Chapter 47
The leader blocked the gap Sophie had used, pipe raised. He kept glancing between Rachel and the trees. The youngest man hadn’t moved. He stood by the tracks, hands at his sides, watching her in the failing light.
“She’s gone, and you’ve got a decision to make,” Rachel said.
Blood had soaked through the left side of Rachel’s shirt by the time the leader made his decision.
She could feel it running warm along her skin and into the denim of her jeans.
The pain had arrived fully as a deep, pulling ache that tightened with each breath, but stopping to look at the wound meant surrendering the initiative, and that was the only advantage she had left.
The leader stared at the gap where Sophie had disappeared.
His pipe hung at his side, momentarily forgotten, as he weighed options Rachel could read plainly on his face.
“Jason, go after her. She can’t have gotten far,” he said.
Jason hesitated. He was the one Rachel had knocked into the equipment shed. A dark scrape marked his cheek.
“She’s fast, and it’s getting dark,” he said.
“Find her. I don’t care if it’s midnight,” the leader said.
Rachel shifted her weight toward the youngest man. The movement pulled at whatever had torn open beneath her ribs, and she bit down on the sound before it left her throat.
“He’s sending your friend into the trees after a thirteen-year-old girl in the dark. Ask yourself what happens when Jason catches her. You already know,” Rachel said.
The youngest man’s face shifted. Fear and revulsion crossed it before he could hide them. His loyalty, already weak, cracked further.
“Just don’t,” he said to Jason.
“Both of you shut up. Go, Jason,” the leader snapped.
Jason took two steps toward the trees. He stopped at the sound of shouting from the eastern tracks.
Voices carried through the twilight, moving fast. Lantern light appeared around the bend.
Three lights, then four, threw long shadows across the ballast. Sophie ran ahead of the inspection crew, pointing toward the maintenance structure.
Five figures followed. Two with Jonah’s orange armbands and three travelers carrying packs and walking sticks.
Their boots hammered the gravel and changed everything.
The two attackers behind Rachel fled north into the trees, abandoning the leader and the youngest man. The leader turned, pipe raised, trapped between Rachel and the approaching group. The youngest man threw down his stick and stepped away from the leader with his hands raised.
“They’ve got numbers. Just stop,” he said.
The leader lunged toward a traveler carrying a wooden staff.
He swung the pipe in a wide arc. The traveler stepped back, and the pipe missed his chest by inches.
A gunshot cracked against corrugated metal.
The leader dropped the pipe and stumbled toward the trees with one hand pressed to his chest, then collapsed beside the tracks.
Nobody moved for several seconds. The traveler who’d fired stood with his arm shaking.
One of Jonah’s men took the weapon from him.
Sophie reached Rachel first, her pack still secured across her shoulders and her hands moving toward the blood-soaked shirt.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“I’m fine,” Rachel said.
The word had barely left her mouth when her legs gave out. Sophie caught her arm and held her steady.
“Stay with me. Don’t do this. Don’t you dare,” Sophie said.
An older railroad worker pressed a folded cloth against Rachel’s side. With his other hand, he lifted the torn edge of her shirt to inspect the wound. His face tightened.
“This needs cleaning now, and you’re not walking anywhere tonight,” he said.
Rachel wanted to argue. Brenton was still west, and Hannah and Caleb were still waiting, unless they weren’t. The pain had become too sharp to ignore. Blood darkened the worker’s hand. Sophie stood beside her, fists clenched around her pack straps.
“Jonah’s outpost is three miles east,” the worker said. “We’ve got a cart at the next siding. Can you walk that far if we help you?”
“I can walk,” Rachel said.
The cut was worse than Rachel had let herself believe.
The railroad worker’s cloth had slowed the bleeding during the cart ride to Jonah’s outpost. Under lantern light, the wound ran six inches along her left side, from above her hip to beneath her lowest rib.
The metal had torn the skin unevenly, and at least three places needed stitches.
Nobody at the outpost was a doctor. The woman who cleaned the wound had been a veterinary technician before everything stopped.
She closed the deepest section with suture thread meant for leather and apologized each time Rachel tensed.
“It’ll hold. Whether it heals cleanly depends on you and whatever bacteria get in. Keep it clean, change the dressing twice daily, and don’t lift anything heavier than a water cup for at least a week,” the woman said.
They moved her to the main maintenance yard the next morning. Every rut in the service road jarred her side, but Jonah had better supplies and more space. Sophie refused to leave her. She slept on a cot three feet away and woke at every sound beyond the railcar.