Chapter 35
Charlotte crouched low behind the SUV, her heart racing as she listened to the voices arguing and moving east toward the highway she had just left an hour ago.
As the last footsteps faded away, she slowly rose from her crouch, her muscles aching with every movement, and cautiously slipped between two houses with backyards separated by a rusty chain-link fence.
The gap was tight, barely wide enough for her shoulders, and the fence snagged at her T-shirt as she pushed through.
Emerging into a backyard, she noticed a child’s slide standing beside an above-ground pool, its water darkening in the twilight.
She hurried across the yard, the pool providing a buffer between her and the street, before leaping over a low wooden fence into the next property.
Her lungs burned with each breath, a reminder of her struggle.
The stealthy movements required far more from her fragile respiratory system than the steady walking had, and she felt the urge to cough rising with each cautious inhale.
With determination, she bit the inside of her cheek, fighting back the cough until it passed.
With every step, she moved through a series of connected backyards, trying to stay as quiet as possible while staying parallel to the road where the gunfire had erupted, feeling a mix of fear and resolve inside her.
She heard two more shots from that direction, then shouting, then the sound of an engine starting, a loud, mechanical rumble from a vehicle old enough to survive what had killed the newer models.
The engine revved, gears ground, and then the sound faded eastward, leaving the residential quiet to reclaim the evening.
Charlotte paused beside a toolshed, one hand on the corrugated metal wall, and let herself cough.
It was the worst yet, deep enough to leave a wet taste in her throat.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her bandaged hand and kept moving.
The backyards gave way to an alley behind a row of stores.
She emerged cautiously, scanning both directions before stepping onto the cracked pavement.
The alley was empty except for dumpsters, broken glass, a shopping cart on its side, and a splintered delivery pallet.
She heard voices from the street beyond the stores.
Not the angry tones of the gunmen, but the murmur of people doing the practical work of survival.
Charlotte approached the corner and peered around the brick edge.
Five people stood beside a pickup truck parked at the curb, its bed loaded with water, boxes, blankets, and a gasoline can.
Two men and three women worked. One woman kept watch at the street’s eastern end, a baseball bat resting against her leg.
The others transferred supplies from a looted convenience store to the truck, working steadily under a deadline.
They weren’t threats. They were people who had recognized faster than most that the old rules no longer applied.
Charlotte understood it, and in different circumstances, she might have been one of them.
She was about to step into the open when the woman with the baseball bat turned and looked straight at the alley.
Charlotte froze. The woman’s gaze passed over the shadow where she stood, then returned to the street.
She withdrew into the alley and continued south, putting distance between herself and the supply group.
Their presence was one more data point since leaving the wagon.
Some people were organizing, some were fleeing, some were shooting at each other, and none of them knew what came next.
She circled back to the main road a half mile south of the gunfire.
The light had faded to early-evening blue, and the temperature had dropped enough that the borrowed T-shirt no longer felt adequate.
Charlotte walked with her arms crossed, the water bottle tucked against her ribs, the watch still clutched in her right hand.
Her cough had settled into a wet rhythm she no longer bothered to interpret.
She took two of Ellen’s antibiotics dry and kept walking.
The subdivision appeared on her left as the road crested a small hill. It was newer than the neighborhood she had passed through earlier: a planned community of identical homes on curved streets with names like Meadowview Drive and Sunset Circle. Charlotte turned onto Meadowview and stopped.
The street was empty in a way that the previous neighborhoods had not been. There were no bodies, signs of violence, or evidence that the gas had reached here. Instead, it felt like a place evacuated in unison, as if every resident had received the same instruction at the same moment and obeyed.
Cars sat in driveways with trunks open; their front doors stood ajar.
She walked slowly down Meadowview, past house after house showing the same pattern.
Someone had moved these people out before the gas arrived.
At the intersection of Meadowview and Sunset, a handwritten sign had been nailed to a telephone pole.
The paper was fresh, the writing clear in block capital letters.
“EVACUATION POINT: RIDGE ROAD COMMUNITY CENTER. NATIONAL GUARD En route. brING ESSENTIALS ONLY. GOD BLESS.”
Ridge Road. Where Ellen, Robert, and Melissa had been taking her. The wagon had been heading there before Charlotte climbed out and turned east. The community center represented safety, organization, and the closest thing to an official response this part of the county had managed.
Charlotte stood looking at the sign. Her lungs ached with each breath, and the watch in her hand had begun to feel less like an object than a part of her body.
She thought of the wagon creaking west toward Ridge Road, of medicine and food and people who knew first aid.
She thought of survival as a choice. Staying alive rather than pursuing the dead.
Then she thought of Sophia’s phone, lying screen-down in the ash beside the maple tree.
Found outside the house, not in it. A detail that changed everything.
Charlotte walked toward the glow. Her shadow stretched ahead of her on the pavement, long and thin in the dying light, and she followed it because it was the only thing moving in her direction.