Chapter 62
Charlotte reached Mason and the horses where they waited at the tree line.
The gelding stood steady beneath the boy’s weight, its ears flicking toward the burned vehicles, and Mason’s eyes followed Charlotte with the focus of a child waiting for an adult to translate chaos into instructions he could follow.
“We need to check what happened here,” she said. “There was a fight. People got hurt. I need to make sure no one’s still here who needs help, and I need to understand who was fighting.”
Mason nodded.
“I’m going to put you over there.” Charlotte pointed to a depression in the ground twenty yards back from the road. “You’ll be able to see me the whole time. The dog stays with you. If you see anything, anything at all, you whistle. Like this.”
She demonstrated two short notes that cut through the evening air. Mason repeated it. His whistle was thin but clear.
“Good. That’s our signal. You don’t come out unless I call you. Understand?”
Charlotte gently helped him down from the gelding, leading both horses to a secluded hollow.
She tethered them to the exposed roots of an oak tree, ensuring they would be hidden from the road.
The dog trotted closely beside Mason, leaning against his leg as if it had taken on the important role of guardian.
With a heavy heart, Charlotte returned alone to the battlefield.
The light was fading rapidly, casting shadows over the scene.
Armed with her flashlight, she carefully swept it across the area, piecing together the story of what had occurred, much like she had once done with the fragments of lives she encountered on her postal route.
Her first sight was the graves. There were four of them, lined up along the ditch.
The soil was still dark with recent moisture, bearing witness to the sorrowful task that had been carried out.
There were no markers or names, just the stark reality of burial, performed by hands that were burdened with duties far heavier than ceremony.
As she moved toward the Humvee, her heart ached at the sight before her.
The interior was a shell of what it once was, entirely gutted.
The fire had claimed the seats, the dashboard, and every combustible element.
It became painfully clear that someone had searched the wreckage after the fight, taking only what they could use and leaving this once-functional vehicle a ghost of its former self.
Behind the Humvee, partly concealed by its burned bulk, she found the first body that hadn’t been buried.
It lay face down in the gravel, one arm outstretched toward the tree.
Charlotte kneeled and turned the body with her gloved hands, moving it just enough to see the uniform.
The insignia of the Sovereign Nations Alliance.
The same design she had seen on the ships in the bay, lying in the dirt of a rural highway twenty miles inland.
She found a second body ten yards away, on its back with a wound in the chest that hadn’t come from burning.
The uniform was identical, and the insignia was the same.
The equipment matched as well, including a rifle still clutched in dead fingers, the same model she had seen on the shoreline patrol.
Charlotte stood very still. The flashlight beam held steady on the second body’s face, which was young and unmarked except for the wound, and the realization moved through her.
The invasion wasn’t contained. The ships on the horizon, the landing craft moving toward shore, and the checkpoints she had seen on rural roads all pointed to the leading edge of something larger.
The SNA was pushing inland, and the evidence of their advance was across this stretch of highway in the bodies of men who had been sent here to establish control and had instead been met with resistance sufficient to stop them.
She thought of the messages in her pouch.
Twenty-one pieces of paper carrying words between people who believed the world still contained routes that could be traveled safely.
Some of those addresses lay in the path of whatever was coming.
Some of the people waiting for news might already be beyond reach.
Charlotte turned from the bodies and swept the flashlight across the rest of the scene, finding more shell casings and evidence of firing from multiple positions.
The civilian pickup had been caught in the crossfire.
Its windshield was starred with impacts, and the driver’s seat was dark with what she didn’t need to examine closely to understand.
She was about to return to Mason when the whistle cut through the darkness. Two short notes.
Charlotte turned. Mason was standing at the edge of the hollow, one hand on the oak’s roots, the other pointing toward the burned Humvee. The dog stood beside him, body rigid, a low growl building in its chest.
“There,” Mason said. “Something moved.”
Charlotte followed his pointing finger, her heart racing as the flashlight beam swept across the Humvee’s charred hull, along the scattered debris, and over the grave mounds.
It finally settled on a shape that hadn’t been there mere moments ago.
She noticed a figure low to the ground, creeping cautiously behind the Humvee’s rear axle.
The way the person moved suggested a desperate urgency.
With mounting concern, Charlotte kneeled and pulled the pistol from her belt.
Days had passed since she had taken it, carrying it silently.
She steadied the weapon, her hands trembling slightly as she aimed at the darkness behind the Humvee.
Every breath she took reverberated through her, a reminder of the weight of the situation and the unknown fate of the person before her.
“Don’t move,” she called. “I’m armed. Show yourself slowly.”
The movement stopped. For seconds, nothing happened.
Then, with the careful deliberation of someone who understood exactly what was being asked of them, a hand emerged from behind the axle and rose into the beam of Charlotte’s flashlight.
The hand was bare, holding no weapon. Wrapped around the wrist, visible even in the failing light, was a bandage dark with blood that hadn’t fully dried.