Chapter 15
David was up early and went straight to the horses.
Curtis was already there, running his hands over Waylon and Willie's shoulders and backs, checking where the collars had ridden through their first full day of real pulling.
He worked slow and thorough, the way he did everything with the horses, pressing along muscle and joint for anything that shouldn't be there.
"They're good," Curtis said.
"You're sure?"
Curtis looked at him. "You planning on checking my work?"
"No."
"Then they're good."
Willie had already worked his nose into Curtis's coat pocket, disappointed to find nothing, and Waylon stood patient through the whole inspection without much interest in anything beyond the grass at his feet.
Karen checked Whiskey over while David went through the same routine with June, and Smokey made his morning circuit of the camp, nose down, confirming nothing had changed overnight that mattered to him.
David laid out the plan while they finished eating a cold breakfast, nobody willing to risk a fire this close to the yard even now that they knew the ground.
They knew where HRLX 44192 sat. They knew the service road that could bring the wagon within reach of it.
What they didn't know was whether last night had changed anything about the yard itself — whether the smoke they'd seen yesterday had drifted closer, whether anybody had noticed two men and a dog moving through the strings the day before.
They'd go in slow. David would ride ahead on June, close enough to Curtis and the wagon to matter if something went wrong, far enough to see trouble before it found them. Karen would ride Whiskey alongside or behind, whichever the road allowed. Smokey stayed with David.
Nobody assumed yesterday's empty yard meant today's would look the same.
The service road took them into the yard from a different angle than their foot approach the day before, the wagon's wheels loud on gravel in a way David's boots hadn't been.
Everything about entering with the wagon felt more exposed.
Harness jingled. Wheels ground over loose stone.
Four horses and a wagon made noise that carried farther than three careful people on foot ever had, and David found himself listening harder than yesterday for anything the noise might be covering.
David rode ahead enough to scout without losing sight of Curtis, Smokey ranging close on either side.
The city sat in the background the way it had yesterday, distant shapes against the sky, nothing about it demanding more attention than it had already gotten.
He watched the tree line beyond the yard's edge more than the yard itself, alert for the kind of movement that had turned out to be nothing yesterday but might not be so forgiving twice.
They passed yesterday's landmarks — the fence gap, the burned car, the old camp gone cold.
David noted the body again without dwelling on it, same weathered shape it had been the day before, undisturbed.
No new tracks worth worrying over. No voices carrying across the yard.
No smoke close enough to matter, though he checked the horizon for it anyway out of habit.
Curtis kept the team to a careful walk through the worst of the gravel, watching the wagon's wheels for anything that might catch or drop into a gap they hadn't spotted the day before on foot.
They reached HRLX 44192, and David checked the seal before anything else.
Unchanged. Whatever waited inside had likely sat untouched since before the EMP, or close enough to it that the difference didn't matter anymore.
Getting the door open took more effort than David expected.
Months of weather had swollen the track the door rode in, and the metal complained loud enough when Curtis finally worked it moving that David's jaw tightened at the sound alone.
Smokey's ears came up sharp, head swinging toward the open ground beyond the yard, though nothing followed the noise beyond an echo that took a few seconds to fade against the rows of silent cars.
Curtis had brought tools from the wagon for exactly this — a pry bar, a hammer, patience. Between the two of them the door finally gave, sliding open on a rail gone rough with rust, and David looked inside before Karen came any closer.
Boxes. Pallets stacked and shrink-wrapped, some sagging where months of heat had worked the plastic loose.
Shipping labels, some faded past reading, others clear enough to make out product codes.
Here and there a carton had split or slumped where moisture or a rodent had gotten at it, but most of the interior looked protected, stacked tight enough that the outer layers had shielded whatever sat behind them.
Karen climbed up without waiting to be invited, and David gave her a minute before saying anything. She stood in the doorway a moment, taking in the shapes and labels, not naming anything yet.
Then she opened the nearest case.
