Chapter 5 The Soldier in the Checkpoint
Dawn found them on a road that had forgotten it was supposed to lead somewhere.
It wound southwest through open cattle country, across shallow creeks and past lonely mailboxes leaning at the edges of gravel drives.
The night had used them hard. Tomber’s headlights were filmed with mud.
One wiper blade had begun to split and left a trembling smear across Dane’s side of the windshield.
The front end still held, but the wheel fought him with a steady rightward pull that had turned his shoulders into knots and made the pain in his knee spread upward until it felt as if someone had driven a nail under the kneecap and asked him to steer around it.
No one had truly slept.
Nell had drifted off in brief, stubborn collapses, head tipped against Rosa’s arm, waking each time Tomber hit a rut or Dane adjusted speed.
The cooler stayed under her feet, buckled in, wrapped in an old blanket Elias had found in the cargo box.
Rosa watched the road until her eyes reddened, then made herself look away for five minutes at a time, not sleeping so much as withdrawing behind her own face.
Otto slept once with his mouth open and woke saying, “I did not consent to birds,” though there had been no birds.
Elias remained in the cargo box for most of the night, wedged among tools and scavenged supplies, occasionally banging on the cab wall to complain about every bump Dane failed to avoid. Just after sunrise, he opened the little interior hatch and shoved his bearded face through.
“Truck’s limping worse.”
Dane did not take his eyes off the road.
“Good morning to you too.”
“Morning ain’t good. Morning is when daylight shows what night broke.”
Rosa stirred, blinking hard.
“How bad?”
Elias grunted.
“Bad enough I don’t want to be in the back if he takes a curve proud.”
Dane flexed his fingers on the wheel.
“There a suggestion hiding under that sunshine?”
“Find a place with military hardware or a farm shop. I can brace the steering, maybe swap a rod if we get lucky. Without that, this ugly beast will pick its own direction sooner or later.”
Otto leaned forward, hair flattened on one side.
“I vote for sooner not being during a chase.”
Nell looked through the windshield at the empty road.
“Do we know where we are?”
Dane pointed to a sign coming up through the pale morning haze.
The sign had been shot through twice but remained readable.
CEDAR DRAW CHECKPOINT
EMERGENCY ROUTE CONTROL
2 MILES
Rosa sat up fully.
“Checkpoint means weapons.”
“Checkpoint means trouble,” Dane said.
“We already have trouble.”
“Then maybe it wants company.”
Two miles later, they saw what was left of the government.
The Cedar Draw checkpoint had been built where the county road narrowed between a dry wash and a low ridge of red stone.
Concrete barriers split the pavement into lanes.
Military trucks sat angled behind sandbag walls.
A row of floodlights sagged over the road, dead in the morning light.
Beyond the first gate stood three tents collapsed under weather and neglect, a command trailer, a fuel bladder surrounded by orange cones, and a line of civilian vehicles trapped where they had once waited for permission to pass.
The permission had never come.
Cars filled both lanes for a hundred yards, doors open, windshields shattered, belongings spilled over seats and pavement.
A baby stroller lay upside down near a barrier.
A suitcase had split open, its contents spread across the road: shirts, socks, a paperback romance swollen from rain, a framed photograph facedown in the dirt.
On the ridge above the checkpoint, crows moved in black clusters.
Dane stopped before the first barricade.
Nobody spoke for a while.
Then Otto whispered, “I preferred the tower.”
Rosa checked her pistol, then the rifle, then her pistol again.
“Could be fuel in that bladder.”
“Could be dead in every car,” Elias said from the hatch.
“Probably both,” Dane replied.
Nell looked at the checkpoint with an expression too old for her face.
“People came here because they thought soldiers would help.”
Dane remembered the president’s recorded speech, the words shelter, order, temporary sacrifice, the flag behind him too still to be real.
He remembered convoys roaring east on the interstate while civilians waved from overpasses.
He remembered a National Guard captain at a Kansas roadblock telling a woman there was no room for her husband in the evacuation bus because the bite on his hand made him a biosecurity risk, and the woman kneeling in the road as if the captain’s boots were an altar.
“People think uniforms know the ending,” Dane said.
Rosa looked at him.
“Sometimes they’re just people wearing instructions.”
That stayed in the cab longer than it should have.
Dane put Tomber in gear and eased forward between the barriers.
The truck’s tires crunched over brass casings.
Infected stirred at the sound from among the cars, not many at first: a man in a torn suit trapped by his seat belt, a woman crawling with one arm from beneath a pickup, a soldier without a helmet turning slowly beside a sandbag wall. Dane rolled past without stopping.
At the second barrier, the lane narrowed too tightly for Tomber.
