Chapter 15 #3
She had been carried the whole way by Otway and dumped behind a drum and she had her rifle up before her breathing had settled.
"Take it."
She fired.
She fired four times in eleven seconds, which was faster than Burner had ever seen her do anything, and on the third one something let go under the truck's hood with a sound like a kettle and a white plume came up into the cold air.
The truck kept coming.
"It'll run four minutes on a dry block," Otway shouted.
"It doesn't need four minutes," Burner said.
Twenty feet.
Neve stood up.
Burner never worked out afterward whether it was courage or the other thing, the thing that happens to people who have been held in a room for three months.
She came up off the concrete with a five gallon jerry can of the camp's kerosene that she had carried twenty-six miles for no reason she had ever explained, and she threw it.
It went under the blade and burst against the front wheel.
She did not have a match and there was nothing to light it with, and it would have been nothing at all except that the engine had been running dry for ninety seconds and the exhaust manifold on that truck was a piece of scavenged pipe that glowed.
The whole front end went up.
The driver got out. Burner saw him come out of the cab door on the far side with his coat burning and he saw three people shoot at him and he saw one of them hit him.
That was Ives. Burner knew it and did not know how he knew it, and he stood behind a steel drum and watched the best man in that yard die behind a blade he had built.
The nine were still coming.
They came around the burning truck in two groups and one of them made it to within thirty feet of the drums, and there was ten seconds of a kind of fighting that Burner had never done in his life and hoped never to do again, and then it was over.
Four of them went back.
Halstead's men left five on the concrete, and one of them was alive and screaming, and Weathers was three quarters of a mile away.
Burner's side had Brill dead in the open forty yards back, and Teague shot through both thighs, and a man named Corlett dead behind the drums with his rifle still in his hands, and Priest with a graze across the scalp that bled like nothing else on earth and that he would not stop talking about.
And the pump.
The blade had come to a stop eleven feet short of it.
They got the wounded out at dusk, back through the fence and north to Weathers, and Teague was still swearing when they carried him away, which everybody agreed was a good sign.
They buried Brill and Corlett in the dark outside the wire because the ground inside was concrete.
Burner dug. He dug for two hours in frozen ground with a shovel from a bench somebody had swept, and nobody made him and nobody stopped him.
At nine that night Halloran came down from the rise with twelve more people and stood in the shop frame and looked at the burned truck.
"Tell me," he said.
Burner told him.
"Two," Halloran said.
"Two of ours. Six of theirs, including the mechanic."
"Then he's got five."
Burner sat down on a steel drum.
"Five," he said, "and no truck, and twenty-two people, and eleven days of food which is now nine, and a well he can't reach."
"That's over, then."
"No."
"Burner."
"It's not over because he's still in there and he's got five men and there are seven people in that building who aren't there by choice," Burner said. "And the only thing left between him and the end is a concrete wall and twenty-two people he can decide things about."
Halloran sat down next to him.
"Then what do we do?"
"We wait," Burner said. "And we let anybody who walks out walk out."
They came in the night.
Not all at once. That was the thing Burner remembered afterward, that it was not a break or a flood, it was a slow leak.
The woman with the buckets came first, at about eleven, and this time she brought two others with her, and they sat down by the drums and drank water and did not say anything for a long time.
At two in the morning, four more.
At half past four, a man came out with a rifle and put it on the concrete forty feet from the drums and walked forward with his hands out.
"Beale sent me," he said. "That's a lie. Beale's dead. Halstead shot him at midnight for saying we should all come out."
"How many left?"
"Him and three."
At six, with the sky going gray, six people came out together, and four of them were carrying a seventh on a door.
Burner got up off the drum and went out to meet them and his legs were shaking, which was ridiculous, which he could not stop.
The woman on the door was about forty and she had not walked in a month and she was awake.
"Are you the one from the grass," she said.
"Yes."
"There's a man," she said. "There's a man three quarters of a mile north."
"I'll send for him now," Burner said.
He did not watch it.
He walked to the far end of the shop frame and stood with his back to all of it and looked out at the burned truck while it happened, because it did not belong to him and because there were some things a man should not be in the middle of.
He heard it, though.
