Chapter 17
Curtis was already at the wagon when David woke, going over harness and traces by feel more than by the thin gray light.
David watched him work through it — collars, wheels, hubs, the tie-downs holding the load steady under its clothing cover — thorough the same way he'd been every morning since Southern Breezes.
"You checked that last night," David said.
"It was dark last night."
"Did the wagon change?"
"Could've."
David let him work. Waylon and Willie stood eating what grain remained, unbothered by the attention. June and Whiskey grazed a few yards off, and Smokey made his usual circuit of the camp, nose down, confirming the night had passed without incident.
Karen came over with a cup of water, glancing at the team. "How do they look?"
"Like horses," Curtis said.
"That's encouraging."
He gave her the real answer a moment later, once he'd finished the strap he was working. Sound, rested enough for a full day, the load manageable so long as nobody did anything stupid.
"Define stupid," David said.
Curtis looked at him. "You want the whole list?"
David studied the wagon in the growing light and felt the size of the problem differently than he had the evening before.
Yesterday it had meant success — a railcar found, medicine loaded, a disguise that held.
This morning it meant two hundred miles of responsibility riding on two horses and four wheels.
He'd crossed plenty of that similar country last summer, but he'd never had to carry anything more valuable than his own survival.
David spread the map across the wagon's tailgate and started tracing the route they'd used coming east.
He hadn't gotten far before the problem became obvious. Traveling by horseback and traveling with a loaded wagon were two different problems laid over the same map.
He put a finger on the river crossing from days back. Curtis leaned in to look.
"We could probably cross there," Curtis said.
"Probably." David didn't like the word any better from Curtis's mouth than his own.
"But they saw three poor travelers on the way out.
Little worth stealing, nothing worth remembering.
" He tapped the wagon. "This is different.
Paired team, two saddle horses, a covered load big enough to need a wagon in the first place.
Even if that crossing stays honest, everybody there is going to remember us. "
Curtis didn't argue it. The hostile roadblock they'd encountered on the way east wasn't worth discussing twice — nobody suggested going anywhere near it.
That left the ford.
"We crossed here," David said.
"On horses."
"Can we get the wagon through?"
Curtis studied the map a long moment. "Maybe."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting from a map." Curtis straightened. "I need to see the water. Depth, bottom, banks, how it looks getting in and getting out. A map doesn't tell me any of that."
David understood. They'd work west and look for a route that avoided both known problems, and they wouldn't know the ford's answer until they stood in front of it again.
They moved out with the sun barely up, Curtis driving the team, David on June, Karen on Whiskey, Smokey ranging beside or behind the wagon depending on how much room the road gave him.
The difference showed itself within the first mile.
On horseback, David would have looked at a mud hole and ridden around it without slowing.
With the wagon, Curtis stopped outright — climbed down, checked the depth with a stick, walked the shoulder, looked for roots or buried rock that could catch a wheel and snap an axle miles from anybody who could fix it.
"You in a hurry?" Curtis asked, catching David's expression.
"Yes."
"Then you should've left the wagon."
David didn't have an answer for that. Curtis climbed back up and explained, without being asked, that losing fifteen minutes checking bad ground beat losing three hours digging a wagon out of it, or worse, losing a wheel entirely with nobody around who sold replacements anymore.
Waylon and Willie pulled through the crossing without drama once Curtis had cleared it, steady and unbothered, and David started recalibrating what a good travel day was going to mean for the next two hundred miles.
They reached a long uphill grade before midmorning, nothing dangerous, just enough rise that Curtis didn't want the team carrying extra weight up it.
He stopped the wagon and everybody dismounted.
"I thought horses were supposed to carry us," Karen said.
"Those two are carrying enough," Curtis said.
David led June. Karen led Whiskey. Curtis walked near the team, driving from the ground where the grade allowed it, and Smokey trotted alongside without complaint.
The wagon climbed slow, Waylon and Willie leaning hard into their collars, breathing heavily by the time they crested it, hooves digging for purchase where the grade steepened near the top.
Curtis talked to them the whole way up, low and steady, the same voice David had heard him use back at Southern Breezes when neither horse had worn a collar in close to two years. Nothing dramatic in it. Just a man letting two animals know somebody was paying attention to what the work cost them.
