Chapter 8 #3
"Sometimes they're smarter than we are," Curtis said, not looking at him.
"Sometimes?"
"Don't get carried away."
The storm held them for close to two hours, thunder rolling steady overhead, rain drumming without any sign of easing for the first half of it.
They used the time. Ate a little. Rested the horses properly instead of just standing around waiting. David checked tack by feel more than by light, working buckles and straps that had taken a beating in the scramble to the barn.
Karen filled in what she remembered of the stranger's account of Charlotte, more detail spilling out now that there wasn't a road demanding her attention. Curtis listened with his arms crossed, working through it the way he worked through most problems — quietly, then all at once.
"So, we're riding into a city full of people pretending it's empty," he said.
"Sounds about right," David said.
Karen was quiet a moment. "The records get us to the yard. They don't tell us who's living around it now."
"No," David said. "They don't."
"What happens if somebody's already living in that yard?"
David had turned that over more than once since Charlotte first became more than a word on a map. "Then we find out how territorial they are before we decide anything else. Maybe it's empty. Maybe it's not. No sense planning a fight we haven't confirmed is coming."
"That's not much of a plan," Curtis said.
"It's the only honest one I've got."
Nobody had a better answer for that yet, and there wasn't much point pretending otherwise this far out. That was a problem for Charlotte, not for a barn in the middle of a thunderstorm eighty-some miles short of it.
The rain eased by midafternoon, thunder rolling off to the east and then fading further than that, until only the drip of water off the barn roof remained.
Curtis checked all four horses again, thorough about it the way he'd been thorough all trip. No injury. No heat in any leg. No tenderness when Curtis checked their feet. Four sound horses that had just proven themselves worth every bit of trust David had put in them.
They saddled up. Karen gave Waylon a long scratch along his neck before she mounted. "You're getting an apple when we're home."
"That's a dangerous promise," Curtis said.
"Why?"
"He remembers things involving food."
Willie immediately nosed at Curtis's coat pocket, and Curtis pushed his head away without much heat behind it.
"See?" he said.
They rode out into a world washed clean and cooler than it had been all day, ditches running with fresh water, broken branches scattered across the road here and there, the air smelling like rain and turned earth.
The road was wet but held under the horses' feet, and they made good miles through the last stretch of daylight — no second stranger, no new trouble, nothing but steady progress after a day that had tried hard to deny them any.
David noticed something shift in how everybody rode after the storm.
Karen gave Waylon more freedom over rough ground instead of fighting his choices.
David let June pick her own line around the worst mud without second-guessing her the way he might have that morning.
Curtis had never needed the lesson, but he seemed satisfied to see the others catching up to it.
By evening they'd made back most of what the day had threatened to cost them — close to twenty miles gained since morning, storm included.
They camped that night well clear of the road, in a stand of trees dry enough that the storm hadn't turned the ground to mud, and David checked the map by the last gray light before full dark closed in.
Charlotte had stopped being a dot on a page somewhere around midday.
Now it had shape in his head — empty streets giving way to occupied blocks without warning, good people and bad ones sharing the same ruined city, groups holding small pieces of something too large for anyone to control completely.
And somewhere inside all of that sat one railcar, identified by a number a dead man had written down months before any of them knew his name.
"How far?" Karen asked.
David checked the map one more time. "About eighty miles."
"Four days?" Curtis asked.
David thought about the roads, the storm behind them, yesterday's detour, and didn't answer too quickly. "If the road cooperates."
Curtis looked at him. "You had to say that out loud."
"Now we're doomed," Karen said.
David folded the map away and let the joke sit without arguing it.
June reached her head over and nosed at his shoulder, hunting for something that wasn't there. He rubbed her forehead instead.
"You already earned yours," he told her.
"Talking to your horse now?" Karen asked.
"She found the barn."
"Waylon got me to it," Karen said.
Curtis, checking Willie's picket line a few feet off, didn't look up. "Willie didn't kill anybody."
"Low bar," Karen said.
"He's proud of it anyway."
They settled in for the night with Charlotte still four or five good days ahead of them, closer than it had been that morning by every mile the storm hadn't managed to take back.