“Good. Ansel helped me weed, and I’m going to plant carrots, peas, and potatoes. We’ll have everything we need for a yummy veggie stew when they start coming in.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Why do you have all your weapons?” he asked, just noticing that I was geared up.
“Your brother and I are going to check out the strawberry patch down the road.”
“My mom used to take us there to pick them every spring. Mmm, we could make strawberry shortcake and strawberry jam…” Kitten trailed off, fantasizing about food again. I smiled at his predictability. My true rival wasn’t Ansel, it was food. All I had to do was keep my man well-fed and he’d never leave me. I remembered those goats we saw grazing in the military compound as an idea began to form in my mind.
“Ready?” Santiago appeared by my side even though I’d told him I’d meet him at the gate.
“Yeah,” I said, untangling myself from Kitten’s arms.
“Be careful out there. You’re still not one hundred percent,” Kitten said to me.
“I love it when you remind me of that,” I told him and pecked his sweaty forehead.
He shot me a look, then pulled me in for a long, lingering kiss on the mouth. I’d certainly never get tired of that.
“Gross,” Santiago said at my side.
“Don’t be homophobic, Santi,” Kitten scolded.
“I’m not…that’s not…it’s ‘cause you’re my brother.”
Kitten laughed. “Don’t eat all the strawberries before you get back.”
“I’ll save the ripest ones for you, cutie,” I said, mostly to annoy Santiago.
“Ugh, enough already, let’s go,” Santiago said.
“I’m not homophobic,”Santiago said to me again twenty minutes later. We’d found the strawberry patch in an overgrown lawn at the edge of the Shady Brook subdivision. He was crouched down on the ground picking the ruby-red berries while I stood watch, scanning both the sides of the nearest house and the woods behind us. We’d done a perimeter search when we got here, including checking out the dilapidated shed on the back forty. We’d found a racoon carcass inside the shed, too rotted away to tell whether it had been natural causes or the result of a Rabid attack. Thankfully, the Rabids around here still appeared to only be active at nighttime.
“I’m just not used to my little brother having a boyfriend,” Santiago continued. “I mean, when I left home, he was still a kid.And now he’s, like, a grown up. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.”
“Maybe the two of you should spend more time together,” I suggested.
“That’s the thing, we’re always working or there are other people around, and even when we’re alone, he doesn’t want to talk about anything personal.”
“Personal, like what?” I asked.
“Like why you’re lying about the Humvee you have stashed away in the Andersons’ garage.”
“What Humvee?” I said, not missing a beat.
He shook his head but continued hunting for berries. “I came across it one day when we were scavenging for video cameras. And I know it wasn’t there before. I asked Macon about it. He’s a bad liar.”
Macon and I were going to have a chat about not spilling the beans to the B-holes.
“Also, the woman, Crenshaw, she was asking about a vehicle, one that belonged to the poor dipshit you scammed all these weapons off of,” Santiago said.
Just the offhand reference to that sick fucker made my muscles tense and the blood rush to my ears. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that Santiago had nothing to do with it.
“Sounds like there’s still a lot of holes in your story,” I said.
“Yeah, so whatisthe story, Cipher?”
I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t trust him yet, and until I did, I wasn’t giving him shit to work with. Who the hell knew if he’d sell us out to the military or someone else to get what he wanted? He seemed like the type.
