Chapter 17 #2
He hammered them, three rounds as fast as the double action would run, all of them low in the chest because he was shooting off the ground at an angle and the Rhino's low bore axis meant the muzzle barely moved between them.
That was the whole reason he had carried the thing for two years and it had never once mattered until that second.
The man went down at eleven feet and did not get up.
The rest of it lasted about eleven more seconds and Burner saw almost none of it.
Sable killed one. Priest hit another twice and that man ran, and the fourth went off the trail into the timber and was gone before anybody could get a sight on him.
Then there was shouting, and Sable's face very close to his, and somebody cutting his belt.
"It's in the hip," he said. His voice sounded perfectly calm and very far away, which he knew from Weathers was a bad sign in itself. "Left hip. Front to back or it's still in there, I can't tell."
"Lie still."
"If it's the artery I'll be gone in four minutes and you should leave now."
"Shut up," Sable said.
It was not the artery.
Weathers said so eleven hours later, in the yard, after six people had carried him nineteen miles on a litter made from two rifles and a coat, which was a thing Burner had done for Delacroix in another life and had never once thought about being on the other end of.
"It went in the front of the hip and it did not come out," she said. "It's against the bone and there's a piece of the bone gone. If it had been two inches inboard we'd be having a different conversation and it would be short."
"Can you get it?"
"No."
"Weathers."
"I can get it in about four years when I've got a real table and light and somebody who's done it before," she said. "Today I can clean it, drain it, and keep the infection off you, and that is the entire extent of the medicine available in the state of Montana."
She looked at him.
"You're going to keep that round for the rest of your life," she said. "And you are going to walk with a stick, and you are never going to run again, and I am telling you now on the first day rather than letting you find it out over six months."
Burner lay on the table and looked at the ceiling of the block building.
"How long till I can walk?"
"Six weeks to stand. Three months to walk badly. A year to walk the way you're going to walk from now on."
"And hunting?"
"You'll hunt," Weathers said. "You'll sit in a blind like a sensible man instead of climbing ridges like an idiot, and you'll probably kill more deer than you ever did."
He was down for nine weeks.
They were, in a way he never managed to explain to anybody, among the most important weeks of his life, because for the first time since the lights went out he was a person that things happened around instead of a person who made them happen.
He lay on a cot in the block building and watched the camp run itself.
Halloran and Otway brought in a hundred and eleven acres of potatoes with forty people and no help from him.
Delacroix took the hunting. She ran it exactly the way he had, pairs and reports and rounds accounted for, and by October she had taught six more people and was better at the teaching than he had ever been.
Priest, who was seventeen now, went out twice to the western camps with Sable and came back with information, and the second time he came back with a map he had drawn himself that was better than anything Burner had ever produced.
Shyla came and sat with him every evening.
She was ten now, definitely, because May had been decided on and had happened, and she had grown four inches in a year and she could shoot.
He had taught her in the spring, exactly as he had promised, and she had hated eleven days of it exactly as he had said she would, and she was now better at two hundred yards than nine of the adults.
"They're saying you'll never walk right," she said, on about the fifth evening.
"That's true."
"Weathers said it."
"Weathers tells people the truth on the first day. It's her best quality and it's why nobody likes her for about a week."
Shyla thought about that.
"Are you scared?" she said.
Burner looked at the ceiling.
He could have said no. It would have been the easy thing and she was ten years old.
"Yes," he said.
"Of what?"
"Of being useless."
Shyla was quiet for a while.
"That's stupid," she said.
"Probably."
"No, I mean it's actually stupid, I'm not being nice."
She turned on the crate she was sitting on.
"You've been saying for a year that the thing that went wrong with Halstead was that everything went through one man. You said it to Halloran in the shop frame in December and I was sitting right there."
"I remember."
"So if you being in a bed for nine weeks breaks this camp, then you built it wrong," Shyla said, "and if it doesn't break, then you built it right and you should be happy."
Burner lay there and looked at a ten year old who had crawled out of a deadfall eleven months ago.
