I flinch and almost rip the paper in half.
“Andrew, I’m looking for bullets. Stop yelling.” But my voice sounds shaky. My hands, my whole body in fact, are buzzing with adrenaline and fear.
“We don’t need them. The Nomads have plenty.”
He’s right. I quickly fold up the paper and put it in my backpack with the pocketknife. I look back down at the body one last time, wondering where he came from, and where he found this wanted poster. We drove all through Georgia and didn’t see any. Part of me wants to show Andrew, but I don’t want him to worry.
Then another thought comes to me.
What if Cal and the Nomads found one of these? We’re already past Fort Caroline, but they could be talking to them on a radio and agreeing to another rendezvous point farther ahead.
For now I’ll just keep this quiet. Maybe this guy wasfromFort Caroline, and that’s the only reason he had the paper in his pocket. I grab the cart—and another that’s shoved against the counter—and head back to Andrew.
He smirks. “Why is there always a cart with one janky wheel?”
“It’s store policy.” I try to keep my voice steady.
We start loading up the kids’ jackets.
“How are you feeling?” I ask. But before he can snap at me for asking about his arm, I clarify, “I mean about us being on the road. With the Nomads.” Now, after finding the wanted poster, I want to be back in the cabin with him more than ever. Away from the roads and people and Fort Caroline.
He holds up one jacket, checking both sides for rat bites or someother kind of rodent holes. “Okay, I guess. I mean, it’s hard to find things to complain about when we’re being chauffeured around.”
“Do you miss the Keys?”
He stops and looks up at me. “Doyou?”
“No, but I know you were hoping things would be different.”
He moves over to a display of hiking and camping clothes and starts picking up things from the floor.
“I was.” He throws some gloves and hats in the cart, then stops and approaches me. In the dim light I can see the sadness on his face, and it answers all my questions about how he felt leaving the Keys. “I just—I know you were scared. And I know why. You got shot and you almost died. That’s enough to royally screw up anyone’s trust.”
Hearing him say that out loud gives me a sudden sense of relief. It’s such a comfort to know he understood where I was coming from. It means we haven’t drifted apart like I was scared we had. I start to reach for the wanted sign in my pocket, but he speaks and it stops me in my tracks.
“But,” he says, “I hope you know there’s more people you can trust besides me. And Cara, too. Things have changed since the bug destroyed everything, but there are still good people who survived.”
There’s that worry again, though. That maybe the Nomads know Fort Caroline is looking for me. I can’t get rid of it entirely.
“What if I fully trust only you and Cara, and hang on to the smallest bit of doubt about everyone else, to keep us safe?”
There’s sadness in his eyes. He puts his good hand up to my chest. “It’s not your responsibility to keep us safe. We have an equal share in that, and no one is ever one hundred percent safe. Even before the bug.”
No, but post-superflu America is still more dangerous than it was before. Especially when we have two settlements out there looking for us now. And who knows how many people in between who have wanted posters with my name and description on them.
He gets up on the tips of his toes and kisses me gently.
“We’ll be okay,” he says.
I nod and he turns his attention back to the rats’ nest of coats on the floor. He grabs a few of the least torn adult jackets.
“And you can sew these into a Postapocalyptic Coat of Many Colors.”
“It’s going to be hideous,” I say, looking at the neon-green jacket with a shredded arm.
“Absolutely. I love it already.”
We finish grabbing the best of the coats and take the cart out to the road. Cara, Niki, and Taylor are waiting for us with their own haul of clothes but not nearly as much winter stuff, so maybe it is good we split up.
