Chapter 2
David had a length of string, a ruler, and a scrap of paper covered in pencil marks, and none of it was giving him an answer he liked.
He laid the string along the road on Rebecca's map, following the bends instead of cutting straight across, then held it against the ruler and did the math again. Same number as the first time.
"Hundred seventy-five miles," he said.
Grace sat across the table sorting bean seed into a tin, not looking up. "One way, or are you counting both?"
"One way."
Russ came in through the open door, wiping his boots before he remembered the ground outside was still too wet for it to matter, and looked over David's shoulder at the string on the map.
"One way?" Russ asked.
"Unless Charlotte moved."
Russ almost smiled. He bent closer, tracing the road with one finger instead of trusting the string.
"Hundred seventy-five on paper," he said. "Paper doesn't know about bridges."
"No."
"Or which roads still go through. Or how bad the mud is past the county line, since we haven't been past the county line."
"No."
Russ straightened up. "So, it's not a hundred seventy-five mile trip. It's a trip that's at least a hundred seventy-five miles."
"Plan for two hundred," David said.
"Two hundred miles," Russ said, half to himself, working out the days in his head the way he worked out feed rations, one number leaning on the next.
"Call it twenty, twenty-two miles a day if the horses are carrying gear and we're not pushing them past what they can hold up under for a week straight.
Eight days out, maybe nine, if nothing stops you. Longer if something does."
"Something always does," David said.
"That's why I said it."
Rebecca sat in the chair Karen had set up for her near the window, her bandaged foot propped on a stool, watching the map get measured like it belonged to someone else's plan.
She'd slept through most of the night before and looked more like herself for it — color in her face, eyes tracking instead of drifting.
"Daniel wanted to go this way," she said, touching a spot on the map north of the string David had already laid. "He didn't know every road. Neither do I."
"That's all right," David said. "We'll find out."
"There's a river crossing about sixty miles out," Rebecca said. "Daniel worried about that one more than the rest. He didn't know if the bridge would still be standing, or whether people would be using the crossing as a checkpoint."
"People do that," David said. He'd seen it himself, more than once, coming home. A bridge was a bottleneck whether anybody meant it to be or not, and bottlenecks drew attention the way spilled grain drew mice.
Grace glanced up from the beans at that, said nothing, and went back to sorting.
Karen stood near the door with her arms crossed, not saying much yet, though David could tell by the set of her jaw that she already had something to say.
Russ looked at the map a moment longer, then asked the question David had been circling since Rebecca first said the word Charlotte.
"When?"
Nobody answered right away.
Grace kept sorting beans into the tin, one at a time, like the question hadn't landed anywhere near her.
David looked at the string again instead of answering.
A hundred seventy-five miles was a number.
It didn't tell him what he wanted to know, which was how many weeks he had before the ground demanded every hand the Hollow had, and whether Charlotte would still hold anything worth the trip by the time he could spare them.
Rebecca watched the silence stretch and didn't fill it either. She'd learned enough about this family in three days to know when a question needed to sit before anybody touched it.
David walked out to the garden with Grace an hour later, mostly because staying at the table with the question hanging in the room hadn't gotten him anywhere.
The ground had softened again overnight.
Somebody had already been through with a hoe testing a strip near the fence, leaving a dark seam of turned earth behind.
Russ's wagon sat with one wheel off, waiting on a spoke Walter was carving to replace a cracked one.
Seed packets were spread across two porch rails to dry after last week's rain got into the tin.
Grace crouched and pushed two fingers into the dirt near the fence line, felt it, and stood back up.
"Another week, maybe less, and we can start the early rows," she said. "Peas. Onions. Some of the greens."
"And after that?"
"After that it doesn't stop for two months. You know how this works."
He did. He'd watched them learn through the fall and winter, mostly by making mistakes.
This year they knew more, which meant there was more to do and less excuse for getting it wrong.
Every household in the Hollow had spent the winter counting seed and arguing over rotation, and most of them had settled on planting as much ground as they could manage.
The winter had taught everybody exactly what a thin food supply cost.
"This is about the worst time we could leave," David said.
