Chapter 12
David checked Daniel's records and his own map before they broke camp, the same ritual he'd repeated every morning since leaving the Hollow.
Charlotte sat forty-five to fifty miles off. The carriage operation from the billboard lay eight or ten miles ahead, close enough to their planned route that reaching it cost them almost nothing.
Curtis was saddling Willie with more attention than the job required, checking the girth twice, adjusting a strap that didn't need adjusting.
"You're excited," Karen said.
"No."
"You are."
"I'm interested."
"Same thing, for Curtis," David said, and Curtis ignored both of them well enough to prove the point.
The morning held cool and clear, the road drying faster now that they'd left the worst of the storm's mud behind them. Smokey took to the ditch line with more energy than he'd shown in days, nose down, tail working, glad of dry ground under his paws for once.
They rode out as the country narrowed back into farmland, and within the hour they found a second sign, smaller than the billboard but unmistakable, pointing down a farm road.
SOUTHERN brEEZES CARRIAGES
Private Events ? Weddings ? Tours
Draft Horses ? Carriages ? Wagons
A faded silhouette of a carriage sat beneath the words, paint chipped but the shape readable. This was the place.
The farm sat well back from the road behind a long gravel drive — a large barn, an equipment shed nearly as big, fenced paddocks gone to weed, a smaller building that might have served as an office, and what looked like an outdoor ring for training or exercising horses.
No smoke. No livestock in the paddocks. No fresh wagon tracks in the drive.
David reined June up in the tree line rather than riding straight in, and the other two followed his lead without needing to be told why.
He studied the property a long moment — windows, doors, the state of the fencing, any sign of recent movement, anywhere a person could watch from without being seen.
Smokey's ears worked, interested rather than alarmed, and came to nothing.
"Somebody's been through," Curtis said, nodding at the office door, hanging open on one hinge. "Not recently, and not looking for what we're looking for."
Made sense. A man searching an abandoned property for food or medicine in the first hard weeks after the EMP might have ignored a shed full of carriages, especially with no horses left to pull them.
By the time equipment like this became worth coming back for, most people probably had bigger problems.
David left Karen with the horses at first, and went through the buildings with Curtis and Smokey, methodical rather than tactical, the caution of travelers checking an empty farm rather than men clearing a building under threat.
The office held nothing but scattered papers and an overturned filing cabinet, picked through months ago and abandoned. The barn stood empty of horses, stalls swept bare, feed long gone to mold or nothing at all, water buckets dry and cracked in the bottoms.
Curtis stopped at the empty stalls nearest the back, studying the size of them.
"Belgians, maybe Percherons," he said. "Built big."
"That good?" David asked.
"For what they were doing here, yes." Curtis didn't say more, and David didn't need it explained further.
Whatever had happened to the draft horses that used to live in these stalls — taken, released, stolen away by whoever came through first — they were long gone, and no amount of searching was bringing them back.
The equipment shed was where the trip earned itself.
David slid the door open on a row of vehicles that told the whole story of what this place had been before the world stopped needing wedding photographs.
A white vis-à-vis carriage sat nearest the door, ornate enough that David had no idea what half its fittings were for.
Behind it, something long and black that could only have been built for funerals.
A small two-wheel cart. A sleigh that would never see snow worth using it on again.
Karen ran a hand along the funeral carriage's side, mostly out of curiosity. "Somebody made a good living off other people's important days."
"Wonder what happened to the last wedding they had booked," Curtis said, and nobody had a good answer for that, so nobody offered one.
And past all of it, pushed toward the back like the plain cousin nobody photographed, sat a four-wheeled passenger wagon.
It looked immediately more useful than everything else in the shed combined.
A strong chassis. A driver's bench up front, two long passenger benches behind it.
Springs under the body. Rubber tires that looked, even from the doorway, in far better shape than anything else in this abandoned world had a right to be. A tongue built for a pair.
Curtis walked around it without speaking, running a hand along the side, crouching to look under it.
"Well?" Karen asked.
