Chapter 10 #3
They came up on a father and his grown daughter hauling milled lumber on a plain farm wagon behind two solid horses, and both looked over with the same careful, unhostile attention David had come to expect from decent people on the road.
The wagon creaked under a stack of boards that smelled freshly cut, and the daughter held the reins with the easy competence of somebody who'd been driving that team since before she needed to think about it.
"Where you headed?" the man asked, once introductions had cleared the first layer of caution.
"East. Maybe farther, depending," David said.
"You taking a wagon that way?"
"Maybe coming back," David said, which was true enough without giving away why.
The man's eyes moved to Waylon and Willie. "Those Appaloosas pull?"
"Better than they look," Curtis said, and left it there.
The daughter studied the two horses a moment longer than her father had, the way somebody who worked animals for a living looked at any team, sizing up conformation and condition out of habit.
"Good bone on both. They'd hold up fine, long as whoever's driving doesn't overload them thinking Appaloosa means the same as draft. "
"Wouldn't dream of it," Curtis said, and something in his tone made David think he meant it.
The man knew the roads well from hauling lumber between farms and the small communities that had reorganized since the EMP — fifteen to twenty-five miles most days, sometimes more.
He gave David real information in return for nothing but conversation: a washed grade to avoid entirely, one bridge sound enough for a light wagon but not one he'd trust loaded, another bridge holding up fine either way, the old highway fastest but busiest, a county route farther south adding miles but staying quiet and wagon-passable the whole way.
David marked every piece of it. This would matter more than almost anything else they'd learned since leaving the Hollow, if the carriage operation gave them anything worth hauling home.
They reached a fork a couple hours later — the direct route to Charlotte breaking left, a quieter road curving right before looping back east toward where the billboard's arrow had pointed.
David took the right fork without hesitation.
"Charlotte's left," Karen said.
"Yep."
"Don't bother," Curtis told her. "I've tried."
Karen laughed, and something in her expression said she'd finally caught up to what David had been building since yesterday morning — that he hadn't forgotten the billboard at all, that every mile of the zigzagging since then had been laid down with that carriage operation somewhere in the plan.
Late in the day they found another sign — a smaller placard nailed to a fence post, faded but readable, naming the same road the billboard had pointed toward, with a mileage count low enough that David did the math twice to be sure of it.
He stopped and got the map out one more time. The carriage operation lay eight or ten miles ahead and only a few miles off the route he'd already chosen toward Charlotte. Reachable tomorrow without costing them much distance.
They didn't go tonight. Too much daylight already spent, and David had no intention of riding up on an unfamiliar property in failing light, wagon or no wagon waiting for them there. They found a secluded spot well off the road instead and made camp.
By his count they stood somewhere around forty-five to fifty miles from Charlotte now. The carriage operation could be checked tomorrow without costing them anything if it turned out empty. If it didn't, everything about the return trip changed.
At camp David spread both sets of papers out one more time — Daniel's freight records on one side, his own road map on the other — and for the first time since Rebecca had handed them over, the two fit together differently in his head.
Before the billboard, the plan had been simple enough to hold in one sentence: find the railcar, take whatever they could carry on the horses, go home.
Now it ran longer. Find the railcar. Find out whether a wagon survived intact enough to use.
If it did, load far more than the horses ever could, and use every mile of the quiet route they'd been scouting since yesterday morning to get it home without anyone worth worrying about noticing.
But he understood the cost of it as clearly as the benefit.
A wagon meant they couldn't vanish into the woods at the first sign of trouble.
Couldn't take a narrow trail. Couldn't cross a creek anywhere that suited them instead of wherever the ground allowed a wagon through.
Everybody who saw them from here to the Hollow would remember them.
Three poor riders on tired horses were easy to forget. A loaded wagon wasn't.
"And if there isn't a wagon?" Karen asked, watching him fold the map.
"Then we're no worse off than we were yesterday."
"And if there is?" Curtis asked.
David looked over at Waylon and Willie, both grazing calm in the last of the light, entirely unaware they'd been volunteered for work neither of them had done in close to two years.
"Then getting home gets a lot more complicated."
"You mean easier," Curtis said.
David shook his head. "No. I mean heavier."