Chapter Thirty-Five Red Wash
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Red Wash
The river was gone.
That was the first thing Eden saw.
The Red Wash had cut a channel forty feet deep through the old highway, then moved again after the flood year.
Now the active water ran half a mile north.
The abandoned channel remained.
Steep walls.
Red silt.
Broken concrete slabs piled where the highway bridge had collapsed.
Nella stood at the rim.
"Still think truck route?"
Eden looked down.
"Maybe."
Nella groaned.
Rhett smiled.
"You'll get used to it."
The survey party included Eden, Rhett, Nella, Pax, Lio, and a Flint guide named Torren who knew every goat path in the valley and distrusted vehicles as a category.
They descended on foot.
The old highway deck lay broken in six major sections.
Too much to rebuild.
Eden had known that from above.
She followed the channel west instead.
Two miles down, the walls narrowed.
Caro's blue line appeared in her memory.
Not on the film here.
A small diagonal mark near the cut edge.
She had assumed it was a crease.
Maybe not.
"North wall," she said.
Torren frowned.
"Nothing there."
"Let's look."
They crossed the dry channel.
A line of pale rock cut through the red wall.
Different geology.
Harder.
Eden climbed.
Twenty feet up, she found rusted steel.
A guardrail.
Buried almost completely by silt.
Her heart accelerated.
"Road."
Pax scrambled up.
"Where?"
She cleared dirt with both hands.
Old pavement emerged.
Not highway.
A service road climbing along the canyon wall.
Torren stared.
"That wasn't here."
"It was under the flood deposit."
Nella climbed slower.
"Where does it go?"
Eden looked west.
The road rose out of the abandoned wash toward a basalt shelf.
"Let's find out."
They walked four miles.
The service road remained intact in long sections.
Two washouts.
One rockfall.
Steep but manageable.
At the top, it connected to an old pipeline corridor running west.
Wide enough for trucks.
Pax whooped.
Nella sat on a boulder and laughed.
Torren looked personally betrayed by the existence of pavement beneath his goat country.
Rhett watched Eden.
She could feel it.
"Don't."
"I'm not saying anything."
"Your face is."
"My face is impressed."
She looked at the road.
"Caro may have found it first."
"And you found it now."
There it was again.
Take the piece that's yours.
Eden walked ahead.
At Mile Five, the pipeline corridor reached a maintenance station.
Roof gone.
Doors missing.
Inside, someone had painted a blue arrow on the concrete wall.
Eden stopped.
Not Caro's pencil.
Paint.
Old.
Below it were initials.
C.M.
Her breath caught.
Caro Meln.
Rhett entered behind her.
He saw the letters.
Said nothing.
Good.
Eden touched the painted mark.
Caro had been here.
She had crossed the wash after the highway failed.
She had found the service road.
And then she had gone back east.
Why?
Eden searched the station.
Nothing personal.
No note.
No hidden map.
Just an old maintenance cabinet and a wall marked with the kind of practical arrow Caro used when she wanted future crews to stop being stupid.
Pax opened the cabinet.
"Paper."
Inside were laminated pipeline diagrams.
Most ruined by heat.
One survived.
The corridor continued west thirty-two miles to a place labeled HOLLOW NINE PUMP STATION.
Beyond that, a branch road reached the pre-Burn interstate.
Nella stared.
"Thirty-two miles."
"If the corridor stays passable," Eden said.
Torren laughed.
"There she is."
Eden looked at him.
"What?"
"Maybe."
Even Nella smiled.
They ate lunch in the roofless station.
Wind moved through broken windows.
Rhett sat beside Eden with his back against the wall beneath Caro's initials.
"You thought there'd be a message."
It was not a question.
Eden took a bite of dried fruit.
"For a while, after she died, I thought every unfinished mark meant she was trying to tell me something."
"Grief is efficient at making clues."
She glanced at him.
He did not say he understood because of Lyle.
He did not need to.
"Maybe she just ran out of time," Eden said.
"Probably."
She laughed softly.
"You like that word now?"
"Borrowed it."
Eden looked at C.M. on the wall.
Caro had not left a grand lesson.
She had found a road and painted an arrow.
That was enough.
Eden took out her pencil.
On the new survey sheet, she marked the service corridor.
Then wrote:
FOUND OPEN. VERIFY SEASONALLY.
Not safe forever.
Not guaranteed.
A record of what the ground was today.
They turned back toward Flint before afternoon heat peaked.
Halfway down, wind shifted from the southwest.
Torren stopped.
His face changed.
"Ash front."
Eden looked at the sky.
A brown wall had appeared behind the western hills.
Too fast.
Nella swore.
Rhett stood.
"How long?"
Torren watched the clouds.
"Three hours. Maybe two."
Flint was six walking hours away.
Their vehicles were there.
The maintenance station behind them had no roof.
Eden looked at the pipeline diagram.
Hollow Nine lay west.
Unknown road.
Unknown structure.
Thirty-two miles away.
No.
Too far.
Then she remembered a square marked halfway.
VALVE HOUSE 14.
Eight miles west.
Possibly underground.
Possibly intact.
She turned the map.
"We don't go back."
Nella stared.
"Flint—"
"They'll seal before the front hits. We radio them now."
Rhett understood first.
"Valve house."
"Eight miles."
"On unknown road."
Eden folded the map.
"Welcome to surveying."