Chapter 12 #2
David watched him work and found himself looking at a different kind of competence than the blunt, rifle-carrying Curtis he'd traveled hundreds of miles with.
This Curtis moved slow and patient, hands sure on leather he hadn't touched in years, talking to the horses in a voice David rarely heard him use on people.
Karen caught David's expression and said nothing, though the look on her face said she was enjoying watching him discover it too.
Hitching came next, and Curtis positioned the team himself, giving David small jobs — hold this, steady that — rather than trusting him with anything that mattered.
Whiskey and June stood tied well clear of the activity. Smokey watched from a shaded spot near the barn, content to observe rather than involve himself in horse business that wasn't his.
Curtis checked every connection twice before he climbed onto the driver's bench and took up the lines.
"Step up," he said.
The wagon rolled.
It rolled quietly, springs absorbing the yard's uneven ground, tires turning smooth over gravel that would have rattled anything without them.
Waylon and Willie leaned into the traces and took the weight without any sign of strain, ears forward, moving like two horses settling back into work they'd known before.
Curtis made a slow circuit of the yard. Stopped. Backed the team a few careful yards. Turned a wide circle and came around again.
"They remember," he said, and something in his voice sounded almost surprised, though David suspected he'd never doubted it as much as he'd let on.
"More sure about them than you were about David driving," Karen said.
"Was before we even started," Curtis said.
Converting the wagon from a people-hauler to a freight hauler took the better part of an hour.
The rear benches turned out to be bolted rather than built in, and a search of the equipment shed produced tools enough to pull them free.
They kept the driver's bench and one smaller side seat, useful if Karen ever needed to ride rather than walk beside it, and cleared the rest into open floor space.
Underneath, the floor ran broad and solid, better than David had hoped for. This wagon could carry far more than Whiskey ever had, so long as Waylon and Willie weren't asked to prove more than two Appaloosas reasonably could.
"Finding the space doesn't mean filling every inch of it," Curtis reminded him, before David had said anything that suggested otherwise.
David walked around the finished wagon one more time, and the bright paint bothered him worse with every lap.
"We can't take it like this," he said.
"What's wrong with it?" Karen asked, then looked at the wagon herself and answered her own question. "Right."
Curtis understood immediately, and didn't like it. "You're going to ruin it."
"I'm going to make it boring."
"You're going to ruin it."
They found what they needed in the maintenance shed behind the barn — old cans of exterior paint, gray and dark green and a brown gone thick enough to need real stirring, along with grease, dirt, and enough neglect lying around the property to borrow generously from.
The plan wasn't to make the wagon look fifty years old. It needed to look like an ordinary farm rig that had been repurposed and left to weather since the world stopped, not like a wedding carriage somebody had forgotten to hide.
They painted over the company lettering first, thick strokes of dull green across careful gold script. Karen took obvious pleasure in covering a decorative flourish along the side panel, brush moving with more enthusiasm than the job strictly required.
"You didn't have to enjoy that so much," Curtis said, watching gold vanish under green.
"I didn't."
She absolutely had.
Curtis worked on the far side of the wagon with the reluctant care of a man performing a task he morally objected to, dabbing paint over the scrollwork like it might be salvageable if he went gently enough.
"You're not going to save it by being careful," David said.
"I know that."
"Then paint it."
Curtis painted it, though not without a long look at the brush first, like he was asking its forgiveness on the wagon's behalf.
They dulled the bright body panels, rubbed dirt into the brass fittings until the shine gave up entirely, worked grease along one polished fender until it looked like the accumulated grime of months rather than something applied on purpose.
David caught Curtis trying to wipe a smear clean at one point and stopped him with a hand on his wrist.
"Leave it."
"There's grease on the paint."
"That's why I put it there."
Curtis looked like a man watching something he loved get slowly buried, which, in a sense, he was.
Several hours later, the wagon looked like an entirely different vehicle — mechanically the same excellent machine Curtis had spent the morning admiring, visually about as unimpressive as a farm wagon could look.
