Peter’s Party Captured by the Second Expeditionary Force marks a sudden reversal on Peter’s journey: a downriver march ends in a concealed net, and the people caught with him are taken to a Texas garrison. What first appears to be a trap set for unknown intruders becomes the group’s introduction to an organized military community. They arrive with their packs returned but their weapons withheld, under a status the soldiers call protection—neither prisoners nor free to leave as they please.

The concealed capture

The party is traveling downriver after breaking camp. Near half-day, Alicia, walking at the head of the line, abruptly stops and signals for silence. She studies the leaf-covered ground, brushes the dead leaves aside, and recognizes the danger only moments before the trap is sprung. A heavy net lifts the entire group into the air, holds them briefly at its highest point, then drops them together. Its ropes leave them tangled in a single captive mass, unable to distinguish where one person ends and another begins.

Peter cannot reach his knife, and cutting the ropes would send everyone plunging to the ground. The net’s spinning motion slows and stops, then accelerates in the opposite direction. As the group turns, Peter sees movement in the brush; a voice below calls them strags, the soldiers’ abbreviation for stragglers. The capture has not been carried out by the infected creatures Peter fears, but by armed people waiting in the woods. That recognition shifts the immediate danger without restoring the group’s freedom: they have been caught by a force with its own territory, methods, and rules.

Taken under protection

By midafternoon, the soldiers have marched the party north over a ridge and down toward their garrison. Peter’s group had missed the muddy trace leading there; hoofprints and tire tracks mark a route they had not found while traveling on their own. The soldiers return the party’s packs but keep its weapons. Their classification is deliberately intermediate: Major Greer says they are under protection, a condition that distinguishes them from ordinary prisoners without allowing them to go where they wish.

The force that has detained them is a long-range patrol unit. Greer and his fifteen men have been in the woods for weeks. Their equipment and bearing announce a military order before Peter learns its history: they carry rifles and pistols, and some men also have crossbows. Their faces are streaked with mud and charcoal. Greer’s soldiers are mostly quiet, while Muncey, the radio operator, is more talkative; he carries a hand-cranked radio whose generator protrudes from its base. The party has not merely stumbled upon a patrol but crossed into the reach of a force capable of sustained operations and communication.

The garrison and Texas

The garrison appears in a bowl-shaped valley beyond a hill. Canvas tents and vehicles sit within a timber perimeter wall at least fifteen meters high, its posts sharpened at the top. Floodlights stand around the compound; horses graze in a paddock, and soldiers move among buildings and along a catwalk above the wall. Peter also sees at least half a dozen Humvees, two large tankers, and an assortment of trucks. A large flag flies at the center, red, white, and blue with a single white star. From the ridge, the enclosed base looks to Peter like a whole city and the heart of a world he had believed in without ever actually picturing.

The lights are especially striking to Michael, who notices that the garrison has them. Muncey describes the area inside the fence as Texas territory, and Greer explains the political fact behind the name: these soldiers are not the United States Army, because there is no U.S. Army anymore. They serve Texas instead. The capture therefore reveals more than the presence of a patrol. It gives Peter’s party a first view of a successor military power with territory, infrastructure, vehicles, livestock, and a national identity.

Strangers at the gate

As the party approaches the gate, a crowd of armed men gathers to look at them. Some stand bare-chested despite the cold drizzle; all are smooth-shaven and armed. Greer warns Peter that people will stare and that he will have to get used to it. The attention makes the party’s outsider status visible: the soldiers have brought in people they call stragglers, but Greer says that none are usually brought in this far west. Farther east, he says, stragglers can still be found; in Oklahoma, the Third Battalion once found an entire town. Here, the patrol is not even looking for them.

That answer leaves the immediate purpose of the net unresolved in the available scene. The soldiers have captured Peter’s party, but Greer’s account suggests the patrol did not set out expecting to find people in this remote area. The contrast between the party’s accidental encounter and the garrison’s organized world supplies the event’s larger consequence: Peter’s journey has crossed a boundary into a political and military order he did not know was there. The group is safer from immediate exposure to the wilderness only in a qualified sense, since its weapons are gone and its movement is controlled by those who brought it inside the fence.

Narrative significance

The capture turns a journey through the woods into an encounter with a community built around armed discipline and defended territory. Its first image is not the flag or the lights but the net: an unseen structure that makes travelers into captives before they can understand what has happened. The garrison then reverses the scale of that first image. What seemed an isolated trap belongs to a much larger system, one with patrols, a chain of command, vehicles, communications equipment, and a claim to Texas.

The sequence also preserves uncertainty rather than resolving the encounter as a simple rescue or imprisonment. Peter’s party is no longer alone in the woods, but it is not free; its packs are restored while its weapons are withheld, and protection is the term applied to that uneasy middle ground. By ending this phase at the gate, the narrative makes entry into the garrison both an arrival and a loss of autonomy, setting up the party’s dependence on a power whose reach and purposes it has only begun to discover.