Chapter 8
David had the map out before the light was good enough to read it, tracing yesterday's cost against today's need.
Curtis noticed while he checked Willie's girth. "You planning on getting all of yesterday back today?"
"No."
Curtis waited.
"Some of it."
"That's what I figured."
A clean twenty miles, if the road allowed it.
Not a number he'd chase past what the horses could give safely, but a number worth reaching for.
The roadblock, the detour, the ruined bridge — all of it had cost them the better part of a day, and David didn't like arithmetic that put them behind schedule this early in a month-long trip.
Every lost day out here meant a longer stretch waiting for them on the way home, loaded or not.
Karen came out moving easier than she had the past two mornings.
"I'm starting to think Waylon's the only reason I'm going to survive this trip," she said, patting his neck.
"Don't tell him that," Curtis said. "He'll start charging you."
"He already costs me most of my dignity. Might as well throw in the rest."
David checked June — legs, hooves, the cinch, the rifle scabbard — and found nothing to worry him. Curtis had Willie and Waylon squared away, and Whiskey's pack sat balanced the way it should. No sore feet. No rubs. Four sound horses on a morning that badly needed one.
He glanced at the sky once before mounting — clear enough, pale gray easing toward blue, nothing in it to worry about yet.
They mounted and rode east.
For several hours, the road gave them exactly what they'd been wanting since the crossing two days back — decent pavement and no trouble at all.
The county route rejoined the better eastbound road well beyond the town they'd avoided, and the miles came easier than they had since leaving the Hollow.
The country around them looked like spring finally deciding to commit to itself.
Fields greening in patches. Occupied farms mixed in among the abandoned ones, smoke rising here and there from chimneys that hadn't shown any the week before.
Somebody had strung new wire along a fence line that had been down long enough for weeds to grow through it.
David recognized the look from repairs they'd made around the Hollow.
Livestock showed up more often too — a handful of sheep grazing a hillside pasture, a mule tied near a barn, chickens scratching in a yard where somebody had clearly decided the risk of keeping them outside was worth the eggs.
Small signs, all of them, but they added up to a country that had made it through winter and meant to keep going.
More travelers than they'd seen since winter, too. A wagon crossing a field in the distance. A man walking alone with a pack on his back. Two riders heading west who lifted a hand and kept going without slowing.
Nobody bothered anybody. But the traffic itself told David something — they were close enough to Charlotte now that its pull was starting to show, the way a current picks up the closer a river gets to open water.
Late morning, Smokey alerted to something ahead — not the low bristle of danger, just ears up, head lifted, attention fixed on the road before David could see anything himself.
A lone traveler came into view a few minutes later, walking west, pushing a bicycle loaded with gear along beside him rather than riding it.
One tire looked flat or close to it, which explained the pushing.
David guessed the man for somewhere near sixty, weathered enough that the age was hard to pin exactly, wary but not afraid.
Both sides slowed without either saying anything about it.
David kept his hands visible and away from the pistol.
The man stepped off to the shoulder, giving them room to pass if that was what they wanted, and something in that small courtesy told David more than words would have.
A man used to trouble didn't step aside for strangers with that much ease.
He'd learned when it was worth the risk of standing his ground and when it wasn't.
"Coming far?" David called.
The man looked at him. "Depends what you call far."
"Charlotte?"
That got his attention. "You headed there?"
"Maybe."
The man gave him a look that said he wasn't buying the maybe, and he was right not to. "Then you're headed there."
David almost smiled.
They didn't trade life stories right off. David asked about the road ahead. The man asked what they were looking for in Charlotte, and Karen answered before David needed to.
"My brother."
The man nodded, unbothered, clearly not interested enough to press. "If he made it through winter, he might not be where you remember him living. Charlotte's not what it was in the fall, and it wasn't much like itself in the fall either."
That opened the door David had been hoping somebody would open for him.
The man had come out of the Charlotte area only a few days back, and what he described matched what David had already guessed, filled in with detail he had no way of knowing otherwise.
