Chapter 48
For three days, Rachel lay still and watched the ceiling.
The yard kept its rhythm around her. She updated the registry from her cot while Sophie carried messages to the central fire pit.
On the fourth day, she tried to stand without help.
Pain drove her back to the cot before her knees straightened.
Sophie appeared in the doorway with water and a tight, worried face.
“What exactly are you trying to prove?” Sophie asked.
“That I can walk,” Rachel said.
“You walked three miles with a hole in your side. Everybody saw it. Nobody needs another demonstration.”
“It’s been four days.”
“It’ll be four more if you tear those stitches. Lie down,” Sophie said.
Sophie set the water on the crate and pulled the blanket over Rachel’s shoulders.
The role reversal unsettled them both. Rachel was used to being capable.
Sophie was used to letting her. By the fifth day, Rachel could sit upright without the room tilting.
By the sixth, she could walk the length of the rail car and back.
Sophie stayed close, one hand near her elbow, ready to catch her without admitting that was the plan.
“You don’t need to hover,” Rachel said.
“I’m not hovering. I’m standing here,” Sophie said.
“Three inches from my shoulder.”
“That’s proximity. It’s different.”
On the seventh day, word reached the yard about the dead attacker.
A community eight miles east recognized him as a young man in his mid-twenties who’d last traveled with three companions.
His mother and older sister arrived that afternoon with a folded canvas tarp.
They asked to see the body Jonah’s people had buried near the tracks, marked with a wooden stake and the date.
Rachel met them beside the fire pit. The mother’s hair was pulled into a tight bun.
Her eyes were dry and fixed ahead. The sister stood slightly behind her, with one hand on her shoulder.
“We’re not here to argue about what he was doing,” the mother said. “People have been telling us for weeks. Following travelers. Taking things. We tried to find him after he had left. He wouldn’t come home.”
“He left with those men a month after everything stopped. We told him not to. They’d been trouble before, fighting and stealing from neighbors. He didn’t listen. He said they were heading west to find work and safety,” the sister said.
The mother reached into her coat pocket and withdrew a small steel revolver with a dark wooden grip. She held it flat on her palm, uncertain whether to offer it or keep it.
“This was his father’s from his military service. He took it when he left. I don’t want it back, not with younger children at home and hungry people passing through. You’re more likely to need it than I am after what happened,” the mother said.
Rachel stared at the revolver. It was smaller than she’d expected, maybe a .38. She had almost no experience with firearms. Fourteen years earlier, she’d fired twelve rounds at a paper target during a required half-day training course and never touched a gun again.
“I can’t take that,” Rachel said.
“You can. Whether you should is between you and what you’re carrying west. It’s loaded. The cylinder holds six. My husband taught him how to clean it, aim it, and respect it. I hope the right lessons stuck,” the mother said.
She left with her daughter supporting her elbow.
Neither woman looked toward the grave marker near the eastern tree line.
After they left, Rachel unloaded the revolver and added all six cartridges to the plastic bag of ammunition.
She left the empty gun on the crate for two days.
Each morning and evening, she looked at it.
The metal caught the lantern light with a cold steadiness that made everything else in the rail car seem temporary.
Two days later, she picked it up again. Empty, the revolver weighed less than she remembered.
She still hated the feel of it in her hand.
Jonah found her staring at the unloaded weapon on the tenth morning.
Rachel could walk the yard without Sophie close behind, though the stitches pulled when she moved too fast. He sat on the crate beside the cot and studied the revolver.
“Hating that you need one is probably healthier than wanting one,” Jonah said.
“Did you want yours?” Rachel asked.
“At first. Then I used it. Then I hated it for different reasons. Your stitches come out tomorrow if the wound looks clean. After that, you’re free to go when you’re ready. The corridor’s been quiet, and nobody’s reported the other three since the shooting.”
The news should have relieved Rachel. Instead, it joined the revolver in her mind as something necessary and dangerous.
Sophie appeared in the doorway with both packs secured across her shoulders.
She’d repacked them to protect Rachel’s injury.
The straps sat tight against her narrow frame.
She looked at the unloaded revolver, then at Rachel, and said nothing.
Rachel picked up the revolver, then set it down and gathered the ammunition into the plastic bag.
She tucked both into the bottom of her pack, where the weight would sit against her spine rather than her injured side.
Brenton was still west. Rachel shouldered her pack carefully and found the weight tolerable.
Sophie was already at the door, watching the tracks beyond the yard.
“Ready?” Rachel asked.
Sophie nodded. Together, they walked toward the western edge of the yard. They passed the fire pit, the hand-drawn map, and the families sheltering inside Jonah’s system. The corridor ahead was empty in the morning light, with wet ballast and strips of colored cloth marking the route west.