Chapter 2 #2
"No." She set the sheet down. "Daniel had records for other yards too. I haven't gone through everything yet. There's more here than one trip is going to use."
David set that aside without chasing it further. One trip at a time. But it told him this wasn't going to be the only time he sat over this table with string and a ruler, and that thought sat with him longer than he expected.
They gathered that evening — David, Grace, Karen, Russ, Curtis, Rebecca, with Walter drifting in and out to listen while he kept working on the wagon wheel outside the open door.
David laid it out plain. A hundred seventy-five miles, plan for two hundred. Eight to ten days each way under decent conditions, with extra food packed in case of delays. No telling how long they'd need in Charlotte once they got there.
Curtis didn't wait to be asked. "You know I'm going."
David looked at him. "Yeah."
Curtis seemed almost disappointed there wasn't going to be an argument.
"That's it?"
"You can ride, you can shoot, and I need somebody watching behind us while I'm watching ahead," David said. "That's you."
Curtis nodded. "Good enough."
Russ had been quiet through most of it.
"I can't go."
David looked at him.
Russ nodded toward the fields outside. "Not unless you plan on planting this place without my mules."
Nobody had much to say to that.
"They're going to be behind a plow as soon as the ground dries," Russ said. "Then hauling manure, seed, whatever else Grace finds for them to haul. You take me and those two animals to Charlotte for a month, you're taking a piece of the planting with you."
David nodded. "Then you stay."
"Wasn't asking permission."
Walter leaned in through the doorway. "I'll help Russ with the stock when he needs it. Curtis being gone will put more pressure on the watches."
David nodded. "Appreciate it."
Luke had been quiet up to that point, standing near the wall with his arms crossed. Now he spoke.
"I want to go."
David looked at him and didn't dismiss it outright, which was itself new.
"Make your case."
Luke straightened. "I've traveled before. I can shoot. I can ride as well as anybody here under thirty. I know how you work when things go wrong, because I've watched you do it."
David let that sit a second.
"You're not wrong about any of that," he said. "But I need you here."
Luke's face started to close up, the way it used to whenever David told him no without giving him a reason.
"Not because you're too young," David said, before Luke could say it for him. "Because if Curtis and I are both gone, we're two men short on the watches. I need you here helping cover that."
Luke turned that over. David watched the moment it landed — not being left behind. Being handed something that mattered.
"How long do you figure you'll be gone?" Luke asked.
David did the math again in his head before he answered. "Three weeks at the very best. I'd plan on four."
"And if you're not back in four weeks?"
"Then you keep doing exactly what you're doing until we are," David said. "Russ and Walter know the plan. Grace does too. That's the job either way."
"All right," Luke said.
Karen straightened. "I'm going too."
David hesitated on that one. "You're the only medical we've got."
"I was," Karen said, and nodded toward Rebecca. "She's a doctor. I'm a nurse who's been running this place alone for eight months because there wasn't anybody better. There's somebody better now."
Then Rebecca sat forward. "I'm going too."
The room went still.
"No," Karen said, flat.
"They're my husband's records. I know how to read them better than anybody sitting in this room."
"You can barely walk to the privy," Karen said.
"I can ride."
"You spent ten days half-starved, dehydrated, and running a fever on an infected foot," Karen said. "You are not getting on a horse for two hundred miles four days after I finally got you stable. I don't care whose records they are."
Rebecca opened her mouth to argue further. David cut in before she could.
"You're not coming. Not this trip."
Rebecca looked like she wanted to fight that, but something in David's tone closed the door on it more firmly than Karen's had.
"Then how do you read the records without me," she said.
"You mark them," David said. "Everything you can. Yard names, railcar numbers, whatever notation your husband used. You teach us to read what we're looking at before we leave. That gets us most of the way there."
Rebecca considered that, then nodded slowly. It wasn't what she wanted. It was something she could live with.
"If you're not going to let me ride," she said, "at least let me be useful while you're gone. I'll go through the rest of what Daniel had. All of it, not just Charlotte. By the time you're back, I'll know what's worth going after next."
"That works," David said.
Karen relaxed a little at that, like the argument had finally settled somewhere solid instead of just running out of steam.
