Chapter 13
David was awake before the sky showed any color, Daniel's papers spread beside his own map on a flat crate inside the maintenance building.
The rail yard sat close enough now that gray shapes of it showed through gaps in the siding as dawn built — rows of dark cars, the skeleton of a switching tower, tracks running off toward a horizon he couldn't yet see the end of.
Curtis came over, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. "Paper change anything overnight?"
"No."
"Worth checking."
Karen joined them a moment later, and David laid it out plain. He and Curtis would go in on foot with Smokey. Karen would stay with the horses and wagon.
She didn't argue the logic of it — somebody had to hold four horses, a wagon, and everything they owned — but she didn't love it either.
"So, I get four horses and a wagon."
"Smokey's coming," David said.
"Then I'm being cheated."
Curtis checked Waylon and Willie before they left, running his hands over their shoulders and chests where the collars had ridden the day before.
No heat. No rubbing. No tenderness anywhere the harness had ridden.
Both horses ate their morning feed like nothing about yesterday had cost them anything they hadn't fully recovered from overnight.
"They're fine," Curtis said. "Good sign for today."
David gave Karen a return time before they left. "If we're not back by noon, you wait."
"How long?"
"Until two."
"Then?"
"Then you get clear of the yard and find somewhere safer to wait."
Karen didn't like that answer. "I'm not leaving you two in there."
"Then don't ask questions you don't want answered," Curtis said.
David kept it plain. He wasn't expecting trouble. This was a contingency, nothing more.
"I liked you better when you were only worrying about saddle sores," Karen said.
"I didn't."
Before he left, David walked over to June and rubbed a hand along her neck. She was staying behind for once, and something in the way she watched him gather his rifle said she'd noticed.
"Behave," he told her.
"Talking to June or Curtis?" Karen asked.
"June listens."
Curtis kept walking without dignifying that.
They crossed into the yard through a gap where the perimeter fence had been cut and folded back long ago, David leading, Curtis a few steps behind, Smokey ranging a short distance ahead but staying close enough to call back with a word.
The industrial landscape opened wider the closer they came to it.
Parallel tracks ran in every direction, weeds pushing through gravel ballast gone rust-colored with disuse, old maintenance equipment sitting abandoned between strings of cars that had stopped wherever momentum left them the day the power died.
Switch stands stood frozen mid-throw. Faded signs marked tracks by number, half of them too weathered to read from more than a few feet away.
David had walked plenty of unfamiliar ground since leaving the Hollow, but nothing quite like this — no fields to read, no fence lines to follow, just steel and gravel and the long dead shapes of freight cars stretching in every direction until distance swallowed them.
A crow worked at something in the weeds nearby and startled off at their approach, wings loud in the quiet.
Yesterday's view from the rise had understated all of it.
On the map, Daniel's location had looked like a simple point to walk toward.
Standing inside the yard, tracks overlapped visually in every direction, cars blocked sightlines a hundred yards in any direction, and David understood for the first time exactly how large a problem they'd taken on.
"You sure his paper says Charlotte?" Curtis asked.
"Very."
"Was hoping you'd say no."
They found the first opened car within the first quarter mile — door forced wide, cardboard packaging scattered across the gravel below it, whatever had been inside long gone.
A second car nearby sat scorched black, fire damage curling the paint back from bare metal, whatever had started that fire long since burned itself out.
Not every car showed the same treatment.
The ones nearest the access roads and gaps in the fence had taken the worst of it.
Deeper into the yard, cars sat undisturbed, doors closed, seals David could see even from a distance remaining attached.
People had come for easy freight near the edges and hadn't pushed much farther than that.
Made sense to David — a hungry man in the first weeks after the EMP wasn't walking a mile into a rail yard on the chance a distant boxcar held something worth the trip when a dozen closer ones sat cracked open already.
That improved the odds more than David wanted to say out loud yet.
They passed an old camp near one of the loading docks — a fire ring gone cold and gray, a scatter of cans, the remains of a blanket rotted through by weather. Weathered enough to have sat untouched for months, whoever had used it long gone or moved on to somewhere with better prospects.
