The road kept a ledger of everything it took. Rubber. Time. A little more of Micah’s patience with every mile. He had learned to read its handwriting: fresh gravel meant friendly hands, glass glitter meant the kind of help you didn’t want to meet twice.
“Drink,” he said, passing the canteen to Isaac in the passenger seat. The boy took a careful swallow and coughed like it hurt to come back from wherever he’d been. In the back, Claire slept on her side with a wool cap pulled over her ears, fever making a rose of each cheek.
Breathing, bleeding, broken, brain. The old checklist floated up without asking permission. Breathing: fast but steady. Bleeding: none. Broken: not yet. Brain: watch the eyes when she wakes.
The Tacoma hummed like a secret as they rolled past a tilted mile marker—only the “1” still legible through the soot. On the map he’d traded for diesel, a red X sat where this cracked two-lane crossed the river. A handwritten note beside it: shoal in late summer.
“This isn’t late summer,” Isaac said, tracking his father’s eyes the way he always did. “It’s not even early fall anymore.”
“We’ll see what the river says,” Micah told him, and tried to make it sound like a joke.
The bridge appeared as a negative space—guardrails to nowhere, the middle torn out like a missing tooth. The river below was loud and brown and busy with the kind of work that moved boulders where men couldn’t.
Micah parked well short of the break and cut the engine. Silence fell hard, then filled with water talk and wind through winter-thin leaves. He checked the sky—flat white, the kind that fooled you about time—and felt the day shrinking around them.
Claire stirred. “We there?” she asked the truck ceiling. “Almost,” Isaac said, too quickly. “Take your time waking up,” Micah said, already outside, already listening. No boots on the bridge. No voices. The only footprints in the road were days old, softened by dew and dust.
He walked to the edge and looked where the span used to be. Rebar curled like iron vines. Downstream, a cottonwood leaned out as if pointing. At the elbow, the water was shallower, darker with stones. The map hadn’t lied. The season had.
He measured angles with his eyes, distances with his body the way the work had taught him when minutes mattered. Twenty yards to the cottonwood. Ten across the slowest tongue of current. Waist-deep, maybe. With Claire on his back? With the packs held high? He could do it once. Twice might spend him past the point of change.
The Tacoma door creaked. “Dad.” Isaac’s voice had a shape Micah hated—a boy trying not to be a boy. He turned.
A woman stood fifty feet away with her hands open and out—empty palms, nothing in the fingers. She wore a hunter-orange beanie and a coat that used to be good. Two others waited behind her, a man with careful eyes and another woman whose stance said tired but not done.
“Hello the bridge,” Orange Beanie called, like it was a custom she remembered from before. “We’re friendly.”
Friendly didn’t mean safe. But people who meant harm rarely announced themselves at conversational distance. Micah lifted his own hands. “Bridge is gone,” he said, because it was the only truth that mattered.
“We saw,” she answered. “I’m Mara. We’ve got three and a small cart. You’re three?”
“Two and a fever,” Isaac said, coming to stand beside him, shoulders squared as if the shape could become the fact.
Micah wanted to tell him to get back in the truck and lock the doors. He wanted to tell him to stop growing up where he could see it. “I’m Micah,” he said instead. “This is my son. My daughter’s sleeping.”
Mara’s eyes did what everyone’s did now—hazard sweep, then inventory, then a softening around the edges that meant she remembered being human. “We heard there’s a county west that didn’t burn. Food. A clinic. Roads you can still take at night.”
“There’s always a county like that,” the careful-eyed man said. “It moves when you walk.”
“Sometimes rumors are map pins,” Micah said before he could swallow it. He hadn’t meant to share hope with strangers. Hope spent easy and left you hungrier.
“Shoal?” Mara nodded at the cottonwood as if reading his mind.
“Maybe. With weight? No.” He looked at the cart behind them—bicycle wheels, a cooler, two five-gallon buckets lashed to a frame with paracord. Good hands had built it; better hands had pulled it. “What’s inside?”
“Food,” said the tired-not-done woman. “Two jars protein, bag rice, flour, some coffee. Don’t ask me to ditch the coffee.”
“Not planning to,” Micah said, and Claire coughed behind him, small and torn.
A branch cracked upstream—dry wood or something like it. Everyone stilled. The river said nothing about guns. Rivers were like that—gossipy until you needed details.
“Decision time,” Micah said, the medic voice back in his throat. “We can ferry people and packs at the elbow. Not the cart. Truck stays. We go light, quiet, in single file. We make the far bank before the wind turns.”
“You lead,” Mara said finally. “We’ll carry what you say and leave what you don’t.”
Isaac touched Micah’s sleeve the way he had when he was five and wanted to cross the street. “How many trips?”
“Two if we’re lucky,” Micah said. “Luck if we’re not.” He moved before courage could leak out of his shoes, slinging his pack and loosening the straps on Claire’s.
She woke fully as he lifted her, fever-light and stubborn as ever. “Don’t… leave the truck,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “It’s got our life in it.”
“Our life’s here,” he told her, and felt her nod even if she didn’t understand.
They went to the cottonwood together—Mara first with the cooler held high, Isaac behind with the buckets, Micah last with Claire. The water bit his legs the way cold does when it wants to be remembered. Stones rolled under his boots like bones. At the elbow, the river let them pass with only a complaint.
On the far bank, Micah set Claire down on a dry patch and checked her eyes: pupils quick, tracking, a good sign for a bad day. He looked back. The careful-eyed man was midstream with the last load when the upstream bank spat a sound that didn’t belong to wood at all.
Micah didn’t say “Gun.” He said, “Down,” the way he had on scenes when glass was still falling. Everyone obeyed because some words carry their own gravity.
Across the water, something moved in the brush. The river raised its voice to be heard over what might happen next. Micah measured the distance between this bank and the trees, between the danger and the people he’d promised to carry, and felt the old math rise like heat.
He picked up a stone—not because it would help, but because empty hands felt worse—and smiled at his son without meaning to.
“Welcome to the road,” he said softly. “We keep going.”
