Chapter 14 #5
"I want you to understand that I know exactly what it cost," Halstead said. "That's all I have ever wanted from anybody. Not forgiveness. Accuracy."
He turned and started toward the rockfall.
Then he stopped and looked back over his shoulder, and it was the exact gesture Sparrow had made in the grass at the south gap, and Burner realized with a lurch that Sparrow had learned it from him.
"Four days," Halstead said. "You'll be at my fence on the twenty-second. Don't come at night. I've got two men who will shoot children in the dark and I would rather they didn't."
"That's a warning."
"That's a preference," Halstead said. "I'm going to try very hard to kill all of you, and I'd rather do it in daylight."
He walked into the rocks and was gone.
Burner stood there alone for about ten seconds.
Then he turned and walked back down the bench, and it took four minutes, and he did not remember any of it afterward.
Halloran came out to meet him.
"Well?"
"Get them moving," Burner said. "Now, while there's light. He's got two men in that rockfall and they've been told to let us pass, and I believe him, and I'd like to test that belief before he changes his mind."
They got the column moving in eleven minutes.
Seventy-two people went through the neck of the bench in a long slow line with four litters and eleven sleds, and nineteen rifles pointed at a rockfall, and nothing happened at all.
Burner walked at the back and watched the rocks the whole way.
That night, camped in a spruce stand six miles further south with no fires, he told Halloran and Weathers and Sable everything Halstead had said, all of it, in order, including the part about the notebook and the part about two years.
When he finished, Weathers said, "He's trying to poison you."
"Yes."
"Is it working?"
Burner looked at the dark.
"I don't know," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got at ten o'clock at night three days out."
Halloran said, "You've got to tell Ferris."
"I know."
"Tonight."
"I know that too," Burner said. "I've been walking six miles working out how to do it and I've got nothing, and I'm going to go and do it badly in about four minutes, and it is going to be the worst thing I've done this month."
He got up.
"Burner," Sable said.
He stopped.
"The thing he said. About you being him in two years."
"Yes."
"He's got one thing wrong in it," she said, "and I've been sitting here trying to work out what it is, and I've got it."
"Say it."
"You told us," Sable said. "All of it. Every word he said, including the parts that make you look bad and the part about Ferris that you could have buried, and you told four people in a tent who can all vote."
She looked up at him.
"He kept a notebook so nobody could pretend," she said. "You just talk to people. That's not a small difference. That's the whole difference."
Burner stood there a moment.
"Thank you," he said.
He found Ferris sitting alone at the edge of the camp with his back against a spruce, and he sat down next to him without asking, and he said it plainly and without any preparation at all because there was no good way and pretending otherwise would have been another kind of lie.
Ferris did not say anything for a long time.
Then he put his face in his hands and made a sound, one, and got hold of himself.
"Alive," he said.
"As of Thursday. That's what he said and I've no way to check it."
"Sick."
"Yes."
Ferris wiped his face with his sleeve.
"Why would he tell you?"
"To hurt us," Burner said. "He said so himself. He said it would do more damage than anything else he could say, and he was right, and I've spent six miles deciding whether that meant I should keep it from you."
"And?"
"And I decided that a man who keeps a thing like that from you has already started down a road, and I've just spent an hour being told exactly where that road goes."
Ferris nodded slowly.
He sat for a while with his hands on his knees.
"There's seven of them," he said. "In the building. Not by choice."
"That's what he said."
"Then when we go in," Ferris said, "I want to be the one that goes to that building. Not the fence, not the shop. The building."
"Ferris."
"I'm not asking to be first through a door. I know what I am." His voice was steady. "I'm asking to be the one who's standing outside it when it opens, so that whoever comes out sees a face that isn't holding a rifle."
Burner looked at him in the dark.
"That's a better idea than anything I've had all day," he said.
They made fourteen miles on the twenty-first.
On the morning of the twenty-second, in a hard gray dawn with two inches of new snow, the column came up over the last rise south of the old state route and stopped.
Below them, across four hundred blackened acres, sat the maintenance yard.
The fence. The block building with smoke coming from a stovepipe. The steel skeleton of the shop.
And, parked in a neat row inside the gate where three vehicles had once been, something Burner had not seen in a month.
A truck.
Running. Idling. White exhaust curling up into the cold.
And standing on the flatbed, looking up at the ridge through a pair of binoculars, was a man in a canvas coat with no hat.