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by Johnny B. Truant

  “I’m sorry,” said Cameron.

  “We won’t slow you down,” Mike said.

  “They won’t slow us down,” Piper echoed, holding Cameron’s sleeve.

  “They will,” he whispered. “A family with a kid? We’ll be a huge target. What’s the first rule of survival, Piper?”

  “Please?” Rachel said.

  “Please … Cameron,” Mike said.

  “Pweese,” said Charlie, the kid.

  Piper put her hand on Cameron’s shoulder. “Just a day or two. Same course. We go where we were going anyway, and they follow or find another way.”

  Cameron took a long, slow inhale then exhaled. “Fine. They can follow us along Route 24, but we lose them when we start following 70 West. I want to see if we can get a car at some point, and we aren’t getting one with a baby seat.” He glanced back at the family then at Piper. “Agreed?”

  Piper nodded.

  “But I don’t like this at all. At all.”

  “Noted.” Piper tried to bat her eyes at Cameron to smooth his edges, but her battered sunglasses muffled her charms.

  “If they get us killed, it’s on you.”

  But Piper didn’t think that would happen.

  Almost certainly not.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “Kid,” said Vincent, still laughing and clapping Trevor on the back. “You’ve got a lot to learn about playing cards. He stood, and Trevor could’ve sworn he heard the chair breathe a sigh of relief. They’d been playing cards for three hours, and Trevor felt like he knew less than when he started.

  “Sorry,” Trevor said.

  Christopher shook his head. “You fucker.”

  Trevor looked across the table. He liked the casual way the guys swore around him. Nobody would think a man Trevor’s age didn’t know those words, but it was different when others assumed he did and treated him like an equal instead of a kid. He’d been getting annoyed looks from his mother and sister for what felt like months, and those looks clearly painted him as a moody teenager with delusions of persecution. Well, the shoe was on the other foot now. No longer was he a lone man around a bunch of girls (Raj didn’t count). Trevor finally had guys to treat him like one of their own.

  He could accept Christopher’s jab as genuine, or he could be a man and say something pointlessly vulgar. Because that’s how this crew worked. Insults were good. They bonded people.

  Instead of demurring or apologizing again for losing his team the card game, Trevor said the wisest thing he could think of: “Fucked your mom.”

  Christopher threw a dish towel.

  Trevor, smiling, gathered the cards.

  Christopher said, “Hey,” and Trevor looked up.

  Christopher tossed his chin toward Raj, reading on the couch.

  “He doesn’t like me, I don’t think.”

  Trevor shrugged. “He doesn’t like any of you.”

  “And?”

  “Whatever,” said Trevor. “That’s his problem.”

  Christopher looked from Raj to Lila sitting on the overstuffed chair at the far side of the living room. Trevor followed his gaze. Lila looked tired. Very tired. Her eyes were dark circles. She’d been staying in the room later and later in the mornings. But judging by the movements he heard through the door in the mornings, he didn’t think she was sleeping any more during the day than at night.

  Lila was quieter, too. She’d stopped talking to Trevor almost entirely, and a small part of him felt positive it was because she knew he’d watched Piper changing her clothes and was disgusted with him. That seemed impossible, but no other explanation made sense. She’d vanished into the bedroom for several hours just this morning, this time with their mother. Trevor hadn’t liked that. He’d made eye contact with Lila as she’d been pulling Mom aside, and he’d made eye contact with them both when they’d emerged from the bedroom much later. Nobody said anything, but Trevor knew accusation when he saw it. They were probably deciding what to do with him.

  Was ogling your stepmother grounds for being kicked out of the bunker? Probably not, but Trevor’s gut clenched at the thought that Lila might know and doubly at the notion that she’d spent the morning discussing his deviance with their mother. Was Mom working up the courage to confront him? She wasn’t in the living room now. Was that even something Heather was capable of doing — talking to her son about inappropriate, incestuous boobs? What would that conversation be like? It would either be hard because she’d be disappointed and chiding … or it’d be even harder because she’d be inappropriate and flip about the whole thing. She might joke about whether or not he’d want to see her naked, his biological mother. Or she might draw comparisons and gross analogies suitable for her crass standup act. For instance: Just because you didn’t come out of a pussy doesn’t mean it’s okay to want to enter it now.