"Pretty close."
He'd expected her to push back on that — expected an argument that laid it all out, why he needed to stay, why Charlotte could wait. Instead she straightened, wiped her hand on her jeans, and looked at him plainly.
"That doesn't mean it's the wrong time," she said.
He looked out over the Hollow. Walter's mallet knocking against a spoke.
Two of the Bennett kids hauling water toward the garden beds.
Curtis somewhere down toward the barricade, probably arguing with somebody about the watch rotation out of habit more than need.
It was a lot of motion for one morning, and it was only going to get busier from here.
"If we wait for planting to finish," David said, "that's four, five weeks before I could spare people. Six, maybe, if the weather turns."
"And if you go now?"
"Four weeks there and back, if the roads hold. Longer if they don't."
Grace considered that against the calendar she carried in her head better than anybody in the Hollow. "Four weeks means you'll miss a good piece of planting."
"I know it."
"Six weeks means that railcar gets six more weeks to disappear."
"I know it."
"You think that railcar waits for us?"
He didn't answer, because they both already knew what the honest answer was.
She went back to testing the soil a few feet down the row, not pushing him further. That was Grace's way of making a point and then letting it sit long enough to do its own work.
Karen found him by the fence a while later, coming from the direction of the house where she'd left Rebecca resting. She wasn't carrying her bag, which told David this wasn't about anybody's foot or fever.
"I did a count last night," she said. "Everything I've got left."
David waited.
"Gauze — not much. A few rolls, and I've been stretching what I have with boiled cloth for a month already. Antiseptic's low. I've got maybe a dozen suture packets left, and I've been saving those for anything that really needs them. Gloves — six pair. That's it."
"And the rest?"
"No unopened IV sets. One partial kit I've never had to use, because I've never had anybody bad enough to need it and lucky enough to survive long enough for it to matter.
" She looked at him. "I can make bandages out of clean cloth all day.
I can boil water and set a bone and stitch a cut with fishing line if it comes to that.
I can't make an IV catheter. I can't make antibiotics.
Those either exist somewhere, or they don't."
She held up her hands, turning them palm up like she was weighing something invisible in each one. "Everything I've got left fits in one bag now. It used to fill two."
David hadn't realized it had gotten that thin. He should have.
That was the whole argument, and she knew it.
"Is the shipment worth leaving during planting?" David asked.
"If it's there? Yes."
"And if it isn't?"
"Then we rode to Charlotte for nothing." She didn't flinch from that. "But if we don't go, we're choosing to leave it there without knowing. That's still a choice, David. It just feels like it isn't, because nobody has to sign their name to it."
He didn't answer right away.
"Summer's coming," Karen said. "Axes slip.
Plows kick back. Horses throw people. Somebody's going to have a baby before fall, probably more than one somebody, and I've been getting by on cloth and luck since September.
Last month it was Danny Webb's arm. Every time it's been close enough to remind me what I don't have.
" A pause. "We can grow more potatoes. I can't grow gauze. "
He went back to Rebecca that afternoon, because none of it mattered if her records were only paper and hope.
She had the bundle open on the table again, sorted now into loose piles — freight by type, she explained, rather than by date. She pulled one sheet free and turned it so he could read it.
"This one first," she said. "Freight identifier, here. Origin, here. Destination — that's the part that matters. Last reported yard. And this last line is the railcar number."
"How many railcars in a yard like that?"
"I don't know. Hundreds. Maybe more."
"And this number finds ours."
"If it's still there."
He looked at her. "Can you find it without him?"
"Yes." No hesitation in that one. "We used to sit up going through these after it happened, before we started walking this way. He explained the codes because we thought we might need them eventually. I know how to read them. I'm not just carrying what he knew, David."
That mattered more to him than he expected it to.
She pulled a few more sheets, working faster now that she had a reason to.
"Boots. Men's, assorted sizes." Another. "Clothing, socks, thermal." Another. "Soap and hygiene, case lots." She hesitated on the next one, then held it up anyway. "Heavy work gloves. A full trailer load."
"All in Charlotte?"