"Don't touch anything."
Karen looked at David. "He's excited again."
Curtis spent the better part of twenty minutes on that wagon before he said anything useful.
He checked the wheel bearings, working each wheel by hand to feel for play or roughness.
He pressed the tires, checked for cracking, found none worth worrying about.
He got underneath and studied the springs, the running gear, the pole where it joined the front axle.
He opened a small brass plate near the driver's bench and read whatever manufacturing date sat stamped into it, nodding to himself.
"Somebody took care of this," he said. "Wasn't sitting unused long before everything happened. Grease is soft in the bearings. Floorboards are sound. No rot I can find."
"Will it work?" David asked.
Curtis looked at him like the question had insulted the wagon personally. "That's not the right question."
"It's the one I'm asking."
"It'll work," Curtis admitted, after a moment. "Waylon and Willie can pull it empty without caring much. Loaded's where we start paying attention."
"How much can they pull?"
Curtis wouldn't guess before he'd seen freight. "We're hauling medicine, not proving what the horses can survive."
Once the wagon had been studied enough to satisfy Curtis, everybody stepped back and looked at it properly, and the problem became obvious at once.
It was beautiful, and beautiful was the last thing they needed.
Deep burgundy paint, gold trim along every edge, the company name lettered across the side in careful script.
Black fenders polished enough to hold a shine under a layer of shed dust. Polished brass trim and fittings caught what little light reached the shed.
It looked expensive because it was expensive, and it looked maintained because somebody had clearly loved it right up until the day the world stopped.
"We're going to get robbed," Karen said.
"Yep," Curtis said.
"Before or after somebody asks why three poor travelers suddenly own that?" David asked.
"Probably before," Karen said.
The harness room sat off the side of the barn, and it held nearly as much promise as the wagon shed had.
Several complete harness sets hung along the wall, most built for draft horses too large for Waylon and Willie, but two or three smaller sets looked close enough to work with adjustment.
Collars in a range of sizes. Bridles, lines, traces, breast straps, hames, spare leather, buckles, a tin of harness oil gone thick but usable.
Curtis worked through it piece by piece rather than grabbing the first complete set that looked close enough. He pulled several likely collars down and set them aside to try against Waylon and Willie, along with bridles, lines, and sound traces.
"Why does that one work and not this one?" Karen asked, holding up two collars that looked nearly identical to her eye.
"Collar's too big, it rides wrong on the shoulder and rubs the windpipe under load," Curtis said. "Too small, it chokes them the same way. Close enough doesn't count for much once they're pulling real weight."
He put together what looked like the best set to try — two likely collars, bridles that would need minor adjustment, lines long enough for the pair, traces sound enough to trust.
They brought Waylon and Willie into the yard that afternoon, and Curtis took his time about the whole thing.
He held each collar up against a horse's neck and shoulder before committing to anything, running two fingers between leather and hide to check the fit. One of the collars he'd pulled turned out too narrow for Waylon and went back on the pile. The second sat right, snug without pinching.
Neither horse had worn harness in close to two years. Willie investigated the leather the moment it came near him, nosing at a trace like he recognized an old friend, and when Curtis said, "You remember this," something in the way Willie stood said he did.
Waylon needed longer. He watched the collar go over his head with the wary attention of an animal deciding whether this was familiar or merely similar to familiar, and Curtis let him take that time rather than rushing it.
No bucking, no fuss, just a horse working out an old memory one strap at a time.
Curtis kept a hand on his neck the whole time, talking low, working the collar back a few inches and forward again until Waylon stopped flinching at the motion of it.
"That's it," Curtis said, mostly to the horse. "Nothing you haven't done a hundred times before."
Willie, meanwhile, had worked his nose into Curtis's coat pocket while nobody was watching him closely enough, and came away disappointed when he found nothing worth the effort.
Curtis checked every buckle twice, walked them both in hand first — step up, whoa, back, over and over until both horses answered without hesitation — before he ever brought them near the wagon itself.