Chapter 13 #4
Break into groups of eight, go in eight directions, and let Halstead chase whichever one he liked.
She had thought it through in detail and it was the first idea anybody had put forward that Burner had not already considered and rejected, and he stood there for four minutes genuinely turning it over before he saw the flaw in it.
Neve said they should go back to the yard.
That one shocked the basin quiet.
She stood up with the shackle scar still raw on her ankle and said that the block building was concrete and did not burn, that the spring there ran all winter, that a fifty acre concrete yard was defensible in a way that a timber basin was not,
and that Halstead's nineteen men could not be in two places.
"It's the one place he's not," she said. "That's the entire argument. He's here."
"There's fourteen men there," Otway said.
"There were fourteen men there before it burned," Neve said. "Now there's a burned yard with no fuel and no trucks and whoever didn't walk away."
Burner listened to that with his whole attention and filed it.
Teague said they should fight, here, and he said it without any heat at all, which made it land harder.
"I voted against it twice," he said. "I want that on the record because everybody here remembers. And I have buried a man this week and I have got a nine year old in that tent with a hole in his hip, and I am done with the part of my life where I hoped it would go away."
And then Ferris stood up and said he was going, and that he did not need a vote to walk out of a basin, and that if the camp voted no he would go anyway.
It got very ugly after that, briefly, and Halloran let it, and when it had burned itself down he asked if anybody else wanted to speak.
Sparrow stood up.
The basin went silent in a way it had not been all morning.
He had not spoken at a meeting. He had not, so far as Burner knew, spoken to more than four people in the camp at once in three weeks, and he stood there with his burned hand curled against his chest and looked at seventy-two people who had every reason to want him dead.
"I've got no standing here," he said. "I know that. I'm going to say one thing and then sit down and you can ignore it entirely."
Nobody stopped him.
"Everything you've said this morning is a way of answering him," Sparrow said. "Send twelve. Scatter. Fight here. Go to the yard. Every single one of them is a move on a board he set out."
He looked around.
"I did this for two years," he said. "I stood in front of eleven settlements and gave them a choice, and the choice was always real, and they always got to pick, and every one of them lost. Do you understand what I'm telling you? The choice was never the trick. The choice was the trick."
"Then what's the alternative?" somebody called.
"I don't know," Sparrow said. "I never once found one. That's why I'm standing in your camp with my hand burned off instead of at home."
He sat down.
The vote was taken at two in the afternoon and it was the closest thing to a disaster Burner had ever seen a group of people do to themselves.
Fight here: twenty-six.
Send the twelve: nineteen.
Scatter: nine.
Go to the yard: eleven.
Abstain: seven.
Halloran counted it three times and then stood on the rock with the slate in his hands and said nothing for about fifteen seconds.
"There's no majority," he said.
Nobody moved.
"Twenty-six is the largest number and it's not half of anything. If I call that a decision then forty-six people in this camp have just been told their vote didn't count, and we've been voting for two years precisely so that never happens." He put the slate down. "So I'm not calling it."
"Then what?"
"Then we vote again tomorrow," Halloran said, "and we all spend tonight talking to somebody who voted differently, and I mean actually talking, and if it's split again tomorrow we'll do it a third time."
"That's not leadership," Oates said.
"No," Halloran agreed. "It's the other thing. It's slower and it's worse in an emergency and it's the only thing that's kept this camp from becoming what's out there."
He got down off the rock.
Burner went and found him an hour later, sitting alone on a deadfall at the edge of the firebreak with his head down.
"That was the right call," Burner said.
"It was the only call. That's not the same."
"No."
Halloran looked up.
"You didn't speak," he said. "Four hours and you didn't say one word in that vote."
"No."
"Why not?"
Burner sat down on the log.
"Because I'm the only person in this basin who's killed anybody this month," he said, "and because about a third of them have decided I'm the reason all of this is happening, and they're not entirely wrong,
and if I'd stood up and argued for fighting it would have carried the vote and it would have carried it for the wrong reason."
"Which is?"
"That they'd rather be told than decide."
Halloran nodded slowly.
"That's the thing, isn't it," he said. "That's what he's actually selling. Not safety. Not food. Just an end to having to choose things."
"Yes."
They sat in the cold for a while.
"What would you have said?" Halloran asked. "If you'd spoken."
Burner looked out at the timber.
"I'd have said that Neve's right and everybody's wrong about why," he said.
Halloran turned his head.
"Go on."
"Every option in that vote was about surviving the winter. Every single one. And the winter isn't the problem."
Burner picked up a piece of bark and turned it over.
"Halstead is not trying to beat us. He's waiting for us to make ourselves into something he can keep. The food, the dates, the twelve, the schedule, all of it is designed to produce a camp that will negotiate."
"And the yard?"
"The yard is the one thing on that list that isn't a response," Burner said. "It's the only idea anybody had today that he can't have planned for, because there is no version of his thinking where seventy-two people walk twenty-six miles toward him in November."
"It's also the one with fourteen men in it."
"Yes."
"And no food."
"It's got a concrete building and a spring and fifty acres you can see across," Burner said.
"And it's got his shop and his parts and his workshop and every tool he's spent two years collecting, and I'd very much like to know what's actually left of it, because I've been building plans on a guess for two weeks and I've done that once already this month and it nearly killed twelve people."
Halloran was quiet a long moment.
"You want to go and look."
"I want somebody to go and look. It doesn't have to be me and it probably shouldn't be."
"It'll be you."
"Probably."
Halloran let out a breath.
"Not before the vote," he said. "I'm not having you walk out of this basin while seventy-two people are deciding. It'll look like exactly what it is."
"Which is?"
"The man who actually knows what he'd do, leaving so he doesn't have to say it."
Burner did not answer that, because there was nothing in it he could argue with.
The second vote never happened.
At four in the morning on the fourteenth of October, the north listening post fired two shots, which was the signal, and then a third, which was not.
Burner came out of his tent with the AK and the whole basin was already moving, ninety-one seconds of drill from a camp that had done it every day for six weeks, and children were going into the big tent and people were going to positions and nobody was shouting.
He got to the north break at a run.
There were four people there and they were all standing up, which was wrong, and then he saw why.
Out on the snow of the firebreak, ninety feet out, a man was walking toward the camp with his hands over his head.
He was alone. He was unarmed. He was moving badly, dragging one leg, and as he came closer into the light of the lanterns Burner saw that he had no coat on at all in twenty degrees, and that his shirt was soaked black down the front.
"Don't shoot," the man called. His voice was ruined. "Don't shoot, please, I'm coming in, I'm coming in."
He got to forty feet and his legs went and he fell in the snow.
Burner went out and got him.
He turned him over and looked at his face in the lantern light and did not know him at all, and the man grabbed Burner's collar with a hand that had two fingers missing and pulled him down.
"Are you the one," he said. "Are you the one from the grass."
"Yes."
"He said you'd come out."
"Who are you?"
"Rowe," the man said. "My name's Rowe. I was on the gate."
Burner's whole body went cold.
"He did this to you?"
"He did this to nine of us," Rowe said. "There were nineteen men in that yard and there's eleven now, and he didn't do it out of anger, he did it on a Tuesday with a list."
He was fading. Burner shook him.
"Why? Why would he cut his own numbers?"
Rowe's eyes came back into focus for one second.
"Because we ate too much," he said.