  But Christopher knew none of this. And honestly, maybe Lila and Mom didn’t know about it either. In fact, they probably didn’t. How could they know he’d peeped that night, with the door having been closed? How could they know that he thought about what he’d seen all the time, when he spent a bit too long in the bathroom and came out relaxed?

  “I’m not sure I understand them as a couple,” said Christopher.

  Trevor shrugged.

  “I mean, he’s … I guess he’s fine, when he’ll talk to me. Seems like a nice enough guy. And smart. Maybe as smart as Terrence. If he’d stop being so … ” Christopher trailed off. “Sorry.”

  “What?” Trevor asked.

  “We’re guests here.”

  “Well, so is Raj.”

  “But I mean, he was here before us.”

  “It’s cool, Chris. You can say Raj is kind of an ass sometimes.” Trevor smiled.

  “I don’t mean it like that. Your sister just seems … well, it’s hard for me to see them together.”

  Trevor looked back. They really were an odd couple. Before the world had gone to shit, he’d wondered at things Lila said about Raj. She couched everything and played like nothing was a big deal, but she was Trevor’s sister, and they’d once been close enough for Lila to shamefully admit to having made a buck or two pirating her own father’s films in advance of their release. Trevor could read her and knew she was a bit gaga over Raj — or had been, at least, before they’d all been locked in the madhouse together. And Trevor, accordingly, had tried to imagine them married, with Raj as a brother-in-law. It was okay, he supposed. But there were way cooler brothers-in-law than Raj.

  “It’s hard,” Trevor agreed.

  Christopher chewed the inside of his cheek.

  “Do you think think he misses them?”

  Trevor didn’t understand. But when he followed Christopher’s gaze, he saw Raj fiddling with his watch phone thing. He seemed to think that if he fiddled enough, he’d be able to call home. If home still existed.

  “His family?” Trevor asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Dunno.”

  “You’re lucky to have yours.”

  Trevor shrugged. He supposed so.

  “I lost mine. I guess that’s why I ended up with Morgan for a bit. Not that I was ever really in with him. You know. Just … kind of … needed someone. Or whatever.” Christopher seemed embarrassed. But it was true that he was tight with Vincent and Terrence and Dan. He’d seemed tight with Cameron, too. Like a brother.

  Maybe there was some hurt there, but he didn’t ask Christopher for more. His family might have been killed, or he might have literally lost them, like Raj had lost track of his. He might have a mother and father still out there somewhere. Maybe a wife. He was young to be married and didn’t wear a ring, but stranger things had happened. Trevor didn’t want to know. This was all kind of a bummer.

  “You like her, don’t you?” Trevor asked.

  “Who?”

  “Lila.”

  “No.” But yeah, he clearly did.

  “You know she’s pregnant. With Raj’s kid.”

  “Yeah, of course,” C
hristopher said. “So?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Before Christopher could respond to Trevor’s just-saying, a muted thud banged from above. Christopher stopped with his mouth about to open, and his eyes ticked around. Following them, Trevor realized that everyone had stopped to trade glances. Except Vincent, who seemed not to have noticed.

  Terrence’s head poked out of the control room. He was wearing another pair of large sunglasses. Again, Trevor wondered how he could see what he was doing.

  “Vincent!” he shouted. “Get your ass in here!”

  Vincent was poking around in the storage pantry. “Just a minute,” he said.

  “Not in a minute. You need to see this. Now!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Cameron woke from a dreamless sleep.

  The previous night, he’d tossed and turned. They’d needed to wake early enough to be out the door before dawn, and time to prepare before that. He’d set his alarm for 4 a.m., and his body had seemed unable to settle in light of the early deadline.

