“There’s food everywhere,” says Not-Randy.
“Then what do you want?” asks Brennan.
“Like I said, to talk. Me and my brother, we’ve been alone since the shit hit the fan. We live down the road.”
“What do we do?” Brennan whispers to me.
All I can think to do is to keep the man on the other side of the door talking and get out of here. I look around the gray, blurred room.
The desk chair. In movies, they always jam chairs under doorknobs and that holds up the bad guy long enough for the hero to get away. I hold up a finger to Brennan, asking for silence, and for him to wait.
“Where are you from?” asks Not-Randy. “Are you local?”
As quietly as I can, I step away from the door. The desk chair is on its side, a few feet away. Holding my breath, I pick it up. It scrapes the floor, but Not-Randy is still talking and his voice masks the sound. “How many of you are there?” he asks. “Are you family, like us?” I bring the chair back to the door and ease its back under the knob. I have no idea if it’ll hold. “Were you sick? My brother was, but he got better. Me, I never got it, whatever it was. They tried to evacuate us with the others, but we wouldn’t have it. This is our place, you know? You must know, you’re still here too. Ain’t many of us that are.” I nod toward the window, and Brennan moves away from the door. I motion for him to go first, and he climbs onto the metal desk. Not-Randy’s still talking. “Used to be there was this band down the road, these three nutjobs. I knew one of them, and he kept trying to get us to join them. But we didn’t. They were real crazy—always talking about trespassers. This group, and my brother and me, I think we were the only ones left in the whole county.” Brennan’s standing now, with his hands on the window frame. He pulls himself up and pushes through, feetfirst. I watch him disappear. “They’re gone now, dead or moved on, I don’t know,” says Not-Randy. “Since then, we—”
Banging, bashing, the sounds of a struggle outside the window. Brennan’s muffled voice, calling, “Mae!”
Then a deeper voice, a shout, “Cliff!”
Motherfucker, I think. That’s why Not-Randy wouldn’t shut up, so his partner could sneak around outside.
The door behind me crashes open, the useless chair skidding toward the wall. Not-Randy steps inside. He’s a hulking, bearded white man. I’m caught between him and the desk; the man outside struggles loudly to hold Brennan.
“There’s only one in here!” yells Not-Randy—Cliff. He steps toward me. He’s close now, taller than me by about a foot. I can see his face: pudgy and unremarkable. His beard is blondish red.
It goes quiet outside.
“Harry?” calls Cliff.
“I’m okay,” his partner returns. “It was just a kid.”
It’s Brennan who’s been silenced.
Cliff reaches out and touches my arm. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We can take care of you now.”
His arrogance, the laziness of whoever wrote his script. It makes me furious. But what can I do? This guy’s twice my size and blocking my path to the door, and his so-called brother is right outside the window.
I say what the script demands. “I don’t need taking care of.”
“It’s okay,” says Cliff. Now his hand is on my shoulder. Hitting a man this size in the arm won’t accomplish anything except to piss him off, and I know the rules. I can’t hit him anywhere that counts. “We have someplace safe,” he adds. His breath stinks as bad as a prop.
Fuck the rules.
I send a hook straight to the man’s jaw. All my strength is behind the strike, years of cardio kickboxing classes. I twist my core with the movement, lift my heel from the floor, smash my knuckles into his face. My fist erupts as the man stumbles away, reeling.
I don’t give him a chance to strike back. I run past him, out the door and into the hall, through the swinging doors, and down the nearest aisle. I trip, sprawling forward, scramble to my feet, hear Cliff cursing, pursuing. The swinging doors crash shut behind him.
I sprint toward the emergency exit. I can hear the man behind me, but I’m going to make it. I slam against the exit bar with my shoulder and push through. I’m free, I’m out, I— The second man stands before me, smiling in dawn’s light. He’s white, smaller than Cliff, bigger than me. And he’s holding a machete.
He lunges toward me, machete at his side. I dodge backward, falling again and landing propped on my side by my pack, then Cliff is there, yanking me to my feet; my head snaps hard enough to tweak my optic nerves.
Furious energy engulfs me. I fight. I kick, I claw. I bite. I mean to kill this man. I can hear shrieking, and I understand distantly that it’s my voice, then Cliff steps away, recoiling. I can taste blood, mine, his, I don’t know, a coppery drizzle in my mouth. My right hand is throbbing and I can’t unclench my fist.
Cliff is hunched over, his nose bleeding. I don’t need to see to know there is hate in his eyes. Not-Cooper is watching, swinging his machete idly at his side.
“Fuck you, Harry,” says Cliff to him. “What are you just standing there for?”
“She’s crazy,” says Harry. “I’m not getting anywhere near her.”
I don’t see any red on the blade, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I have to get to Brennan, I have to make sure he’s okay. He’s somewhere around the corner. Cliff and Harry are between us.
“What did you do to him?” I ask, stalling.
“The kid’s fine,” says Harry. The machete continues to swing.
Cliff stands fully and raises a hand to his bleeding nose. I see his hand is bleeding too. The expanded meaning of the metallic taste in my mouth makes my stomach twist. I’m disqualified. I must be. Not only did I strike this man, I bit him. Hard enough to draw blood.
Cliff steps toward me. “Look,” he says. “I get it. You’ve been through a lot. We all have.”
Why aren’t they stopping him? Stopping me?
I maintain a watchful crouch as Cliff takes another step. I can tell now that much of the blood in my mouth is coming from a cut on the inside of my lip, which I feel swelling and throbbing.
I broke a rule and nothing’s changed.
Maybe they’re making an exception. A special circumstance, like when Heather hit Randy and the consequences never came? She was provoked and forgiven. I’m being forgiven too. Because conflict makes for good TV and that’s all they care about.
Conflict—and the unexpected.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll go with you.”
Cliff pauses and looks at Harry. It’s clear they don’t buy my sudden acquiescence. They shouldn’t, but I need them to.
“I think my hand’s broken,” I say, and I allow myself to feel my pain. I allow all my frustration to surface. As I start shaking, I think of my husband. How badly I need to be home, how far I’ve come and all that I’ve seen and done. I think of the blue cabin, the message left for me there. I summon one of the simplest tools available to me—tears. I feel them sliding down my face; I taste their salt.
Cliff immediately relaxes. He puts out his hands in a gesture of appeasement.
“I want to see my friend,” I say.
“This way,” says Harry. He heads toward the corner of the building, toward the broken window. The machete swings casually at his side. Cliff takes my arm. I can see the cut on his face, the already swelling skin at the corner of his mouth, the blood running down his palm and wrist. He’s holding me close, but lightly, like I’m not a threat. I’m used to being dismissed as harmless, but that’s because I usually don’t cause any harm. Does he think my fighting him was some last gasp of feminist fury, now dissipated? Is this what he needs to believe?
I can work with that.