Chapter 15 #2
The steel frame stood, black and buckled at the west end, and the roof was gone entirely except for two sheets hanging down over the north bay. The concrete floor was swept, which was the thing that stopped Burner in his tracks for a full second.
Somebody had swept it. There were tools laid out on a plank bench that had been built in the last three weeks, and a barrel of scrap sorted by size, and a coil of hose on a nail.
Four weeks. They had been rebuilding for four weeks.
"There," Sable breathed.
The well was where Rowe had said it was. A steel casing coming out of the concrete with a cast iron hand pump on top and a bucket hooked over the spout, and a wooden crate beside it where somebody sat.
Forty feet from the fence. A hundred and thirty from the block building.
Burner put six people around it in the dark and put Delacroix at the southeast corner of the shop frame behind a stack of steel drums, with a clear view down the whole length of open concrete.
Then he waited for dawn.
It came at ten past seven.
The camp discovered them at twenty past.
A man came out of the block building with a bucket in each hand and walked forty yards across the concrete toward the well and got within about sixty feet before he stopped dead.
Burner stood up in the shop frame with the AK across his chest and did not point it at him.
"Put the buckets down and go back," he said.
The man dropped both buckets and ran.
There was a great deal of noise from the block building for about four minutes, and then there was no noise at all, which Burner had expected and which was worse.
At half past seven, Halstead came out.
He walked to the middle of the yard with his hands behind his back, and he stopped at about a hundred and ten feet, which was comfortably inside the range of every rifle in the shop frame, and he stood there and looked at the well.
"Delacroix," Burner said quietly.
"On him."
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to."
Halstead spoke.
"That's very good," he said. "I want to say that first. I did not think of it, and I have thought about this yard every day for two years."
Burner stepped out where he could be seen.
"Here are the terms," he said.
"You've got terms?"
"I've got one."
Burner had rehearsed it four hundred times on his belly in the snow and it still came out harder than he expected.
"Anybody who wants water can come and get it," he said. "Any time, day or night. Women, children, the seven in that building who aren't there by choice, and any one of your eleven men who walks out here with his hands empty. Nobody will be touched. Nobody will be asked anything."
Halstead did not react.
"That's your term?"
"That's my term."
"And what do you get?"
"Nothing," Burner said. "That's the point of it."
The yard was very quiet.
"You understand what you've just done," Halstead said.
"Yes."
"Say it, then. I'd like to hear whether you've worked it all the way through."
"I've made it impossible for you to let them come," Burner said. "Because the first man who walks out here with empty hands and gets a drink of water and walks back unharmed is the end of you. Not because he'll betray you. Because he'll have found out that it's a choice."
Halstead stood in the cold for a long moment.
"Yes," he said.
"So you'll have to stop them. And you'll have to do it in front of everybody. And by tonight there'll be twenty-two people in that building who know that there is water forty yards away and the only thing between them and it is you."
"Yes," Halstead said again.
"And tomorrow they'll be thirsty."
"Yes."
Burner lowered the rifle another inch.
"You can end it right now," he said. "Send out the seven. Send out the four women if they want to go and keep them if they don't. Put your eleven men's rifles on the concrete and walk north with us, and I will stand in front of seventy-two people and argue for every single one of you,
and I will probably lose about half of them and I'll say so honestly."
"And me?"
"You'd get a vote taken about you," Burner said. "Which is more than you've ever given anybody."
Halstead was quiet for a while.
"Do you know what the difficulty is?" he said.
"Tell me."
"I believe you."
He turned and walked back to the block building without hurrying, and at the door he stopped and looked back.
"I'm going to come for that pump this afternoon," he said. "I want you to know in advance, because I've told you everything in advance for a month and I'd like to finish that way. It will be with the truck and it will be at about two o'clock when the sun's behind me."
"Understood."
"There's one more thing."
"Say it."
"Ives," Halstead said. "The mechanic. He got a hose on the plow truck and a cap off a burned engine and he turned that thing over on the sixth of October, and I want somebody to know his name, because he is the best man in this yard and he is going to die this afternoon behind a blade he built."
He went inside.
