Chapter 10 #2
"Better let him decide whether he wants the company," David added, gentler about it, and Smokey settled the question himself by lowering his head and standing neutral while the girl worked up the nerve to touch his ear.
He tolerated it well enough, tail giving one slow sweep, and the girl grinned like she'd won something.
An older man running the loose collection of tables came over and introduced himself plainly — Ray Miller, no ceremony to it.
"Where you headed?" he asked.
"East," David said.
Ray looked down the road like the answer amused him a little. "Lot of east out there."
"That's what I hear."
He didn't offer Charlotte, and Ray didn't press for it.
David asked about the roads while Karen traded a little of the food they could spare for a half-dozen eggs and a look on her face David hadn't seen since the Hollow — something close to ordinary contentment, standing among people bartering over food the way people used to at any market anywhere.
Ray gave him plenty. One bridge ahead stood open and sound.
A road two counties over flooded badly after heavy rain and had cost more than one traveler a wasted day this spring already.
A little town to the northeast had organized itself well enough that travelers spoke well of it.
The old highway carried most of the through traffic, fast but crowded.
Several county roads still held up fine for anyone patient enough to use them.
"Anybody running wagons through here?" David asked, keeping it idle.
Ray didn't find the question strange at all. "More every week. Folks are getting horses broke to harness again now the roads are drying out. One family two farms over hauls lumber with a two-horse team most days."
"Which roads hold up best for a loaded wagon?"
Ray thought about it honestly. "One route looks shorter on a map, but there's a washed section steep enough I wouldn't trust a team down it loaded. Longer way adds some miles but stays kinder to a wagon the whole way."
David marked it on his own map in shorthand only he'd recognize later. GOOD FOR WAGON.
Curtis noticed the note and said nothing.
Karen liked the place. David could see it in the way she lingered longer than the trading required, the way she smiled at a woman haggling good-naturedly over jar lids, the way the whole scene reminded her of something the world used to look like before all of it stopped.
"They're good people," David told her, once they'd stepped back from the tables.
"You sound disappointed."
"I'm not."
He explained it anyway, because she deserved the reasoning rather than just the caution.
Twenty or thirty decent people had seen them today.
Those people talked to another twenty or thirty by next week's gathering.
If David came back through here pulling a wagon loaded with medical supplies, people would remember three strangers from a few weeks back who'd asked careful questions about wagon roads.
Not because anyone here meant harm. Good people talked, the same as anybody, and good people could hand a piece of useful information to somebody who wasn't good at all without ever meaning to.
Karen understood without needing more of it spelled out. They finished up, thanked Ray, and left without any tension in the leaving at all — just three travelers moving on, same as they'd have looked riding in.
David turned them off the more traveled road within the hour, angling away from Charlotte for several miles on a county route that added distance without adding anything visible toward their goal.
"We're going to see every county in North Carolina before we see Charlotte," Curtis said.
"Maybe."
"Just checking."
They worked through county roads, old farm lanes, a stretch of subdivision connector pavement that had clearly never carried much traffic even before the EMP. The horses stayed sound through all of it, though the pace slowed every time David stopped to check the map against what he was seeing.
By late afternoon they'd covered better than twenty miles of riding and gained maybe fifteen or sixteen of it toward Charlotte, the rest spent on reconnaissance that wouldn't pay off until the return trip, if it paid off at all.
Late in the day they came on a subdivision that had been half-built when the EMP hit, and David slowed on instinct before they'd gone twenty yards past the entrance sign.
WHISPERING OAKS, the sign read, or had once read — half the letters gone now, the rest faded to a suggestion of paint on rotting wood. A single stone pillar stood beside it, the matching one on the far side toppled and grown over with vine.
Curving paved streets, complete right down to the curb cuts and storm drains.
Streetlights that would never come on standing over houses in every stage of construction — a few finished and empty, more just framed skeletons open to the weather, foundations poured and nothing built on top of them at all.
Stacks of lumber sat rotting where they'd been dropped, warped and gray after months of weather.
Grass and weeds had already found every crack in the new pavement, working through with the patience only plants had left in this world.
"Somebody had big plans," Karen said, looking down a street of empty foundations.
"Somebody had a bank loan," Curtis said. "Different thing."
Nobody appeared to live there. David checked carefully before riding in anyway — no smoke, no fresh tracks, no sign anybody had claimed the place for shelter.
The streets, once they rode the loop of them, connected two county routes that hadn't shown any obvious link on the map.
That mattered more than the houses did. A half-finished subdivision like this could work as a bypass around whatever populated crossroads sat between the two roads it joined — good pavement, wide enough for anything, no narrow bridge choking the route down to one lane.
David marked it. Another line on the second map, the quiet one.
They picked a house near the loop's far end to camp in — roof intact, exterior walls mostly up, no windows or doors yet to worry about latching, an open garage facing a patch of ground where they could secure the horses close to the house and keep them in sight.
Karen looked around the bare stud walls and empty window frames. "Roof."
"Luxury," Curtis said.
"No windows."
"Air conditioning."
"No doors."
"Easy access."
"You two finished?" David asked.
"Probably not," Curtis said, and wasn't.
They ate, checked the horses over by the day's last light, and settled in with Smokey pressed against David's side the way he'd taken to doing most nights now. No trouble arrived. The quiet held all the way through supper and past it.
Once the horses were settled, David asked Curtis more about Waylon and Willie, wanting the whole picture before he let himself get further attached to the idea.
"Man drove them together most days," Curtis said.
"Feed, equipment, whatever needed hauling around his place.
They know the commands. They've worn harness plenty.
They're not draft stock — don't load them like a pair of Belgians and expect them to shrug it off.
But a decent rig on decent roads, with a sensible load? They'll pull it fine."
"What kind of commands?"
"Whoa, back, step up. They know how to turn off the lines and work together.
The basics. He didn't run a fancy operation — hauled feed and fence posts, mostly, not show carriages.
" Curtis rubbed a hand along his jaw, thinking it through out loud.
"Willie'll be the easier one to get moving again.
He never forgets anything that involves work he used to enjoy.
Waylon might need a day or two to remember he's not just a saddle horse anymore. "
"How long since you drove them?"
"Around when I bought them. Close to two years now."
"They'll remember?"
"They'll remember," Curtis said. "More sure of that than I am about you driving them."
Karen laughed at that, and David let it go without arguing, because Curtis wasn't wrong to doubt him on it. If this worked, Curtis would be the one holding the lines.
That settled something in David's head about how the return might shape up, loosely — Curtis driving the team, David riding June, Karen somewhere between horseback and wagon depending on the load, Whiskey still earning his keep as a pack horse, Smokey ranging the same as always.
Nothing locked yet. They hadn't found the wagon.
But the shape of it existed now where it hadn't that morning.
They broke camp early the next day and rode out of the half-built subdivision onto the county road it connected to, and a few hours on David noticed fresh wagon tracks cut into the drying mud along the shoulder.
Two-horse spacing, from the look of it. Curtis confirmed it without much ceremony, reading the wheel ruts and the manure and the hoofprints the way a man reads sign he's seen a thousand times before, not making a show of the skill.
"Decent-sized wagon," Curtis said. "Loaded, from how deep those ruts are cutting."
The tracks ran east along the same road, so David followed them.
Before long they heard it before they saw it — wood creaking, harness jingling, the steady roll of wheels on pavement, an ordinary sound that had gone missing from the world for the better part of a year and was only now starting to come back into it.