“He’s a good boy,” she said. “But he’s wired funny. He is incapable of backing down from a fight. You’ll get much better results from him if you choose diplomacy over confrontation.”

“Sometimes the situation doesn’t accommodate diplomacy.”

“Is that so?” Victoria asked. “So, by getting in his face like that, were you able to undo the confrontation with Mr. Grubbs? Did you think there was some magical way to roll back time?”

McCrea looked confused for a few seconds until he realized that he’d heard his own words recited back to him. He chuckled. “I saw how you did that. Well played.”

They’d gone maybe a hundred yards and were approaching a right-hand switchback when McCrea turned and started walking backward again.

“Are we sill alone?” Victoria asked.

“We seem to be. But I imagine we’ll see them again.”

Victoria agreed. “You can only hang out in the woods and hunt for so long. The weather’s going to turn soon. Being cold grows old pretty quickly.”

“So this town we’re going to,” McCrea said, “Ortho. What do you know about it?”

“It’s not my district,” Victoria said, “but they’ve come on some tough times. There was a good-size auto-manufacturing plant there until a few years ago, but it shut down when the jobs went to China. From what I’ve heard, there’s not a lot left except poverty and meth.”

“Meth?” Copley asked. “As in methamphetamine?”

Victoria didn’t know he’d been listening. “Unfortunately, we’re pretty much in the meth capital of the country. One of them, anyway. That’s another group that will turn feral in a few days.”

Within four miles, as they approached the Kanawha River Basin, the terrain flattened and straightened. Somewhere along the way, the road they were walking changed from a route number to Charleston Street. The woods transformed to lawns—big ones, an acre or more. Most were occupied by ranch homes, less than two thousand square feet, though there were a few two-story houses, and a few double-wides. This was not a prosperous town, but it had a feeling of life to it, unlike so many of the burgs in Coal Country, where desperation was the only tangible commodity.

They kept to the center of the street in hopes of being perceived as the least possible threat. The last thing Victoria wanted was to trespass on people’s property. Never give an excuse for people to be more paranoid than they already were.

“People on the porch, up on the right, Major,” Copley said.

Four people in total stood in a line under the roof of a wraparound porch: a man and a woman plus two girls under ten. The dad and mom had pistols holstered on their hips, but they didn’t seem to present any threat.