He heard Ferris make a sound that he had only heard once before, at a fire, from a man called Halloran with a blistered hand.
At eight in the morning on the twenty-fourth of October, twenty people had come out of the block building.
Two remained inside.
Halstead, and a man called Cutter, who according to four separate accounts had not slept in three days and had sat by the door the whole time with a rifle across his knees telling anybody who came near it that he would shoot them.
Sparrow came down from the rise at nine.
Burner was sitting on a steel drum with a cup of water in his hand and he had not slept in thirty hours, and Sparrow walked across the yard and stood looking at the block building.
"He's got Cutter."
"So they say."
"Cutter's the worst of all of us," Sparrow said. "I want to be precise. Halstead is the reason it was a system. Cutter's the reason nobody ever tested it."
"Will he come out?"
"No."
"Will Halstead?"
Sparrow was quiet for a moment.
"He'll come out," he said. "He'll want to say something."
At ten in the morning the door of the block building opened.
Halstead came out with his hands behind his back and walked to the middle of the yard and stopped at exactly the same place he had stood two days before, a hundred and ten feet from the shop frame, and Burner walked out to meet him and stopped at fifteen.
Halstead had not shaved. That was all. Everything else about him was the same.
"Twenty out of twenty-two," he said.
"Yes."
"In eighteen hours."
"Yes."
"That's better than anything I could have done to you," Halstead said. "I want you to know I recognize the workmanship."
"Send Cutter out."
"Cutter isn't coming out and you know that. He's been on that door for three days and he'll be on it tomorrow, and if you go through it he will kill two of your people before anybody touches him."
"Then you come out and we'll starve him."
"He's got nine days of food in there," Halstead said, "which is now twenty-two days of food because there's two of us, and I don't believe you've got twenty-two days of anything."
Burner did not answer.
"There it is," Halstead said.
"There's what?"
"The count. You've just done it." Something almost like warmth went across his face.
"Seventy-two people, eleven miles from nowhere, on the twenty-fourth of October, holding a concrete yard with two men in the only heated building in it. You are about nine days from the first hard decision and you know exactly what it is."
"Say what you want."
"I want to make you an offer and I want you to notice that I have never made one before," Halstead said. "Everything I've ever said to you has been a schedule. This is the first thing I've asked for."
"Ask."
"Let me walk out."
Burner stared at him.
"Alone," Halstead said. "North, or east, or anywhere. No rifle. No food beyond three days. And Cutter comes out behind me twenty minutes later on the same terms, because he'll do it if I tell him to and he will not do it for anyone else alive."
"And the building?"
"Yours. With everything in it. Nine days of food for twenty-two, which is nine days of food, which is probably the difference between you and February."
Burner looked at him for a long time.
"You're asking me to let you go."
"I'm asking you to trade two men for nine days and a building," Halstead said.
"And I am going to say the next part very carefully. You know what I am. You know what I will do if I get to a settlement somewhere in April with nothing in my pockets. I am not going to pretend otherwise and insult both of us."
"No."
"So it is exactly the calculation I have spent two years making," Halstead said, "and I have handed it to you whole, and now you get to make it in front of seventy-two people."
He put his hands behind his back.
"That's the last thing I've got," he said. "I don't want you to think there's another move. There isn't. I've got a concrete room and a man who won't leave a door and nine days, and I have spent four weeks losing to you and I would like to stop."
Burner stood in the cold and felt the whole weight of it settle onto him.
"I'll put it to the camp," he said.
Halstead's eyebrows moved, very slightly.
"You'll what?"
"I'll put it to the camp," Burner said. "All seventy of them. Today, before dark. And they'll vote, and I'll do what they decide, and if they decide to let you walk I'll walk you to the gate myself and if they decide to starve you out I'll sit in this yard for three weeks."
"They'll take the nine days."
"Maybe."
"They'll take it and half of them will hate themselves for it and you'll have done a monstrous thing to seventy people for no reason at all," Halstead said, and for the first time in four weeks there was something in his voice that was not level.
"Decide it. That's what you're for. That is what the entire thing is for, that one man carries it so that seventy don't have to."
"No," Burner said. "That's what you're for."
He turned and walked back toward the shop frame.
"Burner."