Chapter 7 #3
Karen lay down but didn't sleep right away, her eyes open toward the last gray light above the trees. David sat against a tree with Smokey pressed warm against his leg. They'd eaten cold rather than risk a fire this close to the roadblock.
He turned the roadblock over in his mind, not looking for comfort in it, just looking at it plainly.
Before the EMP he'd handled pressure well enough — weather, mechanical failure, decisions that mattered in seconds rather than minutes.
A stall on approach. An engine warning at the worst possible altitude.
He'd trained for those things, drilled them until his hands knew what to do before his mind finished the sentence describing the problem.
But pointing a pistol at a man and being ready to use it had never been part of David's life before the EMP. He'd never needed that skill then.
Somewhere on the road home, that line had moved.
Not all at once. A little with every threat, every bad stretch of road, every person who mistook hesitation for an opening.
He remembered the first time somebody had pointed a weapon at him with real intent behind it — the strange, almost clinical distance he'd felt, like watching the moment happen to somebody else while some older, more practical part of him decided what came next.
He hadn't liked that feeling. He'd needed it since, more times than he cared to count on the walk home, and needing it enough eventually made it stop feeling strange at all.
At the roadblock he hadn't felt fear the way he once would have. He'd registered distance, weapons, the men he could see and the ones he couldn't, Smokey's position, Curtis's position, Karen's position, the road behind them if they needed to run it. Then he'd acted.
The part that troubled him wasn't the acting. It was how little thought the acting had required.
There'd been a version of him, once, who would have frozen at the sight of five armed men, who would have talked too long or moved too slow and let the moment decide itself instead of deciding it.
That version of him hadn't survived the trip home.
David couldn't have named the day it changed.
Somewhere along the road, hesitation had stopped being his first response.
He wasn't proud of it. He didn't wish it gone either, because Grace and the boys were alive in part because he'd learned it on the road home, and Karen and Curtis had gotten through today whole because he'd carried the lesson with him this far.
Karen's words came back to him. That's what bothers me.
It bothered him too. But hesitation with men like that would have cost them the horses, maybe Karen, maybe all of them, and knowing the alternative didn't make the knowledge sit any easier.
He thought about telling her that, decided it wouldn't change anything she already understood, and let it go.
He looked down at Smokey. "You scared them worse than I did."
Smokey lifted his head at David's voice, ears pricked, then settled again once nothing more followed. David rubbed a hand along his neck and let the quiet hold for a while.
Before he lay down, David checked the map one more time by the last of the light.
The roadblock and the ruined bridge together had cost them the better part of a day, and pushed them farther south than planned. He marked the crossroads town in his own shorthand.
ROADBLOCK — HOSTILE — AVOID
Then he marked the bridge, and studied the tangle of roads ahead, the ones they could use and the ones they couldn't. The return trip would be worse than the outbound one, whatever they found in Charlotte.
If they came home loaded with anything worth taking, that road stayed closed to them, full stop.
He thought about the men at the roadblock a while longer, turning over what he'd seen rather than what had happened.
Five visible, opportunistic rather than organized, no discipline in how they'd spread out across the road, no fallback plan once the situation stopped going their way.
That told him something about the danger on this stretch of road.
These men tested travelers who looked weak and backed down when somebody pushed back.
Worse men would have had a plan for exactly what David had done. These hadn't.
That didn't make them harmless. It made them predictable, which was its own kind of comfort on a road that offered little else.
Curtis came over during the watch change and looked over David's shoulder at the map.
"How much did today cost us?"
"Half a day. Maybe more."
"Could've cost more."
"Yeah."
Curtis nodded toward the road ahead. "Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow we keep going."
"Same road, or you found us a new one?"
"New one," David said. "Rejoins the main route a few miles past where we would've come out anyway. Just took the long way getting there."
"Worth it."
"Ask me again once we're back on pavement."
Curtis went to sleep. David sat a while longer, looking east toward where the country only got busier the closer they came to Charlotte — more roads, more towns, more people who'd survived the winter and were starting to test what they could take from whoever passed through.
There would be more men like the ones at that roadblock. Maybe worse ones.
Somewhere in the dark, brush rustled. Smokey's head came up sharp, and David's hand moved to his pistol before he'd consciously decided to move it at all.
A deer stepped out into the open a few dozen yards off, paused, and moved on. Smokey lowered his head.
David looked down at his hand on the grip. He took it off the pistol and rested it on Smokey's back instead.