Chapter 14 #2
"He didn't have to," Sparrow said. "That's the horror of it. He just had to do it and let a man walk north."
Otway had a stick and was drawing in the dirt floor.
"Three weeks of food," he said. "On the fourteenth. That's the fourth of November."
"Yes."
"And he wrote us a note saying we had till the fifteenth of December."
Burner nodded slowly.
"He's got six weeks less than we do," he said.
The tent went very quiet.
"Say it out loud," Halloran said.
"The whole canvas was a lie," Burner said.
"Not the numbers about us, those were right. The part about him. He wrote all winter and eleven miles of country and we have time. He hasn't got time. He's got until the first week of November and then twenty-two people in a burned yard start starving and eleven armed men start looking at each
other."
"So the eight," Weathers said.
"The eight were arithmetic."
He heard himself say it and did not take it back this time.
"He cut his own camp by eight because eight fewer mouths buys the other twenty-two about ten more days," Burner said. "And he made it look like discipline. He made it look like a man punishing greed. And then he sent one of them north to tell us."
"That's the most frightening thing I have ever heard," Weathers said.
"It's the most frightened thing I've ever heard," Burner said.
They all looked at him.
"He's cutting his own people to buy days. He's writing us letters about schedules. He's walking across firebreaks in the daylight to leave notes because he needs us to believe he's got all winter."
Burner put both hands flat on the crate.
"For three weeks I've been treating him like a patient man with a plan. He's a hungry man with three weeks of food and eleven guns and one idea left."
"Which is?"
"Us," Burner said. "We're the idea. He doesn't want twelve people to work a garden. He wants our food."
Halloran had gone very still.
"He'll come before the fourth of November."
"He'll come before he's weak," Burner said. "Which is sooner. A man who's careful about everything else will not wait until his own men are too hungry to walk twenty-six miles. Call it the twenty-fifth of October."
"That's eleven days."
"That's eleven days."
Halloran put his head in his hands.
"And we've got no majority," he said. "We've got a camp that voted four ways last week and I sent them off to talk it over and the talking is going about as well as you'd expect."
Burner stood up.
"Then I'm going to say the thing I didn't say at the vote," he said.
They put it to the whole camp at noon.
Halloran got up on the rock and told them about Rowe. All of it, the same way he had read out the canvas, without softening one line, and Burner watched seventy-two people learn that a man eleven miles away had killed eight of his own and sent one to their door.
Nobody interrupted.
When he finished, Halloran said, "Burner's got something to say and I've asked him to say it, and I want everybody to know that I asked, because there's people in this camp who think he's been running us and he hasn't.
He's been quiet for a month and it's cost him something and I'm done letting him be quiet."
Burner got up on the rock.
Seventy-two faces. Snow on the ground. Somebody's child coughing.
"I'm going to tell you what I'd do," he said. "Not what you should do. What I'd do, and my reasons, and then I'm going to get down and you can all tear it to pieces, and if you vote against it I'll do whatever you decide and I'll do it properly."
He took a breath.
"Halstead has eleven fighting men, twenty-two people and three weeks of food," he said.
"We have nineteen who can hold a rifle, seventy-two people and ten weeks of food. Everybody in this camp has been thinking of us as the weak ones for three weeks and as of this morning that is no longer true and I want every one of you to hold onto that."
Nobody moved.
"He is going to come here before the end of October, because he has to. And when he comes he will not come to negotiate, because there's nothing we can give him that keeps twenty-two people alive through February. He's coming for all of it."
"Then we fight here," Oates called.
"No," Burner said.
That got them.
"We fight here and we win," he said. "Probably. Nineteen rifles behind a firebreak against eleven men in the open, and we'd hold, and it would cost us six or eight people and one of them would be a child,
because this basin is a timber edge with eleven doors and I have not been able to fix that in six weeks."
"So what?"
"So we don't let him choose the ground," Burner said.
"That's the only thing I've learned in a year of this. Every single time he has chosen where and when, and every single time it has cost us. The one time we chose, we opened a shed and walked twelve people out and burned four hundred acres and lost nobody."
He looked out at them.
"Neve said it at the last meeting and I have thought about nothing else since," he said. "We go to the yard."
