FIELD NOTE
A column with a day of food in its pockets does not get to pick its road.
Eleanor Briggs counted the food on the back of a dead man’s slate. A day. Two if nobody eats like they are hungry.
That number split Camp Ridge in half on a rise above brown water. Eighty-odd souls went north and east toward a cellar. Seven and a dog went down to the river.
Both halves are betting on the other one.
EP028 releases this weekend, Part One Sat, Part Two Sun.
Season Two runs two parts to an episode. Paid subscribers get each part the day it drops. Free subscribers wait a week.
The field note continues below for paid subscribers.
INSIDE THIS FIELD NOTE
What the remnant is walking toward, and what it is walking on. What the seven traded to get across the water, and what they had left to trade with.
And the one thing neither column can do for the other right now, which is the only thing that matters...
The remnant is a day’s walk into country the cache column crossed once, months back. Reilly leads it with one eye and the green book buttoned into his coat. Grace Moon keeps nineteen children reading at the head of it.
What they carry is a day of rations, the wound kit, and the set on John Moon’s shoulders. What they do not carry is a way to hear from the west.
That is the first cost of the split, and it is not on the slate.
The set went with the remnant because the remnant is the thing that will need to hear the band. Mark said that in the dark and he was right. It also means the seven walked down to the water with no radio. Whatever they find on the far side, they cannot send it back.
The remnant walks toward a cellar on the promise of one message it has no way to receive.
And the cellar is a promise, too. What the cache column banked under the re-concealment was enough to keep a hundred people alive long enough to think. That was months ago. The county has not walked that ground since, as far as anybody knows. As far as anybody knows is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
So the remnant’s whole plan is a cellar it has not seen in months and a man it cannot hear.
The seven’s plan is worse, and Mark said so under the rise. Not a good plan. The plan the country in front of them allows. A small element finds out what the men on the water want and whether it can be paid, then comes back for the remnant or sends for it.
It found out. The price was Reeves’s hands for a week. Mark would not rent a man, so he paid with two sets of hands instead, his wife’s and the doctor’s, and all seven of them living under Jonah Pike’s rules until the water goes down.
Man went to buy a boat ride and bought a week.
That week has a price before a single day of it is spent. The seven are inside a line they did not build, on a shelf they cannot see the back of, with thirty-one strangers who came out in the cold to count them. Their rifles are slung. The Wardens’ rifles are not.
Casey is a hundred and ten pounds on a blanket litter with a shoulder shot through. He cannot guard. He cannot walk. He needs a floor and a week of lying still, and Sarah said on the near bank that he does not get two cold nights.
He is about to get his floor. The girl with her hand in his ruff is about to sleep indoors for the first time since the camp burned.
That is what the crossing bought.
What it did not buy is any way west. The water is not going down for a week. That was Morris’s read from the road and nobody has argued it. For the length of that week the seven are seven people and a dog living where they are told, working who they are told, and waiting on a river.
Mark Smith has led a hundred people for exactly two days. He led them by assignments in a creek bottom, and he led seven of them down a road in the open because there was no other way to walk. He has not prayed once in either place, and he has not pretended to.
Two columns, then. One walking toward food it cannot see, carrying the only radio. One sitting on food it did not earn, with no radio at all. Each waiting on the other.
Briggs’s number was a day. The seven ate this morning from Pike’s stores or they did not eat. The remnant ate what fit in its pockets. Nobody has a second day written down anywhere.
Reilly’s last words on the rise were build me a way across that water. Mark’s were keep them alive until I do. Neither man has a way to tell the other whether it is still true.
EP028 releases this weekend, Part One Saturday, Part Two Sunday.
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