Chapter 3 #4
David walked the creek bank a short distance while the others ate, studying the water level against what Rebecca's notes said about the crossing sixty miles ahead.
If this creek was running this high already, the river was going to be worse.
He didn't say so out loud yet. No sense borrowing trouble before they'd earned it.
Twenty minutes later they were back up and moving.
The afternoon wore on gray and mild, the sun never quite breaking through but never threatening rain either, the kind of day that made for easy traveling if nothing else did.
David let June set her own pace on the straight stretches and only gathered her up where the road demanded more care.
Behind him he could hear Karen and Curtis talking low, nothing urgent in it, just the sound of people filling miles with conversation because the alternative was silence for hours at a stretch.
They passed a farmhouse midafternoon where a man and a girl who looked to be fourteen or fifteen were working a field beside the road, turning soil with a hand plow behind a single mule.
The man straightened when he caught sight of three riders and a dog coming down the road, and his hand found something leaning against the fence post — a shotgun, David guessed, close enough to reach but not raised.
David reined June down to a walk well before they drew level, giving the man time to see there was no hurry in it.
"Afternoon," David said.
The man studied them a moment before he answered, eyes moving over the rifles, over Smokey, over the loaded pack on Whiskey. "Afternoon."
"Didn't mean to come up on you fast. We're just passing through."
"Most people are, these days." The man relaxed by a degree, though his hand didn't leave the fence post. The girl had stopped working too, watching from behind the mule without coming any closer.
"You know the road ahead?" David asked. "Bridges, washouts, anything we ought to know about?"
"Road's gone bad about six miles up, where it dips down by the old grain elevator.
Stay left when it forks past there — right fork's been underwater since the thaw started.
" The man nodded down the road the way they were headed.
"Past that I couldn't tell you. Haven't been more than ten miles from this house since fall. "
"Appreciate it."
The man's eyes lingered on the loaded pack horse a moment longer than curiosity alone would explain. "You headed far?"
"Far enough," David said.
The man didn't push it, which told David something about him too — a man who didn't ask twice when a stranger declined to answer had learned the same lessons David had. He gave a short nod instead, the kind that passed for goodwill between people who no longer assumed it by default.
"Careful on that road," the man said.
"Same to you," David said, and touched his heels to June.
They rode on without looking back. The girl had already turned back to the mule by the time David glanced over his shoulder, the man's hand still resting near the fence post until the road bent and put the farmhouse behind a stand of trees.
Nobody spoke about it for a while after.
It didn't need discussing. A man defending a field with his daughter and a mule was proof enough of something David had already suspected — the roads weren't just opening up for the Hollow.
They were opening for everybody, the same way Grace had said they would.
By midafternoon the country had started to feel less familiar, an unfamiliarity David recognized without needing to think hard about why.
He reined June up near an old mailbox leaning sideways out of the weeds, post half rotted through, the farmhouse behind it dark and shuttered the way most of them were now.
Curtis came up beside him without asking why they'd stopped. He already knew.
"What?" Karen asked, looking between them.
David nodded at the road ahead, plain and empty and no different in appearance from the road behind them. "This is about as far as we've been since winter."
Karen looked down it too, like she expected something to mark the difference. There wasn't anything to see. Just road, and wet fields, and trees still bare enough at the top to show the gray sky through them.
"No sign at all," Karen said.
"There wouldn't be," David said. "Nobody's had a reason to put one up."
He sat there a little longer, looking down the road. Behind him were roads he knew, people he knew, and places he could find in the dark. Ahead was a hundred and seventy miles none of them had seen since the EMP.
Smokey moved a few yards ahead on his own, nose working low along the shoulder, unbothered by whatever line David had just crossed in his own head.
David touched his heels to June, and she stepped forward without hesitation, picking her way around a washout where the road had crumbled at the edge.
Whiskey followed on the lead. Waylon fell in behind him, steady as ever.
Willie came last, glancing once toward the dark farmhouse before he decided it wasn't worth the trouble and kept walking.
He let June choose her own footing, and they rode on.