  This must have been his body making up for the shortfall. There had been no tossing and turning. No waking, not even to take a leak. He’d felt secure as they’d nodded off, and that had probably helped. Piper had proposed someone staying up to guard, but it seemed unnecessary. By the time they stumbled upon the barn, they hadn’t seen anyone for hours. Animals were still inside — six horses they might pick from and try to ride in the morning. They’d been obviously hungry and a bit malnourished, which told Cameron that nobody had been tending to them for maybe a week. The house had been freshly burned, the tang of smoke still clinging to the nearby brush. The barn, he had to assume, had been abandoned.

  Nobody would bother them. The world hadn’t turned entirely upside down. As far as Benjamin and Charlie (Charlie Cook, not four-year-old Charlie Nelson) had told him and as far as he’d heard on the airwaves, there were entire sections of the country that had returned to civility. Few cities had stayed in riots or disorder. Many towns had normal power and were still playing by the rules. They probably even stopped at crosswalks in those places. Maybe Scouts still helped old ladies cross the street.

  They were in the mountains. Yes, there were a few marauding gangs. But what barrel didn’t have its bad apples? Cameron had certainly been in worse places. Americans acting like a single roving gang was cause for alarm — reason for ceasing life and holing up with your guns permanently drawn. But Cameron had wandered Mexico, South America, Israel, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Kingpins and warlords had controlled land even before the ships had come. Sometimes, people got killed. Sometimes, it happened often. And yet life, for most, simply went on.

  They’d slept without a guard, and well.

  The barn was quiet. He was the first one up. He’d thought he might be. If Piper and the Nelsons could get to sleep, odds were they’d stay there. Piper had suffered as fitful a previous night as Cameron and would be coming off an adrenaline spike. Mike, Rachel, and little Charlie had lived through something traumatic. The adults should sleep like the dead, in desperate need of recovery.

  But Charlie surprised him. Some kids could sleep through anything, but others would be understandably nervous with an unstable life as described by Mike and Rachel. Cameron hadn’t wanted to talk to any of them, but once the die had been cast, his distance had seemed overly rude. He’d made it clear they’d part ways tomorrow or the next day, and Mike kept assuring them — almost preemptively — that they’d be splitting off before nearing the highway. Fine. A day’s compassion might not hurt them after all.

  Rolling over on his ratty horse blanket, Cameron found himself tangled in his rifle strap. He’d slept with it on because flouting caution would be stupid. Reminding him of the same point, Cameron felt a crick in his back. Because dammit, he must’ve slept on his damned pistol, too.

  He pulled the gun from his waistband, thinking that was stupid, and that rounds in the chamber or not, spending a night atop your firearm was asking for a bad back in the morning.

  Piper was beside him, on her own blanket, curled into a comma with her back to Cameron. Her pistol was in her pants too, but at least right now she wasn’t sleeping on it. Maybe only one of them had learned a lesson.

  He sat up and stretched. Damn, was he stiff. He’d been in a bed or cot (he’d hit both, plus the couch, in rotation) for too long. On the way to Meyer’s compound, they’d slept on just about everything. He was out of practice after just a week. Soft. Even when they’d been playacting their way into Morgan’s graces as hoods, taking Christopher’s temperature to find his loyalties, they’d slept on the ground, padded with coats stolen from the other people camping under the stars around the house, yes … but ground nonetheless.

  He smacked his parched lips, needing to take a leak.

  One thing at a time. It was rare for Cameron to sleep so soundly, rarer still to sleep like the dead with a goddamned gun under his back and around his shoulders. His body was used to drinking and peeing at least once per night, trading old moisture for new.

  He reached for his backpack in the dimly lit barn and struck hay.

  He reached again. Grabbed hay.

  He turned. Rummaging in shadow, his searching hands discovering nothing. Given that his eyes had been closed, they were as adjusted as they were going to get. He swore inside his head. What he wouldn’t give for a lamp or a switch to flick.

  Without bothering to unclip it, Camerong found the small metal flashlight on his belt and turned its end. A tiny flood of bright white light washed the hay.