At eleven in the morning a woman came out of the block building alone with two buckets and walked across the concrete.
Burner watched her come and did not move and told everybody else not to move.
She was about thirty and she was terrified and she walked the whole hundred and thirty feet with her shoulders up around her ears waiting for something to happen.
Nothing happened.
She got to the pump and Neve worked the handle for her and filled both buckets, and nobody asked her one question, and she stood there for a second with water slopping over her boots looking at twenty armed people who were all deliberately looking somewhere else.
"They said you'd shoot me," she said.
"Who did?"
"A man called Beale."
"Nobody's going to shoot you," Burner said. "Come back whenever you're thirsty, and tell whoever wants to come that it's the same for them."
She picked up the buckets.
"There's seven of us," she said, very fast, "in the back room, and there's a woman who's sick and she can't walk and her name is"
"Ferris," Burner said.
The woman's face broke.
"Tell her," Burner said. "Tell her the exact words. Tell her that her husband is three quarters of a mile north of this yard and that he has walked twenty-six miles to stand outside that door."
She went back across the concrete with the buckets and she did not run.
At twenty past one, the engine started.
Burner heard it from the north bay of the shop frame where he was checking Delacroix's field of fire, and everything in the yard went quiet, and he came around the drums and looked out across a hundred and eighty feet of open concrete at the plow truck rolling out from behind the block building
with the blade down.
There were men walking behind it.
He counted, and he got to nine, and then the truck turned its nose toward the shop and the blade came up like a wall and he could not count anymore.
"Down," Burner said. "All of you. Down now."
Twenty people went flat on the concrete floor of the shop frame.
The truck came at eleven or twelve miles an hour, which does not sound like anything until it is coming at you behind a steel blade six feet high and eight wide, and behind it nine men walked in a tight double file in its tracks.
"Delacroix," Burner said.
"I can't see a thing but blade."
"Tires."
"He's got the blade angled to cover the near side and the far side's behind the body. There's about nine inches of daylight at the top of the rear wheel and it's moving."
"Can you take it?"
"Not from here. From the fence line, maybe, when he turns."
"He won't turn."
"He'll have to turn," Delacroix said. "He can't drive a blade into a steel frame at eleven miles an hour, he'll tear the front axle out. He has to come alongside."
Burner lay on the cold concrete and watched a wall come toward him and understood that she was right and that everything now depended on which way the driver turned.
"Sable," he said. "Take five and get to the north bay. If he comes up the west side you'll have the whole flank."
"And if he comes up the east?"
"Then Delacroix's got him and you'll have nothing, and you'll run across the floor and it'll cost you eight seconds."
She went.
At a hundred feet the truck did something Burner had not planned for.
It stopped.
It stopped dead in the open concrete with the blade square on to the shop frame, and the nine men behind it went down flat in its shadow, and then the engine note changed and the truck began to reverse.
Slowly. Twenty feet. Forty.
"What is he doing," Teague said.
Burner watched, and his stomach dropped away from him.
"He's not coming for the shop," he said.
"What?"
"Look at the angle. He's backing across to the northwest." Burner came up on his knees. "He's going for the well."
The well was forty feet inside the fence and sixty feet clear of the shop frame, in the open, and Burner had put six people around it in a ring of steel drums at half past eleven last night.
And a truck reversing across open concrete with a plow blade on the front had a clear run at it from the north.
"He's going to bury it," Burner said. "He's going to put that blade through the pump and shear the casing off at the concrete."
"Then we shoot the driver."
"The driver's behind an engine block and the cab's got sheet steel wired over the glass, I've been looking at it for twenty minutes."
Burner stood up.
"Everybody on the well," he said. "Now."
It came apart very fast after that.
Twenty people came out of the shop frame into open concrete and the nine men lying in the truck's shadow got up and started shooting, and for about forty seconds it was the worst thing Burner had ever been inside of.
Brill was hit in the first six seconds. He saw her go down and he could not go to her.
They made the drums.
Six people were already there and fourteen more came in over the top of them and went flat, and then there were twenty rifles behind a ring of steel drums and forty feet of open ground in front and a truck coming backward at the pump.
"Radiator's facing us now," Delacroix said.