Chapter 100
They camped in a stand of pines on the western slope of the ridge.
Charlotte had chosen the spot for its vantage point.
They could see anyone approaching from three directions, and the trees provided enough cover to conceal their outlines from above.
She unsaddled the horses, rubbed them down with handfuls of pine needles, and picketed them in a clearing where grass grew between the rocks.
Mason didn’t help. He dismounted when she told him to, removed his mask when she said it was safe, and then sat against a tree with the dog pressed against his side, his eyes fixed on a distant point. She offered him food. He took it, ate without interest, and returned to his silence.
Morning arrived with a chill. Frost covered the grass in areas where the sun hadn’t reached.
Charlotte woke to the dog’s wet nose against her cheek and heard Mason awake already, sitting against the same tree and staring into the same empty distance he had brought to sleep with him.
Despite the risk, she built a small fire.
They needed warmth, and the smoke would dissipate through the pine canopy before rising high enough to give them away.
She boiled water from the creek they had crossed the day before, added a pinch of salt from Claudia’s supplies, and handed Mason a cup.
She saw the blue in his fingertips and wrapped her own around them for a moment, feeling the small bones beneath skin that had no business being that cold in September.
“Drink,” she said. “All of it.”
He drank, but his eyes didn’t meet hers.
They ate dried apples and jerky. Charlotte checked the horses’ feet and cleaned the gelding’s left fore, where a stone had bruised the frog sometime during yesterday’s climb.
The mare was sound, and the gelding would manage. Throughout it all, Mason barely spoke.
“Thank you for the cup,” he said when she handed it to him. “I’m not hungry enough for more. Which way do we go?”
She showed him the map. West along the ridge road Claudia had marked, then north toward the state forest checkpoint.
From there, the route opened toward the first message delivery on Millerton Road, and beyond that, the long arc toward Colorado and whatever remained of the family cabin. He nodded, and that was all.
Charlotte understood the withdrawal. She’d done it herself after Jacob died, after the community center, and in the terrible days after Crestview Street when the world had narrowed to the next breath and the step after that.
Mason was doing the same thing. It wouldn’t hold forever.
Withdrawal never did. Forcing it to break before he was ready would only do more damage, and Charlotte had promised Claudia she would keep him safe.
Her own grief lived somewhere else. She felt it in her hands when she handled Claudia’s map, in her chest when she thought of the cabin by the creek with its south-facing windows, and in the hollow behind her sternum where the infection had been and where something quieter had taken its place.
Claudia was dead. The farm was occupied or destroyed.
The messages in the saddlebags were still undelivered, and the route west toward Colorado stretched across a broken country that had just demonstrated how temporary safety really was.
She packed the camp with care. She doused the fire completely, scattered the ashes, and covered the pit with pine duff.
She saddled the horses with attention to each strap and buckle, checking twice what normally required one look.
The dog watched her work with its head tilted, and when she approached Mason, who was still sitting against the tree, the animal rose and pressed against his leg.
“We need to move,” Charlotte said.
Mason stood. He gathered his small pack, the canteen, a handful of jerky, and the child-sized mask clipped to his belt, then walked to the gelding without being told.
Charlotte helped him mount. They rode west along the ridge.
The trail widened as it descended through mixed hardwood, where morning light came in patches, and the air carried the scent of damp earth and pine resin.
Charlotte kept the mare at a walk her lungs could sustain, and Mason’s gelding matched the pace without guidance.
An hour into the ride, the trees thinned.
The trail opened onto a rocky overlook where the land fell away toward a valley broader than the one that had held Claudia’s farm.
Charlotte reined the mare to a stop and lifted the binoculars from the saddlebag.
She swept the valley from east to west, tree line to tree line.
The figures were there before she found them.
Three men stood on the opposite ridge where the trail resumed its descent.
They were in the open, rifles slung, watching the overlook where Charlotte and Mason had stopped with the patient attention of people who’d been waiting.
She lowered the binoculars slowly but didn’t react.
Her body had learned since the shoreline that fear was information more than emotion, and what she felt now was the cold, clarifying focus of a woman assessing a threat and understanding exactly what it meant.
They had been found. The question was by whom, and what came next depended entirely on the answer.