The city had emptied out fast after the EMP. Whole sections had been abandoned as people moved toward family, farms, or anywhere smaller and easier to manage. Food disappeared within weeks. Water got hard to manage without power behind it. Winter had pushed even more of them out.
But thousands remained, scattered through what used to be a metro area of over a million people.
"You'll go ten blocks and think nobody's left," the man said. "Then turn a corner and find thirty people living together like it's the most normal thing in the world."
Pockets everywhere, he said. Some neighborhoods had barricaded themselves off entirely.
Some apartment buildings held small communities that had banded together out of necessity and stayed that way out of habit.
Churches, warehouses, whole blocks that had reorganized themselves around whoever showed up first and held their ground.
Some groups traded. Some helped travelers passing through. Some wanted nothing to do with anybody. Some took whatever they thought they could get away with taking.
"There are good people in there," the man said, and paused long enough that David waited for the rest of it. "There are bad ones too."
"How do you tell the difference?" David asked.
"Usually after you wish you'd known sooner."
Karen leaned forward slightly in the saddle. "Did you stay with anybody? While you were there?"
"Church group, most of the winter. Decent people. Fed me better than I fed myself most days before all this." The man shifted his grip on the bicycle. "Left because I've got people west of here I hadn't seen since it happened. Wanted to know if they made it."
"Did they?" David asked.
"Don't know yet." He said it plainly, without inviting sympathy for it, and David respected that more than he'd have respected a longer answer.
He gave them what advice he had. Don't ride through the middle assuming it's empty. Watch intersections closer than open road. Stay clear of anywhere barricaded unless somebody invites you past it. Don't show people what you're carrying, and don't tell strangers where you're sleeping that night.
David already knew most of it. Hearing it confirmed from somebody who'd just walked out of the place mattered more than it should have.
David let the conversation drift toward industrial parts of the city, careful not to ask anything that sounded like it was reaching for a target.
"Any parts worse than others?" he asked.
The man named a few areas without much hesitation — one neighborhood David wouldn't remember the name of past the hour, a stretch near the old highway interchange, a warehouse district south of downtown.
"Anything that obviously held food got picked through months back," the man said.
"Warehouses, rail cars, all of it. But Charlotte's got more freight sitting around than anybody's had time or reason to search through completely.
There's more stuff in that city than there are people left to look for it. "
David kept his face even. "That so."
"Problem is, everybody knows it. Half the people still living there have already been through the easy places.
What's left takes work to find, and work to hold onto once you do.
" The man shifted his weight, glancing between the three of them like he was reconsidering how much to say.
"Rail yards especially. Big enough that nobody's gone through more than a fraction of it.
Takes tools most people don't have anymore, and time most people can't spare when they're worried about the next meal. "
"You ever go looking yourself?" David asked.
"Once. Enough to know it's not a one-man job, and not a one-day job either." The man shook his head. "Left it alone after that. Wasn't worth the risk for what I could carry out on my own back."
That was exactly the shape of the problem David had already understood from Rebecca's papers, said out loud by somebody with no idea what those papers contained. The man didn't know about a medical railcar sitting in a yard somewhere, and David didn't tell him.
Before they parted ways, the man looked west, toward the sky behind them, and his expression changed.
"I'd find a roof," he said.
David turned in the saddle. Clouds had built fast while they'd been talking, dark and stacking high enough that the change felt sudden even though it couldn't have been.
"He's right," Curtis said, already reading it the same way.
"How bad?" Karen asked.
Curtis kept his eyes on the sky. "Bad enough I don't want to be sitting on a horse when it gets here."
The man told them about an old farm a few miles east — barn standing, house mostly not, nobody living there when he'd passed through going the other direction. He gave them enough of a description to find it.
They thanked him. No long goodbye. He kept walking west, pushing his bicycle, and they turned east toward whatever time they had left before the sky made good on what it was promising.
David judged they had enough time. He was wrong within twenty minutes.