Chapter 16
Burner got to the north bay in forty seconds and it was already too late to matter.
There were six people standing in a ring around a shape on the concrete floor and somebody had put a lantern down beside it, and the light made everything worse.
The man was called Oates.
Burner had heard him shout at a meeting in a basin eleven days ago about a woman named Hobbes and her two children, and he had stood on a rock and told him that you have until was a different sentence from I will wait, and Oates had shouted back at him,
and they had never spoken again after that and now they never would.
He had been cut across the throat with something and he had been dead for perhaps ten minutes.
Burner crouched and looked and did not touch anything.
"Who found him?"
"Me." Priest was holding a rag against his scalp with one hand. "I came down to change the watch at seven. Oates was on it alone."
"Alone."
"Yes."
Burner closed his eyes for a second.
"Whose decision was that?"
Nobody answered.
"Whose decision was that?"
"Mine," Halloran said from the dark behind them.
He came into the lantern light and stood over the body and his face did not change at all, which Burner recognized, because he had learned to do the same thing in September.
"There were four people on him at five o'clock and I sent three of them to help carry the wounded into the building, because it was twelve degrees and Weathers wanted them under a roof," Halloran said. "And I left one man with a rifle on a tied prisoner and I did not think about it for one second."
"That's on me too," Burner said.
"No it isn't."
"I walked past this bay at half past six. I saw one man and a rope and I thought, that's fine, and I kept walking, because I was tired and I wanted to look at a building with a stove in it."
"Burner."
"I'm not doing a performance," Burner said. "I'm saying the true thing in front of six people so that nobody has to work it out later. We both walked past it."
He stood up.
"How was he cut loose?"
Brill would have found it in four seconds. Brill was in the frozen ground outside the wire.
It was Sable who found it, kneeling on the concrete with the lantern, in about ninety seconds.
"There," she said.
There was a strip of steel about five inches long lying under the drum stack where a rope end had been dragged across it. The shop frame had burned four weeks ago and the sheet metal of the roof had come down and been cut up for scrap, and the edges were raw and every single one of them was a knife.
"He sat down next to that," Sable said, "and he worked his wrists on it for an hour and a half."
"With a man watching him."
"With a man watching him in the dark, in the cold, alone, at the end of the worst day of his life," Sable said. "Oates wasn't a soldier. He was a man from a camp that grew potatoes."
Burner stood with his hands at his sides.
"Then he got up," he said, "and he waited until Oates looked somewhere else, and he did that."
"Yes."
"And took the rifle."
"And a coat. There was a spare on the drum."
"How long?"
Priest said, "He was warm when I got there."
Burner turned and looked out through the open end of the shop frame at four hundred acres of black and white, and the dark beyond it, and the north.
"He's got forty minutes," he said.
They put it together in eleven minutes standing in the yard in the cold and it was the fastest decision anybody had made in four weeks.
"He'll go north," Sparrow said. "He'll go straight north because that's where Halstead went and Cutter has never once in two years done a thing that wasn't behind that man."
"Will he catch him?"
"Halstead's got an hour and a half and Cutter's got a rifle and no reason to walk carefully." Sparrow's burned hand was curled against his chest and he was shaking, not from cold. "Yes. He'll catch him by midnight."
"And then what?"
"And then there's two of them," Sparrow said, "and one of them's got a rifle, and Halstead has got the entire rest of his life to work out what to do with a man like Cutter and a country full of camps that don't know what's coming."
Halloran said, "We voted."
Everybody turned.
"I want to say it out loud before anybody says anything else," Halloran said. "We voted, thirty-five to thirty-three, and I read it out and Burner walked him to the gate. That happened. We did that. Nobody in this camp gets to pretend tonight that they were against it unless they actually were."
"And now a man's dead," somebody said.
"Yes."
"So the vote was wrong."
"The vote was close," Halloran said. "That's not the same thing, and if this camp starts treating a close vote as a wrong vote every time something bad follows it, then we will never make another decision as long as we live."
Burner spoke.
"It's also not why he's dead."
They looked at him.
"Cutter didn't get out because we let Halstead walk," he said. "Cutter got out because there was one man on a rope in the dark next to a sheet of cut steel, and that was a housekeeping failure, and it was mine and Halloran's, and I'd rather everybody was angry about the right thing."