Elias climbed down from the cargo box with his shotgun and tool roll, squinting at the arrangement.
“Barrier’s got to move.”
Rosa looked at the concrete blocks.
“With what, optimism?”
“Tow chain and the truck. Unless you got a better idea tucked in your bedside manner.”
Dane killed the engine.
The silence after Tomber stopped was worse here than on the open road. The checkpoint had too many places for sound to hide. Canvas flapped softly. A loose cable tapped against a floodlight pole. Somewhere inside the civilian line, something knocked from within a trunk.
Dane opened his door.
“Rosa, high ground. Otto, stay behind Elias unless he asks you to touch something. Nell—”
“I know,” she said before he could finish. “Stay where you can reach me, don’t wander, don’t be brave over bodies.”
Elias barked a laugh.
“She does listen.”
“I listen,” Nell said. “I just don’t always agree.”
Rosa gave the girl a brief look that was almost proud, then stepped out with the rifle.
They worked under the pale sun with the dead watching from cars.
Dane hooked the tow chain around the first concrete barrier while Elias directed him with the impatience of a man convinced every younger person had been born ignorant on purpose.
Otto helped feed the chain and only tripped twice.
Rosa climbed the low ridge beside the checkpoint, taking position near a fallen floodlight where she could see both road approaches.
Nell stayed by the truck’s passenger side with the cooler strap across her chest, eyes moving, tire iron in hand.
The first barrier scraped aside with a grinding sound that drew infected from the tents.
Three came out tangled together, soldiers by their boots and civilians by their clothes, all of them equally ruined. Dane reached for the shotgun, but Rosa fired from the ridge. One fell. Then another. The third staggered toward Nell.
Nell backed up instead of freezing.
Good, Dane thought.
She lifted the tire iron as if she meant to swing, but Dane reached the infected first and drove the butt of the shotgun into its temple. It dropped heavily against the barrier. Nell’s breath came fast, but she did not lower the tire iron.
“I had it,” she said.
“No.”
“I maybe had it.”
“That’s closer.”
She swallowed, looked at the body, and seemed to decide not to argue with the dead at her feet.
They moved the second barrier. Then the third.
By then the checkpoint had begun to wake.
Infected pushed against windows. A child’s car seat shifted in the back of an SUV, and Rosa had to look away before firing through the glass at whatever was still strapped near it.
Otto went quiet after that. Even Elias stopped complaining for a full minute, which Dane had begun to suspect was his version of prayer.
Near the command trailer, Dane found the fuel bladder half-full and the pump handle intact.
Elias checked the line.
“Diesel.”
For the first time all morning, hope showed itself plain and dangerous.
Dane looked toward the ridge.
“Rosa?”
She scanned the eastern road through the rifle sights.
“No headlights.”
That did not mean the Milemen were gone. It meant they had learned patience.
Otto crouched near the generator beside the fuel bladder.
“I can maybe run the pump from this battery if the leads aren’t corroded.”
“Maybe is your favorite word,” Elias said.
“No, my favorite word is safe. We haven’t been introduced lately.”
Nell stood near the command trailer, looking at the faded insignia painted on its side. A flag. A number. A motto half-scraped away.
Dane noticed a narrow cable running from the trailer door to a grenade fixed under the step.
“Nell.”
His voice changed the air.
She froze.
“Step back. Slow.”
Her eyes dropped. She saw the cable. Color drained from her face.
“I didn’t touch it.”
“I know. Back up.”
She moved one foot. Then the other. The cooler bumped softly against her hip. Dane reached her and guided her away by the shoulder, careful not to pull too hard.
Rosa called from the ridge.
“What?”
“Trap,” Dane said.
Elias limped over and studied the grenade without getting too close.
“Military setup.”
Otto looked sick again.
“Why would soldiers booby-trap their own trailer?”
A voice answered from inside the command trailer.
“To keep people like you out.”
Everyone went still.
Dane raised the shotgun toward the door. Rosa dropped to one knee on the ridge and aimed at the trailer window. Elias brought up the double-barrel. Otto lifted his screwdriver, looked at it, and lowered it again in humiliation.
The voice inside was hoarse, young, and tired.
“Don’t touch the door.”
Dane said, “Wasn’t planning to.”
“You came for fuel.”
“Yes.”
“Take it and leave.”
Rosa called down, “You bitten?”
A pause.
“No.”
“Come out and prove it.”
Another pause, longer.
“I can’t.”
Dane looked at the trailer. The windows were covered from inside with taped cardboard. The door remained shut. The cable trap had been placed carefully, not by panicked hands.
“Can’t, or won’t?” Dane asked.