The basin erupted.
He let it go for about a minute and then raised a hand and it took a while to come down.
"Say the objections," he said. "All of them. I've got answers to some and none to the rest and I'll tell you which is which."
"There's eleven armed men there!"
"There will be eleven armed men here in eleven days. The difference is that there, they'll be sitting in a place they haven't finished rebuilding, and here, they'll be choosing their moment."
"It's twenty-six miles!"
"It's twenty-six miles in October with a boy on a litter and a woman recovering from a gut wound and nineteen children, and it is the single hardest thing this camp will ever do, and I am not going to pretend otherwise."
"There's no food there!"
"There's no food here on the twelfth of December," Burner said. "There's a well that runs all winter and a concrete building that doesn't burn and fifty acres you can see across and nine hundred pounds of tools in a steel-framed shop, and I'd rather spend the winter with tools than without them."
A woman near the front said, "You want us to walk twenty-six miles toward the man who's trying to kill us."
"Yes," Burner said.
"Say why."
"Because he's not there."
That stopped the noise completely.
"He's here," Burner said. "He's within four miles of this basin right now with four men and he's been here for three weeks, and the eleven in that yard are the ones he left behind,
and the eight he killed were killed to make the food last while he sits out there in the timber waiting for us to fall apart."
He let that sit.
"If we move on the yard, one of two things happens," he said. "Either he stays out here and we take a concrete building off eleven hungry men, or he runs twenty-six miles to get in front of us, and he arrives at the same time we do having marched four men for a day and a half."
"And if he gets there first?"
"Then it's fifteen men in a yard with no fuel and three weeks of food against seventy-two people and nineteen rifles who have just walked twenty-six miles knowing exactly why," Burner said.
He got down off the rock.
They talked for three hours.
Teague spoke for it. Neve spoke for it, and hard. Nate spoke for it from a crate with his leg stuck out and said eleven words, which was more than he had said in public since the shed.
Otway spoke against it, on the grounds that a fifty acre concrete yard could not be heated and that seventy-two people in a block building with one stove would be dead of sickness by January, and that was the objection Burner had no answer to and said so out loud.
Weathers spoke against it and then, halfway through, stopped, and stood there, and said, "No. I've changed my mind while I was talking and I'd like the record to show it."
Ferris did not speak at all.
The vote was taken at four in the afternoon, in the failing light, with snow starting again.
Fifty-one to eighteen, with three abstaining.
Halloran counted it twice and said the number out loud both times.
"Then we go," he said.
They had three days to do a thing that needed three weeks.
Burner slept four hours a night and the rest of it was moving.
They would go in one body, all seventy-two, because splitting was how you lost people.
They would go northeast first, four miles, the wrong direction, and then cut south on the far side of the shoulder where the timber was thick, because Halstead was watching the south trail and had been for three weeks.
It would take four days. Two full days of walking, two of crawling with the litters.
Weathers picked over the medical stores and left behind the things she could not carry and cried about it for about ninety seconds and then never mentioned it again.
They killed and butchered everything hanging. They burned what they could not take, because Burner insisted, and that was the fight that nearly broke the camp in half on the second evening, sixty people standing around a fire watching two hundred pounds of gear go into it.
"He'll use it," Burner said. "Everything we leave, he uses. Every blanket, every pot, every nail."
"It's ours."
"It stops being ours the second we walk away from it."
On the second night, Shyla came and sat next to him while he worked.
She had Cass with her, and the two of them sat on a log with the dog between them and watched him check over forty rounds of ammunition by firelight.
"Is it going to be bad," Cass said.
It was the fourth thing Burner had ever heard her say.
He put down the round in his hand.
"Yes," he said.
Shyla looked up sharply, and he saw her decide not to say anything.
"Four days of walking in the snow and it will be the coldest you have ever been and there will be a day, probably the third one, when you will want to sit down and not get up," Burner said. "And there's going to be a fight at the end of it."
Cass's face did the thing that Shyla's used to do.
"But," Shyla said.
"But there's seventy-two of us," Burner said, "and every single person in this camp knows exactly why they're walking, and there is nothing on this earth harder to stop than that. I've watched people do four impossible things in five weeks. I'd bet on us."