Chapter 19
They walked west from the gravel driveway without looking back.
Rachel carried the heavier pack with canned food, water bottles, and first-aid supplies.
Sophie followed three steps behind, her blistered feet forcing her into the careful sideways gait Rachel had heard on every mile for the past week.
Morning light stretched their shadows across the road.
Rachel already had the map in her hand, folded along a worn crease that pointed toward the city ahead.
The road carried them past the first bend and into open farmland.
Rachel stopped at a fence post and spread the map across the wood.
The city appeared as a gray blotch in small capital letters, squarely across their route west and about twelve miles from where they stood.
North and south, thinner roads wound through rural stretches and small communities.
She measured the distance with her thumb against the scale.
Skirting the city would add at least twenty miles, and every added mile meant another day on their feet that couldn’t take much more.
The rural routes offered something worse than distance.
They meant sparse water sources, guarded farms, and limited supplies, the same conditions that had kept them rationing every cracker since they left the SUV.
The road behind them had already taught them that hand pumps were guarded by farmers who limited what travelers could take, stores were closed or picked bare, and people answered doors with shotguns because too many strangers had asked before them.
“We need to go into the city,” Rachel said.
“What?” Sophie asked.
“The city is in our way, and we need what’s in there more than we need to avoid it.”
“That’s the exact opposite of what anyone with a brain would do right now.”
“I know how it sounds,” Rachel said.
“You saw those people. The ones leaving. They’re getting out, and we’d be walking in.”
“Our shoes are falling apart. Your feet look raw from a week on bad roads. We need larger packs, rain gear, more food than what’s left in those cans, and containers that hold more than a liter of water. We won’t find any of that out here.”
“You don’t know what we’ll find in there, either.”
“I know we won’t make it to Brenton with what we have. Not both of us, and not on these roads. Two hundred miles is too far with your blisters splitting open and this pack rubbing my shoulders raw every morning,” Rachel said.
Sophie didn’t argue after that. She waited while Rachel tucked the map into her backpack, then adjusted her straps and started walking again.
Her silence carried more weight than her protests would have.
She followed, and the road drew them toward the city’s outer neighborhoods as the morning warmed.
The warning signs appeared three miles out.
A family of four passed them heading east. The father pushed a shopping cart loaded with plastic bags and a sleeping child, while the mother carried a second child against her hip. Neither parent spoke.
The cart’s wheels caught on cracks in the pavement, scraping through the quiet road.
Behind them came an older couple with matching rolling suitcases.
The woman’s face was flushed and damp beneath a wide-brimmed hat.
Two more families followed, then a man alone with a backpack and a five-gallon water jug knocking against his leg with each step.
They passed a woman sitting on a roadside tree stump with her suitcase open beside her.
She sorted through clothes she’d decided were too heavy to carry, setting aside a sweater, a pair of jeans, and a paperback book with its cover curled from the humidity.
A man in his sixties stood at the edge of a driveway two miles later, watching the exodus with his arms crossed.
He wore a faded polo shirt and held a garden hose that wasn’t running.
Rachel stopped at the property line and called to him.
“What’s it like in there?” Rachel asked.
“Water pressure’s gone in most neighborhoods.
Some people still have a trickle if they’re on a gravity-fed line, but the pumps are dead.
Trash is piling up because the collection trucks don’t run.
A house fire burned for eight hours two nights ago because the fire engine was as dead as every other vehicle.
Nobody could get it started,” the man said.
“Any police?”
“Some. They’re walking beats now, same as everyone else. A few officers showed up on horseback, but most of them are working on foot.”
“Are stores still open?”
“Some. The owners who stayed open decided it was safer to stay open than to close. They’ve got limits, cash only, and they’re running out of everything people actually need,” the man said.
Rachel thanked him and kept walking. Sophie stayed close.
Her eyes moved from abandoned properties to the people leaving, then back to Rachel, as if to check whether the plan had changed.
It hadn’t. Rachel guided them onto a side street that ran parallel to the main road, keeping to occupied neighborhoods and empty sidewalks.
The streets grew narrower, the houses closer together, and the smell changed from cut grass to garbage left too long in the heat.
Spilled fuel hung in the air, mixed with the faint acrid edge of smoke from somewhere unseen.
They reached the commercial district an hour later.
Six blocks of storefronts stretched ahead, most of them dark behind security gates or boarded windows.
A drugstore had been emptied, its glass door propped open with a brick and its shelves bare inside.
A hardware store stood locked and dark. Light showed through the front windows of a grocery at the far end of the block, where people waited in a loose line outside the doors.
Rachel counted thirty people, maybe more.
They stood in the heat with baskets, bags, and empty containers.
They didn’t shift with impatience the way she’d seen at other distribution points.
They waited because they had no other choice.
A man in his fifties stood in the doorway with his arms crossed.
He wore an apron over a plain T-shirt, and his voice carried.
“Five at a time. One basket each. Cash only. No exceptions,” the man said.
The line didn’t move. His words settled over the waiting crowd, and no one changed shape or place.
Rachel took Sophie’s arm and led her toward the end.
No one objected, but no one made room, either.
They became the new end of the line, thirty-first and thirty-second, standing in the heat with empty hands and packs on their backs.
They watched the doorway, waiting for five people to come out so five more could go in.