Something in her whole posture changed. She opened a second case. A third. She'd stopped being a passenger the moment her hands touched the first box, and David recognized the shift for what it was — Karen going to work.
One of the first cases held IV supplies — tubing coiled and sealed, catheters in a range of sizes, start kits shrink-wrapped tight, tape and securement supplies, needles and syringes packed by the dozen, alcohol prep pads in foil packets that had somehow survived intact.
And behind those, cases of sealed saline bags.
Karen checked the cases rather than trusting the labels alone, opening several and inspecting bags for damaged packaging, clouding, leaks, or discoloration.
She set the good ones into a pile forming near the door, methodical about it in a way that told David this mattered more than her expression let on.
He watched her hold one bag up toward the light, checking it a second time.
"Good?" he asked.
"Very."
That was all she gave him before she went back to work, pulling more cases toward the growing pile.
David watched the saline pile grow past what he expected. "How much saline are we taking?"
Karen didn't look up. "Yes."
Curtis, working nearby, caught that. "That isn't a number."
"It's the number I'm giving you."
Karen worked through the medications with more care than she'd shown the saline, rejecting cartons as fast as she opened some of them.
Anything that had needed refrigeration and sat exposed to months of temperature swings went into a reject pile without a second look. Anything with compromised packaging or questionable liquid inside got set aside too, no matter how badly she might have wanted to trust it.
David watched her toss one box onto the reject pile. "Bad?"
"I don't know."
"Same thing?"
"Out here it is."
He picked up one of the rejected boxes and turned it over, reading a label that meant nothing to him. "Looks fine."
"Looks fine and works are two different things when I've got no way to test either." She didn't say it unkindly, just plain, the way she said most things about her work. "I'd rather leave ten good boxes behind than carry one bad one all the way home and hand it to somebody who trusts me."
That settled it for David. He didn't second-guess her again.
She moved faster once she reached the dry medications, oral antibiotics in factory sealed packaging that had survived the months far better than anything requiring cold.
She sorted through case after case, pulling out bottles and blister packs David couldn't have named if his life depended on it — amoxicillin, doxycycline, a few others she read off the labels half to herself as she worked, murmuring dosages and shelf-life estimates that meant nothing to him and clearly meant a great deal to her.
Where she found injectable antibiotics, she checked formulation and storage requirements before deciding, rejecting some, keeping others with the same careful attention she'd given the saline.
The take pile grew steadily as she worked past antibiotics into pain relief, fever reducers, antihistamines, something for nausea, something for the kind of stomach trouble that could kill a person slowly if it went on long enough without treatment.
She didn't explain every choice. David didn't need her to.
He could see her weighing weight against value with every case she picked up, choosing the cartons that would matter most against the ones that simply looked impressive.
She opened another carton partway through the morning and stopped.
David noticed the change in her before she said anything. "What?"
She pulled out a sealed bottle, turning it over to read the label.
"Prenatal vitamins."
To David, they were vitamins, nothing more. To Karen, clearly, they meant something else entirely.
She checked the dates, checked the packaging, found the seals intact enough to trust. Then she found a second case behind the first, and a third.
"We're taking these," she said.
"All of them?"
"All I can fit."
David realized, watching her face, that she looked more pleased by a case of vitamins than she had by some of the more impressive-looking equipment further back in the car.
"Iron, folate," she said, without being asked. "Half the diet problems out here hit pregnant women hardest, and there's nothing I can do about that except this." She didn't say more than that. She didn't need to.
The vitamins went straight into the high-priority pile beside the saline.
Karen kept working through the morning, and the piles kept growing — sterile gauze, rolled gauze, abdominal pads, wound dressings, boxes of medical tape, syringes and needles by the dozen, more IV catheters, antiseptic, wound irrigation supplies, splints, suturing kits, masks.
She found a case of pre-formed splints and held one up, turning it over. "I've been using fence boards and torn sheets for eight months. This is going to feel like cheating."
Curtis, hauling boxes toward the door, glanced at it. "Looks like a fence board with better manners."