Chapter 7 #2
Behind him, he felt more than saw Curtis go very quiet, working something out.
"Nobody follows us," David said. "Nobody cuts through the woods. Nobody gets clever after we turn around."
"Or what?"
"Then there are consequences," David said. "Wouldn't be my first time dealing with them."
The leader scoffed, but it came out thinner than he probably meant it to.
Smokey's growl deepened as one man shifted his weight, and David added, without heat, "I'd quit worrying about me long enough to watch the dog."
The man glanced toward Smokey. Smokey didn't move at all.
That seemed to unsettle him worse than if the dog had lunged.
David began backing June, one careful step at a time, the pistol holding steady on the leader the whole way. Curtis backed Willie in the same rhythm. Karen backed Waylon. Whiskey followed on the short lead without protest, staying close.
Smokey held his ground while the distance opened up, a wall of teeth and intent between the men and the horses even as yards kept building between them.
At about forty yards, David called him.
Smokey broke from cover and closed the gap in a few long strides, falling in beside June.
One man lifted his rifle halfway.
"Bad idea," Curtis said, low and even.
The leader barked something short at the man, and the rifle came back down.
They kept backing until the bend swallowed the roadblock from view, and only then did David turn them fully around.
He kept the pace to a controlled trot rather than a gallop. Panic ruined horses and invited chase. Calm invited neither.
Once they'd put distance behind them, David didn't relax. He turned them off the main road at the first usable side track and led them half a mile before he stopped.
He listened. Beside him, Smokey's ears worked the air, and Curtis had gone quiet in the same listening way.
"Are they coming?" Karen asked.
"Don't know."
They waited. No hoofbeats. No shouting. Once, something that might have been a voice carrying from a distance, but nothing that resolved into pursuit.
David studied the map rather than assume they were clear.
Men who ran a roadblock like that could have watchers positioned to cut across open country, which meant the obvious parallel road wasn't necessarily the safe one.
A county road ran south and eventually rejoined their eastbound route several miles past the town, but the map showed a creek crossing he had no way to confirm was standing.
North added twelve or fifteen miles around the long way.
South added maybe eight, if the crossing held.
"You sure?" Curtis asked, when David said south.
"No," David said. "It's the better bad choice."
Curtis accepted that without further argument, the way David had noticed him doing more of since the confrontation. Not blind trust. Something closer to a man who'd watched somebody else's judgment prove sound once and was willing to extend it a little further credit.
They moved. Nobody talked much for a while. Smokey ranged close instead of wide, staying within easy call, glancing back toward the road behind them more than he usually bothered to.
They stopped again a few miles on, at a wooded drainage where the horses could drink, and Karen finally asked the question David had been waiting for since the roadblock.
"Were you going to shoot him?"
"If I had to."
"That's not what I asked."
David looked at her. "Yes."
Karen absorbed that without flinching, though something behind her eyes worked through it slower than her face let on. She'd watched people die before. She understood injury and death better than most people did — as facts of the body, things to manage when everybody around her needed her steady.
"You didn't hesitate," she said.
"Couldn't."
"Did you know he'd back down?"
"No."
"Then how were you that calm?"
David didn't have a polished answer for her. "Wasn't calm."
She looked at him for a long moment. "Could've fooled me."
"That was the idea."
He explained a little of it, because she'd earned that much. If those men had seen fear, or seen him hesitate even a second too long, they'd have pressed harder. The leader needed to believe David had already accepted where the whole thing might end.
"Had you?" Karen asked.
"Yes."
"How many times has it come to that? Before today."
David thought about how to answer that honestly without turning it into more than she'd asked for. "More than once on the way home."
Karen took that in without asking him to elaborate, which he appreciated more than he said.
"I had my hand on the pistol before I even decided to draw it," she said, almost to herself. "Didn't feel like a decision. Just happened."
"That's the training doing its job."
"I didn't train for that."
"You know how to keep your head when everybody around you is losing theirs," David said. "That counts for something."
She considered that, and something in her shoulders eased a fraction, like the comparison gave her somewhere to set the feeling down instead of carrying it loose.
