Her voice holds a warning. “Howie.”
Howie replies in the same tone. “Raven.” They stop walking just feet away from me, about to turn up the plumbing aisle. “Yes, there’s more people out there, but we need food.”
Raven jumps in. “I’m not saying we don’t, but we need to be able toprotectwhat we have.”
“Or we get our numbers up, have people join us. But they won’t if we can’t feed them. Or ourselves.”
Raven sighs like she’s not convinced.
“Besides,” Howie says, with what sounds like teasing in his voice. “We already voted. You were the one who wanted everyone’s input.”
Raven chuckles. “Yeah, and look how that bit me in the ass.”
“Today would be cool, folks!” the first guy calls from down the aisle. It sounds like he’s straining, plastic clacking together.
“Cool it, Jack, we’re coming,” Howie says, turning up the aisle.
“Trying to throw your back out?” Raven asks.
“I’m not trying to be on the trench-digging team,” Jack says. “Besides, you were the one who left the kid out at the truck.”
“He’s a better shot than Raven,” Howie says as he grunts and picks something up.
“He got luckyonce.” Raven and Howie argue about one of their crew being a better marksman while they lift what sounds like PVC pipes. When they take the first load out to their truck and their voices are barely audible, I make a run for the back of the store.
I don’t want to wait for them to get back and decide on what else they might need to grab. Especially when two of them are apparently ready to shoot anyone who comes by.
A small crack of daylight filters through the jamb of the back door. I reach out in the dark and feel for the handle, expecting it to be locked. But the door opens easily, squealing on rusty hinges.
I flinch as my eyes adjust to the bright sunlight. The lock looks like it’s been pried off with a crowbar, the door bent and broken from the outside. I pull over a broken cinder block and prop it up against the door so it doesn’t close, then take one last look inside the darkened hardware store.
For a moment I think about the people in there. They must live close by. They’re growing food, too. They have plans and votes and, from the sounds of things, leaders.
But they also have guns, and they expect to have to use them. They even have a “kid” at the front of the Home Depot guarding their truck because he’s a better shot than the others. The idea makes me nauseous.
I can hear Raven and Jack talking from the front of the store, so I turn and duck into the trees behind the shopping center, glancing around quickly and watching for movement. Even once I reach the highway on the other side, I stay low.
It’s a two-hour walk back to the cabin—it would have been faster if I took one of the bikes from the shed, but I wanted to be able to hide on the highway if I saw anyone. Still, it gives me time to think about what it could mean if we joined up with another settlement.
Maybe Andrew and I would be welcome, but then I picture the both of us stationed outside another Home Depot or a grocery store that hasn’t been completely ransacked. We have guns and we have to shoot anyone else who might come by.
Even in the warm sunlight, the thought gives me chills.
I’d never be able to join up with a settlement who were so willing to end other people’s lives. After everything we’ve all been through with the superflu. If the news was even close to correct on the death toll estimates, then there’s very few people left. Maybe Andrew would be able to join up with them. He was heading for Reagan National, after all.
So maybe I would just stay on my own.
Chills return, and something else. It feels like grief. The idea of Andrew leaving and me being alone again creates a pit in my chest like all my vital organs have gone missing.
I have to tell him, to give him the option to leave and join up with them if he wants to. Because of course he’d want to.
I won’t tell him. Not yet, at least. I don’t want to worry him—that there might be other survivors around us—but, even more, I don’t want him to leave.
Andrew
JAMIE IS LATE. I GET UP FROMthe chair on the front porch and hobble inside to check the time on the clock hanging on the kitchen wall. It’s almost 3:30. He was supposed to be back an hour ago.
I go back to the front porch and sit on the top of the front steps so my leg is going straight down toward the little garden gnome. I flex the muscles in my bad leg and there’s that familiar throb of pain. But it’s only a dull ache now. I bend my knee and put a tiny bit of weight on the heel of my foot. The pain increases a bit, but it’s bearable.
