Chapter 7
David woke before the others, the way he had every morning since leaving the Hollow, and lay a moment listening before he moved.
No wrong sounds. Just the river somewhere behind them, birds working up to full volume, one of the horses shifting its weight in the dark.
He got up and checked June first, running his hands down each leg, lifting each hoof to look for stones or cracks.
Sound. He moved to Whiskey next, checking the pack lashings that had shifted crossing the bridge, then to Willie, kneeling to feel the leg that had skidded on the boards.
No heat. No swelling.
"He sore?" Curtis asked, sitting up in his bedroll.
"No."
Curtis got up anyway and checked Willie for himself, running the same hands down the same leg, satisfied only once he'd confirmed it firsthand. David didn't take that personally. A man who trusted his animals to somebody else's eyes alone wasn't much of a horseman, and Curtis was a good one.
He finished with Smokey, checking each paw for cracks or stone bruises from the day before, and found nothing worth worrying about. Smokey tolerated the inspection the way he tolerated most things David did to him, patient and a little bored by it.
Karen woke slower, working a hand into the small of her back and wincing.
"I thought nurses were supposed to know how long pain lasts," she said.
"Depends on the pain."
"This one?"
"Until Charlotte."
"You're improving," Curtis offered, checking Waylon's girth.
"That's not encouragement."
They ate quickly, standing mostly, and David spread the map while the others finished.
Their road ran east and southeast through country that would get more populated the closer they came to Charlotte, but the main paved route gave them the best speed, and speed mattered as much as caution did.
They looked poor. Four horses and three riders with nothing worth robbing beyond the horses and whatever weapons they carried in plain sight.
He thought about the crossing from the day before as he folded the map away.
Rivers pulled people together. So did towns, fuel stops, intersections — anywhere a road narrowed enough to force travelers past each other.
Winter had kept most of that quiet. Spring was waking it back up, and David meant to pay attention to every place that fit the pattern from here on.
They mounted and rode east, Smokey working the ditch line ahead of them in easy loops.
The first few hours passed without trouble.
They passed abandoned houses with the paint peeling and the yards gone to seed, fields showing the first green haze of new growth pushing up through last year's dead stalks, washed shoulders where spring runoff had cut the dirt away from the pavement.
Fallen limbs lay where nobody had bothered clearing them.
Here and there David noticed wagon tracks crossing the road, or horse droppings fresh enough to mean somebody had passed in the last day or two, or a boot print pressed into a soft patch of shoulder mud.
More movement than winter had ever shown them.
They passed a farmhouse with smoke rising from the chimney, but nobody came out to look at them. Later they passed two people working beside a garden bed, and one lifted a hand. David lifted his back. No words exchanged, no need for any.
"More people than I expected," Karen said.
"Spring brings everybody back to the road," David said.
"Including the ones you'd rather stayed home," Curtis said, and didn't elaborate.
Around midday they stopped briefly near a creek for water and food, and David studied the map again while the horses drank.
Ahead lay a town — not large, an old crossroads community from the look of the marked roads, a scatter of buildings that had probably held a couple of stores, a gas station, a church, maybe forty or fifty houses on either side of the main road where it bent through the center of things.
County roads looped around it in both directions, but the map gave him no way to know their condition.
"Bypass it?" Curtis asked.
David thought it through rather than answering on reflex.
No sign of trouble on the road so far. Every inhabited place they skirted cost them time they couldn't spare on a month-long trip, and they needed to learn which roads held up and which didn't before they were deep enough into unfamiliar country that a wrong guess became expensive.
They weren't carrying anything worth killing over.
Three armed adults, four horses, and a dog the size of Smokey weren't easy targets either.
"We'll ride through," David said. "Stay sharp."
Karen looked ahead at the rooftops just visible through the trees. "You think it's occupied?"
"Most places are, one way or another. Question's whether whoever's there wants anything to do with us."
"And if they do?"
"Then we find out fast and decide from there," David said. "Can't plan for people we haven't met yet."
Smokey drifted closer to June as they came within sight of the first rooftops, no longer ranging as wide as he had all morning. Attentive rather than alarmed. David noticed and didn't turn them around. Not yet.
