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to extricate myself from the handshake, but he gripped me a little harder.
    “Now, there’s something you should know,” he said with a stern but friendly expression and in a tone reserved for 1950s TV dads admonishing their children. “Sara and I...we’re together now. She’s cried for you, and now she’s moved on. I hope there won’t be any hard feelings over that.”
    “Me too,” I said. He didn’t seem too bright, and his mild posturing lacked substance. He wasn’t really a man; he was just pretending to be one.
    He released my hand and maintained eye contact for a moment under the brief and mistaken presumption that he had successfully pissed out his territory. Then he went back to the edge of the woods to retrieve his fishing gear.
    “I’m going to put this away then I’ll go find the girls,” he said.
    I looked over at Julio, and he was staring at me. I couldn’t read him; it was as if he was looking right through me. Grant took his fishing supplies into the house then came out again.
    “Did they go down the path?” he asked.
    Julio nodded but didn’t take his eyes off me.
    “If they come back up the other way tell them to wait for me. I’ll try to catch up with them.” At that, he took off in a jog following the same path Sara and Christine had taken.
    “Sara said you all might come back with us to Clayfield,” I said.
    Julio shrugged, “We’re still working it out, you know?”
    “There are more infected in Clayfield than here,” I said, “But there are more supplies…more food.”
    He nodded.
    We stood there–me by the truck, he by the house–for a long time without another word. I leaned on the truck a while. I walked around pretending to look at nature for a while. I squatted down and dug little rocks out of the ground with a stick. Julio remained planted the whole time.
    Finally, Sara appeared, returning up the path. She was crying. When she got in the clearing, she went over to Julio. She said something to him in a low voice, gave him a quick hug, then went into the house. After a couple of minutes, she came out carrying a duffle bag.
    “We can go now,” she said, tossing the bag into the back of the truck. “You drive.”

CHAPTER 6
     
    She didn’t say anything for several miles. She just stared out of her window, crying softly. I held her hand, but I didn’t press her for information. I didn’t like seeing her like that.
    After a while, she said, “I’m sorry. He’s a sweet guy, and I really hated hurting him like that.”
    “Okay,” I said. “But I don’t want you to feel forced into anything. Are you sure about this?”
    “Completely,” she sniffed.
    “Do you expect them to come to Clayfield eventually?”
    She shook her head, “I don’t know.”
    We didn’t see any infected people near the lake. Once we’d traveled several minutes they began to appear next to the road or in yards and fields. Seeing them off the road was tricky, because the weeds and grass had grown so tall and because often they would be standing perfectly still.
    We crossed over into Grace County after 4 p.m. It was another fifteen minutes before we got close to Clayfield. I could see the top of the water tower and the courthouse spire sticking up over the trees in the distance. I turned off on a side road that would take me toward the stables.
    “I drove around downtown Clayfield this morning before coming out to the Lassiter place,” Sara said. “It looked a lot different...overgrown…banged up. I noticed a big hole in the roof of my church.”
    “A tank shell did that, I think. I haven’t been in there, but that’s probably what did it.”
    “I wonder where they found tanks.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “There are armories around. They could have taken them from there. The National Guard might have had them out when things were getting bad and abandoned them. Wheeler’s men weren’t military. They might have been an organized militia, but I doubt it. I got the