Chapter 17
The vote on Cutter went fifty-two to eighteen and it did not go the way Burner had expected at all.
They did not vote to take him in.
They voted to keep him, which was a different thing, and it was Weathers who found the words for it on the sixth day when the whole camp had argued itself sick.
"He's not a member and he's not a prisoner," she said. "He's a man who can't be let loose and can't be killed and can't be trusted, and the only honest name for that is a responsibility. So let's say that out loud and stop pretending we're deciding anything else."
So Cutter lived in the north bay with a chain long enough to reach the tool bench and the door and nowhere else, and he worked, and he ate what everybody ate, and there were two people awake near him at all times for the rest of the winter.
He never once complained about the chain.
That was the thing that unsettled people most. Burner watched forty of them come to the same conclusion in their own time, which was that a man who accepts a chain without argument is not a man who has been humbled. He is a man who has always been on one and is relieved to have it back.
Sparrow said as much in March.
"It's the worst thing I've ever seen," he said. "And I don't know what the alternative is, and neither do you, and I've watched you not know for six weeks."
"No," Burner agreed.
March came in wet.
The snow went off the burned acres in eleven days and what came up underneath was the thing nobody had expected, which was grass.
Cheatgrass first, and then, in the low places where the fire had run hottest and cleanest, real bunchgrass coming back out of root crowns that had been choked out for twenty years. Otway walked those four hundred acres for three days with his hands behind his back like a man in a church.
"It's the best thing I've seen since the lights went out," he said.
"It's grass."
"It's four hundred acres of open ground with two years of ash on it and no competition," Otway said. "Give me forty people and a month and I'll put potatoes in a hundred acres of that."
They planted in April.
Seventy-three people, because Rowe's count now included Cutter whether anybody liked it or not, and about two thirds of them had never grown anything in their lives, and they put in a hundred and eleven acres in nineteen days.
The greenhouses went up in the second week, panes hauled twenty-six miles on sleds in November by people who had thought they were carrying dead weight.
And on the fourteenth of April, Burner walked out of the maintenance yard with four people and a notebook to go and find the first name in it.
It was Halloran who argued about the composition of the party, and he was right, and Burner lost.
"You're not taking Sable and Delacroix and Priest," he said. "That's three of the best rifles in this camp and you'd be walking them into country we know nothing about for weeks."
"That's the point."
"The point is that if you're gone three weeks and something comes at this yard, we've got Otway and a lot of farmers." Halloran shook his head. "Take two. Not four."
They settled on three. Burner, Sable, and Sparrow.
Sparrow because he had spent two years standing in front of frightened people and saying the first words, and because there was no one else alive who had ever done it, and because the notebook had his handwriting in it in four places where Halstead had recorded what his talker had said at a gate.
"They'll know my face," Sparrow said.
"That's why."
"You understand that at about a third of these places, the sight of me is going to get all three of us shot."
"Yes."
"And you want me anyway."
"I want the places where they don't shoot," Burner said. "Because at those places you'll be able to say a thing that nobody else on earth can say, which is that you were there and you're sorry and you'll answer for it."
Sparrow looked at him for a long moment.
"When did you decide that?" he said.
"About three in the morning in January."
They went east first.
Eleven miles to the old crossing and then north up a creek drainage to a church that the notebook said had nine people in it and had been taken from twice, in April and in August.
They found it on the third day.
It was a white clapboard building with a steeple and about forty graves behind it, and there were four people living in it, and one of them shot at Sparrow from a window at two hundred yards and missed by about nine feet.
They spent the whole next day lying in the timber a quarter mile off, doing nothing, in plain sight.
On the second day an old man came out with a rifle and stood in the churchyard and shouted at them for twenty minutes.
On the third day he let them come to eighty yards and they talked for two hours across that distance, with Sparrow doing most of it, and at the end of it the old man said the thing that Burner would hear in one form or another at almost every place they went that spring.
