because twelve people out of a shed had opinions about the subject.
Two months and a half of food.
One nurse, one patient with a gut wound who was still alive at thirty hours, one boy with a hip, one boy with a shoulder, one man with a leg that had set wrong.
And it was the twenty-ninth of September, and there was snow on the peaks that had not been there five days ago.
"Say the rest," Weathers said from the back.
Halloran put the slate down.
"The rest is that we don't know where eleven men are," he said. "As of this morning they were sitting in front of an empty canyon four miles from here. They'll have walked into it by now. They'll have found out."
"And then?"
"And then he's got a choice," Halloran said. "He's eleven men on foot, twenty-six miles from a yard that may not exist anymore, with nothing to carry food in and nothing to carry it back to. He can go home and find out what's left. Or he can come looking for us."
"Which will he do?"
Burner stood up, because he had been thinking about nothing else for two days.
"He'll go home," he said.
Nobody expected that.
"He's got eleven men and no supply and winter's coming and he is the most careful man I have ever heard of," Burner said. "He'll go back, and he'll see four hundred burned acres and two blown tanks and whatever's left of that shop, and he'll spend a week finding out exactly how bad it is."
"And after the week?"
"After the week he'll know two things," Burner said. "He'll know he can't feed nineteen men through a winter on a burned yard. And he'll know that the only place in this country with food in it is wherever we are."
The basin was very quiet.
"So he comes," Halloran said.
"He comes. Not tomorrow. Not next week. When it's cold and he's hungry and the calculation's simple." Burner looked around at all of them. "Probably November."
He sat down.
That night he slept for eleven hours, which was the longest he had slept since the lights went out, and he woke at nine in the morning to the sound of somebody saying his name.
It was Priest, and his face was wrong.
"There's a man at the edge of the timber," he said. "He's alone and he's on his feet but barely, and his coat's burned off his back."
Burner was up and moving before the sentence finished.
Twenty people had already gathered at the south edge, and they parted for him, and he came through and stopped.
Sparrow was sitting on the ground with his back against a spruce.
His hair was gone on one side and the skin of his neck and his left hand was blistered and weeping, and he had walked twenty-six miles in two days in that condition.
He looked up at Burner and tried to do the smile and could not manage it.
"Two distributor caps," he said. "And the fuel line."
Burner got down in the dirt in front of him.
"You made it," he said.
"I made it out of the yard," Sparrow said. "There's a thing you need to know and I'd like to say it before somebody starts putting salve on me and being kind, because I won't be able to say it after."
"Say it."
"Halstead wasn't at the canyon."
Burner went cold.
"There were eleven men in front of that canyon and I counted them from a ridge on Saturday morning," Sparrow said. "And none of them was him. He sent Rowe out with eleven torches and stayed behind."
"He was in the yard," Burner said. "I saw him. In the middle of it. At the end."
"Yes."
"Then where is he now?"
Sparrow looked up at him with his burned face.
"He left the yard on Friday morning with four men," he said, "about two hours behind you, on your track."