“Yes.” I hand him my water bottle, and he downs the pill. “There should be enough for all of us in case something bad happens again. Even after your round.”
He smiles, and it seems like the first genuine smile he’s had in months. “Good. I think a couple others are going to need them, too.”
I shake my head. “I meanus. Our group, not the Nomads.”
Andrew stares at me as though he doesn’t understand.
“There was only one bottle.” I take it out of my bag and show it to him. “That’s all we have, and my mom’s notebook says you have to take a hundred and fifty milligrams every six hours.”
“If I got bit by a crocodile every six hours—”
“Alligator.”
“Whatever, I wouldn’t take all those pills. We’re giving them to the Nomad’s doctor, Jenn, and she’s distributing them.”
“What about everyone else?”
“No, Jamie, what abouteveryoneelse.”
“What if one of the kids gets sick?” I ask. “Are you going to be okay with them not getting antibiotics because we used them on strangers?”
He stares at me as though he doesn’t understand how the kids might need them. They’re kids. They could get sick; they could get hurt. One ofuscould get hurt. He rode up and down the eastern coast of Florida looking for antibiotics after I was shot and found none until we got to the Keys.
We lucked out with this porn-obsessed drug dealer. Maybe he’s one of the bodies in the mall, maybe he’s a body somewhere else nearby, but wherever he is, he helped us. We’d be stupid not to keep what we can when he was planning to do the same.
“What happened to you?” Andrew asks.
It takes me by such surprise I don’t know what to say. So to buy time, I ask, “What?”
He’s studying my face as if it’s a mask he’s never seen before. “You aren’t like this. You don’tdothis. You’re kind, Jamie. You care about other people—you kiss stuffed animals to make them feel better, forChrist’s sake—so how can you just say these people—who are helping us, by the way—aren’t important?”
“You’reimportant. Cara’s important, and Amy, and Henri-Two. The others and the kids, they’re all important.”
He sighs and looks over to the group of Nomads at the fire closest to us. Our group is on the other side, separate from everyone else.
“I get what you mean. But you would never have said this last spring when we first met. I was a stranger, and you gave me the antibiotics and pain meds you had in the cabin.”
“I wasn’t going to use them all myself.”
“Exactly. And we aren’t going to use all this.” He holds out his hand to me. I stare at it for a moment, understanding exactly what he’s doing but still not sure I agree. Finally I hand the pill bottle over to him. “We’re doing the right thing,” he says.
“Okay,” I say.
I know what he means. Morally, yes, we are absolutely doing the right thing. But morality is a construct of civilized society, which doesn’t exist anymore. Now we shoot each other over supplies or out of revenge.
In the cabin, it was easy to pretend we were still playing under the original moral rules of society. Then the people came—Howard and Raven and the group of others who showed up and demanded our supplies.
About an hour after Andrew gives the antibiotics to Dr. Jenn, Cal approaches our group. He says hello to everyone who is still awake, then kneels down next to me.
“Can I talk with you?”
I get up and follow him off to a quieter area of the dark parking lot. I can see half his face in the dim light of our fires.
“I heard you and a few others went into the distribution center and found supplies.”
“Yeah. We gave Dr. Jenn all the medical stuff, but we couldn’t find much food.”
He nods. “I just wanted to say thanks for helping us out. I know you didn’t need to, since you snuck in—”
