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“I need a quick shower,” he says. “Be right back.”

Shawndra gives me a quick grin from across the room. She finds it romantic that Donovan always wants to kiss me as soon as he gets back. The other Deadmen usually go straight to the showers, but he comes to kiss me every time.

They’re making the world safer for all of us. The least I can do is be glad to see him when he returns from a long day. It doesn’t really matter if he’s a mess.

That’s what the other women here tell me, anyway. It’s been seven months since I cut my hair in the nursing home and nearly got murdered in the street.

The Deadmen—specifically, Donovan—saved me. I’d be a hypocrite to complain about their brutality when I wouldn’t still be here without it.

There are fifteen Deadmen and five other people in our group. Genevieve is in charge. She’s married to Justin, the leader of the group. Maggie and Shawndra are girlfriends, like me. We do the cooking and laundry. Floyd is the sixty-three-year-old mechanic who keeps everything running and repairs things the guys sell for money.

I’m not a scavenger anymore. I get to sleep every night not wondering if someone’s going to attack me or kill me before I even know it’s happening.

I’m not alone anymore.

Once the men have all showered and they’re seated around a rectangular table, we take our seats, too. The food will be passed around the table.

I peel, boil, and mash twenty-five pounds of potatoes every day. Donovan smiles at me as he adds a big spoonful of them to his plate.

“These look great,” he says.

They will be. I’ve mastered the process, but it took trial and error. The guys were patient as I learned, eating lumpy or pasty potatoes more than once.

Now I know you can’t just use any kind of potato. I’ve never been a cook, and when Genevieve rushed through a lesson on how to make them, I swear she deliberately left out key details.

Shawndra says Genevieve is jealous of me because I’m young and pretty. It’s absurd, because Genevieve is pretty, too. Before the virus, women paid good money for salons to color their hair the silvery shade that hers is naturally.

“How was your day?” Donovan asks me.

It was the exact same as every other day. After breakfast, I showered, did laundry, put on makeup, read for an hour, and made twenty-five pounds of mashed potatoes.

“It was good. How about you?”

“Better now that I’m with you.”

My cheeks warm. He’s always sweet to me. A few weeks into me joining the group, he confessed that they don’t let new people in, but he had such a crush on me that they made an exception.

On the other side of the table, Herrin and Burt, two Deadmen I don’t know well, are grinning at each other.

“When I say explode, that’s what I’m talkin’ about,” Herrin says. “Her head was in about ten thousand pieces.”

He uses his hands to demonstrate an explosion and they both laugh.

I pass the platter of roast chicken to Donovan without taking any, my appetite gone.

“Did you hear the way those guys were screaming in that shed?” Burt says gleefully, shoving a spoonful of potatoes into his mouth. “Please, you’re burning us alive!”

I wince and Donovan gives them a stern look.

“Can you not at the dinner table?” he says.

Burt scoffs and says, “Can we not what? Be happy another thirty-one privileged motherfuckers were sent straight to hell today?”

“Can you leave out the gory details when we’re eating?”

“The gory details are the point,” Justin booms from the head of the table. “We ain’t the Girl Scouts. We’re the Deadmen.”

There’s a rumble of excited noises from the other men. Justin glares at me, and then at Donovan.