Smokey sniffed through it and moved on without any change in his posture.
"Old?" Curtis asked.
"Looks it."
"Dog agree?"
David glanced at Smokey, already working ahead again. "He's not voting."
Daniel's notes referenced a marker at the edge of one track grouping, and David found it faster than he expected — a faded metal sign, barely legible, but the numbers on it matched what Daniel had written down to the digit.
Something in David's chest eased at that, small but real. Until this moment, all of it had been numbers on paper carried hundreds of miles on faith. Now the yard itself was confirming what Rebecca's husband had written down months before he'd ever heard of the Hollow.
"He knew his job," Curtis said, reading David's face rather than the sign.
"Looks that way."
David thought of Rebecca for a moment, ten days alone through country that had killed her husband, carrying papers she couldn't have known would matter this much to strangers she hadn't met yet. If this worked, Daniel's work survived him in a way David doubted the man had ever imagined it would.
He didn't say any of that out loud. There wasn't a need to.
The ground Daniel's notes pointed toward turned out harder to search than the marker had promised.
Some signs had fallen or rusted past reading.
Cars could have been switched between whenever Daniel last recorded their position and the day everything stopped, strings reshuffled in ways his paperwork couldn't have predicted.
Long trains blocked crossings that would have been a two-minute walk if the yard had stood empty, forcing David and Curtis around hundreds of feet of coupled cars to find a gap where two strings separated.
David checked the sun's climb against the time they'd allotted themselves, more out of habit than worry this early in the morning. Plenty of hours left. He kept the pace steady rather than rushed, the same discipline that had gotten him through worse ground on the long trip home.
They worked down the numbers car by car.
Wrong prefix. Right prefix, wrong number entirely.
Close, but not close enough to matter. One boxcar carried a reporting mark close enough to Daniel's that David crossed the full width of the track to check it by hand, running a finger along stenciled paint gone faded with weather, only to find the last two digits wrong.
Curtis crossed to the far side of one string and called numbers back across the gap between cars, and they settled into a rhythm — David on one side, Curtis on the other, close enough to stay in sight of each other, far enough apart to cover twice the ground.
Every so often one of them called out a partial match, and the other crossed over to confirm or dismiss it, the work slow but steady.
Smokey moved between them, never straying far from either man for long, occasionally stopping to sniff at something along the ballast before moving on without comment.
They found the body near an old maintenance building, half-collapsed into the weeds beside a boxcar somebody had forced open long before.
Months dead, by the look of it. Clothing weathered to rags, nothing left to say who he'd been or what had killed him. No weapon anywhere nearby that David could see.
Curtis looked it over from a respectful distance. "Wasn't the railroad that killed him."
"No."
Neither of them said more than that. David checked the surrounding ground for anything fresh — tracks, disturbed gravel, signs somebody had been through recently — and found nothing that changed their plan.
They moved on, the caution in both of them sitting a degree higher than it had ten minutes earlier.
Smokey stopped hard between one string of cars and the next, ears forward, body gone rigid in the way David had learned to trust without question.
David stopped. Curtis followed a half-second behind.
A sound carried from somewhere deeper in the yard — metal against metal, faint, impossible to place. Could have been wind working a loose door. Could have been something else entirely.
They waited. The sound came again, and this time David caught movement between two distant cars, a shape shifting through a gap too far off to identify.
Both men moved to cover without a word passing between them, rifles ready but not raised, Smokey's posture shifting from alert to something closer to focused.
The shape resolved a moment later into a doe, stepping delicately between the rails, pausing to look their direction before catching their scent and bolting into the maze of cars beyond.
Curtis let out a breath. "Good thing you brought the dog."
"He found a deer."
"Exactly."
The tension had been real while it lasted. That was simply how ground like this worked — nobody got to know in advance which sounds meant nothing and which ones mattered.
Daniel's notes finally brought them to what should have been the right track, and David felt the same small lift he'd felt at the first marker.
It didn't last.