Chapter 1 #3
"There were about eight of them. Maybe ten. Armed. Not — not desperate-looking. That's the thing I keep coming back to. They weren't starving. Their clothes were worn but they weren't rags. They looked like they knew what they were doing."
"Daniel saw them first," she said. "We tried to go around. It didn't work. They came up on us before we'd gotten far enough."
Her hands tightened slightly on the cup.
"He got them looking at him instead of me. Told me to run." Her voice didn't break, exactly. It went flatter instead, like she was holding it that way on purpose. "I heard shooting before I made the treeline. I saw him go down before that. I know he didn't get up."
The room stayed quiet for a moment. Grace reached over and put a hand briefly on the woman's arm, said nothing, took it back.
"I don't know what they call themselves," Rebecca said. "Daniel started calling them Ravagers, after we heard what they'd done to a farm a few weeks before that. It stuck. It's not — I don't know if it's a real name for anybody. It's just what we called them."
"Did you see them again after that first day?" David asked.
"No."
"Hear them?"
"Not after the second night."
David considered that. It didn't prove anything, but it meant there was no reason yet to believe the group was right behind her.
"I walked through the woods instead of the roads," Rebecca said.
"Didn't eat much. Drank from creeks when I found them.
Hid during the day some, at first, because I thought they were still close.
Then I stopped hearing anything and just kept walking anyway, because by then I didn't know what else to do. "
Grace asked, quietly, "What's in the papers?"
Rebecca looked toward Karen. Karen crossed the room and set the wrapped bundle in her lap, and Rebecca held it differently than she'd held anything else since she'd arrived — careful, both hands, like it weighed more than it did.
She worked the shoelace loose and unwrapped the plastic.
Inside were sheets of paper, some printed, some handwritten in cramped, fast script. Maps folded and refolded until the creases had worn thin. Long columns of numbers and letters that meant nothing to David at a glance.
"Daniel worked logistics," Rebecca said. "Freight. He worked for one of the big third-party logistics companies. They handled shipments for all kinds of customers — trucking, rail, warehouses, distribution centers. He knew how things moved between where they were made and where they ended up."
David picked up one of the sheets. Rows of information, dense with abbreviations. "What am I looking at?"
She leaned over, pointed. "That's the trailer number. That's the load's last known location. That's what was inside it."
He read down the line she'd indicated.
*WORK BOOTS — MEN'S — ASSORTED SIZE*
She turned to another sheet.
*CLOTHING / SOCKS / THERMAL*
Another.
*SOAP / HYGIENE — CASE LOTS*
Grace had leaned in without seeming to notice she'd moved, reading over David's shoulder. She knew exactly what clothes and boots and soap were worth now, better than anyone in the room.
"You're saying those are still sitting somewhere," Grace said.
"I'm saying that's where they were when everything stopped," Rebecca said. "I don't know what's happened to them since. They could be looted. Burned. Moved somewhere else entirely. But that's where they were, and Daniel had the records to say so."
Karen had picked up a different sheet from the small stack, frowning at it.
"What's this one?"
Rebecca went still for a second when she saw which page it was.
"Medical."
Karen's head came up. "What kind?"
"His company was moving freight for a medical distributor.
A hospital supply expansion, I think — I never fully understood the business side, only what he told me.
There were containers, railcars, sitting in a yard when it happened.
Sealed. He had the container numbers and the railcar numbers.
He had their last reported position before everything went down. "
"Medicine," Karen said, very carefully, like she didn't want to hope out loud.
"Some. Mostly not pills, from what he told me. Dressings, gauze, syringes, IV supplies. Gloves. Splints. The ordinary things a hospital burns through every single day and never thinks twice about, until there isn't any left."
Karen didn't say anything for a moment. David glanced at her and saw something behind her eyes that wasn't quite hope and wasn't quite grief, sitting right next to each other.
David looked back down at the papers, at rows of numbers that had meant nothing to him thirty seconds ago and now felt like they might mean a great deal.
"Where?" he said.
Rebecca looked at the papers, then back up at him.
"Charlotte."
Nobody spoke.
"How close can those papers get us?" David asked.
"To the yard." She turned one of the sheets, pointed to a string of characters near the bottom. "And that gets you to the railcar."
Nobody said anything.
Grace was the first to understand what that meant.
Not a rumor. Not a hope. They had a yard, a last known position, and an identification number.
If the shipment was still there, thousands of people could have passed within yards of it without knowing which car or container held anything worth taking.
"Daniel knew where things were," Rebecca said, quiet now, like she'd said the hardest part and everything else was easier by comparison.
David looked down at the stack in her lap — pages of destinations and load numbers and freight codes, ordinary paperwork that had outlived the world it was written for.
"How many places did your husband have records for?" he asked.
Rebecca looked down at the papers for a long moment.
"I never counted."