The Supply Road to Charlotte

Chapter 1

The ground froze hard overnight, and David Turner already knew it wouldn't last.

He stood at the edge of the garden plot with a spading fork, watching his breath fog in the early light.

The top inch of soil was stiff, silvered with frost, but the sun was climbing fast enough that by midmorning the whole yard would be soup.

That fact was going to decide the day's work whether anyone liked it or not.

Luke came out with the wheelbarrow, breath clouding, hair sticking up on one side from sleep.

"Looks dry enough to turn," Luke said, eyeing the frost.

David drove the fork in, hit the frozen crust, then felt it give into wet ground underneath. He worked the handle and lifted a clod. Water beaded out of it immediately.

"Top looks dry," David said. "Don't turn it yet."

Luke crouched and pressed a thumb into the exposed dirt, felt it, said nothing else. He didn't argue. A year ago he might have. A year ago he wouldn't have known what he was looking at in the first place.

They spent the next hour on things that didn't care about mud — hauling aged manure from the pile behind the barn, mending a sagging section of garden fence where a deer had tested it over the winter, sorting through last year's dead vines and pulling them for the burn pile.

Grace wanted the garden bigger this year.

Not by much. Just enough that it mattered, which after a winter like the one they'd had meant something different than it used to.

Smokey lay near the fence post in a patch of sun, head up, watching without looking like he was watching.

Billy Jean came up the path around midmorning with a basket over one arm, and Smokey lifted his head, gave two beats of his tail against the ground, and put his chin back down. Familiar. No reaction beyond that.

"Mama sent seed potatoes," she said, holding the basket out toward the porch, though her eyes went to Luke first. "Says you can have half if Grace has room."

Luke straightened up too fast, brushed dirt off his hands onto his jeans, and said something about there being plenty of room, probably more room than they had potatoes to fill it.

Grace, sorting seed packets at the outside table, didn't look up, but David caught the corner of her mouth doing something.

She said nothing. That was enough.

Grace had commandeered the table with envelopes and jars and a few paper packets gone soft at the corners from handling.

Some were the last of the store-bought seed from before, kept dry all winter in a tin.

Others were seed they'd saved themselves — beans, squash, a jar of tomato seed that had been fermented and dried back in September.

She was sorting by what needed warm ground and what could go in early, and by what households were short and what they could spare.

Carol Hendricks stopped by on her way to somewhere else and asked whether Grace still wanted wool off her sheep this spring.

"I do," Grace said. "Not yet, though. Not while it's still freezing some nights. Let them keep their coats a while longer."

Carol nodded like she'd expected that answer and kept walking.

David, coming past with an armload of fence rail, caught the tail end of it.

"Madam Mayor's office opens early," he said.

Grace didn't look up from the seed packets. "Keep talking. I've got garden work I can assign you."

"I'm suddenly very busy."

"You're always suddenly very busy."

He let that one go and kept walking, because she wasn't wrong.

Water dripped steadily off the cabin's eave where the sun hit first. A smear of old gray snow still held on under the north side of the woodshed.

The creek ran loud and full with meltwater somewhere behind the tree line, and June had a halo of loose hair around her wherever she stood, shedding out her winter coat in earnest. Somewhere down the hollow a rooster was making more noise than the hour called for.

Nobody was talking about the roads yet. But everybody was thinking about the garden, and after the winter they'd had, that counted for something.

David and Luke loaded the wheelbarrow with the last of the manure and pushed it down toward the Coopers' old garden plot, which the Hollow had started working communally since nobody remained to claim it. Along the way they passed most of what the Hollow had become since fall.

Russ had a wagon jacked up on blocks near his place, going over the axle with a critical eye.

One of the young Bennett boys was carrying an armload of kindling twice his size and looking proud about it.

Walter stood with Everett's old plow horse, lifting a hoof and checking it.

He checked every hoof in the Hollow now.

It was simply his job at this point, and nobody thought twice about it anymore.

Russ straightened up as they came by and wiped his hands on his pants.

"All winter nobody cared what dirt looked like," he said. "Sun comes out three days in a row and suddenly everybody's a farmer."

"Including you," David said, nodding at the wagon.

