Chapter 18
David woke before first light, having slept poorly after spending part of the night turning the wagon tracks over in his head.
Curtis already had Waylon and Willie fed, checking them over before harnessing the way he did every morning. Yesterday's work had left them sound. Whiskey and June grazed nearby, and Smokey made his usual circuit, confirming nothing had changed overnight.
David spread the map on the tailgate.
"How far are we going around?" Curtis asked.
"Far enough."
"That's not a distance."
"It's the best one I've got."
Karen came over, pulling her coat tighter against the morning chill. "I thought his answers bothered you all the time."
"They do," Curtis said.
David laid out the reasoning while they finished breaking camp.
They'd told a story going east — poor travelers, nothing worth stealing.
Now they had a wagon, a paired team, and a different lie entirely.
Anyone who remembered them from the outbound trip and saw them again now, loaded and different, would start asking questions neither lie could survive.
Better to avoid the roads they'd already used wherever the ground allowed it.
The bridge crossing, the roadblock, the farm couple who'd fallen for the sick-sister story — every one of those places now held a version of David's group that didn't match the one riding through today. He didn't want anybody putting the two together.
David chose a secondary road angling southwest before it curved back toward true west. It added miles. Curtis didn't love it, but he understood well enough not to argue.
The day that followed was the kind David had stopped expecting — cracked pavement giving way to gravel, then old farm roads, nobody in sight the whole stretch.
They stopped twice for routine wagon checks, nothing wrong either time.
They passed abandoned houses, fields greening in patches, once a scatter of cattle grazing far off that told David somebody managed that land without needing to see who.
Smokey ranged ahead in loose loops and returned each time without anything to report.
Willie tried to steal grass at every stop regardless of how brief. Waylon simply waited, patient as ever.
"I think Willie believes every stop is for him," Karen said.
"Most things are, according to Willie," Curtis said.
"Does he know we're going home?" David asked.
"He knows we're going west."
"How?"
Curtis looked at him. "He doesn't."
Karen laughed, and David let the moment sit without chasing it further.
By afternoon he realized they'd made better time than the day before — no damaged bridge, no strangers, no major detour eating hours they couldn't spare.
They stopped after midday to water the horses and let everybody stretch, David checking the map while Curtis loosened the team's harness for a while.
Karen brought Whiskey his water, and the gelding turned his head toward her before she'd even reached him, ears pricked forward.
"I think he likes me," Karen said.
"He tolerates you," Curtis said.
"That's practically love from a horse."
"Don't tell June," David said. "She'll get jealous."
"June doesn't care enough about you to get jealous," Curtis said, and went back to checking Willie's feet.
David looked at the map again while they ate, and found something worth a small measure of satisfaction — ten or eleven useful miles already, and the day only half spent. For once, the plan was holding.
Midafternoon they passed an old pickup with a small utility trailer hitched behind it, both sitting half off the shoulder where they'd stopped the day the world quit working.
David and Curtis checked it while Karen held the team.
Not much left worth taking — somebody had been through it before, by the look of the glove box hanging open and the tailgate down — but a length of good rope remained coiled under the trailer's bed, along with a tow chain rusted but sound, and a tire iron nobody had bothered with.
Curtis took the chain.
"We need more weight?" David asked.
"We need a way to pull a wagon out when you put it somewhere stupid."
"I'm riding June."
"You'll find a way."
David let that go without arguing further, and Curtis coiled the chain into the wagon bed where it wouldn't shift against anything that mattered.
They camped well off the road again, and David checked their back trail carefully before dark.
Nothing.
"Nobody followed us," Curtis said.
"Today," David said.
"You ever planning on being happy again?"
"When I get home."
"Grace will probably have work waiting," Karen said.
"Then maybe never."
Karen wondered aloud what Rebecca would do first when she saw the medical haul. Curtis guessed she'd inventory everything before she let herself say thank you. David figured Grace would make them unload the whole wagon before anybody sat down to eat.
"You married her," Karen said.
"I know."
The day ended ordinary, no sense of anything watching them from the dark, no reason yet to think tomorrow would be different.