He turned to Sparrow.
"How dangerous is he?"
Sparrow took a moment.
"There's a thing I should have said four weeks ago and didn't because nobody asked me directly," he said.
"Cutter isn't a lieutenant. He's not Rowe and he's not Beale. Halstead used him about eleven times in two years and every time it was a thing that required a person who does not feel it afterward."
"Prentice," Sable said.
"Prentice and the woman at the spring. That was him and Beale and I'd bet the whole of my life that Beale held the rifle and Cutter did the other."
"He was ordered to."
"He was ordered to," Sparrow agreed, "and he'd have done it either way, and Halstead knew that, and used it, and wrote it in a book so it would be his doing and not Cutter's. That's the part I never understood until this week."
Burner looked north.
"Does Cutter want us?"
"No," Sparrow said. "That's what I've been trying to say. Cutter doesn't want anything. He goes where the man is."
"Then we've just put the two of them together in one place with one rifle," Burner said.
Nobody argued with that.
He took four people and went north at eight o'clock and they came back at three in the morning having found exactly nothing but a set of boot prints in the snow that went four miles up the old road and then onto rock.
He knew before he went that he would not find him.
He went anyway, because there was a dead man on the floor of the shop frame and somebody had to do something, and because doing nothing on that particular night would have taken something out of him he could not afford to lose.
He got back at three and sat down on a drum and could not get up again.
Weathers found him there at four.
"How long have you been sitting there?"
"An hour."
"Doing what?"
"Deciding whether to stand up."
She looked at him for a long moment and then sat down on the drum next to him, which she had never once done.
"You've slept eleven hours in five days," she said.
"That's about right."
"You walked twenty-six miles with a torn back, crawled four hundred yards on your belly, stood in a fight, dug two graves in frozen ground, walked a man to a gate, and then went out for seven hours in the dark."
"Yes."
"So I'm going to say a thing to you as a medical matter and I want you to hear it as one," Weathers said.
"You are not thinking clearly and you have not been thinking clearly since about Tuesday, and every single decision you make from here until you sleep is going to be worse than the ones you made last week."
Burner did not answer.
"And the reason I'm saying it tonight," she said, "is that in about six hours, seventy people are going to wake up in a burned yard with a dead man in the shop and nine days of food, and they are going to want somebody to tell them what happens next."
"Halloran."
"Halloran's been awake as long as you have."
"Then they'll have to work it out themselves."
"That's not an answer and you know it."
Burner put his face in his hands.
"I've got nothing left to tell them," he said.
"I know."
"No. Listen." He looked up. "I mean it as a fact. For five weeks I have known the next thing. Every single time. Go to the yard, hold the well, cut the wire, light the slope. There has always been a next thing and it has always been in my hands before anybody asked."
"And now?"
"Now we're in it," Burner said. "This is the place. There's no march and no raid and no clever thing. There are seventy people in a concrete yard with nine days of food and five months of winter, and the next thing isn't a plan. It's a thousand mornings."
Weathers nodded slowly.
"Yes," she said.
"And I don't know how to do that."
"No," she agreed. "You don't. You're a man who's spent a year being extremely good at four days at a time."
She stood up. "Fortunately there are seventy-one other people here, and about nine of them have run a farm, and two have run a school, and one of them ran a hospital ward for thirty years, and every single one of us has been waiting for you to stop."
Burner looked up at her.
"That's the kindest thing anybody's said to me in a month," he said.
"It wasn't kind," Weathers said. "Go to bed."
He slept fourteen hours.
He woke at six in the evening on the twenty-fifth of October on a bench in the back room of the block building, under three blankets he did not remember, with a dog on his feet.
The building was full of people.
That was the first thing he understood, lying there in the warm dark. There was noise everywhere, low, constant, dozens of voices, a child crying somewhere and being shushed, a pot being scraped, somebody laughing.
Seventy people were living in a concrete building.
He lay there for a long while and listened to it.
Then he got up and went out into the main room and stood at the edge of it and watched a camp he had not organized get on with things.
Halloran had a plank table set up with four people around it and a slate and he was doing something with numbers.