She looked away, toward the creek, toward the horses drinking with their heads low.
"That's what bothers me," she said, quiet.
David didn't answer that one. It bothered him too, and there wasn't much comfort he could offer either of them about it that would also be honest.
Curtis had been tending Willie a few yards off, close enough to have heard all of it and pretending otherwise. Once Karen walked off to refill a canteen, he came over.
"You beat him," Curtis said.
"What?"
"To the draw."
"Wasn't a contest."
"Sure looked like one from where I was sitting." Curtis kept his eyes on Willie's girth, adjusting something that didn't need adjusting. "I had my hand moving. You already had yours out."
David didn't say anything to that.
"Didn't know you had that in you," Curtis said.
"Neither did I. Once."
Curtis considered that. "Figured you for a pilot who'd gotten good at surviving."
"I am."
"You're more than that."
"Let's not make this weird," David said.
Curtis grinned, and something in the set of his shoulders had shifted since the roadblock, settled into a different kind of trust than the one he'd carried out of the Hollow. "Wouldn't dream of it."
The southern county road narrowed further as the afternoon wore on, pavement giving way to broken asphalt and then to packed dirt, exactly as the map had warned. The creek crossing was exactly where the map said it would be.
The bridge was not what the map promised.
An old wooden structure, half collapsed, the center span dropped or tilted so badly that no horse was crossing it, spring runoff running high and fast beneath what remained.
Somebody had tried to shore it up once, David guessed, looking at a few weathered boards nailed across the worst gap years ago, long since rotted through and offering no more support than the memory of an intention.
David studied it a moment, then walked the bank looking for a ford. Smokey tested the water's edge and pulled back on his own, unwilling to commit to a current that strong.
"North route?" Curtis asked.
David looked at the light already going long across the fields. Backtracking toward the roadblock wasn't a choice worth naming out loud. They needed another way, and they needed it before dark.
He studied the map again, then the terrain. A farm lane ran along the creek downstream, overgrown but passable. They followed it, working past a collapsed fence, a fallen tree blocking half the width, ground soft enough in places that they had to dismount and lead the horses through by hand.
The lane had clearly gone unused for a long stretch of years even before the EMP, judging by the size of the saplings growing up through what had once been a clear cart track.
David pushed through where he could and walked the horses around where he couldn't, checking his footing more than once on ground that looked solid and wasn't.
At one washed-out ditch, Whiskey balked hard at the mud.
June crossed first without hesitation. Whiskey followed once he saw her clear. Waylon came through steady as ever. Willie stopped halfway to investigate something in the brush — a branch, or an old feed sack, David couldn't tell which.
"Willie," Curtis said.
Willie ignored him for one full beat before deciding to move.
"Dependable," Karen said.
"Never said focused," Curtis said, and even David nearly smiled.
They pushed on another quarter mile before the lane opened out along a wider stretch of bank, the ground firmer here, easier walking for both horses and riders.
David kept checking the light. They had maybe two hours before dusk made the footing too uncertain to trust, and he didn't want to be caught working through unfamiliar ground once he couldn't see what he was stepping into.
Eventually the creek widened over a stretch of gravel that looked promising.
David checked the depth and bottom with a broken branch before letting Smokey test the edge.
Knee-deep on a horse, gravel underfoot, current manageable.
He led June through first. Smokey crossed alongside them.
Whiskey followed on the lead. Karen and Curtis came last, Waylon and Willie both taking the crossing without complaint.
They reached the far bank without anybody hurt, but hours had gone into gaining what amounted to a handful of miles east.
They made camp before full dark, well off both the main road and the creek, in a spot David chose for the same reasons he'd chosen every camp since the Hollow — limited sightlines from the road, open enough around the horses to hear anybody coming, no running water close enough to cover footsteps.
Curtis volunteered for first watch without being asked.
"I've got it," he said.
"You sure?"
"Yeah." A pause. "Figure I owe you a quiet hour."
"You don't owe me anything."
"I know."
That said more than thanks would have.