Which left the four of them: David, Karen, Curtis, and Smokey, with Russ and Walter staying behind to keep the Hollow's stock and fields moving.
Luke found Billy Jean down by the fence line afterward, mending a section of chicken wire that had come loose over the winter. He told her plainly — David and Curtis were going, he wasn't, and with both of them gone somebody needed to take more turns on the watches.
"You wanted to go," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I did."
"But you're not upset about staying."
Luke thought about that honestly before he answered. "I was, for about a minute. Then Dad told me why, and it stopped feeling like getting left behind."
Billy Jean nodded like that made sense to her, twisted the wire tight, and moved down to the next post. "Good. Because somebody's got to keep an eye on things while your dad's gone, and I'd rather it be you than somebody who doesn't take it serious."
That evening David found Grace at the horse trough, hauling water for the night while June and Whiskey crowded the fence waiting on her.
He picked up the second bucket without being asked and fell in beside her.
"You've been quiet since the meeting," he said.
"I've been thinking, not quiet."
"About?"
"About how you keep looking for a reason to stay that isn't just you not wanting to go."
He didn't answer that right away, because she wasn't wrong.
"The Hollow needs every hand right now," he said. "That's not nothing."
"No, it's not." Grace poured her bucket, and June pushed her nose into the trough before it was even half full.
"Russ and Walter can keep things moving.
Luke can carry more of the watches, and there are other men here who can do the same.
I've got the planting. I can run that with my eyes shut at this point. "
"That's comforting," David said.
"Wasn't meant to be." She almost smiled, then let it fade.
"We'll be thinner on security with both you and Curtis gone.
I don't like that. But we'll manage it. It was meant to tell you the Hollow doesn't fall apart because you're not standing in it for a month.
You built it that way on purpose. Don't decide now that it depends on you after all. "
He looked back toward the cabin, lamp already lit in the window, and then out past it toward the dark line of the ridge.
"You think I should go?" he asked.
"I think you're already going."
"That wasn't the question."
"Yes," she said. "I think you should go."
He waited for more. She gave him the rest without making him ask for it.
"Go before the ground dries out enough for everybody else to start moving again too," she said. "You said it yourself. Once the roads open for us, they open for whoever else is out there. Better you're already back by the time that matters."
She was right, and he'd known it before she said it, the same way he could feel weather changing a day before the sky proved him right.
"There's one more thing," Grace said, pouring the last bucket. "If you find something out there worth more than you can carry, don't try to prove a point about it. Come home with what you can hold and go back for the rest later. I'd rather have you than a wagonload of gauze."
"Noted."
"I mean it, David."
"I know you do."
They finished watering the horses without saying much else. It didn't need saying again.
The next morning David sat at the table with Russ, Karen, and Curtis, and Rebecca pulled her chair close enough to mark the map without standing on her bad foot.
Russ worked the numbers while David went over the horses again. June under him. Karen and Curtis on their own mounts. Whiskey carrying the bulk of the camp load on the way out.
Four horses. Three riders.
It was enough to travel. It wasn't much of a freight train.
They worked through what they'd need, most of it laid out on the porch in piles as they talked so nobody had to hold a list in their head.
Feed for the horses on days the grazing wouldn't be worth much.
Bedrolls, rolled tight and tied. What ammunition they could spare without stripping the Hollow's own defense too thin, counted out twice by David to be sure.
Karen's kit, cut down to what mattered most for the road and repacked into a smaller bag she could carry on her own horse without help.
Canteens for each of them, plus collapsible water bags for dry stretches.
They could carry enough drinking water for themselves.
The horses were another matter, and David marked every creek and river Rebecca knew along the route.
Rope. A pry bar, in case the railcar didn't open the easy way, wrapped in a spare shirt so it wouldn't rattle against the saddle all day.
Rebecca marked her map as they talked, working through what remained of Daniel's records one sheet at a time, writing yard names in block letters where his handwriting had gone small and hurried. She circled three railcar numbers in the same yard and underlined one of them twice.
"That's the medical car," she said. "The other two are the boots and the clothing."
"Same yard?"