Chapter 10
The country had changed again by the second morning after the storm, and David noticed it before anyone said a word about it.
More houses. Paved county roads instead of dirt and gravel.
An old subdivision entrance, a church with a gravel lot, a convenience store with its windows long gone but its shell still standing.
Not Charlotte. Not close enough to see anything of a skyline yet.
But the outer edge of something larger, the way the ground starts sloping toward a river long before the water comes into view.
Traffic showed it too — horse tracks overlapping in the mud along the shoulder, boot prints, the narrow double line of a bicycle tire, wagon ruts cut deep enough in one spot that David studied them a moment before riding on.
Spring had put people back on the roads everywhere they'd traveled, but here it felt thicker, more constant, closer to what a real population center pulled toward it.
The storm had left puddles standing in the low spots and washed gravel along the shoulders, but the sky today held clear and the morning air smelled like wet earth drying out.
Karen had slept better than she had in days, by her own account, and even Curtis seemed loose in the saddle in a way that suggested the horses had all come through the last two days without carrying any hidden trouble into today.
David checked the map before they set out. Eighty miles left, more or less, if the roads cooperated. Four days at a reasonable pace.
He already knew it wouldn't stay that simple.
"Charlotte move overnight?" Curtis asked, watching him fold and unfold the same section of map.
"No."
"Then why are you looking at it like it did?"
David folded it away. "Trying to figure out how we're coming back."
"We haven't gotten there yet," Karen said.
"That's why I'm doing it now."
They mounted and rode east.
A couple hours into the morning they came out onto a wider paved road that had clearly carried real traffic once — gas station shells on two corners, a fast-food sign with half its letters gone, a scatter of billboards standing along the shoulder on tall rusting poles.
Most of them meant nothing anymore. An injury lawyer's smiling face, faded to a ghost of itself. A roofing company. A hospital system's cheerful slogan about care that didn't exist for anybody now. David rode past all of it without much thought.
Then one caught his eye enough to slow June without meaning to.
SOUTHERN brEEZES CARRIAGES
Horse-Drawn Carriages ? Weddings ? Tours ? Special Events
Draft Horses even a long, gentle rise could wear down a two-horse team hauling real weight in a way it never touched a rider on a fit saddle horse.
Turning around somewhere narrow mattered more than it ever had on horseback, where a bad choice cost nothing worse than backtracking a few careful steps.
And people mattered most of all. A wagon couldn't slip off into the trees at the first sign of trouble the way riders could. It couldn't outrun anything. It committed to whatever road it was on the moment it started down it.
David traced the route they'd already traveled with one finger.
The river crossing a few days back — visible, toll-collecting, honest people who'd still remember a loaded wagon coming through weeks after three poor travelers passed the other direction.
The hostile roadblock — impossible, full stop, wagon or no wagon.
The creek and collapsed bridge they'd detoured around — no wagon was making the muddy farm lane to the ford they'd used downstream.
"You're finding problems," Karen said, watching his face.
"A lot of them."
"Thought the wagon was supposed to solve one," Curtis said.
"It does."
"And makes six more?"
"About that."
Curtis considered it, unbothered. "Sounds useful."
David decided against the direct route before they'd gone another mile.
If they came home with a wagon, he wanted the quiet roads scouted before they were loaded down with anything worth stealing.
He picked a county road off the map that angled southeast before curving back north toward Charlotte, longer than the straight line but further from whatever traffic the main road was already carrying.
Curtis studied the map over his shoulder. "Charlotte's that way." He pointed.
"I know."
"We're going this way."
"I know."
"Are we trying to reach Charlotte or avoid it?" Karen asked.
"Both," David said, and neither of them argued the logic of it, though Curtis shook his head like a man resigned to a longer day than he'd planned on.
They rode the zigzag through the late morning, and David felt every extra mile of it, but every mile was also a mile scouted for the trip home, and that made the arithmetic worth doing.
Near midday they came up on an old rural crossroads where a cluster of horses stood tied outside a building that had once been a feed store or country market, two wagons parked nearby, smoke rising from a cook fire, tables set up along what used to be a parking lot.
David's first instinct was to bypass it entirely.
His second thought, slower and more useful, was that they needed road information badly enough to risk the stop, and that the place didn't carry the feel of anywhere dangerous.
Families stood among the tables. Children ran between wagon wheels.
Older people sat talking on upturned crates.
The weapons present were the ordinary kind everybody carried now, slung or holstered, nobody posturing with them.
Twenty or thirty people, easily, trading eggs and seed and dried beans, jars of something preserved, a table of repaired hand tools, another with leather work and mended boots, somebody's seedlings set out in old paint cans and coffee tins waiting for someone willing to trade food or labor for them.
Nothing dramatic about any of it. Just people who'd worked out that meeting at the same crossroads once a week beat riding farm to farm looking for what they needed, the way farmers had probably done at this same corner long before the EMP made it necessary again.
A woman near the first hitching rail offered water for the horses before David had asked for anything, and a man nearby pointed out where to tie them without being asked either. Somebody warned Karen off one loose rail before she reached for it.
A child, maybe seven or eight, eyed Smokey from a careful distance and looked up at a nearby adult before edging closer, asking permission with her whole posture even before she found the words.
"He won't hurt you if you don't crowd him," Karen said.