The last part is a lie, but I don’t want to think about the Fosters. I look away from him as my eyes burn with tears.
“Dammit,” he says under his breath. He sets the gun against the back of the sofa and holds out a hand to me. “Come on.”
I take his hand and he helps me stand. My muscles tense; I take a breath so as not to cry out. As we pass the cabin door he slams it shut with his foot.
My mystery boy is strong and manages to do most of the work himself. We make our way over to a dining room off the living area. There’s a large wooden table with six chairs around it.
With his free hand, he flicks the switch by the doorway and the chandelier hanging above the table lights up.
He has electricity?
“Hop up,” he says, turning me around. I do as he says and push myself back onto the table. “I’ll be right back, wait here.”
“Oh, okay, because I was thinking of making myself a sandwich.” He looks back at me on his way out of the dining room, as though he doesn’t realize I’m joking. I open my mouth to apologize, but he speaks first.
“Sucks for you, I’m all out of bread.” As he leaves I swear I can see a smirk pulling at his cheeks.
Excuse me, new kid, having a postapocalyptic sense of humor ismything. But his joke manages to put me a little more at ease.
I throw my coat to the floor and look around at the cabin for the first time. A gun to the face, I’ve learned, tends to shut down one’s attention to detail. The fireplace is cold and empty. I would expect to see animal heads on the wall, a mounted big-mouth bass, a crochetedrug under the couch in the living room. Instead, the living room rug is white shag and the sofa is an oversize and expensive-looking gray leather number. There are two other leather chairs in the living area, and mounted above the fireplace is a sixty-inch TV covered in dust.
The dining room has no china cabinet or sideboard. Instead there are framed pictures on the walls, scattered in a way that makes it seem like whoever did it spent a lot of effort making it look effortless.
I look closer at the picture of a child and his mother at the beach. They’re both white, but the mother’s tan hints that they’ve been in the sun for a while. Lucky. Any time I tried to tan I just burned. It looks like the son is similar, as his skin is still fair and there’s an unabsorbed glob of sunscreen on his shoulder.
The mother has brown hair. She’s wearing red sunglasses and a white-and-navy striped bathing suit, and is holding a sun hat on her head, the brim pushed up by the wind.
The boy is no more than seven; his smile is wide and gapped with missing baby teeth. Freckles dust his nose and cheeks. He’s closing one of his eyes against the glare of the sun; the other is bright blue.
I recognize this boy, only ten years older.
The now-older boy enters the dining room with a small plastic box in his hands. He sets it down on the dining room table and looks over at the picture he caught me examining.
“Is that your mom?” I ask him.
He frowns and doesn’t answer.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m nosy. I’ll shut up.”
He pulls the lid off the white container and sets it on one of the chairs as he digs through medical supplies. My eyes go wide.
He doesn’t just have gauze and alcohol and antibacterial ointment. He has a small jar of burn gel, individually wrapped sterile syringes, cotton balls, peroxide, a few sterile scalpels, and instruments that I recognize from medical dramas that used to run on repeat before the bug.
Shit, maybe Tom Hollandishere!
He unties the brown—formerly yellow—T-shirt from around my leg, then reaches down to the cuff of my jeans. He tries to pull it up, but the blood and damp weather have made the denim shrink and the jeans go no farther. I breathe in deeply as pain shoots up my leg.
“Don’t think jeans were a good choice today,” he tells me.
“This happened yesterday.”
“Take them off.”
“Shouldn’t you buy me dinner first?” I ask. I don’t realize I’m going to say the joke until it’s already out. My face warms, but my embarrassment is short-lived as he finally lets his smirk grow into a smile.
I unbuckle my belt and pull my pants down to my knees, taking my left leg out first. He helps me with the right leg as we both pull at opposite sides so the denim doesn’t rub against my wound.
“Jesus!” His eyes go wide at what’s left of my calf. It’s the first time I’ve seen it without the jeans obstructing the view, and my stomach churns. He leaves the room, running to the kitchen, but I can’t pull my eyes away from my leg. My chest tightens and my arms and legs tingle with fear.