Morning came, and David chose another minor road rather than let their path reconnect with the route they'd used heading east.
"We're paying heavily in distance," Curtis said, not quite a complaint.
"I know."
They'd likely covered better than forty miles since leaving Charlotte and gained considerably less than that westward, the cost of choosing quiet roads over direct ones.
"How long can you keep doing this?" Karen asked.
"I can't," David said, and meant it plainly. Eventually they'd have to cross roads other people used. Eventually somebody would see the wagon. All David could control was where and when that happened, not whether it happened at all.
They crossed a muddy county intersection midmorning, and the wagon cut deep tracks straight across it — Waylon and Willie's prints ahead of the wheels, June and Whiskey's alongside, Smokey's paw prints threaded through all of it.
David noticed the depth of the cuts and didn't like what they told him.
Curtis caught him looking. "Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Start wishing wagons could fly."
"Wasn't."
"You were getting close."
They kept moving, the tracks behind them recording exactly the kind of outfit that had passed through, whether David wished it otherwise or not.
Several hours later, Smokey started paying attention to something behind them — not a growl, just a stop, a look back, nose working the air.
David reined June around. Nothing visible. Curtis stopped the wagon.
"What?" Karen asked.
"Smokey heard something," David said.
They listened. Nothing came of it — could have been wildlife, could have been travelers too far off to matter. They moved on.
They stopped at a creek crossing twenty minutes later to water the horses, and Smokey drank only a moment before raising his head and looking back down the road instead of finishing.
David noticed. Karen noticed David noticing.
"Again?"
"Yeah."
"Horse?" Curtis asked.
"Could be."
"Following us, or going the same direction we are?"
"Don't know yet."
Nobody pushed past that. A moment later, faint and gone almost before David was sure he'd heard it, hoofbeats carried down the road behind them and faded again.
Eventually David saw them — two mounted riders behind them, distant enough that details stayed soft, moving faster than the wagon's pace.
That alone didn't mean anything. He considered turning off the road, but the ground on either side offered nothing clean — a ditch on one side, soft field on the other, nothing that let a loaded wagon leave the road without announcing exactly why.
"Could just be travelers," Curtis said.
"Could be."
"You don't sound convinced," Karen said.
"I'm not convinced either direction."
David moved June nearer the wagon's rear quarter. Karen stayed on Whiskey. Curtis kept the team moving rather than stopping outright and surrendering whatever initiative they had left.
David slowed June a few strides, deliberately, letting the wagon gain twenty or thirty yards ahead of him.
The riders slowed too, holding the same gap they'd kept the whole time.
David caught the wagon back up.
"You see that?" Curtis asked quietly, once David had come alongside again.
"Yeah."
"They matched us."
That told David plenty without proving anything he could act on.
Two men riding the same road at the same pace as everybody else on it wasn't a crime, and he wasn't drawing on strangers for keeping a consistent distance.
But he held onto the fact rather than dismiss it, and kept both hands loose and ready from that point on.
The riders closed the distance with the easy confidence of men who'd done this before, and one called out well before they were close enough to require it.
David studied them as they came — both mounted on decent horses, weapons visible but slung rather than in hand, clothes worn but not ragged. Nothing about their appearance alone said danger. Plenty of ordinary travelers looked exactly like this now.
The older one nodded toward the wagon team before he said anything about the wagon itself. "That's a good-looking team."
"They'll do," Curtis said.
"Matched?"
"Close enough."
"Good bone on that one," the man said, nodding at Waylon. "How old?"
"About nine," Curtis said, cautious but not unfriendly, the way a man talked to another man about livestock without giving anything else away.
For a stretch of a few seconds, it read exactly like two people who understood horses passing the time on a quiet road. David almost let his guard ease with it.
"East," David said, before the man had bothered asking outright where they'd come from.
"Long way from anywhere out east," the man said, an easy smile on his face that didn't quite reach his eyes.
"Most of it is," David said.
"What's in the wagon?"
The shift was small, but David caught it — the horse talk had been a way in, not genuine interest.
"Farm supplies."
One of them laughed. "That's a lot of farm supplies."
"Big farm," David said, and didn't elaborate.