Dull green and gray body. Lettering gone under paint.
Bright trim smeared and dirtied past recognition.
The good tires remained the one detail nobody could disguise without damaging them, but from any distance short of close inspection, this looked like exactly what they wanted it to look like — an ordinary rig, nothing worth a second glance.
Karen stepped back to admire the work. "It looks terrible."
"Good," David said.
"No," Curtis said. "It looks terrible."
"That's the point."
"Doesn't make it less terrible."
They didn't strip Southern Breezes bare on their way out. David wanted useful weight, not dead weight, and the two didn't always mean the same thing.
Curtis took spare harness leather, buckles, a small set of repair tools, the tin of harness oil, grease for the wheel bearings, and a coil of rope sturdier than anything they'd carried since the Hollow. He wanted enough to fix harness trouble on the road without needing a blacksmith to do it.
Karen pointed out the irony of watching David refuse extra cargo the same afternoon they'd found a wagon meant to solve their cargo problem.
"That's how we keep the hauling capacity," David said. "We don't waste it before we've got something worth hauling."
Leaving Southern Breezes meant rearranging everything about how they traveled.
Curtis drove the wagon, Waylon and Willie in harness for the first time in close to two years and settling into it with less fuss than David had expected.
Karen rode Whiskey now, freed of most of his pack load once the gear had shifted into the wagon bed.
David rode June, ranging a little ahead and to the sides the way he always had, close enough to stay useful, far enough to see trouble before it saw them.
Smokey traveled alongside, adjusting his pace without complaint to whatever the wagon allowed.
They started slow while Curtis learned the feel of the team under real road conditions rather than a farm yard's flat gravel.
"I liked Waylon better," Karen said, a few miles in, shifting in Whiskey's saddle.
"Waylon's working," Curtis called back from the bench.
"So am I."
"You're sitting on Whiskey," David said.
"Exactly."
The wagon rode better than any of them had expected, springs smoothing out road surfaces that would have jolted a rider's spine, rubber tires holding steady over patched pavement and packed dirt alike.
Waylon and Willie settled into a rhythm within the first hour, breathing easy, gait unbothered by a load that amounted to little more than their own harness and a wagon bed mostly empty.
Curtis watched them constantly anyway, reading their breathing and stride the way he read everything about a horse, alert for the first sign that empty travel had become something harder.
They covered ground slower than three riders alone would have, though not painfully so — the wagon governed the pace now, and every choice about which road to take had to account for width, surface, and grade in a way David's earlier calculations never had.
This was only a preview. The real test waited on whatever they found in that rail yard.
By afternoon the country had changed again, this time unmistakably.
More pavement. More abandoned commercial buildings, warehouses standing hollow-eyed with broken windows, industrial roads running toward rail spurs that disappeared into the distance.
Dead vehicles littered the shoulders in greater numbers than anywhere they'd passed since the Hollow.
Somewhere along the way they passed a wall marked with spray paint faded enough to have been there since the first bad weeks, though nothing suggested anyone lived close enough to matter today.
Curtis kept the wagon to a walk through the worst of the debris, weaving the team around abandoned cars where the road narrowed, watching the surface for anything that could catch a wheel.
"This where it gets interesting?" Karen asked, watching an empty strip mall roll past, windows long gone, a sign for a nail salon hanging by one bolt.
"Getting there," David said.
David rode with more care now. The wagon had become a liability the moment trouble became possible, and trouble grew more possible with every mile closer to a real city.
They avoided the widest roads where they could, sticking to the quieter routes David had been marking since the billboard first caught his eye.
From any distance, the disguise held. Three ordinary travelers with a battered farm wagon, nothing worth a stranger's attention. David noted that without saying it out loud to Curtis, who would have found some way to disagree on principle even while agreeing in practice.
Late in the afternoon they came over a rise where an industrial access road gave them the first real view across part of the Charlotte rail complex, and the scale of it stopped David cold for a moment.