I whistle. Leo comes running back to my side. We leave the forest the same way we came in, "Why?" I call back.
"He booby traps everything to keep the infected out."
My hand instantly goes to Leo's fur. I grip it tight and walk back exactly the way we came. I'd seen yards like this.
He put his hands in his pockets. When I get close I can see he's clean too. "He said to tell you, he has steaks and things for Leo."
I look at Leo and nod, "Ok."
He doesn’t move, so I walk past him.
"Wait."
Turning, I see his clean-shaven face in the dim light of the sky, "What?"
"Star and me have never had anything, you know that right?" His tone is low like he's testing the water. "You get that when I explained it before, it was the truth?"
"Yeah, she told me. I don’t really care." I hate lying to him, but I hate him assuming I do care.
"She treats me the same way she treats everyone. She is just flirty and sweet to everyone."
I put my hands up, "It's fine."
"You don’t need to be jealous or whatever…"
I cut him off, "STOP!" I storm past him, almost dragging Leo by the fur. I can feel the muttering trying to burst from me.
He grabs my arm and spins me around. My knee comes up fast but he jumps back, narrowly missing a hard hit to the groin.
I step back, "I said not to touch me. I'm not jealous of Star. Asshole." I back up pulling an arrow and holding it on him.
He puts his hands up, "I'm sorry. I didn’t mean like jealous. I meant..."
"I don’t care what you meant. I'm done with it. We're friends. Let's be friendly, don’t make me shoot you." I nudge Leo. He looks up at me and backs off Will, when he sees my face.
I turn and walk to the house, but my arrow stays taut in the bow. I don’t look back at him; I listen to him. He walks behind me softly.
"I can't believe you almost hit me in the nuts," he calls out.
"You're lucky you're fast. I have boney knees," I mutter back.
Leo growls back at him.
"When is he going to quit hating me?"
I turn and shake my head, "When you stop scaring him. You act like all the fuckers he's saved me from. You think you're the first guy Leo has had to pull off of me? You think he hasn't dove in and saved me a thousand times? He hates men, just like I do. He doesn’t trust them anymore than I do. You all seem to have one thing on your mind, and you seem to think you should be allowed to have it, even if we don’t want to give it. Leo and me have seen things like that tons. Men grabbing arms and spinning girls. Making them kiss them and dragging them into the bushes. You know what that sounds like, when you're ten years old? You know what it sounds like, when people take what isn’t theirs to have? It's enough to make you never want anything to do with anyone."
His face is pale in the night, "Em, you know I would never do that."
I shake my head and fight the god damned tears that just keep coming, "No. No, I don’t know that. Your own brother and sister don’t know that. You act like…like…"
"You?"
I laugh, "Yeah. You act crazy like me, but you have no excuse. You had family and friends and people. I get you went to the farms, Will, you suffered. Big deal. They didn’t put a baby in your belly and then kill it just to see what it looks like."
He steps forward and I see the square of his jaw tense, "You think what happens to the women in the farms is more brutal than what happens to the men? You think they don’t have it hard? You think I don’t wonder if any of those babies out there are mine too? Babies I won't ever know about or see. They took my rights too. The only difference is, I didn’t get to go to sleep, Em. I was awake while they took it, and when they were done I got shoved into the work farms with all the other men." He spits on me with the last of his words. I didn’t realize how close we were until that moment. His breath huffs from him down on my face and I can see the steel in his blue eyes even in the dark.
I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know, what I did say. His lip is trembling like he wants to say or do something that I think I want him to do. No matter what I do, I can’t stop myself from wanting it. Leo senses it and presses his cold noise against my hand. I jump and step back.
"I'm hungry." I turn and walk away and promise myself that if he grabs my arm, I will shoot him in the damned leg.
When I get inside, I hear laughing. I walk towards it; smells are like promises in the air of food and drink. I round a corner and walk towards the light. They're in a huge kitchen with lights and food spread across the long counter. I stop and stare. It's like the restaurants I went to with Granny. They had whole counters of food and you could pick what you wanted. Jake grins at me over a heaping plate of food. He motions for me to come. I hear Will and then feel the heat of his body pressed against the back of me.
I sigh and lean back into him, "That’s a lot of food," I whisper.
Will speaks softly, "It's a lot of food. Bernie shops in the city. He's allowed in and out of the city."
I nod, "So, he's friends with my real dad then?"
Will's hand runs up my arm, "Put the bow down and come and eat and we can talk about it, okay?"
