Chapter 68
The additional message came from a soldier Charlotte never learned the name of. He approached as she secured the mare’s saddlebags, a folded piece of notebook paper in hand, and held it out with the formality of someone asking a favor he had no right to request.
“For my sister,” he said. “She’s in a settlement west of the state forest. Millerton Road, the old schoolhouse. If you pass that way.”
Charlotte took the paper, but she didn’t open it. The address was written on the outside in block letters, and the fold was tight, the kind made by hands that wanted the contents to stay where they belonged.
“Sixteen,” Mason said from the gelding’s back.
“Sixteen,” Charlotte agreed.
She slipped the message into the pouch and mounted the mare.
They left the barricade behind. The forest road climbed west through oak and maple trees, with the horses moving at a walk that eased Charlotte’s lungs while keeping them steadily on course.
Two hours later, the first community came into view, a cluster of structures where the forest road met a gravel lane.
Charlotte sensed it was inhabited even before she saw anyone.
Trees had been cut back on both sides of the road, creating clear fields of fire.
Fresh soil was piled into berms along the eastern approach, and shallow trenches had been dug behind them.
A man worked alone in one of the trenches, his shovel rising and falling in a steady rhythm.
He didn’t look up as the horses passed. Charlotte rode by without speaking.
The man’s indifference spoke volumes about the many travelers who had come through and how little attention most deserved.
The second community was larger, featuring fifteen or twenty buildings along a fortified main street.
Sandbags lined the storefronts, and the windows were boarded up from the inside.
A woman directed two teenagers who were stacking canned goods in the basement of a former hardware store.
Food cases were arranged on shelves while a girl logged the inventory in a spiral notebook.
“Keep the medical separate,” the woman said. “Antibiotics on the left shelf, bandages in the crate. Anything with an expiration date gets used first.”
The teenagers worked without complaint. Charlotte guided the horses past a church whose parking lot had become a supply depot.
Fuel cans stood under a tarp. A man was testing old generators in coveralls, and water barrels lined the wall, each labeled with dates and purification methods.
The community was preparing, and all attention stayed on the work.
The third community lay at the junction of the forest road and a county highway.
Charlotte heard it before she saw it. Voices gave instructions, and there was a clatter as equipment was moved.
She stopped at the tree line. From there, she could see the highway junction and the surrounding activity.
Thirty or forty people were gathered there, some armed with hunting rifles, others with shotguns and revolvers, and at least one with a military-grade rifle.
“North flank gets the school building. South flank takes the gas station. Anyone with medical training reports to the clinic. We rotate watches at 0200 and 0800. Radio checks every hour on the half.”
The man giving orders stood on the bed of a pickup truck.
He looked exhausted, and the people below him listened with the full attention of civilians who had decided that taking orders was better than the alternative.
A woman distributed ammunition from a plastic storage bin, counting each round aloud as she placed it in waiting hands.
Charlotte sat still on the mare’s back. Mason’s gelding stood beside her, and the boy watched the junction with wide-eyed focus.
The communities she had passed were digging in, preparing to receive whatever was coming from the east. The war was no longer elsewhere.
It was there, in the freshly turned earth of fighting positions, the boarded storefronts, and the faces of people who had been civilians three days before.
Charlotte turned the mare westward. She knew she needed to cover distance before dark.
The clinic in Dover was still fifteen miles away, and her lungs had settled into a burn that the antibiotics didn’t diminish.
They rode through the afternoon. The communities grew sparser as the land rose, giving way to isolated farms, houses with chimneys smoking, and the occasional vehicle on roads the EMP had emptied.
Darkness arrived gradually, and the trees along the forest road became silhouettes against the purple sky of an early fall evening.
Charlotte was looking for a place to stop when she saw the western horizon flash beyond the ridge.
Then came another pulse, then a third, followed seconds later by a distant sound that Charlotte felt in her chest before she fully heard it.
Artillery. Charlotte had never seen it fired before, but she knew what it was with the same certainty she had known the sound of the C-130. The flashes continued, steady and purposeful, lighting the horizon in pulses of orange and white. Mason saw it, too.
She felt him go still on the gelding’s back. “Keep moving,” Charlotte said.
Her voice emerged steadily through the mask.
She turned the mare toward the forest road and urged her to a pace that wasn’t quite a trot but covered ground with more urgency than the walk had allowed.
The flashes continued behind them. Each one illuminated the trees along the ridge in brief, stark relief before the darkness reclaimed everything, and Charlotte rode westward with sixteen messages against her chest, artillery fire on the horizon, and the certainty that whatever safety had existed in West Virginia was measured in hours rather than days.