Chapter 67
Alvarez carefully read the first message.
Her eyes moved across the handwriting, revealing nothing in her expression.
Charlotte observed from a few feet away, confined in a hazmat suit that trapped the heat against her skin.
She had almost forgotten what dryness felt like.
The pouch on her chest hung open, holding the remaining messages.
The clearing was quiet. The other soldiers maintained their positions, but Charlotte could sense their attention on her.
After finishing the first message, Alvarez refolded it with the precision of someone handling evidence and handed it back. “Next,” she said.
Charlotte reached into the pouch and removed the second letter.
This one was written on the back of a food package, the address scrawled in pencil above the nutritional information.
She placed it in Alvarez’s hand and waited.
The process continued. Alvarez examined each message with the same attention.
Some she read fully; others she skimmed for addresses, place names, and routes.
The last message was from Diane, added at the settlement for relatives west of the state forest.
Alvarez read it twice, tracing the route description, and when she looked up, something in her expression had changed. “You’re delivering these on foot,” Alvarez said.
“Horseback,” Charlotte said. “As far as we can.”
Alvarez handed the message back. She studied Charlotte’s face through the hazmat mask, and whatever calculation she was making behind her eyes arrived at a conclusion Charlotte couldn’t read.
“You can pass,” Alvarez said. “The child stays with you. The dog, too. Keep to the forest road. The highway north of the state line is being watched.”
Charlotte returned the messages to the pouch. She had expected resistance, and its absence left her uneasy. Behind her, two soldiers were speaking in low voices near the barricade’s eastern flank. Their conversation carried on in the still air of the clearing.
“Three settlements in as many days. Same pattern each time. They come in civilian vehicles, sometimes on foot, claiming to be refugees. Then they’re gone by morning, and two days later, the SNA hits the exact weak points they wouldn’t have known about.”
“Food stores,” the second voice said. “Every time. They’re mapping where people are keeping supplies, which buildings still have generators running, and which roads are being used for evacuation. Then they hit the supply lines first.”
Charlotte’s hands stilled on the pouch. She didn’t turn, but she listened. A third soldier joined in, his voice tired.
“Millerton got hit yesterday. Not the town itself. The water treatment plant is three miles north. They knew exactly where the backup generator was, exactly which pipe to cut to shut down the whole system. That’s not reconnaissance. That’s someone walking the site and taking notes.”
Charlotte finished securing the pouch. The letters were inside, all fifteen of them, and the weight of what she had just heard settled against her chest. Information.
They were collecting it all. Food stores, wells, and usable buildings.
Ordinary details had become tactical intelligence in a landscape where destroying one generator could leave a thousand people without clean water.
She was carrying fifteen pieces of that same intelligence.
The realization settled into place alongside the others she had accumulated since Crestview Street.
The world had ended, her family was gone, Mason was her responsibility, and the infection in her lungs was winning. Information had become a weapon.
She turned back toward the horses. Mason sat still on the horse, watching the barricade.
The dog sat at the animal’s feet, equally still, eyes fixed on Charlotte.
Charlotte was about to mount the mare when the sound reached them.
Multiple engines were moving from the east along County 12.
The soldiers reacted instantly, their weapons coming up toward the eastern approach.
A military truck appeared through the gap.
It wasn’t a Humvee, but something larger, with a canvas cover over the bed and military markings Charlotte didn’t recognize.
It slowed as it approached the barricade, and the driver cut the engine twenty yards out.
The rear canvas flaps opened. Figures emerged from the truck bed under armed escort, moving carefully.
Civilians, Charlotte thought at first, until she saw their hands.
Every one of them was bound. Their hands were secured behind their backs with zip ties, and they moved in single file under the direction of soldiers whose weapons were not pointed but were very much present.
Six or seven prisoners. Men and women in civilian clothing, some visibly injured, all conserving energy for whatever came next.
One of the escorts approached Alvarez. Their conversation was brief and inaudible from where Charlotte stood, but she saw the woman nod, then gesture toward a tent that had been erected behind the barricade.
The prisoners were led toward the tent. As they passed the barricade’s inner perimeter, one of them, a woman in her thirties with dark hair cut short, looked directly at Charlotte.
The contact lasted less than a second. The woman’s eyes moved from Charlotte’s hazmat suit to Mason on the gelding to the dog at his feet, and she saw calculation there, the focus of someone gathering data for later use.
Then the woman was gone, ushered into the tent with the others, and the canvas flap fell closed behind them, and the barricade returned to the vigilant silence it had maintained before the truck’s arrival.
Charlotte stood still. Somewhere in the tent behind the barricade, a woman with bound hands and assessing eyes was being questioned about the same kind of information Charlotte carried west in handwritten form.
She mounted the mare, but the movement cost her, and her cough took her halfway into the saddle.
When it passed, she gathered the reins and turned toward Mason. “Let’s go,” she said.
The gelding fell in beside the mare, the dog took position at the rear, and together they moved past the barricade toward the forest road that would lead them west toward whatever safety still existed in a world where information had become something people were captured for carrying.