I look back at him and nod. I let him take the weapons from my hands. "I can still kill you with my bare hands."
He grins and looks like Jake for a second, "You don’t have to, you have a pet wolf."
"I hate you," I laugh.
He nods, "I know. I'm okay with it."
I walk to the huge counter. Star passes me a large square plate. I've never seen anything like it. It's heavy and thick. I take some of everything. I don’t even know what it all is. I know there's chicken, steak, potatoes and beans, but the rest are casseroles or something. They're all in tinfoil packets and steaming hot like TV dinners. I used to like the fried chicken TV dinner. I grab a fork and carry my plate through the door that Jake went through. Anna and Bernie are sitting next to each other talking. He's young looking, but I can tell he's older. He has dark hair and dark eyes and his skin isn’t tanned but it's olive colored.
The eating room is fancy—everywhere in the huge house is fancy.
I sit next to Jake and look down on the plate. I don’t know where to start. I dig the fork into the potatoes and take the first bite. It's hot and salty and perfect. I close my eyes and moan.
I open them to see Bernie staring at me.
"What do you know?" he asks.
I shake my head, "Nothing."
He chews his bite, "Can you start at what you remember?"
I swallow and nod, "I know my dad moved us around a lot. Then he bought a health food store, my grandparents bought an old house, and we all lived together. My mom died when I was pretty little so it was just us. They hated my uncle for having an affair with my mom. My dad brought it up a lot." It feels weird sharing the tiny details of the world before.
I look at Will as he sits next to Star and starts eating. Taking another bite, I continue, "My dad was always crazy about technology. He didn’t like cell phones or computers much. Granny had them all, but she was pretty basic with them, looking up recipes and stuff. She let me have the technology though, but only for gaming, movies, and books. I wasn’t allowed to interact with people online. We lived in a small area and my dad made me go to survival camps and made me do training on the weekends. He was obsessed with the end of the world. He called it the meltdown. He said the world was going to have a meltdown. We were supposed to go to the family cabin before the meltdown, but Granny and Gramps didn’t believe. They wouldn’t come. He would disappear a lot and I would stay with Gran. Then the sicknesses started and the chaos hit, before we could go to the cabin. He made arrangements for us to stay with his friend in a bunker. We left it too late to get to the bunker, and ended up ditching our car in the roadblocks, and running through the hills to the place where his friend lived. We stayed in the bunker for a while. It was supposed to be short term, until the chaos was over. He figured the sick would die off fast and we could just go to the cabin."
My mouth starts to water. I stop and take a drink from the glass in front of me. It's water. It sparkles in my mouth. I clear my throat and finish the story, "The day we left the bunker was the last time I saw my dad. He and Brian were fighting and I could feel the jeep driving over things, bumpy things on the road. People were still out…walking. Some were sick. Some were little kids who were alone. We drove until we couldn’t, because of an accident. Something happened. The others or the military came and shot someone on the road and took the women. Dad kept saying it was just like the doctor had said it would be. Now I know it was the doctor who saved me in the city. He had warned my dad a few times about the bad stuff coming. Anyway, he and Brian started fighting again and the jeep crashed. Brian was gone and Dad was trapped and hurt. I crawled to his window but he couldn’t move." I hold my empty hand out, "He held his hand out with nothing in it and made me take the nothing from him. Then he screamed at me and told me it was us and them and I was never to stop running. I knew how to get to the cabin, so I ran. I left him there to die in the jeep. I ran and I never looked back. I got to the cabin a few days later." I look at my empty hand and know it's the most I've ever said in my whole life.
I can't look at them all. I don’t want to. I don’t want their pity, I know it'll be there in their eyes.
I take the next bite and swallow, but the lump in my throat makes it hard.
Bernie speaks after a moment, "Lenny must have been the health food store owner and Michael is your uncle?"
I nod and force myself to keep eating. The salt and taste is gone though.
"I was twenty when the world ended. The CIA had scooped me up when I was nineteen. I saw this coming down the pipes. I started preparing immediately. My dad never used this house so I took it over and converted it; took it off the grid completely and started stocking piling." He talks like he's proud. He sips from his glass, "I helped build the new city and stayed in the good books, so I have access to food and things, but I don’t believe the propaganda. The hype that only breeding the healthy will rid the world of the sickly, and forcing the sick to the borderlands, is the way to keep the city clean. The kids like you, they're maniacs. The ones your age aren’t as bad, but the ones about thirteen and younger are insane. You dad is obsessed with perfecting them. He's turned into a monster himself. Too much playing God, if you ask me."
