“Sorry,” he says. “We knew you were out there—we saw the other guy—”
“Jamie.”
“Yes. We saw him out getting supplies in town one day and they followed him. Left you alone for a while, hoping you’d go out searching for other survivors and find us, but when spring rolled around and you didn’t—”
“You decided to rob us.”
“We were trying to scare you into joining us.”
“Ah, yes, because intimidation is so inviting.”
He shrugs. “Yeah, that was my fault. My wife told me it was a bad idea, but I think I was underestimating you. We’d had a couple of bad run-ins with other groups in the area, so we thought it best to scare you into joining us and make it seem like we were your best option.”
“Stealing our food and trying to starve us to death makes you our best option?”
“We left enough food to last you a week, and we went back to the cabin three days later to check on you and invite you back here to live. But youse were already gone, so we figured you had joined upwith one of the other groups.”
I watch his face, trying to figure out how much of this is true. “Jeff said there’s three groups in the area?”
“Including us, yeah. There’s a farm about fifteen miles south with around ten people living on it. And the next closest is a group of twenty in a motel six miles west.”
“A Motel 6 or a motelthat issix miles west? Again, who taught you grammar?”
“The second one,” he says, sounding as if he’s trying not to laugh.
“How many people are here?”
“Forty-two.” We reach a small corrugated-metal building painted white with a red cross on the door. Howard pulls it open for me. “Watch your step.”
The room is dark, but I can see there’s a large step up that would be easy to trip on. I step inside and Howard flips on a light switch.
The building is one room with four recessed lights in the corners that barely light it up when they flicker on.
“Solar panel on the roof is good for maybe forty minutes of light. They’re LED, so they get brighter the longer they’re on.”
In the center of the room is a padded exam table that’s only missing the disposable butcher paper that made me feel like deli meat at my pediatrician’s office in the before times. There’s a rolling stool pushed into a corner, cabinets above a sink, and a large, locked closet on the wall to my right.
“Have a seat.” Howard motions to the table and goes over to the sink. He squeezes soap out of a dispenser into his hands and uses his foot to hit a pedal below the basin. After a few pumps, water poursfrom the spigot and he scrubs his hands. Then reaches into the upper cabinet. I see boxes lining the shelves, and he takes one down. It’s a box of assorted bandages. He opens the other cabinet and takes out a towel.
He places them on the table next to me, then goes to the closet, which he unlocks using a ring of keys dangling from his belt loop. He removes a bottle of alcohol, a tube of ointment, and a glass jar filled with long Q-tips.
Once he has everything, he dampens the towel with some alcohol and holds it close enough to my face that I can smell it. “This is going to burn.”
“I’ve felt worse.”
His eyes drop down to my hand. “What happened?” He puts the towel against the cut on my cheek and the burn is immediate. I suck air through my clenched teeth as he dabs at it, the yellow towel coming away brownish red.
“Alligator attack.”
“I’m sure you can make up a better lie than that.”
“Oh, I absolutely can. But sadly nothing beats the truth.”
He looks at me like he’s not sure he understands the joke. “An alligator.”
“It’s a long story involving the breakdown of the food chain, but let’s stick with grammar before moving on to biology.”
Behind him, the door swings open. A Black woman with her hair in short locs enters. Howard peeks back, then returns his attention to me.
