Plague Riders by Gabriel Goodman

Author:Gabriel Goodman [Goodman, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781467700276
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group

CHAPTER SIX

T

hat night, in Shep’s nightmare, they found Dusty Hollow. They could see it across the river. But here there was no bottleneck and the river seemed wider than he’d ever seen it. The water ran wild, which made swimming impossible. And as they stood there, trying to figure out how to ford the gap, raiders appeared with torches and began setting fire to Dusty Hollow’s wooden shacks. Shep screamed and screamed, trying to warn his parents. And somehow, despite the distance and the chaos all around, he could pick out the sound of his mother and father howling as they burned.

A rumble of thunder woke Shep the next morning. Even before he opened his eyes, he could smell fresh rain in the cool air of dawn. He propped himself up on one elbow and took in his surroundings.

The night before, they’d only stopped running once they were sure they’d lost Vargas. Cara didn’t speak to him the rest of the night. He knew she was mad he’d made them cross the river. If they’d stayed on their own side, they might still have had the medicine to barter with.

Emerging from the forest, they’d found a small cemetery where knee-high grass covered the graves, leaving tombstones peeking out over the wild weeds like ordinary rocks. Before collapsing from exhaustion, they took shelter in a caretaker’s shack that smelled of mold and motor oil.

Through the small, broken window on the side of the shack, Shep saw a light rain fall as fluffy gray clouds churned overhead. His heart skipped a beat when he couldn’t find Cara on the floor next to him, where she’d fallen asleep last night. He flung the door open and found the girl crouching under the shack’s small awning.

Nearby, Cara had stretched bits of tarp they’d found in the shack across some tree branches. The tarps, which came up to Shep’s waist, sagged as rain pooled in the middle of them. Looking over her shoulder, Shep saw Cara reading from Gene Matterhorn’s Wilderness Survival Guidebook. The page was opened to a diagram that looked just like the canopies Cara had made.

“Just so you know,” she said, her eyes fixed on the pages of the book, “rainwater tastes like crap. But it’s all we’ve got.”

“You’re a genius, Cara,” Shep said.

“One of us has to be,” Cara replied, but a small smile told Shep she was no longer angry.

Shep kicked off his moccasins and ran barefoot to the sagging tarps, refilling the small canteen they shared. When the canteen was full, he and Cara sat under the awning to discuss their options. Without horses, they had no hope of reaching Dusty Hollow by the next day, when the raiders planned to burn the camp to the ground. They talked about sneaking back to the railcar camp and stealing back their horses. But Vargas would know that was their easiest option. Even if he had continued looking for them, he’d probably left one of his hunters at the camp in case Shep and Cara returned.

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