"I'm a mule man. Dirt's everybody else's problem." He said it while running a hand along the wagon bed like he'd been thinking about spring hauling for a month already.

They kept moving. Past the garden fence, David glanced toward the road out of habit — the relief watcher was walking out to swap with the man who'd had the dawn shift, rifle slung, unhurried. Nobody remarked on it. It had become as ordinary as feeding the stock.

Luke noticed it too. "You think we'll need more watches once planting starts?"

"Probably."

"Because the roads are opening?"

"Because people are."

Luke didn't ask anything further. He'd learned that David didn't waste words when the short answer covered it.

But David turned it over as they walked, because it was true and it mattered — once the ground dried and the weather held, whoever was still moving through the country was going to start moving again, and not all of them were going to be looking for potatoes.

They'd have to work out the watch schedule again once real fieldwork started. Couldn't spare the same hands all day, every day, once there was plowing and planting and fencing to do on top of it. That was a problem for tonight, or tomorrow. Not for right now.

They were most of the way to the Coopers' plot when David heard the running feet.

A boy came down the path from the direction of the road at a dead sprint — one of the Hollow kids, thirteen or so, running hard enough that David set the wheelbarrow handles down before he'd even reached them.

"David!"

"What is it?"

The boy pulled up gasping, hands on his knees for a second before he got the words out. "There's a woman at the gate."

"Alone?"

"Looks like it."

Then, straightening, still catching his breath: "She's in bad shape."

David was already moving.

"Stay here," he told Luke, and didn't wait to see if it landed. He caught Grace's eye on the way past the cabin — she'd come out onto the porch at something in his walk.

"What is it?"

"Woman at the barricade."

"Trouble?"

"Don't know yet."

He took the rifle off its pegs by the door out of habit more than expectation, and Smokey was up and moving before David had it slung, falling in beside him without being called.

The walk down to the outer barricade took a while at a hard pace.

David used them to think rather than run blind.

By the time the felled-log gate came into view, the picture was mostly what he expected: the forward watcher tucked into cover off the road, a second man positioned farther back with a clear line, the gate itself still shut.

Rifles were up but controlled — pointed toward the ground in front of the woman, not at her, not wandering.

The woman herself was on the far side, leaning against one of the felled logs like it was the only thing keeping her upright.

She was a mess. Clothes so dirty their original color was a guess.

Hair matted flat on one side. One pant leg torn open at the knee.

A boot that had lost most of its sole, flapping when she shifted her weight.

The pack on her back hung crooked, half off one shoulder, like she hadn't had the strength to fix it in a while.

Her face had scratches across one cheek, old enough to have scabbed.

Her lips were cracked white. There was blood on one sleeve, dried dark, not fresh.

She was thin in a way that had nothing to do with a hard winter of rationed food. She was thin in a way that worried him, and it took a lot to worry him.

Smokey came alongside and lifted his nose, working the air. His ears went forward. He didn't growl, didn't rush her. Just watched, weight forward, alert.

The woman saw him and flinched backward, nearly losing her footing against the log. That told David more than anything else so far. Whatever she'd been through, dogs were part of it, or fear itself had worn her down to flinching at anything that moved.

David stopped a few yards inside the gate.

"Ma'am."

Her head came up slowly, like it cost her something.

"Is this your place?" Her voice came out cracked, barely there.

He didn't answer that directly. "You're hurt."

Her eyes weren't on him. They kept sliding past him, back down the road she'd come from.

"Are there people behind me?"

"Did somebody follow you?"

She didn't answer right away. When she did, it wasn't really an answer. "I don't know." A breath. Then, stronger, like she needed to believe it herself: "I lost them."

Lost who. David wanted the answer, but this wasn't the time to push her for it.

He turned to the forward watcher. "Which way'd she come from?"

"Out of the trees. West side. I didn't have eyes on her till she was fifty yards out — she'd been using the timber, not the road."

"Anybody with her? Behind her?"

"Haven't seen anybody."

David glanced toward the second watcher, already scanning higher ground through a gap in the trees. Good. He'd want that covered before he opened anything.

He looked back at the woman. "You carrying a weapon?"