"Why now?" he said. "Where were you in August?"
And Sparrow said, "In the yard. Eating."
The old man came back four days later with two others and walked the twenty-six miles to the maintenance yard, and Halloran fed them, and they went home again with eleven pounds of seed potatoes and the location of every place in the notebook within thirty miles.
It worked at eleven places out of twenty-nine that spring.
That was the number Burner kept, and it was better than he had let himself hope and much worse than it felt like it should be, and by the middle of June there were four camps in loose contact with the yard and a rough trail network with marked caches and two places where a runner could sleep.
It was not an alliance. Nobody used that word. Halloran forbade it, actually, at a meeting in May, on the grounds that the second anybody in this valley started talking about alliances there would be somebody talking about terms.
"We're neighbors," he said. "That's the word. That's all we're going to be for about five years and it's enough."
The trouble came from the west, in July, from a place that was not in the notebook at all.
Burner heard about it first from a fourteen year old boy who ran nine miles from the church camp with a message and arrived so far gone that Weathers had him on a table for an hour.
Three men had come to the church. They had taken forty pounds of food and a rifle and they had broken the old man's arm, and they had said they would be back at the end of the month.
"Did they say a name?" Burner asked.
The boy nodded.
"They said they were from Stale," he said.
It was not a place. That was the first thing they had to work out.
It took a week and four conversations at three camps before Burner understood that Stale was a man, and that there were somewhere between six and nine of them, and that they had come down out of the northwest in June, and that they were nothing like Halstead at all.
"He doesn't explain anything," the woman at the creek camp said. "That's what I can't get over. He came here on the second and he took our flour and he never said one word about why. Not a threat. Not terms. He just took it and left."
Burner sat with that for a long time afterward.
"That's worse," Sparrow said, when he brought it up. "You know that's worse."
"I know."
"Halstead needed us to agree to the language. That was the crack in him, that was the whole thing you found. This one doesn't need anything."
"Yes."
"So what do we do?"
Burner looked at the yard, at a hundred and eleven acres of potatoes coming into flower, at seventy-odd people who had built a roof out of scrap and survived a winter.
"We go and look at him," he said.
They went in August, six of them, and it went wrong in the first ninety seconds.
That was the part Burner would take apart for years afterward and never entirely forgive himself for. They had good information. They had a marked route, a rally point, a rule about noise, and three people with a year of hard practice.
And they came around the shoulder of a ridge above the old lumber yard at ten in the morning and walked directly into four men coming the other way on the same trail.
Nobody had any warning. Both parties stopped dead at about twenty-five feet.
There was a second, maybe two, where nothing happened at all.
Then the man on the left of the other group went for a pistol on his hip and everything came apart.
Burner had the AK slung and not in his hands, which was the actual mistake, the one underneath all the others, because he had been walking a marked trail in country he thought he knew.
He did the thing he had drilled for a year instead.
His right hand went across his body to the crossdraw and the Rhino came out and up and he was already moving left off the trail line as it came.
The other man was faster.
It was a Beretta 92 Compact, and Burner saw it clearly in the fraction of a second before it went off, the squared slide and the blued finish, an old police gun that had been carried a long way.
The first round went past his head.
The second hit him in the hip.
It was not like being shot in a story. There was no punch and no spin. His left leg simply stopped being a thing that held him up, as though someone had removed it without telling him, and he went down sideways onto the rocks with his hip already going hot and wet.
He did not drop the revolver.
That was the only thing he did right in the whole encounter and it was entirely because of a year of carrying it in the same place on the same side and drawing it eleven hundred times in the dark.
The man came forward.
That was his mistake. He came forward two steps with the Beretta up, tracking down to where Burner had fallen, and in doing so he closed the distance to about fifteen feet and put himself against the flat gray of the sky.
Burner was flat on his right side with his shooting arm underneath him and his hip on fire.
He fired three times.