David noticed Curtis watched the horses through the whole climb, barely glancing at the wagon itself.
At the top, Curtis gave the team a short rest — water where the ground offered it, breathing time regardless. David looked back down the grade and felt the arithmetic of the morning settle uncomfortably in his chest. They'd spent a long stretch of effort gaining very little ground.
"That wagon doesn't get home if they don't," Curtis said, nodding at Waylon and Willie.
David didn't need the lesson twice.
Curtis checked the collars again before they moved on, working a finger under Waylon's to feel how it had sat through the climb. Satisfied, he moved to Willie's side and asked David to hold his head a moment while he loosened a strap and checked the skin beneath.
"Nothing wrong," Curtis said. "Just don't want it riding wrong three hours from now because I ignored it here."
Willie took David's closeness as an invitation and started working his nose into David's coat pocket.
David pushed his nose away. "Does he ever quit?"
"Not if there's food involved."
Willie tried the other pocket.
"There's nothing in there."
"He don't believe you."
Karen, watching from Whiskey a few feet off, said, "I don't believe him either."
David checked, mostly to prove a point, and came up with nothing but a scrap of paper and a spare buckle. Willie sniffed it anyway, disappointed, and gave up only once Curtis had finished with the strap and led him a step away.
During the next rest stop, Karen climbed partway into the wagon bed to check how the load had shifted on the morning's rough ground, and came up holding a sealed package she turned over in her hands.
N95 masks.
She looked at them, then at the wagon, then at David.
David recognized that look. "What?"
"I have an idea."
"Those are usually expensive," Curtis said.
Karen pulled three from the package, handing one to David, one to Curtis, keeping the third. "Put these somewhere you can reach them fast."
"Why?" David asked.
"Because nobody wants to get close to a sick person."
She laid it out while the horses rested.
The wagon's real weakness wasn't necessarily somebody deciding to attack them outright.
It was curiosity — people seeing a loaded wagon and wanting to know what filled it, walking over, asking questions, maybe lifting the cover if they got bold enough.
Nobody could shoot every curious farmer who wandered close.
Karen's answer was to make curiosity unpleasant instead. If they saw people ahead, she'd get into the wagon, pull a blanket over herself, mask on, and act sick. David and Curtis would mask up too and keep their distance from her, telling anyone who asked that their sister had taken ill.
"With what?" David asked.
"We don't know," Karen said. "That's the point."
Fever. Cough. Trouble breathing. Maybe a bad version of something people already understood the shape of.
Curtis looked at her. "You're the doctor."
"Nurse."
"Close enough for the lie."
"Which is why I'm the one writing it," Karen said.
They refined it while the horses grazed what little grass grew along the shoulder.
Karen insisted on keeping it simple. David and Curtis were brothers. Karen was their sister. She couldn't ride far anymore, hence the wagon. They were heading west because they'd heard about a doctor somewhere that direction.
"Where west?" Curtis asked.
"A settlement west of here," David said. "Nothing more than that."
What was wrong with her? David suggested they didn't know, which was true enough to be easy to hold onto under questioning.
"People are going to ask," Curtis said.
"Then we tell them what we think," Karen said, and landed on it a moment later. "Some bad version of COVID."
David looked at her.
"COVID was years ago," Karen said. "But people remember what a contagious respiratory illness looks like, and they know what masks mean when somebody's wearing one around a sick person. We don't need the disease to be real. We need people to believe it might be."
Symptoms stayed simple — fever, cough, weakness, trouble breathing. Nothing more exotic than that.
"The more we say, the worse the lie gets," Karen said.
"You've done this before?" David asked.
"Lied about having COVID?"
"Made people do what you wanted."
"I'm a nurse."
"That answers it," Curtis said.
Karen wasn't satisfied leaving it there. If David and Curtis didn't tell the same story, the lie would fall apart faster than no story at all.
"How long has your sister been sick?" she asked, testing them like a stranger would.
"Three days," David said.
"Four," Curtis said, at the same time.
Karen looked between them. "And we're dead already."
"Three days," David said again.
"Where did she get sick?"
David opened his mouth to answer.
"Wrong," Karen said, before he'd gotten a word out. "You don't know."