Chapter 3 #3
Karen shifted her weight in the saddle, testing muscles she hadn't used in a while. "How far do you figure we'll make today?"
"Depends on the road more than the horses," David said. "We'll know more by dark."
Curtis rode with his rifle across his lap rather than slung, eyes moving over the tree lines and fence rows the way David's own did without either of them needing to say why.
Neither of them expected trouble this close to home.
Both of them looked anyway, because that was the whole point of looking — you didn't wait until you expected something to start.
The country here was still Hollow country in every way that mattered.
David recognized the Petersons' old barn roof through a gap in the trees, recognized the bend where the creek cut close to the road, recognized the fence post that had been leaning the exact same direction since before the EMP.
None of it needed comment. It was simply the last of what he knew by heart before the knowing ran out.
Once, a couple of miles on, Smokey stopped hard along the ditch line, nose up, body gone rigid in a way David recognized immediately. Curtis's hand drifted to his rifle without any visible urgency. David reined June up and waited.
Smokey held the point a few seconds longer, then relaxed, tail giving one loose swing before he trotted on ahead like nothing had happened at all.
"Deer, probably," Curtis said.
"Probably," David agreed, and let his own hand ease back to the reins.
Nothing came of it. That was the whole story, and David was glad of it. But it told him Smokey's nose hadn't dulled any from a winter mostly spent inside the barricade, and that was worth knowing before they were three days out with nobody familiar for fifty miles in any direction.
Nobody mentioned Rebecca's story out loud, but David noticed Curtis watching the tree lines a little longer than the empty road probably called for, and he didn't think less of him for it.
A group that called itself nothing and left a man dead in the woods didn't need to be close by to be worth watching for.
Better to build the habit now, on ground he trusted, than to start building it later on ground he didn't.
They were maybe four miles out when the road dropped into a low stretch where the snowmelt had turned everything the color of coffee and twice as thick. An old sedan sat half in the ditch at the edge of it, windows gone, door hanging open on one hinge, more landmark now than vehicle.
David reined June up short of it and sat a moment, reading the ground.
"Not riding through that blind," he said, and swung down.
Smokey trotted ahead to the mud's edge and sniffed along it before pulling back, as uninterested in it as David was. Curtis came forward on foot, studying the same stretch David was studying.
"Firmer ground off to the right," Curtis said. "Past that fence line."
"Agreed."
They worked the horses off the road and around through the field beside it, one at a time, David leading June and Whiskey through first. June picked her footing the way she always did, unhurried, testing before she committed her full weight.
Whiskey followed the lead without complaint, though his ears flattened once when his back hoof sank deeper than he expected.
Waylon came next, placing his big feet with a care that surprised David a little for a horse that size, carrying Karen through without a single misstep. She sat easy through it, letting him work without fighting his head the way a less experienced rider might have.
Willie tried angling toward a softer-looking line that turned out to be exactly the wrong choice, and Curtis corrected him with a short word and a shift of weight before he'd committed to it.
"Told you," Curtis muttered, mostly to the horse.
It cost them the better part of twenty minutes, all told, for a stretch of road that measured maybe sixty yards.
David looked back at it once they were clear, then ahead at the miles still waiting. Paper didn't know about bridges. It didn't know about mud either, and they'd covered barely four miles proving it.
He didn't say any of that out loud. Curtis already knew it, and Karen would learn it the same way David had — one delay at a time, until it stopped being worth remarking on.
They stopped near a creek a couple of hours on, the water running high from the winter thaw. David let the horses drink their fill.
He loosened June's cinch, ran a hand under Whiskey's pack saddle checking for any rub starting where the straps crossed his back, and found nothing that worried him yet. Curtis did the same for Waylon and Willie without being asked.
Karen swung down slower than she had that morning and stood a moment with one hand braced against Waylon's shoulder before she trusted her legs on their own.
"Sore?" Curtis asked, not looking up from Willie's girth.
"No."
Curtis looked at her.
"Ask me tomorrow," Karen said.
Waylon stood half asleep in the sun while she leaned against him, eyes half shut, one hind foot cocked. Willie, on the other hand, had already worked his nose into the open flap of a saddle bag where the food was packed.
"Willie," Curtis said.
The horse stopped, ears swiveling back, and pulled his head out like he'd never been interested in the first place.
"He likes lunch," Karen said.
"He likes everybody's lunch."
They ate standing, mostly, passing jerky and the last of Grace's biscuits around without much talk, letting the horses graze what little green had come up along the creek bank.
Smokey drank his fill and stretched out flat in a patch of sun, chest rising and falling slow, resting the way David wanted him resting.
"Waylon eat like this every stop?" Karen asked, watching him work at a patch of new grass with methodical patience, never rushing, never wasting a bite.
"Every stop," Curtis said. "Doesn't matter if it's two minutes or twenty. He treats every one of them the same."
"Willie doesn't."
"Willie treats every stop like it might be his last meal ever." Curtis nodded at the gelding, who had already abandoned the grass in favor of nosing at David's bedroll. "Hey."
Willie stepped back, unbothered, and went back to the grass like that had been the plan all along.
David settled down near where Karen sat, and for a while neither of them said much, just chewed jerky and watched the water run.
"How's it sit with you," David asked, "leaving Rebecca to cover the Hollow?"
Karen thought about it before she answered, which was how David knew the question had landed somewhere real.
"Eight months, everybody does what I tell them," she said. "Nobody's questioned a call I made since September. Then a doctor walks through the gate half-dead, and four days later I'm handing her the whole Hollow and riding off like the nurse who used to be in charge."
"Bother you?"
"Not enough to want her gone." She turned the last of her biscuit over in her hand without eating it.
"She's better trained than I am. I know that.
Doesn't mean it doesn't feel strange, being the one who gets replaced by somebody more qualified instead of the one training somebody less qualified.
I spent eight months being the only answer anybody had.
Now there's a better answer, and I'm the one leaving town. "
"You're not being replaced," David said. "You're the only reason she's alive to do the job."
Karen almost smiled at that. "I know it. Doesn't stop it from feeling the way it feels."
David didn't push it further. Some things didn't need fixing, just saying out loud once.