Chapter 13 #2
The car sitting at the exact position Daniel's paperwork described wasn't the one they were looking for. Wrong reporting mark entirely, wrong car type, sitting where HRLX 44192 should have been.
David stood in front of it a moment longer than the disappointment strictly warranted, running through the possibilities rather than letting frustration take hold of him.
Hundreds of miles of travel, a wagon dragged into existence out of a wedding-carriage barn, all of it resting on a stranger's paperwork being close enough to right, and here was the first real evidence it might not be.
"Moved?" Curtis asked.
"Either before everything stopped, or after."
"People can move one of these without power?"
"Not easily," David said. "But that doesn't mean it sat here when the EMP hit. Daniel's record could be from before the last time this yard got switched around. Freight moves right up until the day it doesn't anymore."
He wasn't going to pretend to know more about railroads than he did. What he did know was that Daniel's paperwork had gotten them this close, and close was worth plenty on its own.
David widened the search rather than starting over.
Daniel's notes named the car type and reporting mark clearly enough that they didn't need to check every car in the yard with equal attention.
They could ignore tank cars, flatcars, and anything else that clearly didn't match what Daniel had recorded, then check the reporting marks on the cars that did.
Curtis took one side of the next string, David the other. A few minutes in, Curtis called across the gap.
"Got your letters."
David crossed to look. Right prefix. Wrong final digits. It wasn't their car, but finding the same reporting mark this close to Daniel's recorded position was enough to keep David moving.
They checked the next car. Wrong again, but closer than the last.
The search had stopped feeling like hunting a needle in a yard the size of a small town and started feeling like a problem they could finish.
David checked the sun's position and felt the noon deadline pressing closer than he liked.
"We're close," Curtis said, when David raised it.
"You don't know that."
"Neither do you."
Fair, and David gave them both a hard limit rather than an open one — twenty minutes, then they turned back regardless of how close they thought they were.
Karen would start worrying on schedule whether they'd found the car or not, and David wasn't willing to trade her peace of mind for a guess about how many more strings remained to check.
Before they moved on, David caught a thin trace of smoke rising somewhere across the yard, or possibly beyond it — too far to place with any confidence, too faint to say whether it came from a mile off or five.
Could have been a cook fire. Could have been debris burning on its own, weeks after somebody last tended it. Charlotte wasn't the empty city its skyline suggested from a distance, and David had known that since the stranger on the road told him so days ago.
Curtis saw it too and didn't suggest investigating, and David didn't either. Whatever that smoke meant wasn't their problem today. He noted the direction and kept their search away from it.
They'd gone another two rows when Curtis's voice carried across the gap, quieter than his usual call, different enough in tone that David came around the end of the string at something close to a jog.
Curtis was standing with one hand on a boxcar's side, pointing at the reporting mark stenciled near the door.
David checked Daniel's paper. First set of digits. Match. Last set. Match.
He read it twice to be sure his eyes weren't finding what he wanted to find rather than what was painted on the car.
HRLX 44192.
This was the car.
He checked the surrounding track and the marker a hundred feet back — one track over from Daniel's last recorded position, a handful of car lengths off from where the paperwork placed it. Close enough to make sense if the car had been moved after Daniel's last record and before the EMP.
"That's it?" Curtis asked.
"That's it."
"You sure?"
David held the paper out. "Now you're asking?"
Curtis checked it anyway, comparing digit to digit like he didn't fully trust David's read of his own handwriting notes. "That's it."
Security came before curiosity. They circled the car slowly, checking for forced doors, broken locks, pry marks, fire damage, anything that suggested somebody had already been inside.
The car looked weathered on the outside, paint faded and streaked with months of rain, rust starting along the lower seams where water had pooled and dried a hundred times over.
Structurally sound, though. No dents deep enough to worry about, no scorch marks, no sign anybody had taken a bar to the door and given up partway through.
The main door sat closed, latch bar down, exactly the way it would have sat the day somebody last locked it.
Then David saw the seal.
A numbered security seal remained fastened across the door latch, unbroken, a detail that meant plenty in a world where every other car they'd passed today had either been forced open or burned.
Nobody had opened this one since whoever loaded it last had locked it down.
He crouched to look at it closer, careful not to touch it, reading the small stamped number without needing to compare it to anything — Daniel's paperwork hadn't recorded seal numbers, but the seal itself told its own story well enough.
That didn't guarantee anything about what waited inside.
Heat, months of temperature swings, moisture, or damage somewhere along the way — any of it could have ruined what Daniel's records promised was there.
But an unbroken seal was the best evidence they were going to get without opening it, and it was better evidence than David had let himself hope for this morning.
Curtis looked at the seal a long moment. "We're here."
David understood exactly what he meant.
He considered it, briefly, honestly — they'd found it, they were standing in front of it, breaking one seal would take seconds.
But Karen wasn't here to assess what they found.
The wagon wasn't here to carry anything out.
They were close to their return deadline already, and opening the car now meant advertising that it had been accessed if anybody came through later, for no gain they could act on today.
"No," David said.
"You walked all this way to find it."
"We found it."
"And now we're walking away."
"For a few hours."
Curtis didn't argue further, because the logic held up even against his own itch to look inside.
On the way back, David and Curtis worked out the route Karen and the wagon would need rather than simply retracing their own footsteps.
Some of what had worked on foot wouldn't work for a wagon — track crossings too rough, gaps too narrow, debris that a person could step around but a wheel couldn't. They found an old industrial service road running closer to the correct section of the yard than David expected, blocked in one spot by a collapsed gate but passable once they'd checked the opening beside it.
Curtis eyed the road's surface and grade with the same attention he gave everything horse-related. "Team can get through there."
"Loaded?"
Curtis studied the grade a moment longer. "Getting in isn't the question."
David understood. Getting a loaded wagon back out was the harder problem, and neither of them had an answer for it yet.
They came back later than David had planned but well inside Karen's deadline, and found her waiting where she could watch the road without standing exposed on it.
She'd kept busy in their absence, from the look of things — Whiskey's coat brushed out, the wagon's contents rearranged into something closer to order, a small fire banked low enough not to carry smoke far.
David noted it without saying anything. Waiting was its own kind of work, and Karen had clearly refused to spend the hours doing nothing with it.
Smokey reached her first, and something in his easy trot must have told her plenty before either man said a word, because she was already reading their faces by the time they closed the distance.
"You found it."