Chapter 80
The main street ran east to west through the mining town, lined with buildings constructed for utility rather than comfort.
Charlotte guided the mare at a slow walk, carefully studying each structure.
The cabins showed signs of recent use: empty food containers stacked beside the porches and a clothesline still sagging from the weight of recent use.
As they passed the processing plant, its doors stood open, revealing workbenches arranged in neat rows and tools laid out as if their owners expected to return at any moment.
A generator sat against the far wall, its fuel cap removed and set beside it, suggesting someone had left their task unfinished.
Mason pointed. “Someone was here.”
She dismounted outside the town’s general store.
Her legs protested, stiff from the saddle and weakened by the infection, and she steadied herself against the mare.
The store’s interior was dark and smelled of wet wood.
The shelves were empty except for a few worthless leftovers: a work glove, a broken flashlight, a toy car missing a wheel.
Charlotte moved through the store with her flashlight, sweeping the floor.
In the back room, behind a counter where a register had been pried open and emptied, she found the first real evidence.
A map lay spread across the counter under a coffee mug filled with pens.
It was topographic, like Helen’s, but in a different hand, with a red route running west toward the state line.
Next to the map was a clipboard holding a handwritten inventory.
The list was detailed, including food supplies, medical kits, fuel, and ammunition, complete with numbers and dates.
The most recent entry was from three days ago.
Charlotte examined the inventory closely.
The quantities were sufficient to sustain thirty or more people, and the level of organization suggested military training or something similar.
She then returned to the street, where the rain had diminished to a mist. Mason was sitting on the gelding, displaying the patience of a child accustomed to waiting without explanation.
“Let’s check the cabins,” Charlotte said.
They moved down the row. Each cabin told the same story of a hurried departure, with blankets, cookware, books, and other small belongings left behind.
In the seventh cabin, Charlotte found a license plate.
It lay on the floor beside an overturned chair, facedown, and she would have missed it entirely if the flashlight hadn’t caught the reflective backing.
She picked it up and turned it over in her gloved hands.
New Jersey. The yellow and blue outline of the state she had seen on thousands of vehicles during her years as a mail carrier.
The plate was dirty but intact; its numbers were still legible.
She stood still with the license plate in her hand.
Her breath came short behind the mask, and for several seconds, the only sound was the rain on the cabin’s metal roof.
Mason had dismounted and stood in the doorway with the dog pressed against his leg.
“What is it?”
“License plate,” Charlotte said. “From New Jersey. Where I’m from.”
She placed the plate on the small table in the cabin and continued her search.
The methodical quality that had characterized her postal route was fully engaged, and she moved through the room with renewed focus.
In the drawer of a nightstand, beneath a folded shirt that someone deemed unworthy of the space it would take up in a backpack, she discovered a business card.
Tuckerton Marine Supply. The address was on Main Street, just three blocks from the post office where Charlotte had sorted mail every morning for twelve years. Though the card was creased and water-stained, the phone number and the logo, a stylized anchor inside a circle, were unmistakable.
She had delivered mail to that store. The owner was a man in his sixties who came out to collect packages himself because he didn’t trust them to be left on the porch.
He had a German Shepherd that barked at the mail truck, and Charlotte had learned to time her approach because the neighbor to the north worked nights and slept during the day.
She slipped the card into the hazmat suit’s chest pocket beside the maps and the urgent message from Three Ridges.
The license plate was left on the table.
Outside, the mist had thickened into fog between the cabins.
Mason stood beside the gelding with one hand on its neck, and the dog sat at his feet watching the eastern approach.
Charlotte mounted the mare. A moment later, a cough took her as she settled into the saddle, and when it passed, she gathered the reins and turned west toward the road leading out of town.
As they rode, she allowed herself a question she hadn’t asked in the days since Crestview Street.
The license plate and the business card weren’t random.
They were specific to a geography she knew intimately, carried by people who had traveled hundreds of miles from a coastline that no longer resembled the place she remembered.
Had others from Tuckerton made it out? The families on her route, the neighbors who had waved from porches and asked about Sophia and the weather.
She didn’t voice the question. She knew Mason was listening, and some questions were better carried silently than asked out loud.
As the mining town faded behind them, Charlotte felt its weight alongside the infection, the messages, and the responsibility of a child on a horse moving west toward a farm with a red mailbox and an apple tree.