The service station has no roof on the pump island anymore, and there is somebody lying inside it who is still breathing.
The Smith family came up on the place from the west road with thirty rounds between them, nothing to eat, a dog on a litter, and their names already written in a book they left behind at the river. They were looking for water and a wall. What they found was a stranger on the floor with a wound that was not going to close, and a sheet of paper she would not let go of until somebody promised her something.
The paper is a map. Hand-drawn, marked in a hurry, and streaked with the blood of the person who carried it. It shows a way west that goes around the controlled roads, the checkpoints and crossings and taxed water the family has been paying for since Camp Ridge fell. It is the first good news anybody has handed them in weeks.
That is exactly the problem. Nobody hands a family good news for free in this county. Not the Wardens, not the county, not a dying woman on a floor. Mark knows that. Morris knows that. And Emily, twelve years old with a survey book in her coat, is about to read that map the way she once read crows over a ridge, and find something on it that nobody meant her to find.
Whether a map can be trusted is the whole of this episode.
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