"Where did you get that?" he said.
"From you. You say it all the time."
"I've never said it that clearly in my life."
"That's because you say it while you're doing four other things," Shyla said. "I've been listening to you for a year. I've had a lot of time."
In November they had the conversation about the western camps, and Burner had it from a cot with a stick beside him.
Stale's people had hit three settlements in October and killed two men at one of them, and there were now nine known camps in loose contact with the yard and every one of them had asked, in one form or another, what the yard was going to do about it.
That was the meeting where it changed.
Burner listened to four hours of it, and the thing that struck him, lying there, was that not one single person turned to look at him for an answer.
They argued. Halloran moderated. Delacroix laid out what could and could not be done with the rifles and rounds available with a precision that made Burner want to applaud.
Sparrow talked for twenty minutes about what happens to a valley when one group becomes the group that handles things, and he was not persuasive, and he was right, and they took it seriously anyway.
Neve, who was twenty-one now and who ran the school and half the greenhouse work, said the thing that carried it.
"We're not going to go and fight him," she said. "We haven't got the people and we haven't got the rounds and we'd lose eleven of us to kill six of them and be exactly where we started with fewer of us."
"So we do nothing?"
"We do the thing that actually worked," Neve said.
"Last year, seventy-two people sat in a basin and nobody in this valley knew we existed except the man who was eating us. And the thing that beat him was not the fire and it was not the well. It was that twenty people came out of a shed and a camp took them in, and then another camp heard about it,
and then another."
She looked around.
"There are nine camps in contact with us," she said.
"That's about two hundred people. Stale's got six men. If those nine camps are talking to each other, and every one of them knows what happened at the church in July within four days of it happening, then he can't do it. Not because we've beaten him.
Because the thing he does only works on people who are alone."
They voted to send runners.
Not soldiers. Runners, and seed, and salt, and a person who could set a bone, and a standing offer that any camp in the valley could send anybody to the yard in winter and be fed.
It was the single most expensive decision the camp had ever made and it passed fifty-eight to fourteen.
Burner stood up on the fourth of December.
It took him eleven minutes and he did it alone in the back room because he had been rehearsing it for a week and did not want an audience, and when he finally got upright with both hands on the cot frame his whole left side went white with pain and he stayed there anyway.
Then he got the stick and went six steps to the door and stood in it.
The block building was full. It was always full now, seventy-odd people and a stove and a school going in the corner and Nate's bench and the noise of it.
Nobody noticed him for about fifteen seconds.
Then Weathers looked up from the far end and saw him standing in the doorway on a stick, and she did not say anything and did not make a fuss, and she simply nodded once and went back to what she was doing.
It was the best thing anybody had done for him in a year.
In January, Cutter asked to have the chain taken off.
He asked Burner directly, in the north bay, which was the first thing he had asked anybody for in eleven months.
"Why now?" Burner said.
"Because it's been a year," Cutter said, "and because I want to know what I do if there's nothing holding me."
Burner leaned on the stick and looked at him.
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said."
"It's a true thing. I don't know if it's honest."
"It's the same word."
"It isn't," Cutter said, "and you know it isn't, and that's about the only thing I've worked out in a year."
They voted in February, and it was the closest vote in the camp's history, and it went thirty-seven to thirty-five with one abstention, and Halloran read it out three times.
They took the chain off on the ninth of February.
Cutter stood in the north bay rubbing his wrist and looking at the open door and did not walk through it for two hours.
Then he went out and got water and came back.
And that was, for eleven months, the entire story of it.
Spring came. They planted a hundred and sixty acres. Four more camps came into contact, and one of them came in entirely, nineteen people who walked twenty-two miles in April and asked to stay and were voted on and taken.
Ninety-six people in the yard by June.
Burner walked with a stick and could do about four miles in a day if the ground was good, and he ran the mapping and the cache system and the notebook work, and he did not go out to strange camps anymore because Priest and Sable were better at it than he had ever been.