The road narrowed through a stretch of woods before it reached the town proper, the curve ahead cutting off any long view of what waited past it.
David noticed the first vehicle from thirty yards out — an old pickup, dead since the EMP like every other vehicle they'd passed, angled half onto the shoulder.
Nothing about it alone meant anything. Dead vehicles littered every road in the country now, rusting where they'd stopped the day the world quit working.
Then a second vehicle came into view farther up the road, pushed most of the way across the pavement.
That one meant something.
David slowed June to a walk. Behind him, Curtis slowed Willie without needing to be told, and Karen fell into pace behind them both.
Smokey peeled off toward the tree line on David's quiet command, disappearing into the brush a few yards off the shoulder.
They came around the bend, and David saw the rest of it.
Two vehicles blocked most of the road, leaving a gap barely wide enough for a single horse to pass through single file, a length of chain looped loosely across the opening.
Five men that David could count from here — one standing near the center of the gap, two by the nearer truck, one seated on a hood, one farther back near what looked like an old block building, maybe a former store.
Rifles slung or carried low. One shotgun. A handgun on somebody's hip.
No uniforms. No toll board. No repair work on the road itself, no sign these men had done anything here except decide the gap between two dead trucks was worth guarding.
David knew the difference immediately. This wasn't the crossing from yesterday.
The man near the center raised one hand.
"That's far enough."
David stopped June about twenty yards out. Curtis and Karen stopped behind him, a little offset to either side. David gave Smokey one more quiet signal, and the dog moved deeper into cover on the right flank, out of sight.
He watched two of the men notice the dog vanish and exchange a look neither of them meant to share so plainly.
Good.
The leader walked a few yards closer — mid-forties, cap pulled low, work coat, rifle carried loose at his side. Ordinary-looking enough that it made David trust him less, not more.
"Where you headed?"
Karen started in on the plan they'd rehearsed. "Charlotte. My brother lives—"
"Didn't ask you," the man said, not looking at her.
That told David most of what he needed to know before anything else was said.
"Charlotte," David said, flat and even.
"Where from?"
"West."
"West where?"
"Far enough."
"Long way to come for a brother," the man said, eyes not leaving David's.
"Long way," David agreed, offering nothing further.
The man's eyes moved over the horses, lingered on Whiskey a beat too long, then swept the rifles David and Curtis carried, then Karen.
"You always travel this heavy?" he asked.
"Roads aren't what they used to be."
"No," the man said. "They aren't."
"Folks using this road pay a toll," the man said.
"What's the toll?"
The man looked at the horses again. "One of those'll do."
Curtis's jaw tightened, but David spoke before he could.
"No."
The man smiled, easy, like David had misread his own position. "Wasn't asking."
One of the men near the truck started moving toward Whiskey.
David saw it before the leader gave any order at all — a shift of weight, a hand reaching. His own hand was already on the way down.
The pistol came up fast, no flourish, and settled level with the leader's chest.
"Stop."
The man moving toward Whiskey froze mid-step.
The leader's surprise showed for exactly one second before he covered it. David had beaten every one of them to the decision that mattered.
Curtis's rifle was already on a second man by the time anybody else reacted. Karen's pistol came up a beat slower, but it came up.
Smokey stepped out of the brush ten yards off the road, low, ears forward, a growl rolling out of him that didn't need volume to carry. He didn't charge. He didn't need to.
One man started to raise his shotgun.
David didn't move the pistol off the leader. "Don't."
"Hold," the leader said, sharp, to his own man.
He understood. David would put a round in him before the rest of them worked out what to do about it, and some part of him had already done the math.
"Here's what happens," David said, quiet. "We back up. You stay where you are."
"You think you're riding out of here?"
"Yes."
"You're outnumbered."
"Probably."
That word seemed to bother the man more than a flat denial would have.
"You've got people I can't see," David said. "I know. Doesn't change who I shoot first."
"You won't make it ten yards," one of the others called from near the truck.
"Maybe not." David's eyes stayed on the leader. "He won't make one."
Nobody said anything to that.
"You done this before?" the leader asked, something uncertain creeping into his voice now.
"Enough," David said.