  Just hay. His backpack was gone.

  Piper must have woken in the middle of the night and moved it, wanting to fish out a water bottle without waking him.

  He knelt tall then shined the flashlight momentarily on Piper, taking a guilty moment to appreciate her sleeping face and form. She was definitely ballsy. Ballsier, in fact, than she probably gave herself credit for. He’d been mad when she’d run toward the scream, for sure. He’d been even angrier (and not a little unnerved) when she’d fired that shot into the air to break up the one-sided fight in the clearing below. And he’d been absolutely furious when she’d bullied him into allowing the man, woman, and child to glom onto their group. Cameron was all about saving people, but dammit, that could get them both killed.

  But the same things that were infuriating and stubborn made Piper noble. Attractive even. Cameron liked strong women. And her strength, too, was surprising. Benjamin and Charlie (again: not little Charlie, he thought with a smile) had given Cameron a full profile of Meyer Dempsey. The man was arrogant, pushy, narcissistic to an almost clinical degree — a force to be reckoned with both in business and life. He’d studied all the public, still-accessible information the facility and world still had to offer about Meyer. At least as much as they’d been able to send to his cell before the network’s most protected data channels had died. Heather Hawthorne made sense with Meyer. She was brash but damaged, meaning they’d butt heads, even though behind the scenes she’d always submit to his way of doing things. Their inevitable divorce made even more sense, as did the fact that he’d dominated his way into custody of the kids.

  But Piper? Little was known about Meyer’s second wife — and of that little, Moab had sent him almost nothing. He’d gone in blind on the younger Mrs. Dempsey. He’d formed his own guesses about who she’d be. She’d have to be much more submissive than Heather. To put it mildly, such a woman — meeting Meyer after he’d achieved megalithic status, being groomed through his own companies and support — would have to be a dishrag. A pretty, obedient doormat.

  But Piper wasn’t like that at all.

  Cameron moved the flashlight past her to shine on the hay beyond and saw something that filled him with terror and rage.

  His teeth gritted. His heart thrummed. His fists clenched.

  “Piper,” he said, barely containing his fury. “Wake up.”

  She blinked her big eyes. Her big, innocent, naive, accidentally sabotaging
eyes.

  “Good morning.”

  Her smile vanished when she saw Cameron’s expression.

  “What?” She rolled, finding something amiss, patting the empty hay beside her, still flattened by the impression of a horse blanket.

  “Where are Mike, Rachel, and Charlie?”

  “They’re gone, Piper,” Cameron said, trying hard to keep himself from shouting, “and they stole everything we had.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Terrence called for Vincent, but everyone came.

  Lila hadn’t heard the whole story of how the troupe had come together, but she’d gathered that Vincent and Terrence had been in the military together — in what capacity or branch she didn’t know. But it didn’t take a story to see that Vincent and Terrence were their own thing. Of the four men in the bunker, Terrence and Vincent paired off most often, always with an unspoken understanding between them and plans brewing under the surface. If they ever had to fight their way out of here, the battle would follow a clear order: Terrence would tell them what to do; Vincent would take the lead and make sure it got done. Dan was big but clearly not military. And Christopher? He was almost out of place. He must’ve had a rough past and struck Lila as a lost soul. He’d do what he was told, or what felt right.

  But despite only calling for his right-hand man, Terrence’s urgency had summoned half the bunker’s occupants before Lila so much as rose from the couch. The little control room was overpacked — spilling into the living room’s corner like a popular bakery at opening.

  Heather looked over. She seemed almost as tired as Lila felt.

  “Don’t get up,” she said.

  But Lila had already risen and was moving forward. Heather rose behind her, following like a woman in a trance.

  Inside her head — more a fearful echo than anything present — Lila could still hear the voice that had come after she’d doubled up in the bathroom. She didn’t want to look down. Voices came from other people. If you were creative, voices might come from inside your mind. And if you were crazy, they could come from everywhere. But under no circumstances did voices come from your stomach. That didn’t make sense, stir-crazy or not.